A BUNCH OF HERBS. 215 



common Mitchella vine, called squaw-berry and par- 

 tridge-berry. It blooms in June, and its twin flowers, 

 light cream color, velvety, tubular, exhale a most 

 agreeable fragrance. 



Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the 

 European, and many of ours are fragrant. The first 

 to bloom in the spring is the showy orchis ( 0. specta- 

 lilis), though it is far less showy than several others. 

 I find it in May, not on hills where Gray says it 

 grows, but in low, damp places in the woods. Ifc has 

 two oblong shining leaves, with a scape four or five 

 inches high strung with sweet-scented, pink-purple 

 flowsrs. I usually find it and the fringed polygala in 

 bloom at the same time ; the lady's slipper is a little 

 later. The purple-fringed orchis, one of the most 

 showy and striking of all our orchids, blooms in mid- 

 summer in swampy meadows and in marshy, grassy 

 openings in the woods, shooting up a tapering column 

 or cylinder of pink-purple-fringed flowers, that one 

 may see at quite a distance, and the perfume of 

 which is too rank for a close room. This flower is, 

 perhaps, like the English fragrant orchis, found in 

 pastures. ^ 



No fragrant flowers in the shape of weeds have 

 come to us from the Old World, and this leads me to 

 remark that plants with sweet-scented flowers are, for 

 the most part, more intensely local, more fastidious 

 and idiosyncratic than those without perfume. Our 

 native thistle the pasture thistle has a marked 

 fragrance, and it is much more shy and limj^ad in iti 



