Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IL FLOWERS AND THEIR VISITORS. The lovely wild flowers, says Jean Ingelow, are the flowers which God made. The hydrangeas and snowballs on our lawns, the hundred-leaved and cabbage roses in our borders, and the whole category of double flowers have been greatly altered by generations of culture. They are, in their present form at least, flowers which man has made. They have been trained into the forms familiar to us by ignorant gardeners bent on producing big blossoms, pleased, like children or savages, by mere masses of color, and lacking the more refined appreciation of graceful forms. In the heart of a double flower will be found a mere crumpled mass of shapeless leaves. The plan on which its parts were once arranged has been obliterated and the exquisite symmetry of its natural shape destroyed. For the purposes of the botanist, as to the eye of the artist, the doubled flower is spoiled. To study the parts of the flower, therefore, we must gather blossoms from country hedgerows, or some single flowers from our garden-beds or window-boxes. However, a rose will show all the central organs (unless it be that triumph of misdirected horticultural zeal a cabbage rose), for only long and arduous culture will take the heart out of the queen of flowers. On the outside of most flowers is a row of leaves, generally, but not always, green. Each one of these outer leaves is a sepal, and all the sepals together form the calyx, or little cup. Sometimes they are all together, in fact as well as in name, having grown into a sort of cup around the flower. This is the case in the carnation. Within the calyx is a second row of flower-leaves, brightly colored or white. Each of these bright delicate leaves is a petal, and all together are spoken of as the corolla, or ...