A BUNCH OF HERBS 



Vervain is a beautiful weed, especially the blue 

 or purple variety. Its drooping knotted threads 

 also make a pretty etching upon the winter snow. 



Iron- weed, which looks like an overgrown aster, 

 has the same intense purple-blue color, and a royal 

 profusion of flowers. There are giants among the 

 weeds, as well as dwarfs and pigmies. One of the 

 giants is purple eupatorium, which sometimes car- 

 ries its corymbs of flesh-colored flowers ten and 

 twelve feet high. A pretty and curious little weed, 

 sometimes found growing in the edge of the garden, 

 is the clasping specularia, a relative of the harebell 

 and of the European Venus's looking-glass. Its 

 leaves are shell-shaped, and clasp the stalk so as to 

 form little shallow cups. In the bottom of each 

 cup three buds appear that never expand into 

 flowers ; but when the top of the stalk is reached, 

 one and sometimes two buds open a large, delicate 

 purple-blue corolla. All the first-born of this plant 

 are still-born, as it were ; only the latest, which 

 spring from its summit, attain to perfect bloom. 

 A weed which one ruthlessly demolishes when he 

 finds it hiding from the plow amid the strawberries, 

 or under the currant-bushes and grapevines, is the 

 dandelion ; yet who would banish it from the mead- 

 ows or the lawns, where it copies in gold upon the 

 green expanse the stars of the midnight sky ? After 

 its first blooming comes its second and finer and 

 more spiritual inflorescence, when its stalk, drop- 

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