WATER ARUM MARSH CALLA

(Calla palustris) Arum family



Flowers - Minute, greenish yellow, clustered on a cylinder-like,

fleshy spadix about 1 in. long, partly enfolded by a large,

white, oval, pointed, erect spathe, the whole resembling a small

calla lily open in front. The solitary "flower" on a scape as

long as the petioles of leaves, and, like them, sheathed at base.

Leaves: Thick, somewhat heart-shaped, their spreading or erect

petioles 4 to 8 in. long. Fruit: Red berries clustered in a head.

Preferred Habitat - Cool Northern bogs; in or beside sluggish

water.

Flowering Season - May-June.

Distribution - Nova Scotia southward to Virginia, westward to

Minnesota and Iowa.



At a glance one knows this beautiful denizen of Northern bogs and

ditches to be a poor relation of the stately Ethiopian calla lily

of our greenhouses. Where the arum grows in rich, cool retreats,

it is apt to be abundant, its slender rootstocks running hither

and thither through the yielding soil with thrifty rapidity until

the place is carpeted with its handsome dark leaves, from which

the pure white "flowers" arise; and yet many flower lovers well

up in field practice know it not. Thoreau, for example, was no

longer young when he first saw, or, rather, noticed it. "Having

found this in one place," he wrote, "I now find it in another.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of

our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our

intellectual ray. So, in the largest sense, we find only the

world we look for."



Now, the true flowers of the arum and all its spadix-bearing kin

are so minute that one scarcely notices them where they are

clustered on the club-shaped column in the center of the apparent

"flower." The beautiful white banner of the marsh calla, or the

green and maroon striped pulpit from which Jack preaches, is no

more the flower proper than the papery sheath below the daffodil

is the daffodil. In the arum the white advertisement flaunted

before flying insects is not even essential to the florets'

existence, except as it helps them attract their pollen-carrying

friends. Almost all waterside plants, it will be noticed, depend

chiefly upon flies and midges, and these lack aesthetic taste.

"Such plants have usually acquired small and inconspicuous

separate flowers," says Grant Allen; "and then, to make up for

their loss in attractiveness, like cheap sweetmeats, they have

very largely increased their numbers. Or, to put the matter more

simply and physically, in waterside situations those plants

succeed best which have a relatively large number of individually

small and unnoticeable flowers massed together into large and

closely serried bundles. Hence, in such situations, there is a

tendency for petals to be suppressed, and for blossoms to grow

minute; because the large and bright flowers seldom succeed in

attracting big land insects like bees or butterflies, while the

small and thick-set ones usually do succeed in attracting a great

many little flitting midges." Flies, which are guided far more by

their sense of smell than by sight, resort to the petalless,

insignificant florets of the ill-scented marsh calla in numbers;

and as the uppermost clusters are staminate only, while the lower

florets contain stamens and pistil, it follows they must often

effect cross-pollination as they crawl over the spadix. But here

is no trap to catch the tiny benefactors such as is set by wicked

Jack-in-the-pulpit, or the skunk-cabbage, or another cousin, a

still more terrible executioner, the cuckoo-pint (Arum maculatum)

of Europe.



Few coroner's inquests are held over the dead bodies of our

feathered friends; and it is not known whether the

innocent-looking marsh calla really poisons the birds on which it

depends to carry its bright seeds afar or not. The cuckoo-pint,

as is well known, destroys the winged messenger bearing its

offspring to plant fresh colonies in a distant bog, because the

decayed body of the bird acts as the best possible fertilizer

into which the seedling may strike its roots. Most of our noxious

weeds, like our vermin, have come to us from Europe; but Heaven

deliver us from this cannibalistic pest!



The very common GREEN ARROW-ARUM (Peltandra Virginica), found in

shallow water, ditches, swamps, and the muddy shores of ponds

throughout the eastern half of the United States, attracts us

more by its stately growth and the beauty of its bright, lustrous

green arrow-shaped leaves (which have been found thirty inches

long), than by the insignificant florets clustered on the spadix

within a long pointed green sheath that closely enfolds it.

Pistillate florets cover it for only about one-fourth its length.

To them flies carry pollen from the staminate florets covering

the rest of the spadix. After the club is set with green berries

- green, for this plant has no need to attract birds with bright

red ones - the flower stalk curves, bends downward, and the

pointed leathery sheath acting as an auger, it bores a hole into

the soft mud in which the seeds germinate with the help of their

surrounding jelly as a fertilizer.