GENTIAN FAMILY 



and in midsummer salt marshes and meadows are 

 radiant with their beauty. The Rose of Plymouth is 

 rarely more than two feet high, its rose-pink flowers 

 often fade to white, and its yellow eye 

 is bordered with carmine. 



"No more beautiful flower grows in New 

 England than the Sabbatia, and at Plym- 

 outh, where it is especially profuse and 

 luxuriant on the borders of the ponds so 

 characteristic of that part of eastern Mas- 

 sachusetts, it is held in peculiar affection 

 and, one may almost say, reverence. It is 

 locally called the Rose of Plymouth and 

 during its brief season of bloom is sold in 

 quantities in the streets of the town and used 

 in the adornment of houses and churches. 

 Its name comes from that of an early bot- 

 anist, Liberatus Sabbati; but this well es- 

 tablished truth is totally disregarded by local 

 tradition. Almost every one in Plymouth 

 firmly believes that the title is due to the fact 

 that the Pilgrims of 1620 first saw the flower 

 on a Sabbath day and, entranced by its 

 masses of pinkish lilac color, named it for 

 the holy day. Indeed, the belief is so deeply 

 ingrained in the Plymouth mind, that, we 

 are told, strong objections are made if any 

 other flowers are irreverently mingled with it 

 in church decoration. Yet the legend was 

 invented not more than twenty-five years ago by a man whose 

 identity is still well remembered, and thus it is of even more 

 recent origin than the one still more universally credited, which 

 says that the Pilgrim Fathers landed upon Plymouth Rock." 



— Garden and Forest. 



Sabbatia. 

 Sabbdtia stelldris 



Similar to the Rose of Plymouth and even more 

 graceful and attractive is Sabbdtia grdcilis, whose 

 upper leaves are very narrow, and calyx lobes exceed- 

 150 



