Wild Flowers Worth Knowing

Excerpt: ...Habitat-Dry soil, fields, roadsides, especially in burnt-over districts. Flowering Season-June-September. Distribution-From Atlantic to Pacific, with few interruptions; British Possessions and United States southward to the Carolinas and Arizona. Also Europe and Asia. Spikes of these beautiful brilliant flowers towering upward above dry soil, particularly where the woodsman's axe and forest fires have devastated the landscape, illustrate Nature's abhorrence of ugliness. Other kindly plants have earned the name of fireweed, but none so quickly beautifies the blackened clearings of the pioneer, nor blossoms over the charred trail in the wake of the locomotive. Whole mountainsides in Alaska are dyed crimson with it. Beginning at the bottom of the long spike, the flowers open in slow succession upward throughout the summer, leaving behind the attractive seed-vessels, which, splitting lengthwise in September, send adrift white silky tufts attached to seeds that will one day cover far distant wastes with beauty. Almost perfect rosettes, made by the young plants, are met with on one's winter walks. Evening Primrose; Night Willow-herb Oenothera biennis Flowers-Yellow, fragrant, opening at evening, 1 to 2 in. across, borne in terminal leafy-bracted spikes. Calyx tube slender, elongated, gradually enlarged at throat, the 4-pointed lobes bent backward; corolla of 4 spreading petals; 8 stamens; 1 pistil; the stigma 4-cleft. Stem: Erect, wand-like, or branched, 1 to 5 ft. tall, rarely higher, leafy. Leaves: Alternate, lance-shaped, mostly seated on stem, entire, or obscurely toothed. Preferred Habitat-Roadsides, dry fields, thickets, fence-corners. Flowering Season-June-October. Distribution-Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico, west to the Rocky Mountains. Like a ball-room beauty, the Evening Primrose has a jaded, bedraggled appearance by day when we meet it by the dusty roadside, its erect buds, fading flowers from last night's revelry, wilted ones of...