STUDIES OF PLANT LIFE 



" Thou comest not when violets lean 

 O'er wandering brooks and springs unseen ; 

 Thou waitest late, and comest alone 

 When woods are bare and birds are flown, 

 And frosts and shortening days portend 

 The aged year is at an end. 



" Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye 

 Look through its fringes to the sky ; 

 Blue, blue as if the sky let fall 

 A flower from its cerulean wall." 



But, bewildered among so many beauties, I have wandered 

 away from my first love, the large dark -blue or open-belled 

 Gentian, Q-entiana Saponaria (L.). The leaves of this 

 species are somewhat clasping at the base and pointed at 

 the end, at first green, but assuming a purplish-bronze hue; 

 the smooth stem is also of a reddish purple, with the large 

 open five-cleft dark -blue corollas terminal on the summit, 

 generally three blossoms; between the axils of the leaves 

 three or more somewhat smaller bells may be found at 

 intervals clustered on the flower stem. The beautifully- 

 folded deep purple buds are surrounded by the pointed 

 bracts and leaves. 



This species is less marked than G. Andrewsii (Griseb) 

 by the toothed appendages between the lobes of the flower; 

 the absence of these plaited folds gives our plant a wider, 

 more open flower, which renders it more attractive to the 

 eye of the florist. 



There is something almost disappointing in the closed 

 sac-like blossom of the 



CLOSED GENTIAN Gentiana Andrewsii (Griseb.). 



Lovely as it is, one would like to peep within the closed 

 lips which so provokingly conceal the interior. The tips of 

 the corolla are white, but the sac-like flower is of a full 



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