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A Door Above the Pollen
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The mandrake legend: a dog, a root and a fatal shriek
to pull up that would cause death to any creature hearing itTraditional mandrake instructi…[1]
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Can You Tell the Time by Flowers?
Linnaeus's flower clock
Linnaeus had what Cooke calls “a happy idea”: a “floral clock” whose hours were marked by flowers opening or closing. He also named “meteoric flowers,” those that open and close at about the same time each day, or seem to answer to changes in the weather.[1]
The schedule Cooke reprints, as corroborated by De Candolle, begins in the dark: purple convolvulus at 2 a.m., goatsbeard between 4 and 5, the yellow Arctic poppy at 5.[2] De Candolle even kept some flowers from daylight and found that certain ones still “followed the clock hour” in opening and closing.[3]
Cooke was not persuaded that such a clock could keep time. “Pretty and poetical as such a theory may be,” he wrote, a dull day or a damp morning changes the results, because opening and closing depend more on light and warmth than on the hour.[4] He granted only that certain flowers have “a manifest tendency” to open or close about a certain time.[5]
Weather made a better story. The scarlet pimpernel keeps its petals shut on cloudy or rainy days so constantly that it earned the name “Shepherd's weather-glass”; if it opens fully in the morning, the book promises, “the umbrella and the macintosh may be dispensed with.”[6] Goat's beard, meanwhile, closes even before noon, hence its country name, “Go-to-bed-at-noon.”[7]
The weather-glass is country lore that Cooke passes on, not a tested forecast. His larger point is that flowers answer to conditions, which is why, in his words, so many circumstances can “upset any horological arrangement.”[8]
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Flowers that work the night shift
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The Stillness Underneath
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When flowers seemed to flash at dusk
lightning-like phosphorescenceLinnaeus's daughter, on nastur…[1]
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The monster arum, shrunk 25 times to fit the page
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The Mammoth Tree and the Tape Measure
Big trees, bigger claims
In his chapter on giants, Cooke notes a naming quirk: the great Californian conifers were “known to Englishmen as Wellingtonia and to Americans as Sequoia,” and were long regarded as the mammoth trees of the world.[1] By 1882, he writes, that supremacy had passed to the “big trees” of Australia, though reliable dimensions were “very difficult to determine” in both countries.[2]
He trusted modest numbers. A work of authority put the tallest known Sequoia at 325 feet, in the Calaveras Grove, and the Grizzly Giant of the Mariposa Grove at 93 feet around at the ground.[3] Heights of four hundred feet and upwards, he warns, “are believed to be wholly unreliable.”[4]
Felling one showed what the size meant. In an account Cooke credits to Dr. Berthold Seemann, the “big tree” was 96 feet around at the base and solid throughout; twenty-five men spent five days boring it with augers and cutting between the holes with an axe.[5] It fell only with a wedge, strong leverage and a heavy breeze, and the crash threw stones and earth that marked the surrounding trees nearly a hundred feet up.[6]
Australia's rivals were gum trees. One hollow Karri was said to admit three riders and a pack horse, who could turn inside without dismounting.[7] Other eucalypts were measured at 480 feet and estimated at 500.[8] Cooke's source concluded that these trees rival the Californians “in length, though evidently not in thickness.”[9]
These are Victorian reports and estimates as Cooke compiled them, not modern verified records. His suspicion of sensational heights is part of the marvel.
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The sensitive plant Cooke watched as he wrote
At a slight touch all the leaflets rise and close the upper surfaces togetherM. C. Cooke, watching the Mimo…[1]
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The Pitcher Plant With Lodgers
A trap that feeds more than the plant
Cooke's side-saddle flowers, the North American Sarracenias, turn a whole leaf into an upright trumpet.[1] A honey-baited path leads insects up to the mouth,[2] and inside, downward-pointing hairs stop them climbing back until they drown in the fluid at the bottom.[3]
The catch attracts freeloaders. A writer Cooke quotes says insects “too wary to be entrapped themselves” drop their eggs into the open pitchers, so old pitchers hold living larvae and maggots.[4] Barton even reported insect-eating birds slitting pitchers open with their beaks to get at the contents.[5]
Professor C. V. Riley studied two of these lodgers. In his summary, as Cooke gives it, the parasitic moth is “a mere intruder, its larva sharing the food obtained by the plant,” while the fly that breeds there has no other connexion with the plant “than that of a destroyer.”[6]
Too much food could be a problem too. In 1879 the Royal Horticultural Society's Scientific Committee heard of a cultivated species whose pitchers drew so many flies that they became gorged and were destroyed, until the grower blocked their mouths with cotton-wool.[7] To Cooke, this suggested that animal food is not essential to at least one species.[8]
His own verdict was cautious. With no digestive secretion yet demonstrated, the Sarracenias “can only be charged with destroying insects, and not with devouring them.”[9] Riley, by contrast, called Sarracenia “a truly insectivorous plant.”[10] Both are Victorian judgements, reported here as Cooke recorded them.
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