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buy certain kinds of flowers, at botanic gardens or nurseries, 
where they are raised in large quantities for the purpose. If not, 
it would be advisable to have a portion of the public gardens and 
city parks devoted to raising such plants as are needed for 
botanic instructio 
re dre certain wild flowers, such as violets, dandelions, 
daisies, buttercups, goldenrods, asters, and black-eyed Susans, 
which may be picked without fear of their extermination. Vio- 
lets are cleistogamous, that is, they are closed to cross-fertiliza- 
tion, but usually produce hidden flowers underground which 
fertilize themselves. The other flowers, most of which are com- 
posites, are so numerous that they are considered pests. It 
would therefore be a good plan to have students study the struc- 
ture and characteristics of these flowers, so that the rarer ones, 
which are decreasing in number, may be saved. These are the 
orchid, the dogwood, the rose, the spring beauty, the columbine, 
the wild pink, the blood-root and the azalea. Cultivated flowers, 
native as well as foreign, may be substituted for these, which are 
too precious to be ruthlessly destroye 
But it must not be thought that caea and students are 
doing all the harm to our flowers. There are various other col- 
lectors of plants, cultural, commercial and scientific. Of the 
cultural collectors little can be said, but it remains with them to 
make use of those flowers which may be picked without injury. 
Those who collect flowers for commerical purposes should be far- 
sighted enough to realize that, if they heedlessly gather the rarer 
plants, the time will come when they will be unable to profit by 
them. as to scientific collectors, they destroy many flowers in 
their experiments and researches, and although it is held that 
anything sacrificed to science is praiseworthy, still ruthless col- 
lecting is also bad. 
The societies for plant preservation are active in circulating 
petitions to inform people of the conditions existing among plants 
and of their power to prevent wanton destruction of our little 
wild flowers. These societies are doing work along the same line 
as the Audubon Society, which did very much to protect birds 
from injury. But the problem before the wild flower protectors 
