THE WILD GARDEN. 179 
way to a new and unsuspected path in our wild garden —the céezs- 
togamic flowers—the plant having one blossom for the light and } 
another for the darkness. Like many of its congeners and a long 
list of other plants, the fringed polygala shows one face to the 
world and another to mother-earth. ‘“ Here, worldling,” she would 
seem to say, “take my fluttering pennant if you will, but spare | 
my anchor.” These subterranean anchor flowers 
are borne on long stems, and are entirely with- sed 
out petals, appearing indeed more like small \ 
roundish pods than flowers; but they plant 
the mould with seed and doubtless keep 
many a spot in the woods perennially tuft- 
ed with the purple broods, else exterminated 
by the vandal hand, whether that of bot- 
anist or eager childhood. I have rarely §%; 
met with a wild-flower enthusiast who 
knows even the spring violet. Take the 
common blue species, for instance (Vzola 
cucullata); you know it of course. “It 
blossoms in the early spring,” say 
you. Oh yes, for poet and doudzon- 
nzere, but not for posterity. Go 
now, even in October, to your favor- 
ite violet-bed in the woods, and find 
your dozen blossoms where there was 
one in May—if you can. The dry 
leaves are rattling to the sowing of their 
seed showers, shot afar from the pods ripen- 
ing from perfect flowers every day. I have 
a clump of this wild violet in my city yard, FRINGED GENTIAN. 
and even as late as November I have picked 
its blooms, nodding among a veritable galaxy of white three-cor- 
nered stars of the open pods, either empty or loaded full with 
their charge of seed. This flower is not for beauty but for utility, | 
looking merely like a close-pointed green calyx; but it is loaded 
with a potent energy unknown to its vain vernal predecessor. 
