THE WILD GARDEN. 



179 



way to a new and unsuspected path in our wild garden the dels- 

 togamic flowers the plant having one blossom for the light and 

 another for the darkness. Like many of its congeners and a long 

 list of other plants, the fringed polygala shows one face to the 

 world and another to mother-earth. " Here, worldling," she would 

 seem to say, " take my fluttering pennant if you will, but spare 

 my anchor." These subterranean anchor flowers 

 are borne on long stems, and are entirely with- 

 out petals, appearing indeed more like small 

 roundish pods than flowers ; but they plant 

 the mould with seed and doubtless keep 

 many a spot in the woods perennially tuft- 

 ed with the purple broods, else exterminated 

 by the vandal hand, whether that of bot- 

 anist or eager childhood. I have rarely 

 met with a wild-flower enthusiast who 

 knows even the spring violet. Take the 

 common blue species, for instance ( Viola 

 cucullatci) ; you know it of course. " It 

 blossoms in the early spring," say 

 you. Oh yes, for poet and bouton- 

 niere, but not for posterity. Go 

 now, even in October, to your favor- 

 ite violet-bed in the woods, and find 

 your dozen blossoms where there was 

 one in May if you can. The dry 

 leaves are rattling to the sowing of their 

 seed showers, shot afar from the pods ripen- 

 ing from perfect flowers every day. I have 

 a clump of this wild violet in my city yard, 

 and even as late as November I have picked 



its blooms, nodding among a veritable galaxy of white three-cor- 

 nered stars of the open pods, either empty or loaded full with 

 their charge of seed. This flower is not for beauty but for utility, 

 looking merely like a close-pointed green calyx; but it is loaded 

 with a potent energy unknown to its vain vernal predecessor. 



FRINGED GENTIAN. 



