How to Know the Wild Flowers

The book that taught America botany by color: find your flower under White, Yellow, Pink or Blue, and read its name, its haunts and its folklore — the first field guide organized the way people actually look.

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Virginia Creeper. American Ivy

Ampelopsis quinquefolia. Vine Family.

A woody vine climbing by means of disk-bearing tendrils, and also by rootlets. Leaves.--Usually divided into five leaflets. Flowers.--Greenish; small; clustered; appearing in July. Fruit.--A small blackish berry in October. Surely in autumn, if not always, this is the most beautiful of our native climbers. At that season its blood-like sprays are outlined against the dark evergreens about which they delight to twine, showing that marvellous discrimination in background which so constantly excites our admiration in nature. The Virginia creeper is extensively cultivated in Europe. Even in Venice, that sea-city where one so little anticipates any reminders of home woods and meadows, many a dim canal mirrors in October some crumbling wall or graceful trellis aglow with its vivid beauty.

COMMON BLACK HUCKLEBERRY.(There is a great similarity between many of the Heaths. For more accurate identification than can be here given, Gray's Manual should be consulted.) Gaylussacia resinosa. Heath Family.

One to three feet high. Stems.--Shrubby; branching. Leaves.--Oval or oblong; sprinkled more or less with waxy, resinous atoms. Flowers.--White, reddish, or purplish; bell-shaped; growing in short, one-sided clusters. Calyx.--With five short teeth. Corolla.--Bell-shaped, with a five-cleft border. Stamens.--Ten. Pistil--One. Fruit.--A black, bloomless, edible berry. The flowers of the common huckleberry appear in May or June; the berries in late summer. The shrub abounds in rocky woods and swamps.

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