Volume 1

Flowers and flower lore / by the Rev. Hilderic Friend ; with illustrations, index, and notes.

  • Friend, Hilderic, 1852-
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Flowers and flower lore / by the Rev. Hilderic Friend ; with illustrations, index, and notes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    371/376 (page 351)
    THE WIND WITCH. a loud popping noise about sunrise. After six o’clock these flowers regularly report the approach of night. The Tamarind-tree, the Water-lily, Victoria regia, and many others expand their petals during the night; and there is a species of Aloes which gradually opens its flowers about five o’clock in the evening, and, when fully expanded, they droop and die. Several species of the Cereus are nocturnal flowers, but I have already spoken of the finest of these. Many other plants are known to undergo curious changes at particular periods of the day or night, or under the influence of the weather, but to write of these is not my work except in so far as they might be associated with popular superstitions or mythic ideas. Dr. Cooke’s interesting work on the “ Freaks and Marvels of Plant Life ” exactly fills up this place. I will refer to one of these plants, because its name lends itself to the imagination, and leads us to suspect that on the plains of Tartary, where it grows, the “ Wind-witch ” has some curious stories attached to it. This is a kind of Thistle, and grows to such a size as to be capable of affording shelter to the huts and hovels temporarily erected in the distant Russian steppes. Professor Schleiden, who explored these regions, tells us that in autumn the stem of the thistle rots off, and the globe of branches dries up into a ball, which becomes as lignt as a feather, and is driven over the steppes by the autumnal winds, which lift it high in the air. Numbers of such balls often fly at once over the plain with such rapidity that no horseman can catch them; now hopping with short, quick springs along the ground, onward in a spirit-like dance over the turf, now caught by an eddy, rising suddenly a hundred feet in the air. Often one Wind-witch hangs on to another, and others soon join the company; while the gigantic yet airy mass rolls away before the piping east wind. It is in this way that in the East, where nature has been so lavish and bounteous, one often witnesses sights that perfectly astound the sober English-