NATURE IN STARTLING MOOD.

Franklin Times, Volume 9, Issue 700, 17 January 1922, Page 8

NATURE IN STARTLING MOOD.

Nature, even when decorating the world with flowering plants, is not always a creator of beauty. Like any great human artist, she has her moods when she cfeates things curious, fantastic, startling, or just nasty, writes N. Tourneur, in “Everyday Science.” These nearly all are found in tropical jungles, where growth is so rtapid and luxuriant that nature is, as it were intoxicated. Orchid- hunters in tropical forests come across spectre heads, faces, and shapes that at first glance do not seem to be flowers at all. In the Pectorhle orchid for instance, nature has copied with horrid fidelity the inside of the human chest—the cavity of the body formed by the spine, ribs, and breastbone. The neck, collarbone, ribs, breastbone, and truncated arms are exactly represented, and the whole flower itself is of the rounded shape of the human tho pax. /Equally startling is a South American orchid, which looks as if five bleeding wounds had just been made in it. In Mexico there grows a flowering tree so strange that it was once worshipped and the natives to-day though Christian at least in name, still regard it with superstitous fear. Its botanical name is Cheirostemon platanoides. The Aztecs called it “Macpalxochiquaukitl,” and to them it was a deity, to which sacrifices and worship must be made. Both names mean “Hand Flower Tree.’’ It, is a big tree, and when it blooms it is covered with flowers which wave aloft a thousand bloodstained fingers. From the middle of each flower there arises a columnlike tube singularly like an arm tand wrist. At the top this divides into five slneder parts, coloured bloodre:!, and arranged like the fingers and thumb of an outspread clutching hand. Thejpoints of the fingers curve over, resembling- the talons with (which the painters of old ornamented the hands of demonis. And the talons are clawed. The five fingers are tipped by a vegetable copy of overgrown nails. The whole flower wrist and clutching fingers, is of considerable size, and stands up -well jabove the stalk petals.

Plant mimicry of the animal world is common among the orchids native to England, but here nature’s moocl is gentle, not horrifying.- A wonderful repetition of an animal form in vegetable growth is to be seen is the Tropaealum canariense, or canaray-bird creeper, a South American plant common enough in English gardens. In each of its blossoms at a certain stage it shows the image of a canary as if modelled and coloured by .hand. The bent head of the bird is joined to the body by a delicate neck, and the fringed petals, canary yellow in hue, mimic the canary features.