JEFFREY'S SHOOTING STAR (Dodocdtheon JSffreyi, Van H.). 

 Flowers nodding, purplish-pink, paling toward the base which 

 is ringed with yellow, the corolla segments strongly reflexed, 

 and the connivent anthers forming a beak; disposed in an um- 

 bel of 5 to 15 blossoms, on a naked stem from a few inches to 

 lj feet high. Leaves clustered at the ground from 2 inches 

 to over a foot long. Plant somewhat viscid, blooming in sum- 

 mer in wet mountain meadows of California, especially in the 

 Sierra Nevada, northward to Oregon. 



Jeffrey's Shooting Star is the species the visitor in the 

 Yosemite is most likely to see, as it is very abundant in many 

 places in that Park. In the High Sierras a variety occurs 

 which is characterized by larger size and a strong fragrance of 

 the herbage. This has been named var. redolens by Doctor 

 Hall. Dodocatheon is one of the genera that have given 

 botanists a lot of trouble to systematize, because of the lack 

 of stable, clear-cut differences between varying forms. The 

 marked similarity of the flowers, however, in the half dozen 

 Pacific Coast species, makes the genus itself of easy identifica- 

 tion by the nontechnical. 



153 



