My Garden in Spring 



stigmata, and a curious line of their own in anthers, the 

 ground colour instead of yellow being smoky -grey or 

 greenish-black, which, of course, is most conspicuous in a 

 newly-opened one, before the anther valves have rolled back 

 and the pollen broken loose. These dusky anthers seem 

 to be correlated with starry flowers rather than the brown 

 markings, and are puzzling to account for without getting 

 inside a bee and seeing with its compound eyes and thinking 

 with its decentralised ganglionic brains. In the other chry- 

 santhus forms, with very rare exceptions the little barbs at 

 the base of the arrow-shaped anthers are tipped with black. 

 There again, what can that be for ? Why should chrysan- 

 thus alone of yellow Croci benefit by these minute spots ? 

 One has to look rather closely to see them at all even in 

 an expanded flower, and they cannot be visible to a bee 

 until it has settled on it, and I cannot think they are put 

 there to help good patient botanists to recognise this other- 

 wise variable species, or they would surely be on the fusco- 

 tinctus forms too. At the same time they do often help to 

 point out a chrysanthus without reference to the corm tunic, 

 but I have known them absent in some pure yellow and 

 pallidus forms. 



One of the smallest of Crocuses, known as C. biflorus 

 Pestalozzae, but deserving specific rank I believe, and which 

 I hope some day to reinstate in that proud position, 

 always has minute black spots just where the filament 

 joins on to the perianth, making the flower look as 

 though some grains of soil had dropped into it. Again, 

 C. Crewei and a very strange rare little blue one thought 

 to be a form of C. tauri and called v. melanthorus, have 

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