16 . THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 



er, who would derive the name from the popping sound made 

 by the leaves. A still more appropriate derivation would be 

 from the old word popple — to move quickly up and down, as 

 a cork on the weaves. Popple certainly has some connection 

 wi:li poplar, but whether popple was derived from poplar or 

 the reverse is beyond our ken at present. 



Cultivated Wild Flowers. — The people who do not stop 

 to think — and there are many such— assume that there is some 

 fundamental distinction between the flowers of the field and 

 those of our own gardens. One class they are accustomed to 

 call wildflowers, the other "tame'' or cultivated flowers. But 

 cultivation means something more than growing plants in a 

 garden. Plants, like men are not cultivated by mere growth ; 

 there must be improvement as well. A wildflower that has 

 been brought into the garden and made more valuable by 

 deepening its color, increasing its perfume, multiplying its 

 flowers or increasing them in size, is trul}' cultivated. We may 

 even agree that doubling certain flowers is a phase of culti- 

 vation, but not all double flowers are cultivated, if by the term 

 we mean improved. Imagine a double orchid, or iris ! A 

 double sweet pea or snap-dragon or columbine is simply a 

 monstrosity, but a double rose, buttercup or daisy need not 

 be so stigmatized, for in the first case, the beauty of the 

 flower depends upon its form and in the second it depends 

 in a measure upon the multiplicity of parts. The cultivated 

 flowers, then, form but a small part of our garden flowers. 

 The others may still grow wild, somewhere, and even the 

 cultivated flowers were once in that condition. The parent 

 of the "golden glow" rudbeckia is still most plentiful along 

 our streams and swamps, its few-rayed flower-heads giving no 

 visible hint of the relationship existing between them. A 

 better division of the flowers would he into the native and 

 exotic species, the exotics being all those that are not native 



