ASTER SPECIES. 
graceful and of fine habit, sending up stems of some 18 inches from a 
tuft of narrow foliage, and carrying loose flattish heads of creamy- 
white, with yellow eye—the whole habit being indeed suggestive of a 
refined Achillea Ptarmica. 
A. puniceus is especially remarkable for its power of growing no 
less happily in 3 or 4 inches of water as it does almost anywhere on 
land. It forms masses of stalwart stems about 4 feet high, clothed 
in leafage of ample cheerful green, rather smooth and limp in look, 
but more or less hairy ; the flowers are produced in August, in very 
ample panicles, and are themselves very ample and of bright clear 
blue, well furnished with a quantity of narrowish rays. It is a 
splendid beauty, extremely variable in its native haunts in bogs and 
damp places in the northernmost States. 
A. pyrenaeus is yet another Aster deserving capitals. It belongs 
to the hills of Catalonia, and from the central tuft it sends up a 
number of stiff undivided stems about 3 feet high, clothed in oval- 
pointed toothed foliage, grey with soft down, and almost embracing 
the stem. The large and brilliant purple flowers are carried at the top 
in a loosely branching head. (July to August.) 
A. radula, specially rough-leaved with stars of pale poor violet. 
A. salicifolius recalls A. paniculatus, but the leaves are stiffer, and 
the heads are carried in broad heads ikea thyrsus. (A. caerulescens is 
a form of this.) 
A. Schreberi has much the same faults as A. glomeratus. 
A. sericeus is beautiful but a little uncertain. It is a slender 
branching thing, about 2 feet high, with narrow leaves all shining 
with a coat of silver silk, and large flowers of a brilliant violet-purple. 
It belongs to the prairies, and especially desires very light soil in a 
warm position, with perfect drainage. 
A. Shortii is a good species—slender and spreading, with full-faced 
flowers in well-furnished racemes. 
A. sikkimensis attains 3 or 4 feet and is lavishly branchy, with 
soft narrowish stem-embracing leaves, and abundance of flowers, blue, 
not large, upon the twisting sprays. 
A. spectabilis grows some 2 feet high, with oval, long-pointed foliage, 
all sharply toothed, and no great abundance of fine big flowers of clear 
violet. 
A. surculosus has the flowers of A. spectabilis, but here the leaves 
are stiff and without any toothing. It comes from bogs and running 
water about New Jersey. 
A. tardiflorus (A. patulus, Lam.) has stem-clasping leaves and 
panicles of pale lightish-blue stars. 
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