Outings at Odd Times

by Charles C. Abbott

Gray gives as the range of the American species the “waters of the Western and Southern States; rare in the Middle States; introduced into the Delaware below Philadelphia.” Introduced by whom? The Indians are said to have carried it to the Connecticut Valley, where it still flourishes in circumscribed localities, and this I find is the impression in southern New Jersey and in the neighborhood of a little lake in the northern part of the State, where also the native lotus is found growing, but I have not yet found a positive statement to that effect. Rafinesque in 1830 remarked, “As it is scarce in the Atlantic States, it is said to have been planted in some ponds by the Indians.”

The fact that the Southern and Western Indians valued the plant is significant. Nuttall records that “the Osages and other Western natives employ the roots of this plant, which is of common occurrence, for food, preparing them by boiling. When fully ripe, after a considerable boiling they become as farinaceous, agreeable, and wholesome as the potato. This same species ... is everywhere made use of by the natives, who collect both the nuts and the roots.”

Early in the century it was growing in the meadows of the Delaware below Philadelphia, and Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton considered it indigenous. He says also that “efforts at cultivating this plant and multiplying its sites of growth have been unsuccessfully made in the neighborhood.”

It is curious that Kalm, who gave so much attention to the food plants of our Indians, should not mention the lotus. It certainly could not have been at the time of his visit here (1748) a common plant, yet the lower Delaware, where a half-century later it was still found, was a locality about which he botanized with much industry. It is hard to believe that, had he once caught sight of its enormous leaves, often thirty inches in diameter, or seen the bright yellow blossoms on their towering stems, he would have omitted to make mention of such an experience. Kalm spent a considerable part of his time among his countrymen at Raccoon, now Swedesboro; and at Woodstown, but a few miles away, the native lotus grows luxuriantly, a relic, it is believed, of Indian water-farming.

There is no improbability in the opinion that the Indians cultivated the plant. They were certainly practical horticulturists as well as growers of field crops. It was of an Indian orchard that the pioneer settler of a New Jersey town wrote when he stated, in 1680, that peaches were “in such plenty that some people took their carts a peach-gathering. I could not but smile at the conceit of it. They are a very delicate fruit, and hang almost like our onions that are tied on ropes.” The peach was probably introduced into Florida by the Spaniards, and in about a century or less its cultivation by the Indians had reached northward as far as New Jersey. The nuts and roots of the lotus could as readily be transported as the pits of the peach, so no obstacle was in the way. Intertribal intercourse was very far-reaching, as shown by the occurrence of peculiar forms of stone implements common in distant localities, and Mexican obsidian and Minnesota red pipe-clay along our eastern Atlantic seaboard.

While yet we have the Indian in mind it is well to refer also to the very significant fact that these people took the golden-club (Orontium aquaticum) from the tide-waters and planted it in upland sink-holes, miles from the nearest spot where it grew naturally.

Perhaps we can never be positive about the matter. If a fiction, it is so pleasing a one I trust it will never be overthrown. To stand upon the bank of a pond and see in it traces of both an aboriginal flower-garden and a farm certainly adds to the interest that surrounds the plant.

We have it on the authority of Emerson that Thoreau expected to find the Victoria regia about Concord. It was but an extravagant method of expressing his opinion of the merits of that region; but I am not so sure that the Victoria is the most beautiful of all aquatic plants. Finding it growing and blooming every summer in an open field near by, I have surely the right to express my preference for another. It and the lotus grow in the same waters, and I love the lotus more, give it the first place among flowers, although there floats upon the surface of these same waters royal red lilies of India, tooth-leaved white lilies from Sierra Leone, the golden one of Florida, and, perhaps more magnificent than all, the splendid purple lily of Zanzibar. I can start across-lots and quickly come upon them all in an open field; but it is the lotus that holds me.

I can not rid myself of the thought that with the Victoria, as with all its attendant lilies, the hand of the care-taker is necessary. A very Amazon itself, it needs an Amazonian setting. We look for a naked baby on the largest pad, and the infant’s mother in a canoe gathering Victorian seed-vessels. These, with a troop of scarlet ibises, spur-winged jacanas, and chattering macaws, are all needed to complete the picture. With them, the world has perhaps nothing more striking to offer; without them, the plant is too bizarre, too like the eagle when shorn of its priceless gift of liberty. Not so with the lotus; it accords well with the unpretending valley of the Delaware, is not a thing apart, but the culmination, as it were, of Nature’s vigor here, and seemingly not out of place even when it fills a meadow mud-hole.

One species is, as we have seen, truly American, native and to the manner born, even if introduced and cared for by the Indian along our Eastern seaboard; but now, where the wildness of the Indians’ day has been long lost to us, and novelty is sweet, we rejoice to find the lotus of the East is no longer a stranger in the land.