Pepacton Author's ed - essays Author:John Burroughs 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: A BUNCH OF HERBS. FRAGRANT WILD-FLOWERS. THE charge that was long ago made against our wild-Hewers by English travellers in this country, namely, that they... more » were odourless, doubtless had its origin in the fact, that, whereas in England the sweet-scented flowers are among the most common and conspicuous, in this country they are rather shy and withdrawn, and consequently not such as travellers would be likely to encounter. Moreover, the British traveller, remembering the delicionsly fragrant blue violets he left at home, covering every grassy slope and meadow-bank in spring, and the wild clematis, or traveller's joy, overrunning hedges and old walls with its white, sweet-scented blossoms; and finding the corresponding species here, equally abundant, but entirely scentless, very naturally inferred that our wild-flowers were all deficient in this respect. He would be confirmed in this opinion, when, on turningto some of our most beautiful and striking native flowers, like the laurel, the rhododendron, the columbine, the inimitable fringed gentian, the burning cardinal flower, or our asters and golden-rod, dashing the roadsides with tints of purple and gold, he found them scentless also. " Where are your fragrant flowers?"he might well say. "I can find none." Let him look closer, and penetrate our forests, and visit our ponds and lakes. Let him compare our matchless, rosy-lipped, honey-hearted trailing arbutus with his own ugly ground-ivy (Nepeta Glechoma); let him compare our sumptuous fragrant pond-lily with his own odourless N. alba. In our Northern woods he shall find the floors carpeted with the delicate Limirea, its twin rose-coloured, nodding flowers filling the air with fragrance. (I am aware that the Lin- nsea is found in some parts of Northern Europe.) The fact is, we p...« less