HEATH FAMILY 



Rhodora ! if the sages ask you why 



This charm is wasted on the marsh and sky, 



Dear, tell them, that if eyes were made for seeing, 



Then beauty is its own excuse for being. 



Why thou wert there, rival of the rose, 



I never thought to ask; I never knew, 



But in my simple ignorance suppose 



The selfsame Power that brought me there brought you. 



— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



On the margin of some quiet swamp a myriad of bare twigs seem sud- 

 denly overspread with purple butterflies, and we know that the Rhodora is 

 in bloom. Wordsworth never immortalized a flower more surely than 

 Emerson this, and it needs no weaker words ; there is nothing else in 

 which the change from nakedness to beauty is so sudden, and when you 

 bring home the great mass of blossoms they appear all ready to flutter away 

 again from your hands and leave you disenchanted. 



— Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 



The Rhodora grows from one to three feet high, 

 with each stem divided into four or five branchlets 

 which are terminated by the encircling flower clusters. 

 A native of swamps, it accepts the garden and will 

 grow and spread if provided with a peaty soil and an 

 open position. Like many others the flowers in order 

 to be effective should be seen in masses. This is a 

 genus of a single species; so far as known there is 

 but one Rhodora. 



GREAT LAUREL. ROSE BAY 



Rlwdodcndron maximum. 



A tall shrub, sometimes a tree ; found in low woods 

 and along streams from Nova Scotia to Ontario and 

 south to Georgia, chiefly along the mountains, often 

 forming almost impenetrable thickets. 



Leaves evergreen, alternate, four to seven inches 



362 



