WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Little Wanderers cover

Little Wanderers

Chapter 25: COCKLEBURS AND SAND SPURS.
By Margaret Warner Morley
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

Children & Young Adult ReadingNature/Gardening/AnimalsScience - Biology

About This Book

A child-oriented natural-history guide explains how plants send their seeds abroad and why dispersal matters. It groups dispersal strategies—light plume-bearing and winged seeds carried by wind, seeds that float or tumble, sticky burs that cling to animals, edible seeds transported by creatures, and pods that eject their contents—and describes the forms and processes that enable each method. Common examples such as dandelions, thistles, maples, burdocks, cotton, various nuts, and touch-me-not illustrate the mechanisms, while brief reflections contrast sedentary adult plants with their wandering seed offspring and note the ecological advantages of travel.

COCKLEBURS AND SAND SPURS.

Cockleburs are covered with hooks, too, but they are much uglier than burdocks, for their seed pods are very hard and are covered on the outside with stiff, strong hooks that prick like needles.

When one walks among cockleburs, he soon stops to pick them off, for they hurt so, he cannot bear it.

Sand spurs are even worse than cockleburs. They are the seed coverings to a kind of grass.

Cockleburs.

In Florida this grass grows in tufts and spreads out close to the ground. Some of its stalks are covered with sand spurs that, like the cockleburs, are hard and are covered, not with hooks, but with very hard spines. These spines stick out in all directions and readily fasten upon whomever or whatever comes along, when they leave the parent grass and are carried away. After a time they are picked off and thrown on the ground, or they fall off, and that is their way of traveling to find a place to grow.

Dogs often get them in their feet, and then they have a hard time picking them out, for of course the poor things cannot walk with sand spurs between their toes.

There was once a dog that hated sand spurs and loved people so much that when any one came near him with sand spurs on his clothes, he would at once begin to pick them off, and the expression with which he jerked them out of his mouth showed very plainly what he thought of sand spurs.

Sand spurs.