Eat A TE ela 
GROUP OF SPARAXIS. 
Ow comparing the flowers of this group with the subject of our first plate (Sparawis pendula,) 
there is obviously a relationship observable between them, but the first glance would not lead us 
to suppose the existence of any very close degree of affinity. And yet the affinity is really of 
the strongest kind, for most of the plants here represented are actual members of the genus 
Sparacis. 
The colours of the perianth in this genus are remarkably brilliant, and subject to great 
variation in the same species. S. dicolor, several varieties of which are here drawn, is 
remarkable for its paler centre and the dark spots on the spreading pieces of the flower, and is 
particularly sportive in the colours which it assumes in cultivation, though tolerably constant 
when growing in a state of nature. In the colonial gardens, where these plants are great 
favourites, they seed very freely ; and the plants which come up from seed exhibit an infinite 
variety in the proportions of colour, some having nearly perfectly dark red petals, and others 
wholly dyed in the clear orange which forms the usual ground colour of the flower. In S. gran- 
diflora the corolla is a rich, dark purple ; and in S. anemonifiora it is cream coloured ;— and 
few floral assemblages are more beautiful than when all are grown together in a flower bed. 
They place under the eye, on a small scale, that extraordinary blending of colour which the 
South African landscape presents on a large one, when, after the rains have moistened the 
ground, the whole plain becomes a flower garden, painted with broad streaks of the 
brightest hues. 
Every traveller tells us of the magic change which a few days of rain, or even a heavy 
thunderstorm, effects on the South African desert, or Karroo, where from the burnt-up soil start 
up, almost with the rapidity of Jonah’s gourd, flowers of the most glowing tint and foliage of 
the tenderest green. Before the rains fall, the face of the Country reminds us of the curse 
pronounced on the Israelites, that “the heaven that is over their head should be brass, and the 
earth that is under them iron.” There is not a cloud in the sky ; the air is hot and dry as the 
blast of a furnace ; the line of the horizon flickers in haze; and the plain, far as the eye can 
stretch, is either bare, or clothed with the scanty, grey twigs of the Rhinosterbosch (Elytropappus), 
or with the shrunken forms of succulent plants. If you go “a bulbing” you must take a 
pickaxe, for no tool of less energy will break the ground, baked hard in that fiery oven. But 
after the first rains the face of nature quickly and completely alters. The shrunken succulents 
again look plump and green ; the Mesembryanthema expand their many coloured starry flowers, 
or open their singular capsules, which held the seeds of last season closely locked up, as in a 
box, through the long drought, but now scatter them on the newly watered ground; annual 
plants spring up by thousands; and the dormant bulbs push forth their stored-up leaves and 
blossoms, till ‘the wilderness and the solitary place” begins, in the poetic language of 
scripture “ to rejoice and blossom as the rose,” and the barren waste is converted into a garden. 
