PENTSTEMON. 



flowers are blue, gradually dilating from the tube, and often, but not 

 always, borne in the long and one-sided spire that the plant's name 

 implies. It lives in the sandy plains of Wyoming and New Mexico, and 

 there is a pleasant variety, P. s. caudatus, in which none of the leaves 

 have any stems at all, and all are more fleshy, while the flowers vary 

 from pale violet to a pinky tone. 



P. sepalulus (Nels.) = P. heterophyllus. 



P. Sileri. See under P. linaroeides. 



P. similis (P. Jamesii, Gray), has either few or many frail delicate 

 stems about 8 inches or a foot long, the plant being usually glabrous, 

 or else with a sparse rimy down ; and the stem-leaves are scantily 

 toothed, oblong in form, and very narrow. The thyrse of blossom, 

 too, is narrow, and inclined to be one-sided ; bearing blue-and- white 

 flowers like those of P. Jamesii, Benth. (of which the entire tuft is 

 the precise picture, altered only in the points specified), but rather 

 longer, about an inch, and abruptly expanding from their tube into 

 a wide cup-form. A lovely small species from South Colorado and 

 New Mexico. 



P. speciosus. See under P. gldber. 



P. spectabilis is a perfectly hairless leafy 2-foot gawk with flowers 

 flattered as being " lilac and blue " in a long foliaceous spire. 



P. strictus stands about 18 inches high, an erect smooth blue-grey 

 plant with a long narrow, drawn-out spike, and rather one-sided 

 sprays of short-tubed ample foxgloves of blue-violet, bell-shaped and 

 baggy, about an inch long ; the lower leaves are oblong paddle-shaped 

 and stalked. 



P. suffrutescens is lower, and slender, in its habit. The older 

 branches most properly lie down in meekness, while the young, with 

 no less propriety, stand up. But none of them are much more than 

 9 inches long, or a foot at most. The leaves are very small indeed, 

 green and almost smooth, narrow-spoon-shaped, and bearing in their 

 uppermost axils some one or three large violet -rose flowers, the branches 

 all being clad in downward-pointing fine down. It makes quite a wee 

 shrub, low and slender and divergent, and comes from the arid places 

 of Colorado, having also had the name of P. procumbens. 



P. Torreyi stands very close to P. barbatus, and may even be no more 

 than a variety, more slender in the habit and more graceful in the long, 

 loose spire of especially brilliant scarlet flowers. 



P. trichander is pretty much the same as this last, but is dwarf er in 

 habit, with a shorter tube to the blossoms. 



P. triphyllus is about 18 inches high, leafy and branched, with 

 inferior purplish flowers. 



55 



