Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/246

234 Of a very different type, perhaps more showy and certainly as interesting to the student of floral structures, is the great blue lobelia (Lobelia syphilitica), a frequenter of all low places, where its rank growth and bright deep blue render it a prominent object. This plant with its insect attendants has often furnished amusement for me by the half-hour. The insects seem always in haste, and dodge in and out of these blossoms with a methodical rapidity, each time receiving a new invoice of pollen to be scattered upon the stigmas of other blossoms subsequently visited. Among the most seemingly out-of-place blossoms as to time of appearing were those of the common blue violet. This is strictly one of the spring flowers, but with us for years it makes a second advent, and in some places blossoms so freely as to be no rarity. It has been used for classes of a hundred members for dissection in October. This favorite plant is not as well known in habit as it deserves. Its underground close-fertilized flowers, for example, are unseen, therefore passed by by those who only pick the showy aërial blossoms. The little low, round-leaved mallow, or prostrate mallow—in my boyhood days we called it "cheeses"—is one of our October flowers.

It will be seen that a fair share of the late autumn blossoms are weeds and useless plants. The May-weed (Anthemis cotula) is one of those which, if less common and without its rank odor, would be a very attractive plant in both foliage and flower; but, as it is, no one is anxious to give this wayside intruder any high place among the purely ornamental species. In like manner the mullein, or "great American velvet-leaf" as it is sometimes called in Europe (Verbascum thapsus),is a plant with some inherent attractions; but, owing to its obtrusive habit, combined with a coarseness and boldness, it can only rank with the weeds. It will accommodate itself remarkably to unfavorable conditions and come up blooming under all sorts of rough if not abusive treatment. There is a strict military air to this plant as well as to one of its October associates in the pasture (Verbena stricta). Both have stems much straighter than some ramrods, and one time a friend, seeing the mullein in great abundance upon rolling ground, remarked that they were like ten thousand men marching up a hill. The species of liatris, or blazing-stars, are of the same strict habit but vastly more showy. We have three species of these charming rose-purple composites, all of which flower late in summer and remain to display their marvels of beauty long after the tender plants have served their time.

Among all the late blossoms there are none for which I have a greater fondness than the gentians. They come, with their mingled purple and blue, at a time when those colors have become unusually rare, for they are never common at any time of