PRAIRIE FLOWERS OF LATE AUTUMN. 235 



year. Some of the species bear flowers that long seern upon the 

 verge of coming into full bloom, and disappoint those who look 

 for wide-open flowers. They are somewhat bell-shaped ; into the 

 plaited opening, otherwise nearly closed, the bee or other insect 

 pushes its way in search of nectar and pollen. Upon the exit of 

 the winged visitant the corolla again closes, to the exclusion of 

 everything except its insect attendants. The most charming of 

 all the species of this late-flowering genus is the celebrated 

 fringed gentian, so named because its long corolla ends in a most 

 delicate row of long, fine, hair-like projections, suggesting the 

 heavy eyelashes of a beautiful girl. The tint of the whole blos- 

 som is a pure and delicate blue, caught, as it would seem, from 

 some patch of October sky, margined by flecks of fleecy clouds. 

 These gentians, as well as rich specimens of a cousin to the thor- 

 oughwort and boneset, with great clusters of pure white flowers, 

 might be gathered any late autumn day, the former in the low 

 prairie, the latter in the tangle of frost-bitten herbage in " the 

 timber " along the water- courses. The boneset flowers suggested, 

 in their exhibition of white, the approach of winter, when all the 

 copse is covered with a mantle of snow and the stream is locked 

 in the embrace of the frost-king. 



One of the latest of the autumn prairie flowers and one not 

 found by me until drear November has come in the wake of In- 

 dian summer weather is the ladies-tresses, an orchid of no strik- 

 ing beauty, but, in a region where orchids are rare and arriving 

 after the eleventh hour, it has its full share of interest. The 

 plants are single-stemmed, few-leaved, and the small, pure white 

 flowers are so arranged upon the long spike as to assume a spiral 

 inflorescence, from which fact the common name doubtless origi- 

 nated in the fertile mind of some imaginative lover of plants. 

 If the witch-hazel had been a member of the prairie flora un- 

 der consideration, it would have been in its place of honor at the 

 close of this list ; but, as it is, the orchid and the aster, the shep- 

 herd's-purse of the wayside and the prairie must vie with the 

 pansy in the flower-garden for the last place in the floral calendar 

 of the year. 



The reasons assigned in a previous article for the early bloom- 

 ing of plants hold good here for those that develop their flowers 

 late in the year, and can be briefly condensed into the expression 

 that, in the experience of the species, it is probably found an ad- 

 vantage to be somewhat out of the season. A single store upon 

 a side street may do as well as any one in the market-place, 

 provided it is thoroughly accommodated to the situation : com- 

 petition, or the absence of it, is likewise an element not to be 

 ignored in the consideration of the time of blooming of flow- 

 ers ; and no one can but rejoice that all plants do not produce 



