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BOTANICAL ERRORS OF SOME WELL-KNOWN 

 WRITERS 



By Jean Broadhcrst 



One of our best-known weekly publications recently printed a 

 vers libre effusion on sugar in which Amy Lowell confused the 

 coarse, whitish, turnip-like root commercially termed the sugar 

 beet with the red beet so well known as a table vegetable. She 

 wrote (in part) as follows (Independent, 29 December) : 



Wide plains 

 With little red balls hidden under them, 

 Beets like a hidden pavement underneath the plains, 

 A Roman floor forsooth! 

 Do mosaics have any colors to equal these? 

 Red as the eyes of cats in firelight, 

 As carbuncles under a lemon moon, 

 As the sun swirling out of a foggy sky. 

 Round as apples. 

 Footed as tops. 



You spin yourself deep into the earth 

 And swell and fatten 

 Sugar in a crimson coat, 



There are still the blood-skinned beets. 

 Waiting to be crushed, pulped, and eaten. 

 Thunder sugar — blood sugar. 



These mistakes are, perhaps, a little more amusing than those 

 commonly made by well-known authors; but it is unfortunately 

 true that our prose and poetry contain many similar errors. 



The commonest error is describing as blooming together flow- 

 ers that bloom weeks or even months apart! If the color scheme 

 suits the author, that is sufficient; why be hampered by truth — 

 or limited by the seasons? And so we read of April violets amid 

 the July lilies and the August goldenrod ! In the same well-known 

 "nature novel" by Gene Stratton Porter common market mush- 

 rooms are found in profitable abundance before the leaves ap- 

 pear on the trees! Even Jean Ingelow is jubilant over a riot 

 of (March-April) daffodils and (June-July) buttercups! 



Then there are several writers who find "beauty unadorned' ' 



