NEW YORK
27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
LONDON
24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND
The Knickerbocker Press
1895
Copyright, 1895
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
Dedicated
TO
MARY GOODRICH WHITING
AND
MARY ESTHER MILLER
INTRODUCTION.
It was with no desire to compete with scientific botanies that this collection of flowers was gathered together, but with the hope of making their acquaintance more easy to non-scientific folk than the much condensed manuals of our flora are able to do. The opportunity of introducing a plant, with that graceful amplitude which forestalls human meetings, is denied to the scientific botanist by the needful restrictions of his formulæ, and there remain unnoted by him (because beyond the scope of a special terminology) numberless traits of race-habit, and personal details of growth belonging to the plants, to which the unlearned observer will attach a degree of significance, incommensurate, perhaps, to their scientific value. To the simple Nature-lover each growth possesses a personal quality more desirable than the catalogued facts of its existence, and which offers an invitation to his thought beyond the knowledge he may gain from books.
Supplementary, then, to the scientific classification, there is a place for the mere lover and observer, who shall display the results of his study in the most direct terms, that require no glossaries of explanation, nor, if it may be avoided, any dissection of flower-growths. Too often the amateur is dismayed, in his effort to name a plant, by the botanical need of a microscopic analysis, which calls for a preliminary training, and in its process destroys the flower he seeks to know. If it were possible for a pictorial botany to be prepared for English readers in the common vocabulary, the destructive element which, at present, occupies a painfully large place in the study of all popular science, might be confined to the needs of the higher student, and no longer pursued by children, or the merely curious observers of our common forms of life. The effort to verify what has already been established, which, in some intellectually alert localities, threatens the more delicate of our annuals and biennials with extermination, might be avoided, if we were able to recognize the commoner sorts of plants by their general character, their gesture, color, and habits, leaving scientific analysis for serious study.