Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 11, 2025
Clustering vines of wild grape hang its wooded shores with a tapestry of the South and the Rhine. The pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes of flowers the points where small tributary brooks flow in, and along the dusky windings of those brooks cardinal-flowers with a scarlet splendor paint the tropics upon New England green.
There were banks now, and they were fringed with green borders of aquatic plants, rushes, and broad spatter-docks, and flags, and arrow-heads, and marsh-marigolds, and round-leaved pond-lilies, and pointed pickerel-weed. The current was still rapid and strong, but it flowed smoothly through the straight reaches and around the wide curves. On either hand the trees grew taller and more stately.
There were water-lilies both golden and waxy-white, and blue spikes of pickerel-weed, and clumps of fragrant musk. And over the surface of the golden-brown water was spread a fairy web of delicate plant life, vivid green, and woven of such tiny forms that it looked like airy foam that a breath would dissolve.
But if the stream be too deep and wide, and the lilies are anchored far out among their broad pads, a floral Venice, with the blue spikes and arrowy leaves of the pickerel-weed for campaniles and towers, there are yet "lilies of the field" over which you may profitably meditate, remembering that Solomon Ben-David was not so arrayed.
Some assimilate none but good influences, and their emblem is the fragrant and spotless pond-lily, whose very breath is a blessing to all the region round about. . . . Among the productions of the river's margin, I must not forget the pickerel-weed, which grows just on the edge of the water, and shoots up a long stalk crowned with a blue spire, from among large green leaves.
The pale, golden-hearted arrow-head neighbored the homespun pickerel-weed, and oh, mysterious glory from an oozy bed! luscious, sun-golden cow-lilies rose sturdily triumphant, dripping with color, glowing in sheen.
The tribes of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for all. By water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold.
The streams shrunken to rivulets that trickled through crevices between broad flat stones and oozed through beds of water-cress and crow-foot, horse-mint and pickerel-weed, the wells low, cisterns empty, and recourse for water to barrels and the sunken ponds. The farmers cutting corn, still green, for stock, and ploughing ragweed strongholds for the sowing of wheat.
Broad leaves of the arrow-head and pickerel-weed give shelter to the coot, bobbing her head and neck as she makes nervous journeys through the water, sometimes scratching a long streak across its mirror-like surface as she uses both feet and wings in her haste to escape from the lone pedestrian.
On the water, meanwhile, the last White Lilies are sinking beneath the surface, the last gay Pickerel-Weed is gone, though the rootless plants of the delicate Bladder-Wort, spreading over acres of shallows, still impurple the wide, smooth surface. Harriet Prescott says that some souls are like the Water-Lilies, fixed, yet floating.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking