The VIRGINIA SNAKEROOT or SERPENTARY (A. serpentaria), found in dry woods, chiefly in the Middle States and South, although its range extends northward to Connecticut, New York, and Michigan, is the species whose aromatic root is used in medicine. It is a low-growing herb, not a vine; its heart-shaped leaves, which are narrow and tapering to a point, are green on both sides, and the curious, greenish, S-shaped flower, which grows alone at the tip of a scaly footstalk from the root, appears in June or July. Sometimes the flowers are cleistogamous (see violet wood-sorrel).
FIRE PINK; VIRGINIA CATCHFLY
(Silene Virginica) Pink family
Flowers - Scarlet or crimson, 1 1/2 in. broad or less, a few on slender pedicels from the upper leaf-axils. Calyx sticky, tubular, bell-shaped, 5-cleft, enlarged in fruit; corolla of 5 wide-spread, narrow, notched petals, sometimes deeply 2-cleft; 10 stamens; 3 styles. Stem: 1 to 2 ft. high; erect, slender, sticky. Leaves: Thin, spatulate, 3 to 5 in. long; or upper ones oblong to lance-shaped. Preferred Habitat - Dry, open woodland. Flowering Season - May-September. Distribution - Southern New Jersey to Minnesota, south to Georgia and Missouri.
The rich, glowing scarlet of these pinks that fleck the Southern woodland as with fire, will light up our Northern rock gardens too, if we but sow the seed under glass in earliest spring, and set out the young plants in well-drained, open ground in May. Division of old perennial roots causes the plants to sulk; dampness destroys them.
To the brilliant blossoms butterflies chiefly come to sip (see wild pink), and an occasional hummingbird, fascinated by the color that seems ever irresistible to him, hovers above them on whirring wings. Hapless ants, starting to crawl up the stem, become more and more discouraged by its stickiness, and if they persevere in their attempts to steal from the butterfly's legitimate preserves, death overtakes their erring feet as speedily as if they ventured on sticky fly paper. How humane is the way to protect flowers from crawling thieves that has been adopted by the high-bush cranberry and the partridge pea (q.v.), among other plants! These provide a free lunch of sweets in the glands of their leaves to satisfy pilferers, which then seek no farther, leaving the flowers to winged insects that are at once despoilers and benefactors.
WILD COLUMBINE
(Aquilegia Canadensis) Crowfoot family
Flower - Red outside, yellow within, irregular, 1 to 2 in. long, solitary, nodding from a curved footstalk from the upper leaf-axils. Petals 5, funnel-shaped, but quickly narrowing into long, erect, very slender hollow spurs, rounded at the tip and united below by the 5 spreading red sepals, between which the straight spurs ascend; numerous stamens and 5 pistils projecting. Stem: 1 to 2 ft. high; branching, soft-hairy or smooth. Leaves: More or less divided, the lobes with rounded teeth; large lower compound leaves on long petioles. Fruit: An erect pod, each of the 5 divisions tipped with a long, sharp beak. Preferred Habitat - Rocky places, rich woodland. Flowering Season - April-July. Distribution - Nova Scotia to the Northwest Territory; southward to the Gulf States. Rocky Mountains.
Although under cultivation the columbine nearly doubles its size, it never has the elfin charm in a conventional garden that it possesses wild in Nature's. Dancing in red and yellow petticoats to the rhythm of the breeze, along the ledge of overhanging rocks, it coquettes with some Punchinello as if daring him to reach her at his peril. Who is he? Let us sit a while on the rocky ledge and watch for her lovers.
Presently a big muscular bumblebee booms along. Owing to his great strength, an inverted, pendent blossom, from which he must cling upside down, has no more terrors for him than a trapeze for the trained acrobat. His long tongue - if he is one of the largest of our sixty-two species of Bombus - can suck almost any flower unless it is especially adapted to night-flying sphinx moths, but can he drain this? He is the truest benefactor of the European columbine (q.v.), whose spurs suggested the talons of an eagle (aquila) to imaginative Linnaeus when he gave this group of plants its generic name. Smaller bumblebees, unable through the shortness of their tongues to feast in a legitimate manner, may be detected nipping holes in the tips of all columbines, where the nectar is secreted, just as they do in larkspurs, Dutchman's breeches, squirrel corn, butter and eggs, and other flowers whose deeply hidden nectaries make dining too difficult for the little rogues. Fragile butterflies, absolutely dependent on nectar, hover near our showy wild columbine with its five tempting horns of plenty, but sail away again, knowing as they do that their weak legs are not calculated to stand the strain of an inverted position from a pendent flower, nor are their tongues adapted to slender tubes unless these may be entered from above. The tongues of both butterflies and moths bend readily only when directed beneath their bodies. It will be noticed that our columbine's funnel-shaped tubes contract just below the point where the nectar is secreted - doubtless to protect it from small bees. When we see the honeybee or the little wild bees - Haliclus chiefly - on the flower, we may know they get pollen only.
Finally a ruby-throated hummingbird whirs into sight. Poising before a columbine, and moving around it to drain one spur after another until the five are emptied, he flashes like thought to another group of inverted red cornucopias, visits in turn every flower in the colony, then whirs away quite as suddenly as he came. Probably to him, and no longer to the outgrown bumblebee, has the flower adapted itself. The European species wears blue, the bee's favorite color according to Sir John Lubbock; the nectar hidden in its spurs, which are shorter, stouter, and curved, is accessible only to the largest humblebees. There are no hummingbirds in Europe. (See jewel-weed.) Our native columbine, on the contrary, has longer, contracted, straight, erect spurs, most easily drained by the ruby-throat which, like Eugene Field, ever delights in "any color at all so long as it's red."