108 SWISS FLOWERS. 



87. Crocus. 



(PLATE XLVIL) 



The Crocus is not one of the plants that are improved by 

 being found in Switzerland ; it is indeed scarcely wild in 

 England, except near neighbourhoods where it has been culti- 

 vated, and we form our ideas of it from the many pretty kinds 

 now so abundantly seen in gardens. The shape of the flower 

 is very well known. It has six long petal-like segments, to 

 three of which the three stamens are fixed, the arrow-shaped 

 anthers being often nearly as long as the filaments. These 

 segments unite in a long sheathing tube, which runs down 

 to the root, the germen, which is on the bulb, and the long 

 style, ending in short orange stigmas. C. vernus (Fig. 87) 

 has white or purplish blue flowers, hairy at the mouth. A 

 few leaves, very narrow and with a white vein running down 

 them and reaching halfway up the flower, rise with it from 

 the bulb, the whole surrounded at the base with a tubular 

 sheath. On mountain-pastures, immediately after the snow 

 has melted ; but the plants have rather a thin and starved 

 look, though they carpet the ground. They are more 

 luxuriant when they take possession of a valley-pasture. 



