THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 113 



you will find horderirii^ the driveway and about tlie dwell- 

 ing, foliage plants and ferns rather than flowers. A neigh- 

 bor has perhaps an arbor covered with a Bougainvillia vine. 

 When, its blossoming time comes, the deep green of its fol- 

 iage will be flecked at first with ruddy purple — more accur- 

 ately magenta — soon the patches of color spread and be- 

 come confluent until the whole arbor is a solid mass of 

 color. It seems like an experiment in decorative art be- 

 longing to a primitive and barbaric stage. You are not 

 sorrv to find that nature has not repeated it. What is re- 

 markable is that it is not the flowers of the bougainvillia 

 that are thus colored. It is only the bracts enclosing the 

 inconspicuous flower clusters. 



Another vine often trained over porches and barns, a 

 bignonia, Init unlike our trumpet creeper, makes the bougain- 

 villia envious when it puts on its gala day dress. Here 

 again is solid color, but no longer the suggestion of the dye 

 vat. It is the color of living flame, not uniform in tint, but 

 with lights and .shades such as belong to veritable flame, and 

 the plant wears this gorgeous attire, wholly concealing the 

 everv-dav garment of green which it covers, for weeks at a 

 time. 



]\Iore prized, but less common, is the stephanotis, 

 whose fragrant clusters in tlieir season transform the trellis 

 into a snow bank. The same snow effect is produced when 

 the ungainly fleshy stems of the night blooming cereus 

 (Ccrcus triqucfra), which are piled up on stone fences, mak- 

 ing the semblance of an evergreen hedge, clothe themselves, 

 as they do once in three or four weeks, through the sum- 

 mer months, with their giant lily blossoms. There is one 

 of these hedges at Oahu College, a continuous stretch of 

 two hundred vards, on which it is a common thing to see 

 two thousand blossoms at once — sometimes there have been 



