THE GERANIUM FAMILY.
The Geranium People are rather unsettled as to their relatives—or, rather, we are somewhat confused on the subject. Probably the geraniums know all about it, but they will not tell the botanists, so the botanists have to do the best they can by themselves.
Some say the tropæolum belongs to the Geranium Family, and it certainly does bear quite a strong family resemblance to the geraniums.
They also say the Impatiens Family is a branch of the geraniums and the pelargoniums, which you know we always call geraniums. The crane’s bills and herb Roberts and all their near relations of course are geraniums, and some say the wood sorrels belong to this distinguished family.
Whether these all belong to one family or not, one thing is certain: they are all agreeable to us, and are not so very numerous even when taken all together. The whole of them do not number half so many as do the branches of the Convolvulus Family.
Like the race of white people, they belong principally to temperate climates.
They do not all belong to our climate, however.
The nasturtiums, for instance, are South Americans and Mexicans. They like to keep warm better than some other members of their family, and their seeds cannot, as a rule, live through our cold winters. But if we gather the seeds and put them away out of the fierce winter cold and plant them in the spring, then the nasturtiums will grow their best and please us with their bright flowers. We cannot help liking them, they are so jolly with their gay flowers and their round leaves with twisting stalks.
We like them, too, because the flower stem curls up and draws the seeds under the leaves out of the way of the young buds that are waiting to bloom.
I do not know whether wild nasturtiums are as large and bright as the cultivated ones. Very likely not, as people have taken great pains to make them large and bright by selecting the seeds of the largest flowers from year to year and giving them good soil in which to grow.
Perhaps the members of the Geranium Family we really know best are the pelargoniums from the Cape of Good Hope. It is about as warm in their African home as it is in our Florida, so of course they cannot live out of doors through our cold Northern winters. But we take them in the house when cold weather comes, and sometimes put them in the cellar.
Of course they do not grow much in the cellar, but they rest there, and when they are taken out in the spring are all ready to wake up and blossom.
The whole Geranium Family seems to take extra care of its seeds.
We know how the nasturtium curls up its stem so as to draw the seeds below the leaves out of the way, giving the buds a chance to come out, and also protecting the seeds.
The pelargoniums do not do that, but they do something much more elaborate for the sake of their seed-children, as we know. They give them a parachute to fly with, for one thing. A parachute, you know, is a contrivance by which bodies can be sustained in the air while falling or blowing along in the wind.
But the parachute is not all,—they give them an auger by which to bore into the ground and plant themselves.
The North American crane’s bill seeds perform in a very similar way, their flowers and seed-cases being quite like those of the pelargonium.
How do you suppose North American crane’s bills came to be like South African pelargoniums?
This is a matter which needs investigating.
The pelargoniums are not as juicy as the nasturtiums, but they are somewhat juicy, and their juice has a slightly acid taste instead of being pungent, like the nasturtium juice.
Where pelargoniums live out of doors the year round they grow very large and have stems that are quite woody.
Some of them, as we know, are useful to the human race as well as ornamental, supplying food and an oil highly esteemed as a perfume.
The wood sorrels do not look much like the rest of the Geranium Family. But they do resemble it in their habit of caring for their seeds. Out in the fields you will find the small, yellow-flowered sheep sorrel, with its clover-like, sour-tasting leaves. Now hunt for a seed-pod. They are pretty little things that stand up something like Christmas candles. Touch a ripe one and it splits open down each of its five cells and shows you a row of white seeds in each. You think the seeds are not ripe because they are white, and you touch one of them. What has happened? That seed surely exploded! No, there it is—the other side of the table, not white, but dark brown. Queer performance, this. You touch another and another, and at last you get to understand it. Each seed is surrounded by an elastic white covering, and this it is that suddenly curls up, very much as the impatiens pod does, and sends the seed within it flying!
When night comes the sorrel goes to sleep. Its leaflets droop and shut together as you see in the picture, and the flowers, too, close. The sorrel loves the sunshine, and often does not open on cloudy days.
There are a great many sorrels in the world besides our sheep sorrel; in fact, we are told there are about two hundred and five of them!
We have only three or four out of all that number, and they are not all yellow like the sheep sorrel. One that lives in the cool Northern woods is white, with delicate pink veins. Pretty little things they are, and farther South there lives a pretty violet one.
Like the pelargoniums, the sorrels are to be found at the Cape of Good Hope. In fact, most of the two hundred and five kinds live there and in South America.
Like the pelargoniums, too, the South African sorrels are much larger and brighter than their American relatives.
We like them so well we raise them in our greenhouses and window boxes. They are much larger than our wild sorrels and have bright pink or white or yellow corollas.
Down in Peru, too, there grows a very useful sorrel; they call it “oca,” and raise it for its potatolike tubers which the people eat.
The Mexicans also have a sorrel with edible bulbs and bright red flowers. In fact, the sorrel, like the potato, has a habit of storing up plenty of underground food which is also good food for man, and several species of sorrel are raised for this purpose in different parts of the world.
In those places, instead of a potato field you have a sorrel field.
We often eat the leaves of the wood sorrel for the sake of their pleasant acid taste. The proper name of the sorrel is “oxalis,” and comes from a Greek word meaning “acid.” But if we were to extract this acid from the sorrel and then eat it, we would have a serious time, for in its concentrated form it is a fearful poison. It is sold under the misleading name of “salt of lemons,” and for this reason people often ignorantly taste it, thinking that “salt of lemons” can do them no harm.
This dangerous “salt of lemons” is very useful in calico printing, in dyeing, and in the bleaching of flax and straw.
The next time you come across a patch of sheep sorrel, stop and think of all it and its relatives are able to do for us.
We usually think of the Geranium Family as being merely ornamental; but, as we have seen, some kinds of tropæolum, several kinds of sorrel, and at least one kind of pelargonium yield edible tubers which are eaten in different parts of the world, and the modest little oxalis yields a substance valuable for manufacturing purposes.
Even our commonplace crane’s bill that blooms so abundantly in the woods in early summer has something for us, for from its roots a medicine is obtained.
