258 A TOUR BOUND MY GABBEN. 



Other climbing plants have particular manners of raising 

 themselves; the vine, the passion-flower, which wears the 

 appearance of a cross of St. Louis ; the clematis with its 

 little perfumed flowers, the sweet pea with its odoriferous 

 butterflies, attach themselves by little elastic gimlets in the 

 shape of corkscrews. 



Ivy ascends straight up, shooting little roots into the bark 

 of trees or into the chinks in walls. 



And in the same manner acts the Bignonia radicans, 

 except that it only fastens its old wood, and lets its branches 

 of the year droop with their clusters of long red flowers. 



The jasmin with its silver stars supports its new shoots 

 upon its old branches. 



So hkewise does the woody nightshade, whose bunches of 

 violet flowers are succeeded by magnificent girandoles of 

 emerald or coral (I say coral for want of a stone as brilliant 

 as the berries of the nightshade) according to the degree of 

 maturity of its fruit. 



The brier and the periwinkle climb by the strength of the 

 sap alone, fall back when they attain a certain height, imme- 

 diately take root again by the point with which they touch 

 the earth, and spring up again with fresh vigour. 



In one of my preceding letters, when speaking of colours, 

 I asked if there were a savant who could tell what was exactly 

 the colour of the purple of the ancients. I, this morning, 

 stumbled by accident upon a passage in Pliny, which says 

 that the flower of the Amaranth is of a more beautiful 

 purple than any that dyers can attain. Unfortunately, the 

 Amaranth is a flower that sports very much ; there are Ama- 

 ranth flowers of all the shades of carmine, from rose-colour to 

 violet, there are some approaching to white, and some yellow. 

 If Pliny had chosen for the term of his comparison a 

 flower of a fixed colour, we should have our question an- 

 swered. 



This reminds me that Virgil, in the fourth book of the 

 Georgics, says saffron is red, — 



" Crocmnque rubentem." 



The safiron is violet, and has orange stamens. I do not 

 know which of these colours is called red in Latin. It is 



