Wild flowers of the north-eastern states — A Reader’s Guide

WILD FLOWERS OF THE NORTH-EASTERN STATES

BEING THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHT INDIVIDUALS COMMON TO THE NORTH-EASTERN UNITED STATES, DRAWN AND DESCRIBED FROM LIFE BY

ELLEN MILLER AND MARGARET CHRISTINE WHITING

------ WITH THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS THE SIZE OF LIFE ------

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND

The Knickerbocker Press

COPYRIGHT, 1895 BY G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

MARY GOODRICH WHITING

It was with no desire to compete with scientific botanies that this collection of flowers was gathered together, but with the hope of making their acquaintance more easy to non-scientific folk than the much condensed manuals of our flora are able to do. The opportunity of introducing a plant, with that graceful amplitude which forestalls human meetings, is denied to the scientific botanist by the needful restrictions of his formulæ, and there remain unnoted by him (because beyond the scope of a special terminology) numberless traits of race-habit, and personal details of growth belonging to the plants, to which the unlearned observer will attach a degree of significance, incommensurate, perhaps, to their scientific value. To the simple Nature-lover each growth possesses a personal quality more desirable than the catalogued facts of its existence, and which offers an invitation to his thought beyond the knowledge he may gain from books.

Supplementary, then, to the scientific classification, there is a place for the mere lover and observer, who shall display the results of his study in the most direct terms, that require no glossaries of explanation, nor, if it may be avoided, any dissection of flower-growths. Too often the amateur is dismayed, in his effort to name a plant, by the botanical need of a microscopic analysis, which calls for a preliminary training, and in its process destroys the flower he seeks to know. If it were possible for a pictorial botany to be prepared for English readers in the common vocabulary, the destructive element which, at present, occupies a painfully large place in the study of all popular science, might be confined to the needs of the higher student, and no longer pursued by children, or the merely curious observers of our common forms of life. The effort to verify what has already been established, which, in some intellectually alert localities, threatens the more delicate of our annuals and biennials with extermination, might be avoided, if we were able to recognize the commoner sorts of plants by their general character, their gesture, color, and habits, leaving scientific analysis for serious study.

The present collection of flowers common to the North-eastern United States, which was started as a personal pastime, has taken its present shape under the belief that it were well to make a beginning towards a floral portrait-gallery; it is from this point of view, rather than from the purely botanical, that the drawings have been made and the descriptions written. Days have been pleasantly spent in searching for a specimen which would show most typically the particular trick of growth, the characteristic gesture which individualized it from all other plants; often a flower has been drawn and described as it grew, surprised in its familiar haunt. Effort has been made to gather within the prescribed limits as great a diversity of growths, and as many variations of types in each family, as was feasible. Because of the desire to localize the collection, somewhat, the flowers of the seaboard have been excluded. A few shrubs, and even one small tree, the Witch Hazel, have been included, because their flowers or fruit form such essential features in the floral calendar, or possess so strong a hold upon the wayfarers’ affections, that their presence has seemed inevitable. In the case of two vines, the Carrion Flower and the Virginia Creeper, the drawings were made from the fruit (companioned by the figure of the single flower) for the obvious reason that the blossoms of the one are inconspicuous, and of the other so malodorous, they offer small temptations to a near acquaintance, while both are recompensed with highly decorative berry-clusters. The drawings of the flowers are the size of life; in every possible instance the growth also is given without reduction.

That every flower-lover will find some favorites omitted, is altogether probable, in a selection of three hundred individuals from among the hosts which invite representation. The extreme dry weather of the previous season must be held accountable for several noteworthy, and much regretted, blanks in the list.