THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 87 



The Coreopsis or Calliopsis in bright yellow, copper, 

 bronze, and brown, blooms incessantly, a free lance among 

 grasses, reeds, ferns, and weeds. Its charming peculiarity 

 is that its stems are tall, strong and wiry. The foliage is 

 close to the ground, so the flowers seem to be floating 

 upon the air. Its type is the despised "tickweed" of the 

 woods, a weed with nothing in its favor except that it is 

 the progenitor of the six varieties of coreopsis, beautiful 

 garden flowers. No matter where your garden stands, 

 north or south, from one paper of seed, sown fall or spring, 

 these plants bloom the first season, self-sow and spread in 

 volunteer ranks, year after year, perpetually. No need 

 to sow fresh seed every year; they do that themselves. 



Under self propagation, however, some of our most 

 beautiful flowers rapidly degenerate. They demand in- 

 tensive culture. Pansies are prolific seed bearers and vol- 

 unteer plants are numerous, but left to nature, without 

 cultivation, they invariably revert to the type Viola tricolor } 

 with both plant and flower diminutive. Po-rtulaca, of most 

 gorgeous oriental colors, will degenerate to the semblance 

 of its type, the common purslane, with flowers no larger 

 than a little pearl button and stems, bare of leaves, that 

 look like earth worms ; the flowers pale pink and yellow 

 exactly like those of the "pigweed" purslane. Phlox Drum- 

 mondi, a native of the Texas prairies, answers the call of 

 the wild in prodigious numbers of volunteer plants. From 

 highly improved strains of all the colors of pink, rose, 

 crimson, lavender, and pure white, the self-sown seedlings 

 produce perfect flowers the first year. After that, every 

 year shows degeneracy. The blooms get small, the foliage 

 shabby, and the colors are confined to the pink and red of 

 the type. 



The. Mexican poppy self-sows its seeds, volunteers in 

 hosts, and, unlike all other poppies, blooms from June to 



