72 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



my first botanical text-book. Gray's "Lessons in Botany" and 

 there was just the record I had been looking for. "In the Fig- 

 wort family the fifth stamen appears in Pentstemon and turtle- 

 head as a sort of filament without any anther, a thing of no 

 use whatever to the plant but very interesting to the botanist 

 since it completes the symmetry of the blossom, and to show 

 that this is really the lost stamen, it now and then bears an 

 anther or the rudiment of one." 



I am convinced that it is only veiy rarely "now and 

 then" that the lost stamen appears, for I examined hundreds of 

 blossoms of turtlehead last summer, and never found another 

 flower with five antheriferous stamens. The manuals say of 

 Chelone, "Flowers white, often tinged with rose or pink." 

 Our plant has decidedly cream-colored flowers without the 

 slightest suggestion of rose or pink. 



Delavan, IV is. 



FLOWERS OF THE SALT MEADOWS. 



JUST back from the white sands of the surf-beaten beach 

 lie the salt meadows, soft with brackish ooze, odorous of 

 fish and haunted by ravenous mosquitoes — a sort of no-mans'- 

 land between the shifting seashore and terra firma. On breezy 

 days of early autumn, when the wind drives the mosquitoes 

 to cover, I love to push my boat far up some one of the many 

 streams that dissect the sunlit marsh and see how nature's 

 garden grows there ; for even in so unlikely a spot as this, amid 

 sedge and "black grass" does she set dainty flowers. 



Here that lowly beauty, the seaside gerardia, lifts to us 

 its chubby purple flower-cups. In our own Western land it 

 keeps ever fresh the memory of old John Gerarde, for whom 

 it is named and who loved plants as you and I do, and wrote 

 quaintly about them in England more than three centuries ago. 

 Here too, we may gather starry sabbatia without stint — that 

 beautiful blossom like a pink five-pointed star wtih a yellow 



