The shrub doubtless gives the small bees and
flies their last feast of the season in consideration of their
services in transferring pollen from the staminate to the fertile
flowers. Very slowly through the succeeding year the seeds within
the woody capsules mature until, by the following autumn, when
fresh flowers appear, they are ready to bombard the neighborhood
after the violets' method, in the hope of landing in moist
yielding soil far from the parent shrub to found a new colony.
Just as a watermelon seed shoots from between the thumb and
forefinger pinching it, so the large, bony, shining black,
white-tipped witch-hazel seeds are discharged through the elastic
rupture of their capsule whose walls pinch them out. To be
suddenly hit in the face by such a missile brings no smile while
the sting lasts. Witch-hazel twigs ripening indoors transform a
peaceful living room into a defenseless target for light
artillery practice.
Nowhere more than in the naming of wild flowers can we trace the
homesickness of the early English colonists in America.
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