FLORICULTURE. 365 



FLORICULTUEE. 



THE PRAIKIE FLORA OF WESTERN MINNESOTA. 



LYCURGUS K. MOYER, 3I0NTEVIDE0. 



The native prairie flora of western Minnesota will soon have passed 

 away like the buffalo. The breaking plow and the barbed-wire fence are 

 rapidly changing the aspect of the country. The wheat field and the en- 

 closed pasture are almost equally destructive to the native wild flowers. 

 A few individual plants may linger beside railways and in obscure cor- 

 ners, but the broad effects of the prairie flora will be gone. 



Let us note down a few characteristic plants of this flora as they now 

 are, or, rather, as they were, a few years ago. 



There is a certain grandeur about our vast prairies in their natural 

 state, but it is mingled with much that is stern and forbidding. Killing 

 frosts come early in the autumn, and it is only by a happy accident that 

 the prairie fire does not sweep the grass away within a very few days. 



Art critics tell us that it is the low, somber tones in the landscape that 

 are really the most beautiful. I can hardly agree with them. To my 

 mind there is nothing more depressing than the blackened and denuded 

 landscape left where the prairie Are has been. Snow may come and try 

 to cover the desolation, but the first wind raises it into the air mixed 

 with ashes and cinders, and leaves it piled in melancholy looking drifts, 

 gray and grimy, and utterly discomfited; the effort to cover up the bleak 

 ugliness of the fire-blackened prairie was a failure; the desolation re- 

 mains as before, or is intensified. 



Spring comes at last, and with the first warm days in April the Pasque- 

 flower (Anemone patens, var. Nattuliana) pushes up its furry involucre 

 on the dryest hill-tops, and opens its pale blue sepals long before its 

 leaves have time to develop. The children all love the Pasque-flower. 

 In our part of the state, they call it the May-flower. The furry coat in 

 which it is clothed seems to protect it from those chilly blasts that Old 

 Winter is wont to blow, when in a spiteful mood just before leaving, and 

 it is not uncommon to find its opening fiowers bpried beneath an April 

 snow. As summer advances, the leaves of the plant appear, and the 

 seed-pods, gathered in a head, develop long feathery styles, making the 

 plant fully as interesting as when in bloom. 



Late in April or early in May, a small Buttercup (Ranunculus rhomboi- 

 deus) is found on sunny hill-sides, and with it a cut-leaf violet (Viola 

 pedatifida). The common blue Violet (Viola palmata, var. cucullata) is 

 occasionally found on the prairie, but is not a characteristic prairie 

 flower. Two Lithospermums (L. canascens and L. angustifolium) are 

 conspicuous on dry grounds in May, and along with them the unassum- 

 ing Onosmodium Carolinianum with its flowers, that look like buds about 

 to open, but which never do. The Lousewort (Pedicularis Canadensis 

 forms conspicuous patches on the open prairie, where the ground is rather 

 moist. Hypoxis erecta. Star-grass, blooms early in May, and along with 

 it Sysirinchium angustifolium, blue-eyed grass, the only representative 

 of the Iris family on the prairies, so far as I know. The beautiful Violet 

 Oxalis is found on the prairie everywhere, and persists in wheat fields 

 after cultivation. Troximon cuspidatum, closely related to the common 

 Dandelion, is found on dry banks and ridges. The Dandelion itself has 



