Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/222

218 Others are scarcely thicker than the stem which hears them, while others are absolutely and completely absent. This hybrid poppy is tall and generally branches like the opium poppy. It is perennial, although its pistillate or seed ancestor is a short-lived annual. This red poppy can even be divided at the root and multiplied like the perennial oriental poppy. These hybrids have generally a dark mark at the base of the scarlet petals as in the oriental poppy; in some the leaves are smoothish and glaucous, as in the opium poppy; in most, deep green and hairy, more as in the other. Many flowers have their stems coalescent with that of the neighboring flower.

"These second generation hybrid poppy plants unexpectedly all proved to be perennials, and are now making a tremendous growth; the clusters of foliage of some of them are fourteen to eighteen inches across already. Among this second generation hybrid lot of poppies each single plant seems to be different from every other plant in the lot and strange to say the leaves now resemble not only poppy leaves, but celandine, various thistles, primroses, turnips, mustards and numerous other plants are very closely imitated, showing most astounding variations."

The striped amaryllis, vittata, hybridized with a Mexican species, formosissima, has narrow twisted petals of a very deep scarlet and nearly plain. The leaves are much narrower than in the vittata, the stalks more slender, and the plants more profuse bloomers.

Hybridizing crinum with amaryllis develops a plant with a fine