144 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1892. 



which it stands, so that it shall seem to spring from and grow 

 out of the earth, this can best be done by planting a few native 

 climbers like woodbine, clematis or bittersweet, along with 

 masses of asters and goldenrod. How consistent this would be 

 here in New England, beside the doubtful expedient of Boston 

 iv}' rising from among geraniums and petunias. The flower- 

 garden has no more satisfying denizen than the Aster Novse 

 Anglite, and it is through people living in the city that our 

 country people will bye-and-bye come to know it and plant it. 

 Strange perversity of nature ! 



Perhaps no one of our plants lias been oftener brought into 

 our gardens than the great yellow gerardia. Here is a species, 

 which in its native wild, has developed into a strong, showy 

 plant, captivating to any eye, gladly welcomed in any garden, 

 but it defies cultivation. As I have seen it, it has grown in the 

 shade of oak trees, and upon their presence it seems in some 

 way to depend for subsistence. Smaller, yet more beautiful, is 

 the rose gerardia, sweet scented also and frail as spun glass, 

 content with bare gravel to grow upon, but dying when care is 

 bestowed upon it. 



Associated with falling leaves, the flight of birds, and the gath- 

 ering of nuts is the coming of the gentians, bottle and fringed — 

 eerie beings — endowed with a strange power over the human 

 mind ; for whoso among men discovers a growing gentian 

 becomes possessed of an uncontrollable desire to pluck it, root 

 and branch. Some plants we gather to make us a bouquet. Of 

 others, we are satisfied with an armful ; but this one is gathered 

 till there are no more. Needless to say, few people ever see 

 them. 



Of the flowering plants in our vicinity, there have been 

 reported not far from one thousand species, belonging to more 

 than four hundred genera, which when we consider that we are 

 removed from the seashore, and so have no marine flora, seems 

 to be a very large number. A botanist living in Worcester is 

 fortunately situated, as he is very near the limits of the northern 

 and the southern plant zones ; the spruce, the fir balsam, the 

 beech and the Labrador tea have come down to us from Canada, 

 while the chestnut, hickory, and butternut are not found very 



