SAXIFRAGA VIRGINIENSIS. 



EARLY WHITE SAXIFRAGE. 



NATURAL ORDER, SAXIFRAGACE/E. 



Saxifraga ViKGiNiENSTS, Michaux. — Low, four to nine inches high; leaves ovate or oval 

 spatulate, narrowed into a broad petiole, crenate-toothed, thickish ; flowers in a clustered 

 cyme, which is at length open and loosely panicled; lobes of the nearly free calyx erect, 

 not half the length of the oblong, obtuse white petals ; pods two, united merely at the 

 base, divergent, purplish. (Gray's Maintal. See also Wood's Chus-Book, Chapman's 

 Flora of the Southern Stales, Botany of California, etc.) 



HE names of plants, if literally taken, would often mis- 

 lead. Michaux, one of our early botanists, finding this 

 plant abundant in Virginia, gave it the distinctive name of 

 Virgiiiic7isis ; but it is distributed over the whole American 

 continent, and is much more common as we go north of Vir- 

 ginia. It is found in Canada and as far south as Georgia, in 

 the Rocky Mountains and in the Sierra and Coast Ranges; 

 and if we accept the suggestion of some botanists that it is 

 scarcely different from Saxifraga nivalis, we may say that it 

 runs far away up into the Arctic regions, which is a remarkable 

 geographical range for a plant with no special organs adapted 

 to aid distribution, and to which cultivation and man's work in 

 o^eneral are enemies. 



The Saxifrages are mostly Alpine or high northern plants, 

 and form a genus of some one hundred and fifty representa- 

 tives. Only a few of them are found in the Atlantic States, 

 and the species we now describe is perhaps the most southern 

 of all. It is amoncr the earliest in bloom of our wild flowers, 



O 



being often open in Pennsylvania by the middle of April. It 

 grows in shaded woods or in stony i)laces, and particularly 

 delights in getting into the clefts of rocks. The gCHcric name 



