From Blue to Purple 



" Thou waitest late, and com'st alone 

 When woods are bare and birds have flown, 

 And frosts and shortening days portend 

 The aged year is near his end. 



" Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye 

 Look through its fringes to the sky, 

 Blue — blue — as if that sky let fall 

 A flower from its cerulean wall." 



When we come upon a bed of gentians on some sparkling 

 October day, we can but repeat Bryant's thoughts and express 

 them prosaically who attempt description. In dark weather this 

 sunshine lover remains shut, to protect its nectar and pollen from 

 possible showers. An elusive plant is this gentian, which by no 

 means always reappears in the same places year after year, for 

 it is an annual whose seeds alone perpetuate it. Seating them- 

 selves on the winds when autumn gales shake them from out the 

 home wall, these little hairy scales ride afar, and those that are so 

 fortunate as to strike into soft, moist soil at the end of the journey, 

 germinate. Because this flower is so rarely beautiful that few can 

 resist the temptation of picking it, it is becoming sadly rare near 

 large settlements. 



The special importance of producing a quantity of fertile seed 

 has led the gentians to adopt proterandry — one of the commonest, 

 because most successful, methods of insuring it. The anthers, 

 coming to maturity early, shed their pollen on the bumblebees 

 that have been first attracted by their favorite color and the entic- 

 ing fringes before they crawl half way down the tube where they 

 can reach the nectar secreted in the walls. After the pollen has 

 been carried from the early flowers, and the stamens begin to 

 wither, up rises the pistil to be fertilized with pollen brought from 

 a newly opened blossom by the bee or butterfly. The late de- 

 velopment of the pistil accounts for the error often stated, that 

 some gentians have none. No doubt the fringe, which most 

 scientists regard simply as an additional attraction for winged 

 insects, serves a double purpose in entangling the feet of ants and 

 other crawlers that would climb over the edge to pilfer sweets 

 clearly intended for the bumblebee alone. 



Fifteen species of gentian have been gathered during a half- 

 hour walk in Switzerland, where the pastures are spread with 

 sheets of blue. Indeed, one can little realize the beauty of these 

 heavenly flowers who has not seen them among the Alps. 



The Five-flowered or Stiff Gentian, or Ague-weed {Gentiana 

 qtthiqnefolia) — G. quniqitcfiora of Gray — has its five-parted, 

 small, picotee-edged blue flowers arranged in clusters, not exceed- 

 ing seven, at the ends of the branches or seated in the leaf-axils. 

 The slender, branching, ridged stem may rise only two inches in 

 dry soil; or perhaps two feet in rich, moist, rocky ground, where 



3 33 



