1 8 A NEW ZEALAND NATURALIST'S CALENDAR. 



curious how long certain highly-specialised flowers will 

 remain open if fertilisation is prevented. I have kept an 

 orchid, (a species of Cypripedium), in a somewhat shady 

 room where no suitable insects were to be found, for over 

 seven weeks, and at last had to send it back to the green- 

 house, not because its blossoms had faded at all, but because 

 they had become dusty. But this little Speedwell gets no 

 time to be dusty ; if the right visitors do not come along 

 when it holds up its pretty petals to be kissed, its repro- 

 ductive process is performed by its own pollen, and the 

 corolla drops, its beauty having failed to be of service to it. 



There are two other introduced Veronicas common in 

 this neighbourhood, and one of them V. an-ensis is, I 

 regret to say, very common in my garden. It is nearly as 

 troublesome a weed as the little bitter-cress, for it has 

 developed the faculty of self-fertilisation to such a complete 

 extent that it usually ripens its seed capsule without open- 

 ing its flowers at all. When it does do so, and this only 

 happens on sunny days, it is seen to have almost the same 

 structure as the larger species, only its corolla is very 

 minute, very deep blue, and extremely transitory. It 

 appears to be there as if to say "I want to show you that 

 I am a Veronica, but my beaxitiful colours are not needed 

 now, only if I did not show them occasionally you might 

 think I had not got them to show, which, of course, is not 

 the case." 



The third species Veronica serpyllifolia is common in 

 many damp open parts of the Town Belt and elsewhere. 

 Its flowers are intermediate in size between the other two, 

 are white or lilac in colour, but with the same blue stripes, 

 and are not so ephemeral as V. Bu.rbaumii. This lilac tint 

 is a more generalised and more primitive colour than the 

 blue, and many blue flowers appear to have developed from 

 white through lilac to blue, which is the most specialised of 

 all. A familiar example is the common forget-me-not. 



In all three Veronicas the ancestral forms must at one 

 time have been thus highly specialised in colour and mark- 

 ings that they might be visited by insects, and some of the 

 better known European forms, like Germander Speedwell 



