Spring Crocuses 



the anthers jet black, and so has a winter flowering one 

 from Palestine, C. hyemalis, var. Foxii. 



Without the means for private interviews with the 

 bees of their native land these questions must remain 

 unanswered, and for the present be placed with those 

 things " no fellah can understand." 



Another of these insoluble riddles is why Miller 

 in the great Dictionary originated the name biflorus for 

 his species No. 4. It is quite the ordinary rule for 

 Spring Crocuses to produce at least two flowers from 

 each set of leaves wrapped round by a spathe or sheath 

 as Miller puts it. C. gargaricus is the only one I can 

 recall that is usually one-flowered, but Miller knew 

 others bore two, and described his No. 3 as so doing. 

 Dean Herbert goes further, and in his diagnosis states 

 " scapo (vidi ipse) interdum furcato bifloro," so reading a 

 deeper meaning into Miller's simple words. Like the 

 Snark : 



" He summed it so well that it came to far more 

 Than the witnesses ever had said." 



But expositors of Browning and commentators on the 

 deep sayings of other poets as well as Herbert are 

 equally Snarkish in their powers of summing. 



C. biflorus in some forms is hard to distinguish from 

 chrysanthus. There is a sheet of specimens in Maw's 

 herbarium in the British Museum, collected above Scutari, 

 and labelled C. biflorus nubigenus, but most of them have 

 the tell-tale black barbs, and I find living plants of them 

 that I have here give me regular chrysanthus seedlings. 

 87 



