Kendall County, Illinois - Chapter 56: Our Plant Life, 1877

Chapter 56: Our Plant Life

[OUNTY FAIRS are meetings of what is in part our botanical society, with special reference to cultivated grains, grasses and flowers : but in this chapter it is intended to treat mostlv of our wild or natural varieties. Our own agricultural society, it may be said, held its first meeting at Newark in the fall of 1853. Officers : President, J. W. Mason ; Vice Presidents, L. B. Judson and William Townsend ; Recording Secretary, J. J. Cole; Corresponding Secretary, A. M. Sweetland ; Treasurer, Isaac Beebe. The annual oration was delivered in the Baptist Church by John West Mason.

we have from the soft basswood, called linden in Europe, to the hard ironwood or hornbeam. Oak, maple, ash, cherry, elm, &c., are found all over the Temperate Zone. Hick- ory and walnut are natives of this country. So is the Cottonwood, thouo;h now found in other countries. In France, hats and felt goods have been made of its cotton, but the manufacture did not pay. It is a brother of the common poplar. The balsam poplar, or balm of Gilead tree, is the medical member of the family. A balsam made from its buds is exported under the name of tacamahac. The willow family - from the tall white willow to the bending, basket making, osier willow of the brooks - belong to the same order. Wild apple and plum trees formerly abounded in the groves.

A shrub is properly a low tree with one stem : a bush has several woody stems from the same root. One of our commonest shrubs is the sumach, which our mothers used for brown and yellow dyes, and which foreigners are apt to call " shoemakers' trees." A variety of it is the dreaded poison ivy which climbs over fences or up the trunks of trees. It yields a yellowish, milky juice. Some persons can handle it with impunity, while even the smell of it is poisonous to others. The bitter sweet is another poisonous vine, found on old fences or in thickets. It keeps its show of red berries all winter. The woodbine, or wild honeysuckle, is another wellknown climber ; also the wild grape vine, which, with the abundant raspberry, blackberry and gooseberry bushes, and crabapple, thornapple and plum trees of olden time, supplied the pioneers with fruit. First, in the spring, is the red-bud, with its scarlet buds close to the twig ; the buffalo or service berry, with white flowers is next after. Other shrubs, are black cohosh, blue cohosh, or squaw-root, leptandra, or black-root, and the prairie red-root, called New Jersey tea, because the spunky Jerseyites used it for that purpose at the time of the Revolutionary tea trouble in Boston. But dearest bush of all is the familiar hazel, intwined as it is with boyhood's memories. The filberts we buy in the shops are cultivated hazel nuts.

Of wild flowers and weeds we have a greater number than can be enumerated here. The following are the most common and most interesting. The object is not to give a perfect list, but to interest local naturalists in making collections of their own.

Wood Plants

Adder's tongue, or rattlesnake violet, a pretty spring flower ; blood-root, a white flower that appears very early in the spring on the hillsides : cinquefoil, or five finger, a yellow spring flower, in barren woods, sometimes so thick as to cover the ground with a yellow carpet; columbine, a yellowish pink flower, on hillsides, about the month of June ; Dutchman's breeches, or children-in-the-wood, a white flower, changing to pink, growing in the thickets early in April, it will bear transplanting to the home garden ; yellow violet, blooms in the woods nearly all summer ; Jack-in-the pulpit, or Indian turnip, a curious inhabitant of the wood, that bears for its fruit a bunch of bright scarlet berries ; mandrake or May-apple, has a white flower and ripens in August ; the medicinal properties of the fruit were well known to the Indians, who used it freely ; prickly pear, a thick, fleshy plant, with prickles instead of leaves, puts out its white blossoms in July, grows on very stony land. Other kinds are, maidenhair, Greek valerian, or bluebells, ladies' slipper, or yellow moccasin flower, Solomon's seal, hawksweed, wood sorrel, brachyelytrum, a grass with long seed spikes, growing only on one side of the head.

Marsh Plants

Sweet flag, blue flag, and cat's-tail flag. The latter are often used for fishing torches. Wild oats grow in ponds. Horse tail, a relic from the coal period. Pond lily ; wild horehound ; jewel weed ; boneset, or thoroughwort, one of the ague specifics of the first settlers. Arrowhead, flowers in June. Sensitive plant, a yellow flower seen along sloughs in August. Cardinal flower, a scarlet flower appearing in September. Button snake root, a species of flag ; the root steeped in milk is a cure for rattlesnake bites. On the edges of the long, narrow leaves are little spines like the rattlesnake's tooth.

Prairie Flowers

About our dooryards we find chickweed ; the common plaintain, from whose humble spikes we gather canary seed ; and the low mallows, which furnished our play - house cheese when we were boys. From the tall mallows a good article of cloth has been made, and was exhibited at the Illinois State Fair, in 1871. Along our roads we find the white-flowered May weed ; the taller smart weed, called water pepper in the old country ; the still taller wild mustard ; pigweed, ragweed, bindweed, fireweed, ad libitum. Along by the fences are sunflower thistles, dandelions, burdock, and other docks, with their great leaves like elephants' ears ; bunches of catnip waiting to be picked and hung up in the woodshed, and maybe a bunch of tansy ditto, reminding us of the Easter tansy puddings among the queer old customs of ancient times. The ground ivy climbs the fence ; the deadly nightshade, with its black berries, stands sullenly on its footstalk in the edge of the brush, and further on are noxious purslane and pokeweed, and the tall mullein. The leaves of the latter were used by the Indians to staunch blood. Down by the creek are the sand burrs, which are such a terror to barefooted boys going after the cows. Out in the meadow the first flower in bloom was the little hepatica, and on a northern exposure, too, and almost before the frost was out. Then soon came those humble members of cultivated families, the sweet buttercups, sisters of the bachelor's buttons ; and the blue violets, belonging to the aristocratic pansies. These were followed by phloxes, foxgloves, marigolds, tiger lilies, anemones, cowslips, blazing stars, lion's hearts' and golden rods, as well as the humbler strawberry, horseraint, white clover, milkweed, and the fragrant pennyroyal. The lion's heart and golden rod are four or five feet high, and bloom about harvest. Spinach, with its pointed leaves, and stramonium or Jamestown weed - called '' Jemsen weed " - are tall plants. The leaves of the first are used for greens, and the leaves of the other were smoked as a primitive cure for the asthma. Other plants are the ground cherry ; the sour sheep sorrel, belonging to the family of docks ; the upland rattlesnake weed, with its little pink and purple flowers ; lobelia, or Indian tobacco ; the fetid skunk cabbage ; the common nettle ; and the rosin or compass plant - so called because the leaves generally stood north and south. There are two kinds ; one, broad leaf and smooth stem, and the other, narrow leaf and fuzzy stera ; but the boys can get their chewing gum from either. Among the prairie flowers now rarely seen was the cup flower, that did not bloom until frost came.

Our prairie grass is made up of many different kinds, all of which have been enumerated by botanists, but as most of them have no common names thev would not be interesting reading. The botanical names, however, are well worth learning, and indeed are necessary to be learned if one has a desire to know what is around him. It is not difficult. Let the work of collecting and of learning the names of the collection go on together. The specimens throw light on the text book, and the text book throws light on the specimens, and in the double reflection the subject grows more and more interesting and absorbing every day. But for such use if you buy a book, get a complete manual, whatever the science may be. If you are through school and are busy, you will scracely find time to study elementaries, and will be disappointed at not finding what you want in them.

Red top grass and blue joint are our most valuable native grasses. There are also meadow grass, yard grass, agrostis, &c. Herds grass, orchard grass and blue grass have been imported. Rye grass, spear grass, white grass, and others, are natives, but coarse and tall. Knot or couch grass, tickle grass, darnel, canary grass, cord grass, and chess, are noxious weeds. The seeds of the last make flour blue. A number of sedge grasses grow

Flowerless Plants

These are (] ) Ferns, of which there are some thirty or forty species in this county. They are all small ; are found in humid soil in the groves, and a few are parasites.

(2) Mosses, with stem and roots. There are many species. They abound in meadows and pastures, and sometimes stock will eat them. The reindeer lives on them. They help to fill up bogs, protect the roots of plants from the cold, and do many other kind offices.

(3) Lichens, without stem or leaves, merely an aggregation of vegetable cells. They appear as spots on trees and stones, and stains on old walls. They are the commencement of vegetation.

(4) Fungi, the scavengers of the vegetable world. Mushrooms and toadstools come under this head, but with them we take leave of the larger plants, and plunge into the apparently endless microscopic avenues of diminutive vegetation, leading us to molds, mildews, &c.

The molds are minute fungi, like patches of fine cobweb. The mildews are yet a little lower in the scale, as the white mold on leaves, &c. Then follow smut, rust, blight, and other diseases that vegetation is heir to. The fungi are in their sphere what the vultures and wolves are in theirs ; they prey fiercely on everything that has not life enough to resist. And so the record of our county possessions begins with the seen and passes into the unseen, and we leave off with kingdoms before us as extensive as the kingdoms we have left behind us.

Closing Chapter. 429

tawa ; A. M. Ebersol, Floral Home, near Ottawa ; John F. and George H. Steward, Piano ; and C. A. Freeman, M. D., Newark, for materials for this and the preceding chapter. J. F. Steward has made a nearly complete collection of the ferns of this county, and G. H. Steward the same of our birds; while each has a large geological collection, illustrating every period in the history of the earth.