52 



WILD. OR XATIVE FLOWERS. 



June, which is its flowering season — though often it may be seen 

 lingering in rocky woods through July, and now and then a few late 

 blossoms will be found in shady ground late in x\ugust. 



Round LEAVED Sundew — Drosera rotnudifolia (L.) 



Two s[)ecies of this interesting and singular family are common in 

 Canada. One Drosera roii/udi/olia with round leaves, beset with stiff 

 glandular hairs of a deep red colour, abounds in boggy soil in most 

 parts of the Dominion. 



The beauty of this little plant consists in the hairy fringes of the 

 leaves which exude drops of a clear dew-like fluid ; each little leaf seems 

 adorned with a row of liquid gems, beautiful as pearls, and glistening in 

 the sunlight like miniature diamonds. 



The round red leaves are prolonged into the petiole, or rather the 

 leaf-stalk is expanded at its edges and terminates in the glandular leaf. 

 The flowers are small, white, sometimes tinged with pink, borne on a 

 slender, naked, somewhat one-sided scape, which droops a little at the 

 tip. I am not aware of any medicinal or useful qualities of the 

 Sundews, but the eye that sees the beauty set forth in the little dew- 

 gemmed leaf of this lovely plant, may behold in it with reverent 

 admiration a work of creative mind, surpassing all that man's ingenuity 

 can produce. The jeweller may polish and set the ruby and the 

 diamond in fretted gold, but he cannot make one ruby-tinted leaf of 

 the little Sundew. 



A rather narrower-leaved species is Drosera loiii^ifolia (L.), which 

 grows abundantly in a peat marsh near Stoney Lake, at a spot known as 

 *' Hurricane Point," a rocky cape, at the rear of which lies a low marshy 

 flat, covering several acres of wet ground ; a rare garden and nursery 

 for many charming flowering shrubs and exquisite bog-loving plants. 

 A beautiful carpet of white Peat Moss Sphagnum cymhifoliuni is spread 

 over the surface, nearly a foot deep \ on this we see wreaths of the grace- 

 ful low-bush Cranberry, trailing its slender branches with their dark green 

 glossy myrtle-like foliage and delicate pink revolute flowers, as well as 

 berries in every stage of progress, the tiny green immature fruit — the 

 golden — the mottled and the deep red ripe berry. How tempting to the 

 hand and eye. There the slender leaved Sundew mixes its white 

 flowers with the fringed Orchis, and sends up from the watery soil its 

 modest flowers in the midst of a bed of the grand blossoms of that 

 rarely constructed plant the " Pitcher Plant," Sarraee/iia pjtrpjtrea, or as 

 it is called by some writers " Side-saddle flower."* 



* Grny sny.s it is tlinicnlt to fancy nny rpscmMnTico liotwccii tliis Mower aii'l a sirlt'-sjidcllc. 1 

 venture to Hiiggost that tlic foiiiinon naiiU' originatcil from the (laji-lilve extension of the leaf. 



