Fireweed

“ The yield is high, running from 50 to 150 pounds a hive, and the honey has a delicious flavor because much of the nectar is gathered from the bloom of fireweed. This plant springs up, almost as if by magic, in the cutover or burnedoff lands. For a season the land is an ugly scar ”

“ The Fireweed, as the name indicates, is found on burnt areas especially, though it also occurs in meadows and open woods and copses. The flowers are pale pink to deep rose-purple and bloom all summer long. The plants are widely distributed over the continent up to 10000 ft. and grow as tall as 5 ft. ”

“ The rose-colored, spirelike, flowered tops attract attention wherever it is found. The name fireweed has been given because it comes up quickly in burned areas. It is not restricted to burned places, however, for it grows wherever there is unpreempted space in sunny locations, as along roadsides. It may be seen in flower throughout the summer, since it grows from sea level to 5,000 feet in elevation. The blooming progresses to higher elevations as the season advances. Its leaves are similar to those of willow, which accounts for another common name—willowweed. ”

“ Leaves.—Scattered, lance-shaped, willow-like. Flowers.—Purplish-pink, large, in a long raceme. Calyx.—Four-cleft. Corolla.—Of four petals. Stamens.—Eight. Pistil.—One, with a four-lobed stigma.
In midsummer this striking plant begins to mass its deep-hued blossoms along the roadsides and low meadows. It is supposed to flourish with especial abundance in land that has newly been burned over; hence, its common name of fireweed. Its willow-like foliage has given it its other English title. The likeness between the blossoms of this plant and those of the evening primrose betray their kinship. ”

“ Alice also recognized it. Willow-herb—also known as “fireweed,” because it always springs up in the track of forest fires—is one of the best honey-yielding plants in America. It flowers in late summer, and lasts until frost kills it, secreting nectar heavily whenever the weather is at all favorable. A single colony of bees has been known to gather the almost incredible amount of four hundred pounds of honey from this plant alone. ”

“ British Possessions and United States southward to the Carolinas and Arizona. Also Europe and Asia.
Spikes of these beautiful brilliant flowers towering upward above dry soil, particularly where the woodsman's axe and forest fires have devastated the landscape, illustrate Nature's abhorrence of ugliness. Other kindly plants have earned the name of fireweed, but none so quickly beautifies the blackened clearings of the pioneer, nor blossoms over the charred trail in the wake of the locomotive. Whole mountainsides in Alaska are dyed crimson with it. ”

“ It was covered by the bright red flowers of a tall plant standing nearly as high as a bear's head, which shoots up all over the charred soil whenever a tract of forest is burned. Other undergrowth may come up in the following spring, but for the first year nothing appears except the red "fireweed," and that grows so thickly that the burnt wood is a blaze of color, out of which the blackened trunks of the old trees stand up naked and gaunt. ”

“ In the untold ages that fire has been a factor in the life-history of these forests there has developed a class of plants known as fireweeds, consisting of a score or more of herbs, shrubs, and short-lived deciduous trees, such as birch and aspen, which quickly take possession of burned areas and flourish until the dominant, but more slowly growing conifers have time to reestablish themselves. ”

“ Along with these two fireweeds, breeders of sylphs, in my pine wood grows the pokeweed, a villainous name for a wonderfully vigorous and beautiful plant. Just now its close-set racemes of purple-black berries are ripening, their color a vivid contrast with the smooth rich green of its ovate-oblong leaves and the wine color of its stems. It is really a royal plant, and so great is its vigor that its dark berries threaten to burst their skins and scatter their rich crimson lifeblood. ”

“ Where cultivation destroyed the weeds, the land is still absolutely bare except for an occasional weed which escaped destruction by the plow. The fallow ground, on the other hand, is a mass of fireweed whose bloom is conspicuous for miles.
The sand blast While these weeds protect the surface of the fallow ground, ash from the bare surface is picked up in clouds by every wind, forming a sand blast which is very hard on the few plants that have persisted. All of them are lopped over before the wind, and their lower leaves are cut to pieces by the sharp sand or are buried beneath it. ”

“ When the foliage of the conifers is consumed by fire the potash and other mineral nutrients stored up in several years' growth of evergreen leaves is returned to the soil in readily available form, and this must be a significant factor in the rapid growth of the fireweeds. ”

“ The Fire-weed is a plant of the open country and not of the forest. It must have a great deal of sunshine. When its seeds fall in the deep shade of a dense forest, where the rays of the sun penetrate but a short distance if at all, they cannot grow. But let the woodman or a fire lay low or destroy the noble growth of trees, then there is soon a transformation—the landscape is enlivened by the bright flowers of the Fire-weed. ”

“ The fire-weed, a species of tall thistle of rank and unpleasant scent, is the first plant that appears when the ground has been freed from timbers by fire: if a piece of land lies untilled the first summer after its being chopped, the following spring shows you a smothering crop of this vile weed. The next plant you notice is the sumach, with its downy stalks, and head of deep crimson velvety flowers, forming an upright obtuse bunch at the extremity of the branches: the leaves turn scarlet towards the latter end of the summer. ”

“ The Fire-weed is one of the most interesting of the wild members of the family. It is abundant in dry fields and along roadsides throughout that portion of North America lying north of North Carolina, Kansas, Arizona and California. With its spike-like racemes of rather broad purple or sometimes white flowers, it beautifies many waste places from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. A plant of the Fire-weed is a continuous bouquet, for it blossoms from June to October. ”

“ Where the northern coniferous forests have been burned, it is not an uncommon sight to see a Fire-weed plant, from six to ten feet tall, with its broad top of flowers closely contrasted with the blackened remains of a forest monarch. ”

“ Everywhere among the grasses, weeds, and bushes we find the airy tokens of her visits; those delicate, hair-like fringes surrounding culm or twig, or growing like a tiny tuft of some webby mould upon the surface of leaf. But who even guesses the nature of the pretty fringe, or even associates with it the pale green golden-eyed fly which we all know so well?
Here beneath our close leaf is an opportunity which we must not permit to pass. Even as we take another cautious peep we discover that a cobwebby hair has grown from the surface of the leaf, with its tiny knob at the summit ”

“ But a fire in a few hours will lick up every stick and leaf, except the large logs and stumps, burn up all the bushes, and the whole network of small roots that cover the ground, so that nothing will start for months, as it destroys all the seeds of the weeds and trees, of which the ground is full; and if it is dry, and a thorough burn, will so roast the large stumps that very few of them will ever sprout again,—while, as in Ben’s case, most of them are spruce, pine, or fir, that never throw up any sprouts from the roots. ”

“ The smell of the smallest quantity of burnt weed would be intolerable in so confined a place: so he cleared away every sprout of it, and laid some of the drift-wood on a spot above high-water mark, picking out the driest pieces of fire-wood he could find for kindling a flame. ”

“ You see, most weeds have grown in spite of everything, and have accommodated themselves to such unpleasant surroundings that when they find themselves in splendid surroundings, as in your garden soil, they begin to grow ‘with a vengeance.’”
“I know!” Mary Frances laughed.
“Well, we fairy folk want to help you as much as possible with your garden. I am going to tell you about—
Some Ways to Rid of Weeds
Of course, one of the best ways is to pull the weeds, never allowing them to go to seed. ”

“ Non-fragrant flowers that yield honey are those of the raspberry, clematis, sumac, bugloss, ailanthus, goldenrod, aster, fleabane. A large number of odorless plants yield pollen to the bee. There is nectar in the columbine, and the bumblebee sometimes gets it by piercing the spur from the outside, as she does with the dicentra. There ought to be honey in the honeysuckle, but I have never seen the hive bee make any attempt to get it.
WEEDS
One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds. ”

“ As a rule, the fire so heats the cones that most of them open and release their seeds a few hours, or a few days, after the fire. If the area burned over is a large one, the fire loosens the clasp of the cone-scales and millions of lodge-pole seeds are released to be sown by the great eternal seed-sower, the wind. These seeds are thickly scattered, and as they germinate readily in the mineral soil, enormous numbers of them sprout and begin to struggle for existence. I once counted 84,322 young trees on an acre. ”

“ But the figwort has found out gradually through the ages that wasps are more serviceable in the cross-fertilization of its flowers than other insects, and it has thus gradually modified its shape, odor, and nectar especially to these insects.
Let us then take a careful look at these queer little homely flowers, and for the time being consider them as mere devices—first, to insure the visit of an insect, and second, to make that insect the bearer of the pollen from one blossom to the stigma of another. ”

“ On our land, and everywhere in the immediate neighbourhood, the process of clearing by fire was sure to be followed by a spontaneous growth, first of fire-weed or wild lettuce, and secondly by a crop of young cherry trees, so thick as to choke one another. At other spots, where pine-trees had stood for a century, the outcome of their destruction by fire was invariably a thick growth of raspberries, with poplars of the aspen variety. ”

“ It is an olive, shrub-like weed, with a conical, disc-like root that adheres very firmly to the rock, and a pinnately-branched frond with leaf-like branchlets. The air-vesicles are cylindrical and pod-like, divided internally into about ten cells, and the spores are contained in globular receptacles at the tips of the branchlets.
The young algologist will probably meet with many difficulties in his attempts to classify his sea weeds and name the various species in his collection. In dealing with an unknown weed we strongly recommend him to first determine the order to which it belongs. ”

“ Common throughout the Southwest, particularly on overgrazed rangelands and deserted clearings, this plant, also called “matchweed” or “turpentine-weed,” often occurs in almost pure stands. The resinous stems burn readily, throwing off black smoke. Most abundant on dry hills and mesas, 3,000 to 6,000 feet elevation, this perennial is found from 1,000 to 7,000 feet, blossoming from June to October. Bees obtain nectar and pollen from the small but densely crowded, yellow flower clusters. ”

“ Another insect stings the same leaf and produces the common oak-apple—a smooth, round, green, shell-like body filled with a network of radiating filaments, with the egg and then the grub of the insect at the centre. Still another kind of insect stings the oak bud and deposits its eggs there, and the oak proceeds to grow a large white ball made up of a kind of succulent vegetable wool with red spots evenly distributed over its surface, as if it were some kind of spotted fruit or flower. ”

“ There are few more obnoxious weeds in cultivated ground than sheep-sorrel, also an Old World plant; while our native wood-sorrel,—belonging, it is true, to a different family of plants,—with its white, delicately veined flowers, or the variety with yellow flowers, is quite harmless. The same is true of the mallow, the vetch or tare, and other plants. We have no native plant so indestructible as garden orpine, or live-forever, which our grandmothers nursed and for which they are cursed by many a farmer. ”

“ Professor Marsh, in the work to which we have already several times alluded, says: "When newly cleared ground is burnt over in the United States, the ashes are hardly cold before they are covered with a crop of fire-weed, a tall herbaceous plant, very seldom growing under other circumstances, and often not to be found for a distance of many miles from the clearing." The botanical name of this plant is Erechthites hieracifolia, and it is well known to the botanists of New England. Its seeds are almost as destructible by fire as thistle-down itself ”

“ Fibres are coiled spirally in the minute vessels of flowering plants, and are not wholly wanting even among fungi. The leaf-organs are very generally spirally arranged; the leaf-stalks are often so twisted as to bring leaves on one plane which otherwise would occupy several. In the leaf itself we have a spiral twist taking place constantly in Alstrœmeria, in Avena, and other plants. A similar tendency is manifested in the flower-stalks, as in Cyclamen and Vallisneria, and the whole inflorescence, as in Spiranthes. Even the bark and wood of trees is often disposed spirally. ”

“ Tournefort seems inclined to this opinion; who says, that the figs in Provence and at Paris ripen sooner, if their buds be pricked with a straw dipped in olive-oil. Plumbs and pears punctured by some insects ripen sooner, and the part round the puncture is sweeter. Is not the honey-dew produced by the puncture of insects? will not wounding the branch of a pear-tree, which is too vigorous, prevent the blossoms from falling off; as from some fig-trees the fruit is said to fall off unless they are wounded by caprification? ”