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There is nectar in the columbine, and the bumblebee sometimes gets it by piercing the spur from the outside as she does with dicentra. There ought to be honey in the honeysuckle, but I have never seen the hive-bee make any attempt to get it. One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.
In the woods and groves in England, the wild hyacinth grows very abundantly in spring, and in places the air is loaded with its fragrance. In our woods a species of dicentra, commonly called squirrel corn, has nearly the same perfume, and its racemes of nodding whitish flowers, tinged with pink, are quite as pleasing to the eye, but it is a shyer, less abundant plant.
If, therefore, we could behold at the same time all the progenitors of Dicentra, we should almost certainly see a series like that now exhibited by the above-named three genera.
For small vases little vases for the breakfast table, or the desk, and for gifts to friends one ought to grow quantities of Heliotropes, Tea Roses, and Pansies. To cut from, early in spring, nothing is lovelier than the Lily of the Valley. For larger vases, the Dicentra is always pleasing, coming close after the Lily of the Valley.
It was, perhaps, this tenderness which made her cling so fervently to her view from her window, a view in which the most optimistic eye would at first have failed to discover anything admirable. Mrs. Still, her gaze took in the topmost boughs of the ailanthus below her window, and she knew how early each year the clump of dicentra strung its bending stalk with hearts of pink.
Asa Gray also saw movement in the tendrils of the Cucurbitaceous genus, Sicyos, in 30 seconds. The tendrils of some other plants, when lightly rubbed, moved in a few minutes; with Dicentra in half-an- hour; with Smilax in an hour and a quarter or half; and with Ampelopsis still more slowly.
The tendrils of Dicentra, whilst the plant is young, are short and after attachment only become slightly flexuous; in older plants they are longer and then they contract spirally. I have seen no other exceptions to the rule that tendrils, after clasping with their extremities a support, undergo spiral contraction.
The plumy dicentra, or Dutchman's breeches, seems so feminine as to be grossly misnamed until we remember that it was first discovered in the Rip Van Winkle country.
Of the list of fragrant wild flowers I have given, the only ones that the bees procure nectar from, so far as I have observed, are arbutus, dicentra, sugar maple, locust, and linden. Non-fragrant flowers that yield honey are those of the raspberry, clematis, sumac, white oak, bugloss, ailanthus, goldenrod, aster, fleabane. A large number of odorless plants yield pollen to the bee.
I know of old clumps that have a spread of six feet or more, sending up hundreds of stalks from matted roots that have not been disturbed for no one knows how long, on which blossoms can be counted by the hundreds every spring. Dicentra, better known as "Bleeding Heart," because of its pendulous, heart-shaped flowers, is a most lovely early bloomer.
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