Wild Flowers East of the Rockies 287 



BLUE-WEED; VIPER'S BUGLOSS (Echium vul- 

 gare) (EUROPEAN). This peculiar plant is locally 

 abundant in dry fields and waste places in the East. 

 It is a waif that has strayed across the ocean, and, I 

 must confess, it is one that farmers wish had stayed 

 in its native countries. It is often regarded as a 

 pest and is a difficult one to get rid of. Of course the 

 botanist welcomes it, as he does any new species 

 that he comes upon; it has unusual flowers both as to 

 form and to manner of growth. We can safely say 

 that Blue- Weed will never be popular as a flower for 

 bouquets; one has but to touch it to find the reason, 

 the stem is thickly set with light-colored bristles as 

 sharp as needle points and even more penetrating. 



The stem is light green, spotted with purple; it 

 grows erect from 1 to 3 feet high. The alternating 

 leaves are rough, hairy and clasping. The flowers 

 grow on leafy spike, springing from the stem near the 

 top. When the first flowers appear, in June, they 

 are close to the stalk at the base of the rolled-up, 

 leafy spike. As they continue to bloom, the spike 

 gradually straightens and the open flowers appear far- 

 ther and farther from the stem, leaving behind them 

 a train of wrinkled nutlets in the axils of the small 

 leaves. The showy, tubular corolla is bright blue, 

 and is exceeded in length by the long stamens and 

 three-parted style; the buds are pink. 



SMALL BUGLOSS (Lycopsis arvensis) (EURO- 

 PEAN). This is a very rough, bristly-stemmed spec- 

 ies, also naturalized from Europe, and now found in 

 waste places near dwellings, from Me. to Minn, and 

 south to Va. The lanceolate leaves are seated on 

 the stem; they diminish to the size of bracts and 

 pass into the racemes of small, tubular violet-blue 

 flowers that terminate the branching stem. The curv- 

 ed corolla is but little longer than its enclosing, hairy 

 calyx. 



