The roots of Wild Indigo are used by drug concerns for the compounding of a number of medicines. An indigo dye, of a poor quality, can also be made from the plant. Wild Indigo grows in dry, sandy soil from Maine to Minnesota, flowering from June to September.
(B) Rattlebox (Crotolaria sagittalis) receives its name because the seeds rattle about in the large, inflated, blackish seed-pod. It is an annual herb, with a hairy-bending stem and stemless, toothless, pointed-oval leaves alternating along it. The yellow, pea-like flowers are in small clusters at the ends of the branches. It is found in sandy soil, chiefly along the coast, from Mass. to Fla. and Texas and, in the Mississippi basin, to Indiana and South Dakota.
(A) Goats Rue; Cat Gut (Tephrosia virginiana). We find this herb in most all dry, sandy, waste places from N. H. to Minn. and southward.
It is a pea-like plant with a simple, silky-haired, erect stem, leafy to the top where it terminates in a dense raceme or panicle of yellowish-white flowers marked with purple. The flowers are large and numerous; they have a rounded standard but little longer than the wings and keel. Its roots are long, very slender, and very tough.
(B) Partridge Pea (Cassia Chamæcrista) is a handsome species with large, showy yellow flowers measuring about 1¼ inches across; often the five, large, rounded petals have purplish spots at their bases; after flowering long, erect seed-pods are left in the place of each of the blossoms.
The leaves of the Partridge Pea are long and compounded of 20-30 small, blunt, lance-shaped leaflets, each with a tiny awl-like point. The stem is erect, rather smooth, and grows one or two feet tall. We find this plant in dry or sandy fields throughout the United States.
(A) Rabbit-foot Clover; Stone Clover (Trifolium arvense) (European). The stalk of this species is soft, silky, and from 4 to 10 inches high. The light-green leaves have three leaflets with blunt tips. The flower-heads are composed of numerous florets; it is the long, pink, feathery tips of the five-parted calyx that gives the blossom its silky fuzziness; it is quite fragrant and is visited by the smallest butterflies. You may find this species everywhere within our range.
(B) Red Clover (Trifolium pratense) is the most common and the most valuable species of clover. One would hardly believe, knowing how abundant it is in all parts of our range, that this Clover could have been introduced and have become so widely distributed, yet such is the case. One reason that it does so well in this country is that we have a very large number of bumblebees, and it has been found that clover is so dependent upon these insects for fertilization, that, without them, it will soon die out.