There is an endless variety in these various welcomes among the flowers, and our barberry has one of the queerest of them all. Poets of all ages have loved to dwell upon the flowers—their "swete smels," exquisite forms, fragrance, and colors. The droning bees in an environment of fragrant bloom have moved many a poetic pen to inspiration. But it is not often that the bards have seen deep enough into the floral mysteries to immortalize the doings of the blossoms.
I recall one such allusion, however, with reference to this mischievous blossom of the barberry. How well old Hosea Biglow knew its pranks!
"All down the loose-walled lanes in archin' bowers
The barb'ry droops its strings o' golden flowers,
Whose shrinkin' hearts the school-gals love to try
With pins. They'll worry yourn so, boys, bime-by."
Those "shrinkin' hearts" of the barberry blossom, so long the wonder and amusement of children, including many children of adult growth, have, so far as I know, herein found their first and only historian—historian, but not interpreter. For Hosea Biglow, nor his literary parent, James Russell Lowell, never dreamed of the significance of this strange spectacle in the shrinkin' hearts of the barberry bloom when surprised with the point of a pin.
But the bee can tell us all about it. He has known this singular trick in the barberry for ages, and kept the secret all to himself. Only comparatively recently (1859 or thereabouts) did the secret leak out, when Darwin, by the previous hints of several other philosophers, discovered the key which unlocked the mystery of this as well as thousands of other similar riddles among the flowers.
These strange "manners" of the blossoms had then a deep vital principle at their base. They had not always been thus, but had gradually, through long ages of time, changed and modified their shapes, colors, odors, nectar, and their manners for one purpose—to insure their pollen being conveyed away upon the bodies of insects and carried to a second flower, and there placed upon the stigma to insure fertilization and development of the seed.
"In archin' bowers"
The plans, devices, tricks, and pranks by which flowers accomplish this result are past belief. I have indicated only a few by way of a hint, and in previous papers on the bluebottle and figwort have described others, but none quite similar to the barberry.