From Blue to Purple 



enlarges and meets the lower lip, so enclosing and protecting the 

 tiny nutlets. After their maturity, either the mouth gapes from 

 dryness, or the appendage drops off altogether, from the same 

 cause, to release the seeds. Old herb doctors, who professed to 

 cure hydrophobia with this species, are responsible for its English 

 misnomer. 



Perhaps the most beautiful member of the genus is the 

 Showy Skullcap (5. serrata), whose blue corolla, an inch long, has 

 its narrow upper lip shorter than the spreading lower one. The 

 flowers are set opposite each other at the end of the smooth stem, 

 which rises from one to two feet high in the woods throughout a 

 southerly and westerly range. As several other skullcaps have 

 distinctly saw-edged leaves, this plant might have been given a 

 more distinctive adjective, thinks one who did not have the naming 

 of 200,000 species ! 



Above dry, sandy soil from New York and Michigan south- 

 ward the Hairy Skullcap (S. pilosa) lifts short racemes of blue 

 flowers that are only half an inch long, and whose lower lip and 

 lobes at either side are shorter than the arched upper lip. Most 

 parts of the plant are covered with down, the lower stem being 

 especially hairy ; and this fact determines the species when con- 

 nected with its rather distant pairs of indented, veiny leaves, rang- 

 ing from oblong to egg-shaped, and furnished with petioles which 

 grow gradually shorter toward the top, where pairs of bracts, 

 seated on the stem, part to let the flowers spring from their axils. 



The Larger or Hyssop Skullcap (S. integrifolia) rarely has a 

 dent in its rounded oblong leaves, which, like the stem, are covered 

 with fine down. Its lovely, bright blue flowers, an inch long, the 

 lips of about equal length, are grouped opposite each other at the 

 top of a stem that never lifts them higher than two feet ; and so 

 their beauty is often concealed in the tall grass of roadsides and 

 meadows and the undergrowth of woods and thickets, where 

 they bloom from May to August, from southern New^England to 

 Gulf of Mexico, westward to Texas. (Illustration facing p. 64.) 



This tribe of plants is almost exclusively North American, but 

 the hardy Marsh Skullcap, or Hooded Willow-herb (5. galericulata), 

 at least, roams over Europe, and Asia also, with the help of runners, 

 as well as seeds that, sinking into the soft earth of swamps and 

 the borders of brooks, find growth easy. The blue flowers which 

 grow singly in the axils of the upper leaves are quite as long as 

 those of the larger and the showy skullcaps ; the oblong, lance- 

 shaped leaves, which are mostly seated on the branching stem, 

 opposite each other, have low teeth. Why do leaves vary as they 



43 



