the aster and the chrysanthemum have been improved into beautiful garden flowers, and the lettuce and endive into salad plants.
The whole insect world seems to help these composite flowers. Bees and wasps and flies and beetles visit them. Moths suck their honey by night. They have enemies, too. Grasshoppers eat their leaves. Crickets and beetles lay eggs on them. Caterpillars bore tunnels down golden-rod stems. The aphis, or plant louse, sucks their juices. But the ant, the red spider, the insect-eating birds, and toads and frogs find a thicket of golden-rods and asters a fine hunting ground, and destroy these enemies. On the strong, weedy stems a tiny wasp builds a gray paper house, and under the plant are to be found bumble bee nests and the cocoon cradles of many insects.
The composite plants are little books of nature. You could spend a long season finding out all the interesting things they could tell you. See Compositae, Dandelion, Daisy, Aster, Chrysanthemum, Goldenrod, Thistle. Plate, Volume II, page 686.
