The CLIMBING FALSE BUCKWHEAT (P.scandens) straggles over bushes in woods, thickets, and by the waysides throughout a very wide range; yet its small, dull, greenish-yellow and pinkish flowers, loosely clustered in long pedicelled racemes, are so inconspicuous during August and September, when the showy composites are in their glory, that we give them scarcely a glance.The alternate leaves, which are heart-shaped at the base and pointed at the lip, suggesting those of the morning glory, are on petioles arising from sheaths over the enlarged joints which, in this family, are always a most prominent characteristic - (Poly = many, gonum = a knee).The three outer sepals, keeled when in flower, are irregularly winged when the three-angled, smooth achene hangs from the matured blossom in autumn, the season at which the vine assumes its greatest attractiveness.
The ARROW-LEAVED TEAR THUMB (P.sagittatum), found in ditches and swampy wet soil, weakly leans on other plants, or climbs over them with the help of the many sharp, recurved prickles which arm its four-angled stem.Even the petioles and underside of the leaf's midrib are set with prickles.The light green leaves, that combine the lance and the arrow shapes, take on a beautiful russet-red tint in autumn.The little, five-parted rose-colored or greenish-white flowers grow in small, close terminal heads from July to September from Nova Scotia to the Gulf and far westward.
SEASIDE or COAST JOINTWEED or KNOT-GRASS (Polygonella articulata;Polygonum articulatum of Gray) a low, slender, wiry, diffusely spreading little plant, with thread-like leaves seated on its much-jointed stem, rises cleanly from out the sand of the coast from Maine to Florida, and the shores of the Great Lakes.Very slender racemes of tiny, nodding, rose-tinted white flowers, with a dark midrib to each of the five calyx segments, are insignificant of themselves; but when seen in masses, from July to October, they tinge the upper beaches and sandy meadows with a pink blush that not a few artists have transferred to the foreground of their marine pictures.
CORN COCKLE; CORN ROSE; CORN or RED CAMPION; CROWN-OF-THE-FIELD(Agrostemma Githago; Lychnis Githago of Gray) Pink family Flowers - Magenta or bright purplish crimson, to 3 in.broad, solitary at end of long, stout footstem; 5 lobes of calyx leaf-like, very long and narrow, exceeding petals.Corolla of 5broad, rounded petals; 10 stamens; 5 styles alternating with calyx lobes, opposite petals.Stem: 1 to 3 ft.high, erect, with few or no branches, leafy, the plant covered with fine white hairs.Leaves: Opposite, seated on stem, long, narrow, pointed, erect.Fruit: a 1-celled, many-seeded capsule.
Preferred Habitat - Wheat and other grain fields; dry, waste places.
Flowering Season - July-September.
Distribution - United States at large; most common in Central and Western States.Also in Europe and Asia.
"Allons! allons! sow'd cockle, reap'd no corn," exclaims Biron in "Love's Labor Lost." Evidently the farmers even in Shakespeare's day counted this brilliant blossom the pest it has become in many of our own grain fields just as it was in ancient times, when Job, after solemnly protesting his righteousness, called on his own land to bear record against him if his words were false."Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley," he cried, according to James the First's translators; but the "noisome weeds" of the original text seem to indicate that these good men were more anxious to give the English people an adequate conception of Job's willingness to suffer for his honor's sake than to translate literally.Possibly the cockle grew in Southern Asia in Job's time : today its range is north.
Like many another immigrant to our hospitable shores, this vigorous invader shows a tendency to outstrip native blossoms in life's race.Having won in the struggle for survival in the old country, where the contest has been most fiercely waged for centuries, it finds life here easy, enjoyable.What are its methods for insuring an abundance of fertile seed? We see that the tube of the flower is so nearly closed by the stamens and five-styled pistil as to be adapted only to the long, slender tongues of moths and butterflies, for which benefactors it became narrow and deep to reserve the nectar."A certain night-flying moth (one of the Dianthaecia) fertilizes flowers of this genus exclusively, and its larvae feed on their unripe seeds as a staple.Bees and some long-tongued flies seen about the corn cockle doubtless get pollen only; but there are few flowers so deep that the longest-tongued bees cannot sip them.Butterflies, attracted by the bright color of the flower - and to them color is the most catchy of advertisements - are guided by a few dark lines on the petals to the nectary.
Soon after the blossom opens, five of the stamens emerge from the tube and shed their pollen on the early visitor.Later, the five other stamens empty the contents of their anthers on more tardy comers.Finally, when all danger of self-fertilization is past, the styles stretch upward, and the butterfly, whose head is dusted with pollen brought from earlier flowers, necessarily leaves some on their sticky surfaces as he takes the leavings in the nectary.