From Blue to Purple 



charming; the early date when they bloom makes them espe- 

 cially welcome; and, once planted and left undisturbed, the bulbs 

 increase rapidly, without injury from overcrowding. Evidently 

 they need little encouragement to run wild. Nevertheless they 

 are not wild scillas, however commonly they may be miscalled 

 so. Certainly ladies' tresses, known as wild hyacinth in parts of 

 New England, has even less right to the name. 



Our true native wild hyacinth, or scilla, is quite a different 

 flower, not so pure a blue as the Siberian scilla, and paler; yet 

 in the middle West, where it abounds, there are few lovelier 

 sights in spring than a colony of these blossoms directed obliquely 

 upward from slender, swaying scapes among the lush grass. 

 Their upward slant brings the stigma in immediate contact with 

 an incoming visitor's pollen-laden body. As the stamens diverge 

 with the spreading of the divisions of the perianth, to which they 

 are attached, the stigma receives pollen brought from another 

 flower, before the visitor dusts himself anew in searching for re- 

 freshment, thus effecting cross-pollination. Ants, bees, wasps, 

 flies, butterflies, and beetles may be seen about the wild hyacinth, 

 which is obviously best adapted to the bees. The smallest in- 

 sects that visit it may possibly defeat Nature's plan and obtain 

 nectar without fertilizing the flower, owing to the wide passage 

 between stamens and stigma. In about an hour, one May morn- 

 ing, Professor Charles Robertson captured over six hundred in- 

 sects, representing thirty-eight distinct species, on a patch of wild 

 hyacinths in Illinois. 



The bulb of a Mediterranean Scilla (5. mariiima) furnishes the 

 sourish-sweet syrup of squills used in medicine for bronchial 

 troubles. 



The Grape Hyacinth {Muscari botryoides), also known as 

 Baby's Breath, because of its delicate faint fragrance, escapes from 

 gardens at slight encouragement to grow wild in the roadsides 

 and meadows from Massachusetts to Virginia and westward to 

 Ohio. Its tiny, deep-blue, globular flowers, stiffly set around a 

 fleshy scape that rises between erect, blade-like, channeled leaves, 

 appear spring after spring wherever the small bulbs have been 

 planted. On the east end of Long Island there are certain mead- 

 ows literally blued with the little runaways. 



Purple Trillium, Ill-scented Wake-Robin, or 



Birth-root 



{Trillium erectum) Lily-of-the- Valley family 



Flowers — Solitary, dark, dull purple, or purplish red ; rarely green- 

 ish, white, or pinkish ; on erect or slightly inclined footstalk. 



7 



