its rose-colored flowers in the moist,
sunny places in the woods or along their borders so early in the
season.

There are few more obnoxious weeds in cultivated ground than
sheep-sorrel, also an Old World plant; while our native
wood-sorrel,--belonging, it is true, to a different family of
plants,--with its white, delicately veined flowers, or the variety
with yellow flowers, is quite harmless. The same is true of the
mallow, the vetch or tare, and other plants. We have no native plant
so indestructible as garden orpine, or live-forever, which our
grandmothers nursed and for which they are cursed by many a farmer.
The fat, tender, succulent dooryard stripling turned out to be a
monster that would devour the earth. I have seen acres of meadow land
destroyed by it. The way to drown an amphibious animal is to never
allow it to come to the surface to breathe, and this is the way to
kill live-forever. It lives by its stalk and leaf, more than by its
root, and, if cropped or bruised as soon as it comes to the surface,
it will in time perish. It laughs the plow, the hoe, the cultivator to
scorn, but grazing herds will eventually scotch it. Our two species
of native orpine, _Sedum ternatum_ and _S. telephioides_, are never
troublesome as weeds.

The European weeds are sophisticated, domesticated, civilized; they
have been to school to man for many hundred years, and they have
learned to thrive upon him: their struggle for existence has been
sharp and protracted; it has made them hardy and prolific; they will
thrive in a lean soil, or they will wax strong in a rich one; in all
cases they follow man and profit by him. Our native weeds, on the
other hand, are furtive and retiring; they flee before the plow and
the scythe, and hide in corners and remote waste places. Will they,
too, in time, change their habits in this respect?

"Idle weeds are fast in growth," says Shakespeare, but that depends
upon whether the competition is sharp and close. If the weed finds
itself distanced, or pitted against great odds, it grows more slowly
and is of diminished stature, but let it once get the upper hand and
what strides it makes! Red-root will grow four or five feet high if it
has a chance, or it will content itself with a few inches and mature
its seed almost upon the ground.

Many of our worst weeds are plants that have escaped from
cultivation, as the wild radish, which is troublesome in parts of New
England; the wild carrot, which