FAVORITE FLOWERS 



'T^HE editor of the American Botanist challenges his read- 

 ■*" ers to name their favorite wildflowers and give the 

 reasons why. I shall confine myself to those that grow in 

 western Nebraska though I lived for thirty-seven years in 

 New England and loved many wildflowers. 



I am quite sure that I, in common with others, care 

 more for the first flowers of spring than for most of those 

 that fill the growing season. I am sure, for instance, that 

 trailing arbutus would not attract very much attention if it 

 came in midsummer. So I find the flowers I want to write 

 about are the first that bloom in this region and excite our 

 imagination by coming out of the cold ground as if by mira- 

 cle. On April 6, 1889. I gathered Townsendia sericea at 

 Valentine, Nebraska and analyzed it correctly — my first at- 

 tempt at systematic botany. Of course I was "tickled to 

 death" to get it right. I had been observing the bud ; sessile, 

 like a button sewed on too tightly, and when I returned from 

 a five-day missionary trip, I found it with its pale pink petals 

 in bloom. "A daisy" I exclaimed. The leaves form a 

 rosette and the buds sit close — the whole plant not over an 

 inch high, on dry hillsides of sand or magnesia, both in thin 

 woods and on the open prairie. If you pick them for the 

 home, they have to go into a saucer of wet sand. Compared 

 with many of the later flowers they are commonplace, but 

 coming when they do they strike right to the heart. 



Immediately following these come Pulsatilla hirsiitis- 

 sima, the Western representative of the wind-flower, Ane- 

 mone nemorosa, which we do not have. Our Western 

 flower has been called an anemone but not bv later authors. 



