WHY PLANTS TRAVEL.
Plants are great travelers; they often wander far and wide. Sometimes they even cross the ocean and take up their abode in a new land.
The oxeye daisy, our common meadow buttercup, and the little Canada thistle, now so abundant everywhere, are not native Americans, but came here from Europe.
Buttercups.
Very likely they sailed in the ships with the early settlers and took possession of the New World with them. They are so much at home now that most people think they always grew here. But they did not, and when the Pilgrim Fathers looked over their new home the fields were not white with daisies nor yellow with buttercups.
No doubt the Pilgrim Fathers were glad of this, for daisies and buttercups often cover the fields and spoil the hay, and while “daisies in the meadow” seem very lovely to the city people who go to the country for the summer, daisies in the hay are another matter, and the farmers do not think them lovely at all.
It is not the grown-up plants that travel, as a rule, though some of them do. For you must know the plant world is a topsy-turvy kind of place where the parents stand still at home and the children wander about.
Of course the children are the seeds, and they are free, but when they once settle down and begin to grow their wandering days are over.