would be protected with a woolly absorbent, as its cousins are.

Inasmuch as perfume serves as an attraction to the more highly
specialized, aesthetic insects, not required by the spiraeas, our
meadow-sweet has none, in spite of its misleading name. Small
bees (especially Andrenidae), flies (Syrphidae), and beetles,
among other visitors, come in great numbers, seeking the
accessible pollen, and, in this case, nectar also, secreted in a
conspicuous orange-colored disk. When a floret first opens, or
even before, the already mature stigmas overtop the incurved,
undeveloped stamens, so that any visitor dusted from other
clusters cross-fertilizes it; but as the stigmas remain fresh
even after the stamens have risen and shed their abundant pollen,
it follows that in long-continued stormy weather, when few
insects are flying, the flowers fertilize themselves.
Self-fertilization with insect help must often occur in the
flower's second stage. The fragrant yellowish-white ENGLISH
MEADOW-SWEET (S. ulmaria), often cultivated in old-fashioned
gardens here, has escaped locally.

In long, slender, forking spikes the GOAT'S-BEARD (Aruncus
Aruncus - Spiraea aruncus of Gray) lifts its graceful panicles of
minute whitish flowers in May and June from three to seven feet
above the rich soil of its woodland home. The petioled, pinnate
leaves are compounded of several leaflets like those on its
relative the rose-bush. From New York southward and westward to
Missouri, also on the Pacific Coast to Alaska, is its range on
this Continent. Very many more beetles than any other visitors
transfer pollen from the staminate flowers on one plant to the
pistillate ones on another; other plants produce only perfect