Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/791

Rh larkspur, poppies, and other highly colored flowers rush into bloom on the first approach of spring, making the fields look like veritable gardens of the gods. The roadsides and hills and neglected fields produce numerous gorgeously colored yellow, purple, and red



thistles, of a great variety of genera, very beautiful to look at, when one has not been trying to pick them.

Some plants which have been introduced for cultivation have become partly or completely naturalized. The aloe, which we know as the "century plant," makes hedges along the pathways, and is planted up the mountain sides in rows. It is used as fodder for goats and as thatch for peasant houses, and from the fiber are