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Inasmuch as some of the
American spikenard's tiny flowers are staminate and some
pistillate, while others again are perfect, they depend upon
flies chiefly - but on some wasps and beetles, too - to transfer
pollen and enable the fertile ones to set seed. How certain of
the winter birds gormandize on the resinous, spicy little
berries! A flock of juncos will strip the fruit from every
spikenard in the neighborhood the first day it arrives from the
North.
The WILD or FALSE SARSAPARILLA (A. nudicaulis), so common in
woods, hillsides, and thickets, shelters its three spreading
umbels of greenish-white flowers in May and June beneath a canopy
formed by a large, solitary, compound leaf. The aromatic roots,
which run horizontally sometimes three feet or more through the
soil, send up a very short, smooth proper stem which lifts a tall
leafstalk and a shorter, naked flower stalk. The single large
leaf, of exquisite bronzy tints when young, is compounded of from
three to five oval, toothed leaflets on each of its three
divisions.


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