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Commonly called “Mormon tea,” there are many species of ephedra (ef-FED-rah) growing throughout the Southwest. This yellow-green, stringy-stemmed shrub with tiny, scale-like leaves, is usually 3 to 4 feet tall, but sometimes reaches a height of 12 feet. Its small, fragrant, springtime flowers grow in dense clusters that attract insects. Some species provide winter forage for cattle and are said to be browsed by bighorn sheep. Pioneers brewed a palatable drink from the dried stems. Certain Indian tribes considered the brew a tonic, beneficial for treatment of syphilis and other diseases.

The bog–garden is a home for the numerous children of the wild that will not thrive on our harsh, bare, and dry garden borders, but must be cushioned on moss, and associated with their own relatives in moist peat soil. Many beautiful plants, like the Wind Gentian and Creeping Harebell, grow on our own bogs and marshes, much as these are now encroached upon. But even those acquainted with the beauty of the plants of our own bogs have, as a rule, but a feeble notion of the multitude of charming plants, natives of northern and temperate countries, whose home is the open marsh or boggy wood.

In our own country, we have been so long encroaching upon the bogs and wastes that some of us come to regard them as exceptional tracts all over the world. But when one travels in new countries in northern climes, one soon learns what a vast extent of the world’s surface was at one time covered with bogs. In North America day after day, even by the margins of the railroads, one sees the vivid blooms of the Cardinal–flower springing erect from the wet peaty hollows. Far under the shady woods stretch the black bog–pools, the ground between being so shaky that you move a few steps with difficulty. One wonders how the trees exist with their roots in such a bath.

Nothing dies harder than generally accepted delusions, particularly those regarding plant lore, and of all such incorrect impressions the one that a potato is a root, is the hardiest and most difficult to kill. Yet, the “eyes” of a potato give it away if one stops for a moment to reflect that the eyes are only buds and buds grow only on stems. That is one of the chief uses of stems—to support in the air the leaves and flowers that come from its buds, and no matter if the stem, as in the potato and many other plants, be ever so deeply buried their true stem nature cannot be mistaken. Sometimes these underground stems are not thickened but lengthened out, in which case, notably in common garden iris, they are called rootstocks. Again, these buried stems may be swollen, as in the potato, when they are known as tubers. Onions and the jack-in-the-pulpit bear still other kinds of underground stems, and there are many more, but they cannot be mistaken for roots, for it will be seen from Figures 6-9 that on their under sides they bear roots themselves. Besides this they bear buds or shoots, which no true root ever does.

But some plants produce roots in the air, as in poison ivy and the trumpet creeper, without injury or the gardener’s skill, and are known as aërial roots. They are some of the most peculiar and fantastic of nature’s devices for allowing plants to grow in apparently unfavorable places. In many orchids, some relatives of the pineapple, and a few other air-inhabiting plants, the roots live wholly in the air, the plants being fastened to a tree or even to a telegraph wire. Such plants live on the air and water vapor, and are mostly inhabitants of moist tropical regions.