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golden rod

Значение термина golden rod в knolik

golden rod - GOLDEN ROD (Solidago virga aurea)
golden rod - Tall slender wands, green below, but blazing with clusters of golden stars above, wave in the hedgerows and add their quota to the prevailing golds of the late days of August. It is the Golden Rod, signal of the passing of summer's prime and herald of the advent of autumn. A story that is an amusing commentary on human nature is attached to this plant, a story which, Gerard suggests, well justifies the old English proverb, "Far fetched and dear bought is best for ladies."

Now, in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and probably long before that, this plant had a great reputation for healing wounds - its very name, Solidago, is a corruption of "in solidum ago vulnera" ("I consolidate wounds") - and for this purpose it used to be imported in a dried state from abroad and sold in the London markets, as much as half-a-crown an ounce being paid for the powder made from it. But, alas for its reputation! One day someone discovered that it was actually growing wild - a mere weed! - in Hampstead Wood, "even as it were at our townes end," and then no one had any longer the slightest belief in its powers, and, in fact, no one would give even half-a-crown a hundredweight for it then, "which plainly setteth forth our inconstancy and sudden mutabilitie," laments Gerard. After a bitter gibe at "phantastical Physitions," he adds, "This much have I spoken to bring these new-fangled fellowes backe againe to esteeme better of this admirable plant than they have done, which, no doubt, hath the same vertue now that then it had, although it growes so neere our owne homes in never so great quantitie." Gerard himself was quite consistent, and in his own practice kept it ever in the foremost rank of "wound drinks"; and it seems to have recovered its prestige later, for Culpepper, writing in the days of Oliver Cromwell, speaks again of it as a sovereign wound herb. He also gives a very curious property of the plant; he says that a decoction made from it "helps to fasten the teeth that are loose in the gums." One wonders how he arrived at this conclusion. It seems a little too far-fetched for his favourite "Dr. Experience" to have taught him.

As a genus the Golden Rods belong in the main to North America; no fewer than eighty-five different kinds have been counted there, and fields, many acres in extent, are converted by them into veritable "fields of the cloth of gold." But though many of these plants find a place in our English gardens, only one kind of Golden Rod - the Solidago virga aurea, i.e. literally the Solidago Golden Rod - grows wild in our lanes and woodlands, and this prefers the poorer soils, and is specially noticeable in hilly districts. From the little tufted root which lasts on year after year arise straight, stiff, unbranching stems. Down by the root are larger leaves with stalks, but higher up the stem the leaves are long and narrow, with slightly toothed edges and no stalks to speak of. It is worth noticing how carefully these leaves arrange themselves with regard to the direction of the light, so that they may all get their share of the sun and there be no undue shadowing one of another. In some of the garden Golden Rods this arrangement becomes a perfect and most definite imbrication, and the long, narrow leaves droop, one slightly overlapping the next, with the same regularity of pattern that one finds in the tiles on the house roof.

The blossoms are distinctly misleading to the casual non-botanical observer. Each appears to be a single five-rayed flower, with perhaps somewhat complicated internal arrangements, for five yellow rays project in a ring, just as if they were the petals of some well-known flower, round a yellow stamen-suggesting centre. It is only when one gathers a Golden Rod stem and begins to pull a blossom to pieces that one realises one's mistake. For each of the blossoms is not a single flower at all, as it seems to pretend at the outset, but a select little colony whose members divide themselves for all practical purposes into two great classes, a very small class that is specially set aside to attract - there are only about five or six aristocrats all told - and a much larger and much less distinguished class that is all herded closely together in the centre of the blossom. The first class, however, is not wholly and solely ornamental, as in the cornflower; we can just discover a tiny fork appearing out of each of the little tubes into which the yellow rays roll down by their base. This is the top of the column from a most minute seed-case, which contains a single still more minute seed. A slight notching can be detected at the tip of each ray, which speaks of the union of the five petals which originally composed it; we call these female flowers. In the centre of the ray florets are tubular florets, each a perfect little flower, as in the daisy, and not lacking one of its essential organs as the ray florets do in both Golden Rod and daisy, despite their greater size and attractiveness. For in the tiny tube five stamens stand so closely pressed together that the heads are now completely joined into a ring, and they stand on the seed-case and form a ring round its column. These are hermaphrodite flowers - i.e. both male and female.

In most of these composite flowers - the Golden Rod is a member of the Compositæ family - the procedure is the same, the anther heads have their opening on the inside, so, when they open, their pollen contents collect in the chamber formed by their united heads. The floor of the chamber is the, as yet closed, top of the ovary column. Presently, by the column growing fast, this floor is carried up right through the pollen chamber. (Notice the difference from the cornflower's method, where the stamen-heads contract instead of the ovary column growing.) Naturally, the pollen dust is swept before it and out on to the exposed surface of the flower, and there it lies. Through the hours of daylight hosts of insects - flies, wasps, bees of all sorts - pay visits; all are equally welcome, for all help to spread the pollen over the individual blooms, and maybe carry it to adjacent blooms or even adjacent plants. It is only when the ovary column has grown up through the anthers that its brush-like tip divides and opens out a sensitive receptive surface for pollen dust. So it always needs an inner ring of florets to fertilise an outer one. This, then, explains why the outermost ring of rays has no stamens - there would be no work for them, since there is no ring outside them to open receptive surfaces and silently ask for pollen, and the plant is not going to risk the waste of much material on the off-chance that it might possibly be of advantage to florets on other blooms.

Then the blooms wither, but are quickly changed into small, rather dingy, feathery balls, feathery because each minute seed is crowned with a ring of single hairs, and the golden wand becomes a long-handled feathery brush. Soon the little ball breaks up, the last stage of communal life has arrived, and the individual members (now the fruits) of which it is composed have for the first time in their existence to start off alone and unattended on a voyage of discovery for a home.

There is an old tradition that the Golden Rod is also a divining rod, and that, in right hands, it can point to hidden treasures of gold and silver.

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