Wild Flowers of Georgetown. 



327 



enclosing the rest of the flower. A very ornamental 

 kind with bright blue and white blossoms, the blue pea- 

 flower or blue vine, though a doubtful native, is 

 thoroughly naturalised along the north trench in the 

 Gardens and is common along the road to New Amsterdam, 

 perhaps escaped from gardens, where it is often culti- 

 vated. Two pea-flowers with similarly shaped white 

 blossoms streaked and shaded with purple, can be dis- 

 tinguished by the pods, which are short (one to two 

 inches) and four-sided in the lesser kind (Clitoria glyce- 

 noides) , long and flattened in the greater purple pea- 

 flower (C. Poit&i.) 



Among the larger trees near town belonging to the 

 pod-bearing order may be mentioned the tamarind (Tama- 

 rindus indie us) , the saman (Pitliecolobinm Saman), the 

 handsome scarlet and white flamboyant (Poinciana 

 regia), and the oronoque (Erytlirina glauca) , whose red 

 and yellowish flowers, often found strewn in the avenue 

 at the Gardens, are called "fowl-cocks" by the children 

 here from their resemblance to a cock, or at any rate a 

 weather-cock, when held upside-down by the large red 

 or orange standard that forms a perch for the bird. 



It would of course be impossible to treat the other 

 groups of plants in the same detail that is here given to 

 the papilionacear. But it is a good plan in botany to 

 begin by examining some one group carefully, and many 

 clues will be gained, and many points of interest dis- 

 covered, by any one who studies this well-marked series, 

 most characteristic of our flora, ten or a dozen species of 

 which may be gathered in the course of an easy stroll ; 

 for instance, up the south Lamaha dam, for a coupl< of 

 hundred yards past the Queenstown bridge. 



