PENTSTEMON. 



P. gracilentus is only half the height of the last, and has foot-high 

 stems of clear blue blossom. 



P. gracilis is a slender smooth plant of a foot high or more (or much 

 less), with narrow paddle-shaped leaves, either toothed or smooth at 

 the edge, and loose open spires of lilac bugles each about an inch 

 long. It loves moist places and meadows from Colorado to Minnesota. 



P. grandiflorus is a large tall leafy species, with big lavender 

 flowers, from the Prairies. 



P. Hallii lives high up in the Alps of Colorado. Its stems rise about 

 8 inches or less, and the leaves are rather thick, and narrowly paddle- 

 shaped. The flower-spike is short and dense, carrying some five to 

 fifteen flowers, dimly sticky, of lilac-purple, bagging out from their 

 tube, which is shorter than the calyx. 



P. Harbourii is yet another covetable high-alpine, from the Colorado 

 Rockies, where it forms low dense masses and mats of smooth thick 

 green little leaves, obovate-oval, with some three pairs of them on 

 the 2- or 4-inch flower-stems that carry two or three blossoms crowded 

 in a cluster. 



P. Hartwegii, a wild original of plants so civilised that now they 

 have forgotten their parent, like the gorgeous daughters of Pere 

 Goriot. 



P. Haydeni is more or less glaucous and rather floppety, with stems 

 of 1 or 2 feet, set in linear-narrow leaves that half embrace them, and 

 are pointed at their tips. The flowers are blue, swelling as soon as 

 they get out of the calyx, and are borne in narrow dense thyrses, 

 embraced by large leafy bracts. 



P. heterophyllus, Wats. (P. sepalulus), is one of the loveliest of all. 

 It is slender and erect and wiry in growth, with narrow leaves and 

 loose spikes of the most exquisite narrow-tubed wide-mouthed flowers 

 of a serene dawn-blue, pale-throated, lined, and shadowed sooner or 

 later with a sheen of very soft external amethyst that doubles the effect 

 of the already entrancing clear tender blues of the mouth. These 

 dainty trumpets of opalescent loveliness sound their music in August 

 and September, and the plant is a hearty erect grower of a foot or 

 more, easily to be raised from seed, even if it show too much of that 

 fashionable American weakness for impermanence. 



P. humilis. — The leaves of this are dark-green, or occasionally bluish, 

 oblong-lanceolate, and with those on the stems marked with teeth. 

 The shoots are not more than a foot high, but usually much less, with 

 smoothness all over, unless it be for a sticky inflorescence. The 

 flower-spike is strict and straight, about 3 inches long, with clusters 

 of about half a dozen flowers,, or less, on short pedicels. These blossoms 



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