Copy and learn: To paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. -Shakespeare. God might have made the earth bring forth Enough for one and all; The oak tree and the cedar tree, Without a flower at all. He surely might have made enough For luxury, medicine, and toil, And yet have made no flowers. Of all the flowering plants, the rose family is the best known and loved, both for its beauty and its usefulness. It is represented in our woods and fields by the pink wild rose, which makes hedges and thickets along our rivers and roadsides, and often hangs its soft blossoms on vines that reach up to tall trees. The wild plum and cherry, and the wild strawberry and other berries are also members of the same family, and may be told by their five-parted blossoms and their many stamens. It is strange to think that most of our fruits and berries are sisters of the lovely rose, and stranger still to think that all the manytinted sweet roses of our gar dens have come from simple blossoms like our wild rose; cultivation having changed the stamens of the wild blossom into the many petals of the garden beauty. The wild yellow violet, penciled with brown, is perhaps the best known of the violet family in California, although along the coast there is a blue violet, small, but very richly colored, which "paints the wildwoods with delight," and also a delicate white violet, darkly marked with purple, which grows beside shady banks. The sunflower family, the largest flower family in the world, has more members in California than any other. You perhaps know it best by the thistles of purple and crimson, the golden-rod, the dandelion, and the brown-eyed Susan. To this family belong the marigolds, daisies, and chrysanthemums of our gardens, and you can always know any member of it by the many flowers packed closely together in one head. The mustard, the tramp of the plain, domestic family to which the cabbage and turnip and radish belong, is now found in both city and country, crowding out more worthy plants. It has good old-fashioned relatives, too, in the wallflowers and candytuft of our gardens, and we note that each of these blossoms has four petals spreading somewhat in the form of a cross. The wild lilac, of the buckthorn family, in purple and white bloom, tints the hills of the whole State in the springtime, first as it flowers, and later as its tiny blossoms drift thickly to the earth. The heath family, which the poets have so much loved, has many members in California. The manzanita, with its pretty blossoms colored like a baby's palm, and its mealy fruit so relished by the mountain children and squirrels, belongs to the heaths. To this family belong also the azalea sisters— the coast mountains bearing the sweet azalea, its white blossoms tinged with pink and marked with buff, and the Sierra Nevada bearing the one with larger white blossoms and less pleasant scent. Each often covers whole hill-sides, and may be smelled miles away. The beautiful bryanthus, another heath, growing on the highest mountains up and down the whole State, has one of the daintiest blossoms in the world—a little fairy cup of coral, set in a saucer of ivory. A cousin of the heath family, not found on our coast, is the trailing arbutus, or Mayflower, whose soft pink blossoms, "flushed with haste," tell Eastern children that spring has come. The strange red snow-plant of California, shooting up in the high, cone-bearing forests as soon as the snow melts, and looking as if carved out of. the heart of a ripe watermelon, is by many called a member of the heath family, though others dispute its place there. Definitions. Stamens, the parts of a flower that bear the pollen dust generally standing in a circle around the center of the flower, like many little threads. Petals, colored leaves of a flower. Spell: gilia, thistle, palms, brier, heath, chrysanthemum, scent, manzanita, bryanthus, stamens, throated, azalea, mustard, hedge, buckthorn, cabbage, turnip. Name some member of the rose family; of the sunflower family. Compare an apple, or other fruit blossom, with a violet, and tell some of the differences. Compare with a lily. What sort of fruit does a rose bear? How does the mustard scatter its seed? What is the difference in color between coral and ivory? Read to the class, if accessible, "The Rhodora." - Emerson. "The Legend of the Moss Rose." — Krummacher. Copy and learn: How much of memory dwells amid thy bloom, Thou hast thy part in each, thou stateliest flower! White rose, are you tired Of staying in one place? Do you ever wish to see The wild flowers face to face? Do you know the woodbines, And the big, brown-crested reeds ? Do you wonder how they live So friendly with the weeds? |