The Call of the Wildflower

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rimination, but the superficial yet often puzzling similarity in what botanists call the "habit" of wildflowers. Thus the horse-shoe vetch may easily be mistaken, by a beginner, for the bird's-foot trefoil, or the field mouse-ear chickweed for the greater stitchwort; and the differences between the dove's-foot crane's-bill

e confusion in the reader's mind by depicting quite dissimilar plants in almost identical terms. In Johns's Flowers of the Field (edition of 1908), for example, the description of hedge-woundwort hardly differs verbally from that of black horehound, and might certainly mis

e, when some of the labiate flowers were in question, dismissed them, not very helpfully, as "all growing in abundance, but so much alike that it needs a knowledge of botany to distinguish them from each other"! I have known a case w

e four or five of the clan-the true chamomile, the wild chamomile, the corn chamomile, the stinking chamomile, and the "scentless" mayweed, which is not scentless. Many of the umbellifers also are notoriously difficult to identify; and among leguminous plants there is a bewildering similarity between black medick, or "nonsuch," and the lesser clover (trifolium minus)

much more apt to confuse plants than to distinguish them: witness such names as "fool's-parsley" and "fool's-watercress." Fools there are; yet anyone who has spent time in studying wildflowers, with no better aid than that of the popular books on the subject, will hesitate to pass judgment on such folly; for as so good an observer as Richard Jefferies said: "If you really wish to identify with certainty, and have no botanist friend and no magnum opus of Sowerby to refer to, it is very difficult indeed to be quite sure."[5] We have to be thankful for small mercies in this matter; and it may be recognize

s attention is often distracted, as, for instance, if one is looking for the spineless meadow-thistle, the eye may be baffled by innumerable knapweed blossoms of the same hue; the clustered bel

the valley abounds, and where visitors are permitted to pick as many flowers as they like after payment of a shilling. Seeing a gentleman busily engaged in gathering a large bunch of ramsons, the keeper, suspecting error, asked him what he supposed himself to be picking. "Why, lilies of t

a stranger, every sheep in the flock has a face like that o