Literary Pilgrimages of a NaturalistPackard, Winthrop
History
Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist
Packard, Winthrop
Natural history -- Outdoor books; New England -- Description and travel
from behind the anthers, there to drop pollen grains on the stigma
and insure the cross-fertilization of the flower. Thus unwittingly
butterfly and bee as they sail about the sun-steeped meadow suffer
discomfort for their own good, insuring vigorous crops of milkweed
for another summer, for themselves or their descendants.
With these comes the smaller, Colias philodice, the sulphur,
bringing with him the very gold of the sunlight. Colias philodice
has many changes. Sometimes the black margins of his wings are
missing and his gold melts into the sunshine and vanishes before
your eyes. Another may come that is white instead of gold, a wan
ghost of a colias that seems born of the mist instead of the
sunshine and to vanish into nothing when he flies away, as mist
does. Sometimes the colias flies up into the wood and lights, and
as I come to the spot where I think I saw him stop I find nothing
but a single bloom of the golden gerardia which now slips from
glade to glade all along where the hardwood growth comes down to
meet the meadow grasses. The gerardia might very well explain all
this if it would, but it is born close-mouthed. If you will look at
the yellow buds which later open into the golden bells into which
the bumble-bees love to scramble, bumbling as they go, you will
see how tightly their lips are pressed together. No word can you
get from these by the most insistent questioning, and even when
they open it is easy to see that they have learned that silence is
golden.
The Baltimore butterfly, wearing Lord Baltimore’s colors of orange
and black, is a common visitant to these meadows, too. He loves to
tipple the lees of the milkweed blooms, but he does not frequent
the meadow for that. It is because along its shoreward edges where
the cool water oozes from black mud grows his home plant, the
turtle-head. On this he was born and to it he goes for the housing
and feeding of his children. Like Gerardia flava, Chelone glabra
is close-mouthed, but its silence is a wan white one which only
blushes pink with embarrassment when questioned, but yields no
reply. You cannot learn any mysteries of the meadow from these.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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