 Wild Flowers of the Farm, Chapter 3. Flowers on the Walls, by Arthur Owens Cook, recorded for LibriVox Coffee Break Collection, Volume 3. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording by Amy Benton. Wild Flowers of the Farm, Chapter 3. Flowers on the Walls, by Arthur Owens Cook. Behind the narrow strip of ground, with flowers and shrubs on the other side of the drive, there is a low stone wall, a piece of the lawn on which the mulberry tree stands has been cut away, and a flight of steps leads down to a little gate into the fold yard. This wall between the garden and the fold yard is very old and rough, not like the smooth brick walls you see in towns. The stones are of different shapes and sizes. The mortar has fallen out of it in many places, and here and there are holes and crevices. Yet it is a very beautiful old wall, for many things grow on it. Mosses, and grasses, and other flowers, too, are there. On this May morning we will not only see, but also smell, one of the flowers which grow upon the wall. It is the beautiful, sweet, scented wallflower. It grows here and there along the top of the wall, and a few plants of it are even springing from the sides. Some of the plants are quite large, and their stems are tough. These have grown here for a long time. The wallflower is a perennial plant. Unless it is killed or torn up by the roots, it will live and grow for many years. Others are quite young, and only a few inches high. These have grown from seeds dropped last autumn by the older plants. You very likely wonder how the wallflower or any other plant can grow upon the wall, for there's no earth to be seen. Nothing but stones and crumbling mortar. But if we pull up one of the smaller plants, we shall find earth clinging to its roots. Dry, dusty earth has been blown upon the wall by wind, and has lodged in chinks and holes. Dust and soil too were mixed with the mortar when the wall was built, and dead leaves falling upon it, and decaying, have produced a little more. For decayed leaves make earth or soil. Wallflowers and other plants which grow on walls and rocks find very little soil sufficient for their needs. Most of the blossoms of the wallflowers upon this wall are of a dark golden yellow color, and are very sweet. Some of the blossoms are, however, a darker yellow than others, and here and there are petals which are quite brown. If we look at the garden behind us, we shall see that Mrs. Hammond has several beds of wallflower this year. It is a flower of which she is very fond. There are wallflowers of two different colors in her beds. One kind has a bright golden blossom, rather deeper in color than any of those upon the wall. The other has flowers that are rich, dark, brown. These plants are sturdier and more bushy than those upon the wall, and there are more flowers on each plant. The flowers are finer too and have a stronger scent. If Mrs. Hammond had wished, she could have sown seed to produce many different shades of brown and yellow wallflowers. She might also have had a purple wallflower or even a wallflower of so pale a yellow as to be almost white. If you and I were clever gardeners, and had plenty of time and patience, we could get purple or nearly white wallflowers from these yellow-flowered plants upon the wall. It would take us many years, but we should succeed at last, and this is how we should set about it. Suppose that we wish to have a wallflower nearly white. We should look carefully along the wall in spring when the blossoms are out until we find the very pale-less yellow blossom we could see. We should mark that plant, and when the flower was over and the seed was ripe, we should collect the seed. Among the plants grown from this seed we should choose again the plant that has the pale-less flowers, and should save the seed from that. We might have to go on doing this for twenty years or more, but in time we should have a wallflower so pale as to be almost white. Quite white we should never get our wallflower, for no pure white flower can be obtained from a yellow one. However pale our wallflower might be, there would still always be just a tinge of yellow or cream color in it. If on the other hand we wanted a purple or very dark brown wallflower, we should save seed from those blossoms which were nearest to the color we wanted, dark brown, or with a tinge of purple in them. We should sow seed from the darkest blossoms again and again, and at last we should get what we wish to have. Besides choosing seed from the lightest or darkest blossoms we should tend our plants very carefully and well, giving them plenty of good rich soil. This would make them grow bushy, and with many flowers, as we see them in Mrs. Hammond's garden beds. Many of our garden flowers have been produced in this way, by selecting and improving wild flowers. Of course all flowers grow wild somewhere, some in England, but many more in foreign countries, where the air is warmer and the soil richer and better. The pansy is a little English wallflower with yellow, blue, and red petals. From this little flower gardeners have produced large and beautiful pansies of many different colors and shades of colors, white, yellow, blue, and brown. This has been done by careful selection just as we spoke of doing with the wallflowers. But if the large, single colored pansies of which I have told you, or Mrs. Hammond's dark brown wallflowers were allowed to seed themselves, that is, were allowed to drop and sow their own seed year after year, do you know what would happen? They would gradually revert or turn back to their original form and color. The flowers would become mixed in color and less fine in size. At last they would be simple wildflowers again. Now it is June, and the blossoms of the wallflower have faded and fallen. The old wall is, however, growing gay with another plant, the red valerian. We must be careful to remember that it is the red valerian, for there are other valerians. There is the great valerian which does not grow on walls or rocks, but in damp and shady places. Its flowers are pale pink. The blossoms of the red valerian on the wall are bright crimson, and they grow in rows on small stems which spring from a stout stalk, a foot or two in height. Each blossom of five petals forms a little tube, or corolla. The base or foot of each little tube appears as a point on the underside of the flower stem. The red valerian, like the violet, is a spurred flower. The leaves are long and pointed. They grow in pairs on opposite sides of the stalk. Sometimes the edges of the leaves are quite smooth, and sometimes they are serrated or toothed, like the edge of a saw. If we pulled a plant of red valerian from the wall, we should find the roots very long and branching. They need to be so, for the plant often grows on rocks and other places where it is exposed to wind. If the roots had not a firm hold, the tall stems laden with blossoms might be blown down. The red valerian flowers all through the summer. Its clusters of crimson flowers are as great an ornament to the old wall as were the wallflowers in May. Now let us go down the steps into the fold yard. There is a wall on either side of us as we descend. The wall which faces the north is nearly always in shadow, and there are ferns growing out of it between the stones. One of these is a beautiful heart's tongue fern, with large and shining leaves. We said just now, however, that ferns have no flowers, so we will turn to something that grows on the wall opposite. This is the ivy-leaved toad flax. It grows on walls and rocks as the red valerian does, but it is a very different plant in appearance. The stems of the red valerian are tall and upright. Those of the toad flax are slender and drooping, and there is a large mass of it on the side of the wall. And we find that the root is at the highest point of the whole mass. The stems of the flowers and leaves hang down below the root. It is a trailing plant. There are, however, other roots clinging to the wall here and there below the main root. The plant, like several others, is able to throw out fresh roots from the joints of its stems, and these give it a firmer hold. The flowers are small, and their color is a pale lilac blue with a bright yellow spot in the center. These flowers, too, are spurred. The leaves are smooth and thick, what is called fleshy. If they are divided into five lobes or divisions, they are not unlike an ivy leaf in shape. When we turn a leaf or two over, we see the underside of some is dark purple. This little plant is usually said to prefer a damp situation and to blossom from May until October. This wall beside the steps is certainly rather damp, for the moisture from the garden above soaks down to it. In my own garden, however, the ivy-leaved toad-flax grows on some very old dry walls, and I have found it in flower in the middle of December. Neither the toad-flax nor the red ballerian are really natives of England. They were brought to our country many hundreds of years ago. They have spread so much that they have now become wild flowers. In the same way many others of our wild flowers were once unknown to England. Now that we have come down the steps into the fold yard, we see that it lies a good deal below the house and garden. Built round the fold yard are the stables for the cart horses, the cow houses, and the great barn. Behind the stables is the rickyard. That, like the garden, is above the fold yard. From it there are only two or three steps to the door of the loft, or tallot, above the stables. It is there we will go now. The wall of the tallot is of stone and is very old. The roof is tiled. There is a little hole cut to the bottom of the door, and you will see one like it at the door of the granary. It is made so that old tib and all the other cats can go in and catch mice. Growing between the stones of the wall just by the tallot door is the plant I want to show you now. It is the stone crop. Some of the stems grow upright, while others are trailing. At the top of each upright stem is a cluster of bright yellow flowers. Some of these are fully open, and we see that each blossom has five pointed petals. The trailing stems have no flowers at all, they're barren, but the leaves on the barren stems are much more numerous and closer together than on those of the upright flowering stems. These leaves are very curious. They are not flat, like the leaves of the red valerian, the toad-flags, and most other flowers. They are very thick and fleshy, something like a short, round, pointed stick. They grow close beside the stalk, not in pairs, but alternately. First a leaf on one side of the stalk, then a leaf on the other. They're erect, too. That is, they point in the same direction as the stalk. On the barren stems the leaves grow so closely they quite cover the stalk. They have a hot, sharp taste, and the plant is sometimes called wall-pepper. The roots are very thin, and can spread easily through narrow chinks of the wall. We will see one more plant of the walls before we look for flowers elsewhere. Our next plant is not very common at Willow Farm. Still, I know where to look for it. Built against one side of the big barn as the foldyard, it's a little lean-to shed. Often there are calves in it. Just now we are more interested in something that is on the roof. Standing close by the wall of the shed is a cattle crib, a kind of big square box, or trough on legs, in which hay or chaff is put for the cattle. The shed is not very high, and by standing on the crib we can scramble up onto the roof. Here is the plant we want to see. It is the house-leek, of which a clump is growing between the tiles. Almost flat on the tiles is a dense mass of large, green, fleshy leaves. These leaves are evergreen. They do not die and fall off in winter. From this cluster of leaves rise straight, thick stems, nearly a foot high. The stems are thickly covered with erect leaves which grow smaller towards the top of the stem. At the top of the stem is a cluster of very handsome, rosy red flowers. Each blossom is star-shaped when fully open, and generally has twelve petals. If we could see the roots, we should find them very thread-like, or fibrous, like those of other flowers we have been looking at today. I do not think I can very well show you the roots, however. We should have to pull up a plant, and that would not please Ben the cowmen at all. There is a belief in the country places that it is bad luck to disturb the house-leek. That someone in the house on which it grows is sure to die soon afterwards. Certainly the plant is not growing on a house here, only on the calves caught. Still, if any misfortune should happen to the calves, we might be blamed by Ben. Besides, it would be a pity to disturb so handsome a plant, would it not? We have spent some time in looking at these flowers on the walls and roof, because we think them very wonderful. We see how little soil they can have in which to grow, and how in dry weather they can have very little moisture, either. Yet the leaves of several of them are thick and fleshy, and the flowers of some are large and beautiful. What could be more handsome than the blossoms of the wallflower, the red valerian, and the house-leek? End of Wild Flowers of the Farm Chapter 3 Flowers on the Wall by Arthur Owens Cook Entry for February the 13th, 1859. From winter from the journal of Henry David Thoreau. Recorded for LibriVox Coffee Break Collection, Volume 3. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Sue Anderson. Entry for February the 13th, 1859. From winter from the journal of Henry David Thoreau. February 13th, 1859, PM. On Ice to Fairhaven Pond. The yellowish ice which froze yesterday and last night is thickly and evenly strewn, with fibrous frost crystals very much like bits of asbestos, an inch or more long, sometimes arranged like a star or rosette, one for every inch or two. I think this is the vapor from the water which found its way up through the ice and froze in the night. It is sprinkled like some kind of grain and is in certain places much more thickly strewn, as where a little snow shows itself above the ice. The old ice is covered with a dry, powdery snow about one inch deep, from which, as I walk toward the sun, this perfectly clear bright afternoon at half past three o'clock, the colors of the rainbow are reflected from a myriad fine facets. It is as if the dust of diamonds and other precious stones were spread all around. The blue and red predominate. Though I distinguish these colors everywhere toward the sun, they are so much more abundantly reflected to me from two directions that I see two distinct rays or arms, so to call them, of this rainbow-like dust stretching away from me and about half a dozen feet wide, with two arms including an angle of about sixty degrees. When I look from the sun I see merely dazzling white points. I can easily see some of these dazzling grains fifteen or twenty rods distant on any side, though the facet which reflects the light cannot be more than a tenth or twelfth of an inch at most. Yet I might easily and commonly do overlook all this. Winter comes to make walking possible, where there was no walking in summer. Not till winter can we take possession of the whole of our territory. I have three great highways reigned out from one center which is near my door. I may walk down the main river or up either of its two branches. Could any avenues be contrived more convenient? With the river I am not compelled to walk in the tracks of horses. Never is there so much light in the air as in one of these bright winter afternoons when all the earth is covered with new fallen snow and there is not a cloud in the sky. The sky is much the darkest side, like the bluish lining of an eggshell. With this white earth beneath and with that spotless skimmed-milk sky above him, man is but a black speck enclosed in a white eggshell. Sometimes in our prosaic moods life appears to us but a certain number more of days like those we have lived. To be cheered not by more friends and friendship, but probably fewer and less. As per chance we anticipate the end of this day before it is done, close the shutters and, with a cheerless resignation, commence the barren evening whose fruitless end we clearly see. We despondently think that all of life which is left is only this experience repeated a certain number of times, and so it would be if it were not for the faculty of imagination. The wonderful stillness of a winter day. The sources of sound are, as it were, frozen up. Scarcely a tinkling rillivant is to be heard. When we listen we hear only that sound of the surf of our internal sea rising and swelling in our ears as in two seashells. It is the Sabbath of the year. Stillness audible. Or at most we hear the ice belching and crackling, as if struggling for utterance. A transient acquaintance with any phenomenon is not sufficient to make it completely the subject of your muse. You must be so conversant with it as to remember it and be reminded of it long afterward while it lies remotely fair and a lesion in the horizon approachable only by the imagination. End of entry for February the 13th, 1859 from Winter from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau. The Wit of a Duck by John Burroughs. Recorded for LibriVox Coffee Break Collection, Volume 3. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits. Their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems at times as if they possess some extra sense, the home sense, which operates unerringly. I saw this illustrated one spring in the case of a mallard drake. My son had two ducks, and to mate with them he procured a drake of a neighbor who lived two miles south of us. He brought the drake home in a bag. The bird had no opportunity to see the road along which it was carried or to get the general direction except at the time of starting when the boy carried him a few rods openly. He was placed with the ducks in a spring run under a tree in a secluded place on the river slope about a hundred yards from the highway. The two ducks treated him very contemptuously. It was easy to see that the drake was homesick from the first hour, and soon he left the presence of the scornful ducks. Then we shut the three in a barn together and kept them there a day and a night. Still the friendship did not ripen. The ducks and the drake separated the moment we let them out. Left to himself, the drake at once turned his head homeward and started up the hill for the highway. Then we shut the trio together again for a couple of days, but with the same results as before. There seemed to be but one thought in the mind of the drake, and that was home. Several times we headed off and brought him back. Till finally on the third or fourth day, I said to my son, if that drake is really bound to go home, we shall have an opportunity to make a trial, and I will go with him to see that he has fair play. We withdrew, and the homesick mallards started up through the current patch, then through the vineyard towards the highway which he had never seen. When we reached the fence, he followed it south till he came to the open gate, where he took the road as confidently as if he knew for certain that it would lead him straight to his mate. How eagerly he paddled along, glancing right and left, and increasing his speed at every step. I kept about fifty yards behind him. Presently he met a dog. He paused and I, the animal for a moment, and then turned to the right along a road which diverged just at that point, and which led to the railroad station. I followed, thinking the drake would soon lose his bearings, and get hopelessly confused in the tangle of roads that converged at the station. But he seemed to have an exact map of the country in his mind. He soon left the station road, went around a house through a vineyard, till he struck a stone fence that crossed the road at right angles. This he followed eastward till it was joined by a barbed wire fence, under which he passed, and again entered the highway he had first taken. Then down the road he paddled, with renewed confidence, under the trees, down a hill, through a grove, over a bridge, up the hill again towards home. Presently he found his clue cut in two by the railroad track. This was something he had never before seen. He paused, glanced up it, then down it, then at the highway across it, and quickly concluded this last was his course. On he went faster and faster. He had now gone half the distance and was getting tired. A little pool of water by the roadside caught his eye. Into it he plunged, bathed, drank, preened his plumage for a few moments, and then started homework again. He knew his home was on the upper side of the highway, for he kept his eye bent in that direction, scanning the fields. Twice he stopped, stretched himself up, and scanned the landscape intently. Then on again. It seemed as if an invisible cord was attached to him, and he was being pulled down the road. Just opposite a farm lane, which led up to a group of farm buildings, and which did indeed look like his home lane, he paused and seemed to be debating with himself. Two women just then came along. They lifted and flirted their skirts, for it was raining, and this disturbed him again, and decided him to take to the farm lane. Up the lane he went, rather doubtingly, I thought. In a few moments it brought him to a barnyard, where a group of hens caught his eye. Evidently he was on good terms with these hens at home, for he made up to these eagerly, as if to tell them his troubles. But the hens knew no ducks. Then withdrew suspiciously. Then assumed a threatening attitude, till one old Dominic put up her feathers and charged upon him viciously. Again he tried to make up to them, quacking softly, and again he was repulsed. Then the cattle in the yard spied this stranger, and came sniffing towards it, full of curiosity. The drake quickly concluded he had got into the wrong place, and turned his face southward again. Through the fence he went into a plowed field. Presently another stone fence crossed his path. Along this he again turned towards the highway. In a few minutes he found himself in a corner, formed by the meeting of two stone fences. Then he turned appealingly to me, uttering the soft note of the mallard. To use his wings never seemed to cross his mind. Well, I am bound to confess that I helped the drake over the wall, but I sat him down in the road as impartially as I could. How well his pink feet knew the course. How they flew up the road. His green head and white throat fairly twinkled under the long avenue of oaks and chestnuts. At last we came in sight of the home lane, which led up to the farmhouse one hundred or more yards from the road. I was curious to see if he would recognize the place. At the gate leading to the lane he paused. He had just gone up a lane that looked like that and had been disappointed. What should he do now? Truth compels me to say that he overshot his mark. He kept on hesitating along the highway. It was now nearly night. I felt sure the duck would soon discover his mistake, but I had not time to watch the experiment further. I went around the drake and turned him back. As he neared the lane this time he seemed suddenly to see some familiar landmark and he rushed up it at the top of his speed. His joy and eagerness were almost pathetic. I followed close. Into the houseyard he rushed with uplifted wings and fell down almost exhausted by the sight of his mate. A half hour later the two of them were nipping the grass together in the pasture and he, I have no doubt, was eagerly telling her the story of his adventures. End of The Wit of a Duck Recording by Alan Davis-Drake on the New Jersey Shore