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The Winds and the Woods: March: Locust

QUEER HOOP-CHASING BY THE WIND SPRITES But the seeds of a tree don't necessarily have to have wings in order to be helped along by the wind. Even the Oaks, and nut-bearing trees like the Hickory, get a lift now and then in a threshing gale, but the Locust has a special device. Haven't you noticed how its big "pea-pods" -- it belongs to the pea family, by the way -- in drying, contract and so become twisted and curled? And then did you ever see them go rolling before a stiff breeze? It's a queer sort of hoop-chasing on the part of the wind sprites; but what these wind sprites are really doing, from a practical standpoint, is distributing the seeds of the Locust.

THE WINDS AS SEED-GROWERS The concerns that raise seeds in their big gardens we call seed-growers, although all they do is to plant seeds already made by Nature and leave Nature to multiply them. Certainly, then, we can call the winds "seed-growers," can't we, when they actually help to make the seeds, just as much as a shoemaker makes shoes when he puts the soles and the uppers together? All seeds that come from wind-pollinated flowers are, in this sense, "made by the winds." Such flowers, having no direct means of communication with other flowers by the famous Bee Line, and similar routes, are obliged to produce their pollen grains in enormous quantities. Near Pine woods, in the season, you'll find sheets of water covered with the yellow dust; and you know, when you bring home a Pussy-Willow or the catkins of an Elm or an Ash, how thick the pollen settles around the vases in which they are put. The pollen grains of wind-borne seeds are smooth, not rough, as are those of insect-pollinated flowers. This roughening is to make the grains stick to the bees and other visitors and to each other, so the little carriers will be well loaded; but the smooth grains of the wind-borne pollen don't stick to one another and thus are enabled to float longer in the air and be carried farther. Moreover, the pollen grains of the Pine have two little balloons, called "flotation bladders," at opposite ends of the grain. These remarkable "dirigibles" have been known to travel over 500 miles!

SCATTERING TREE SEEDS BY BOWS AND ARROWS So you see the winged seeds not only anticipated our air-planes but our dirigibles also!