Family

Honeysuckle.

Colour

White.

Odour

Scentless.

Range

New England westward.

Time of Bloom

Spring.

Flowers: fertile flowers, with parts arranged in fives and clustered in a cyme; neutral flowers with large flat corollas that grow in a border about the others. Fruit: juicy, acid; often used as a substitute for cranberries. Leaves: three to five lobed; pointed; netted-veined; toothed; with two glands at the summit of the petiole. A shrub with greyish, smooth bark.

The primary law of the viburnum household is to keep things separate. The neutral flowers which are arranged about the fertile ones of the centre are for the purpose of attracting the bee's eye. To look pretty and to be seen is their only care in life. It seems as though the unattractive little fertile flowers had begged them to play this role for them, as they themselves are busy with the weight of reproducing their species upon their shoulders. In cultivation they resign this burden into the hands of the gardener, and the whole cyme becomes composed of neutral flowers. It is then known as the snowball tree, or the guelder rose, V. Alnifolio. Plate XCIX.