ASTER PATENS. 

 SPREADING ASTER. 



NATURAL ORDER, COMPOSITiE. 



Aster patens, Aiton.— Stem eighteen inches to two or three feet high, slender, roughish-pubes- 

 cent, br.anched above, — the branches often elongated, spreading, and clothed with minute 

 bract-like leaves. Leaves half an inch to two or three inches long, scabrous and serrulate- 

 ciliate, clasping and auriculate at the base. Heads of flowers about medium size (larger 

 in the variety p/i/o^/fo/ius), sub-solitary on the slender branches, rays bluish-purple ; invo- 

 lucre minutely scabrous ; akenes silky-pilose. (Darlington's F/o7-a Cestrica. See also 

 Gray's Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, Chapman's Flora of the 

 Southern United States, and Wood's Class-Booh of Botany.) 



HE common name of the plants comprising- this well- 

 known genus is Star-wort, which is a translation of the 

 ancient Greek name asfe?', signifying a Star; and so named be- 

 cause of the ray petals of the compound flower giving the head 

 somewhat the appearance of a star. But the plants known as 

 Aster to the ancients were a very heterogeneous set, as must 

 needs be when the laws of true affinity were but imperfecdy 

 known ; and some of them have been removed to other genera 

 by authors who have lived nearer our own time. The Asfer of 

 Dioscorides is probably the plant now known 2.'-^ Inula Biiboniiiiu, 

 and more closely related to the common Elecampane than to 

 anything we should regard as an Aster now. The Aster of Pliny, 

 the well-known Roman writer, was probably the plant still known 

 as Aster Amellus, and which grows in Italy, Sicily, and abun- 

 dantly about Athens in Greece. But though the name Star-wort 

 in its origin is so ancient, so many plants have flowers that have 

 been likened to stars, and by the people named accordingly, that 

 it is as well that the easy name Aster has come into common use, 



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