Ambrosia

He had a most intense admiration of female loveliness, and looked upon woman as a kind of super-angelic being, whose food should be the ambrosiæ and nectar of the gods, and whose garments the spotless white of vestal purity.

A favorite. It’s refreshing now and will evolve into golden ambrosia with age. […] The dessert wines of the Loire Valley and AJsace also deserve recognition. From the Anjou area of the Loire come the ambrosiae of Savennières, Bonnezeaux, and Quarts de Chaume.

Their disease does not appear before August. At this time, throughout the entire United States one could say, not only in every field, in every meadow and in every forest, but even in the largest cities, there blooms the ambrosiæ, which are commonly known as ragweed; […]

Fig. 1.—Spiculated pollens of ragweeds (ambrosias) low in protein. […] In the cocklebur (Xanthium americanum) and the rough wild elder (Iva ciliata), the spicules are shorter, being 0.7 and 0.5 microns, and the reaction is proportionately less active than with the ragweeds (ambrosias). […] While the grass pollens have so light a coat that they are frequently crushed in the ordinary process of mounting, the ragweed (ambrosias) pollen grains resist pressure between two glass slides carried to the point of crushing the glass.

Dr. William Scheppergrell,^([sic – meaning Scheppegrell]) in Public Health Reports, states that the common and giant ragweeds (ambrosias), which are the principal causes of hay fever in the Eastern States, do not grow so abundantly in the West, and that the pollens of other plants, notably the wormwoods (artemisias), are the exciting causes of hay fever in the Pacific and Mountain States. […] [quoting Scheppegrell] The most important hay-fever weeds of the Pacific and Mountain States, and which give the most severe reaction, are the wormwoods (artemisias). While their pollen is not produced in the same profusion as that of the ragweeds (ambrosias), they give a marked hay-fever reaction which in some species is five times as active as that of the ragweed (ambrosia).

Section G: The Collector’s corner, Mrs. J. R. Cowan, blue, for her ambrosiae.

Once again there can be heard throughout the eastern part of the country the stacatto^([sic]) sneezing, the hacking cough and the stuffy head of the hay fever patient, for ragweed season is upon us. As it does each year, about the fifteenth of August, plants of the group called ambrosiae spread their pollens to the wind and the misery begins.

The ambrosias [ragweeds] are not only very harmful competitors of plants, but they also are dangerous vectors of allergic illnesses of man.