MORE ABOUT THE TROPÆOLUM.
The tropæolum, which people call nasturtium, has shields to defend itself.
Warriors are content with one shield, but the tropæolum has many.
They have only to protect themselves from the darts of the enemy, but the tropæolum has a harder task: it has to protect itself against the pangs of hunger.
It needs many shields to do this, for hunger is a tireless foe, and has his quiver always full of arrows.
You see, in the tropæolum the shields are the leaves, and they are held out on long stems to catch the darts Apollo, the sun, flings at them. These are not unfriendly darts, but as they strike the little shields of the tropæolum they make them tingle with life. Then the shield leaves go to work and make food for the plant. They make starch and many other things. They make a spicy juice, for one thing, that causes our tongues to smart if we taste it. Sometimes we bite a tropæolum stem, for we like the taste of the sharp juice. But we do not want too much of it, for it makes the palate at the back of the nose tingle, and that is why we call it “nasturtium.” “Nasturtium,” you know, comes from two Latin words, nasus tortus, which mean “convulsed nose”; and nobody likes to have a “convulsed nose” very long at a time!
“Nasturtium” is not the right name for our plant with its many shields.
There is another plant which “convulses” our noses, and which the botany tells us is the nasturtium, but which we call water cress. We eat it in the spring of the year.
The right name of our garden nasturtium is “tropæolum,” which comes from a Greek word meaning “trophy,” its many shields probably being likened to so many trophies taken from the enemy.
Another name for it is “Indian cress,” and, like the water cress, it sometimes is eaten, only in this case it is the flowers instead of the leaves that find themselves converted into a salad. The fruits, too, share a similar fate. Like the rest of the plant, they are filled with spicy juice. This is a misfortune to them, since it tempts people to take these juicy, spicy fruits and pickle them to eat.
Perhaps the plant learned to store up this stinging, spicy juice to protect itself from being eaten by animals. But what can it do to protect itself from the pickle jar?
Perhaps, however, the stinging juice was but a result of the plant’s peculiar method of growth. Of course juice must have some sort of taste, and why not a stinging taste as well as any other?
This plant prepares another liquid which is not sharp and stinging, but sweet and spicy; with this delicious nectar it fills its long spur and keeps it full.
The bees collect it and convert it into tropæolum honey to fill their waxen cells.
This the plant does not object to. It makes the nectar for the bees, and when, they take it away and store it up for winter use the tropæolum suffers no loss. But when some one comes along and picks the fruits and stores them up for winter use, that is another matter!
We are tempted to call the spur of the tropæolum its “horn of plenty,” for that is the name of the horn overflowing with good things that never is empty.
The Goddess of Plenty owns this horn. You can see it in her pictures, as it always stands at her side, and there overflows with flowers and fruits. All that is good that grows in the earth is in the horn of the Goddess of Plenty. It is her cornucopia, for “cornucopia,” you know, means “horn of plenty.”
The goddess got her horn from the Naiads. They, you know, are the nymphs of the brooks and fountains, and they gave it to her.
This is the story of how she got it.
The river god, Acheloüs, and Hercules, the god of strength, struggled together. Hercules threw the god Acheloüs and seized him by the throat. Then Acheloüs, in order to escape, changed himself into a serpent.
This did not help him, for Hercules seized him by the neck and would have choked him, but Acheloüs again changed his shape.
He became a bull, but this was not enough to defend him from the great strength of Hercules, who seized him by the neck and dragged him to the ground, and in the struggle rent one of his horns from his head.
The nymphs of the brooks and the fountains, who were related to the river god, Acheloüs, consecrated the horn and gave it to the Goddess of Plenty.
Saturn.
That is one story, but some say the following is the history of cornucopia.
You know Saturn, the oldest of the gods, had a bad habit of swallowing his children. When Jupiter was born, his mother, Rhea, did not wish his father, Saturn, to swallow him; so she gave him to the care of the daughters of the king of Crete. They fed him on milk from the goat Amalthea, and watched over him and protected him so that his father should not find him. The people of Crete danced about him and made such a noise when he cried that his father could not hear him.
He must have cried very loud indeed to make all that necessary; but then, he was destined to become a very great god, so no doubt he did make more noise than ordinary babies.
Out of gratitude to his kind nurses, and also as a token of esteem to the good Amalthea, Jupiter broke off one of her horns and endowed it with a very wonderful power. It became filled at once with whatever its possessor might wish!
Jupiter.
This was a horn of plenty indeed!
Now you know both stories, and you may take your choice as to which one you will believe. Whether our tropæolum had either of these in mind, it certainly made a very dainty cornucopia when it constructed its honey-horn and filled it for the bees, the butterflies, and the humming birds.
The tropæolums we have in our gardens are not the only kinds; there are, in fact, some forty different tropolæums living in South America and Mexico, and in Peru there is one which has large tuberous roots filled with plant food, which is also good food for man, and is eaten in some parts of South America instead of potatoes!
How would you like to dig your potatoes out of the nasturtium bed?
It certainly would be a pretty place to work on a summer day, and how fine the fields would look all covered with gay tropæolum blooms instead of plain green potato tops with their dull blue flowers!
