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Teratological Notes. 



L 



Oil the interesting subject of double flowers in a wild state 

 I am not aware that any published records have been made 

 in Pacific North America; which may be owing to the fact 

 that we have never had a journal of botany on this side the 

 continent; certainly it is not because instances of the rever- 

 sion of stamens and pistils to petals have not been observed 

 in indigenous species growing without cultivation. Mr. 

 Charles T. Blake of Berkeley, who is a keen botanical observer, 

 and has had many years of es:perience with Californian plants, 

 assures me that in more than one instance he has seen Oalo- 

 chortus flowers as double as possible; and two years since, 

 he brought to me, from near Webber Lake in the Sierra 

 Nevada, a neat herbarium specimen of Delphinium paiens in 

 which the few flowers were as perfect rosettes of blue petals 

 as are ever seen in the best double varieties of the old D. Con- 

 solida^ or annual Larkspur of the gardens. To Miss Emma 

 Harrison of San Francisco I am indebted for a good specimen 

 oE Triteleia Ictxa having each of the fuunelform perianths 

 filled with petals resultant from the transformation of the 

 stamens and pistil into these organs. 



The not very rare anomaly of a continuation of the growing 

 axis through the center of a rose blossom took on a striking 

 phase, this year, in my garden. The shrub producing the 

 freak was of the double variety of the Cherokee Eose {Rosa 

 l<^vi(j(da, or Sinica), a hardy and vigorous climber. On a 

 rapidly growing shoot which had developed in July, long 

 after the flowering season of the species, and which was 



