Wild Flowers: An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect VisitorsBlanchan, Neltje
Science
Wild Flowers: An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors
Blanchan, Neltje
Wild flowers -- North America
Flowers - White and pink, pale or deep, small, cylindric,
bell-shaped. 5-parted, borne in 1-sided racemes from the sides of
the stiff, grayish branches. Stem: A shrub to 3 ft. high. Leaves:
Alternate, oval to oblong, firm, entire edged, green on both
sides, dotted underneath with resinous spots, especially when
young. Fruit: A round, black, bloomless, sweet, berry-like drupe,
containing 10 seed-like nutlets, in each of which is a solitary
seed. Ripe, July-August.
Preferred Habitat - Moist, sandy soil, thickets, open woods.
Flowering Season - May-June.
Distribution - Newfoundland to Georgia, west to Manitoba and
Kentucky.
This common huckleberry, oftener found in pies and muffins by the
average observer than in its native thickets, unfortunately
ripens in fly-time, when the squeamish boarder in the summer
hotel does well to carefully scrutinize each mouthful. For the
abundant fruit set on huckleberry bushes, as on so many others,
we are indebted chiefly to the lesser bees, which, receiving the
pollen jarred out from the terminal chinks in the anther-sacs on
their undersides as they cling, transfer it to the protruding
stigmas of the next blossom visited. After fertilization, when
the now useless corolla falls, the ten-celled ovary is protected
by the encircling calyx, that grows rapidly, swells, fills with
juice, and takes on color until it and the ovary together become
a so-called berry, whose seeds are dropped far and wide by birds
and beasts. "The name huckleberry, which is applied
indiscriminately to several species of Vaccinium and
Gaylussacia," says Professor L. H. Bailey, "is evidently a
corruption of whortleberry. Whortleberry is in turn a corruption
of myrtleberry. In the Middle Ages, the true myrtleberry was
largely used in cookery and medicine, but the European bilberry
or Vaccinium so closely resembled it that the name was
transferred to the latter plant, a circumstance commemorated by
Linnaeus in the giving of the name Vaccinium Myrtillus to the
bilberry. From the European whortleberry the name was transferred
to the similar American plants."
A common little bushy shrub, not a true blueberry, found in moist
woods, especially beside streams, from New England to the Gulf
States, and westward to Ohio, is the BLUE TANGLE, TANGLEBERRY, or
DANGLEBERRY [now TALL HUCKLEBERRY (G. frondosa). It bears a few
tiny greenish-pink flowers dangling from pedicels in loose
racemes, and corresponding clusters of most delicious, sweet,
dark-blue berries, covered with hoary bloom in midsummer. The
abundant resinous leaves on its slender gray branches are pale
and hoary beneath. The caterpillars of several species of sulphur
butterflies (Colias) feed on huckleberry leaves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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