tain and by sea, in diy field and in wet swamp, 

 it flourishes in its season and warms every 

 landscape with its rich color. 



THE TEXAS BLUEBONNET 



(Lupinus texensis Hook) 



When the legislature of Texas came to con- 

 sider the issue raised by the flowers in their 

 respective bids for Lone Star fame, it had a 

 wide range of candidates, active and receptive, 

 from which to choose. There were primroses 

 and phloxes, euphorbise, salvias, Texas plumes, 

 Texas fire-wheels, rain lilies, and Indian paint- 

 brushes, but the Texas bluebonnet — a different 

 flower, by the way, from the bluebonnets of 

 Europe — won the day, and is crowned queen 

 of Texas' floral empire. It blooms in the 

 spring and has a range rather more limited 

 than most of the State flowers. One authority 

 tells us that it is a great home body and never 

 crosses the Texas line or the Mexican border. 

 But when it is recalled that Texas is approxi- 

 mately as large as all the Atlantic Seaboard 

 States down to and including South Carolina, 

 it will be seen that it has a rather extensive 

 habitat at that. 



To the botanist the Texas bluebonnet is 

 known as Lupinus because of its reputedly in- 

 satiable appetite. For generations it was be- 

 lieved that flowers of this genus were wolfish 

 in the amount of plant food consumed, and 

 that they virtually exhaust the soil on which 

 they grow. Hence their name of wolf flowers. 

 Happily, this charge has been proved an unjust 

 one. The lupines are, it is true, found in 

 sterile, waste lands, gravelly banks, exposed 

 hills, and like places ; but they do not impov- 

 erish the land. Rather they choose poor soil 

 for their home, adding to the landscape's 

 beauty and fertility. 



There are about seventy species of lupines in 

 America, mostly in the West. They can justly 

 lay claim to being among the most brilliant of 

 all the denizens of Nature's garden. Many a 

 sandy waste they transform into an oasis of 

 color. The blossom has five petals, the upper 

 one an advertising banner announcing to the 

 passing bee that the table within is laden with 

 choicest viands, and that no daintier food was 

 ever served in flower land. There are two 

 side petals which serve as landing stages for 

 the aeronauts of insectdom and two others 

 which touch at the bottom and resemble the 

 keel of a boat. When the bee alights on the 

 landing stage the keel opens up, and the table, 

 all set and garnished, greets the hungry vis- 

 itor's eye. 



The lupines sleep at night. Some species 

 transform their horizontal stars of day to ver- 

 tical stars at night ; others shut them down 

 around the stem like an umbrella around the 

 ferrule. 



THE DAISY 



(Chrysanthemum cucanthemum L.) 



So popular is the white ox-eye daisy in 

 North Carolina that neither a legislature nor 

 the school children had to express formally 

 the State's choice. The unanimous tribute of 



a "common consent" award was paid it by the 

 people of the Tar Heel State; and if the whole 

 catalogue of Nature's blossoming children had 

 been ransacked there could not have been 

 found a hardier flower, a more persistent war- 

 rior in behalf of its right to exist, or a better 

 loved or worse hated plant, than the ox-eye 

 daisy. Flowering from May to November, it 

 has adjusted its economy to the necessities of 

 its perpetuation in a way admirable to the 

 student of flower resources and baffling to the 

 good farmer who so heartily dislikes to have 

 his field dressed in the full regalia of poor 

 farming (see page 512). 



To the daisy a home in the woods is like an 

 East Side tenement to one who has lived on 

 Fifth avenue. It can never content itself in 

 the shade and the solitude of the forest. 

 The meadow, the pasture, the hay field, the 

 roadside — these are places where it likes to 

 grow; and if it is to grow there it must be 

 well prepared to fight a battle with the farmer. 

 It must be able to set some seed before haying 

 time, else how could it continue its hold in the 

 hay field? Then, too, it must vary its period 

 of blooming, for what farmer who prides him- 

 self on well-kept pastures would permit daisies 

 to crowd out his clover if they could be over- 

 come in a single mowing? 



Prolific beyond words is this enterprising 

 blossom. It multiplies by wholesale and cov- 

 ers the green turf of April with a flowery 

 snow' in June. Ten thousand thousand city 

 folk go out and gather and admire, but ten 

 thousand thousand farmer folk, knowing that 

 it means poor quality and less quantity in hay 

 and pasture, cannot understand the urban en- 

 thusiasm for a blossom that lowers production 

 and increases the cost of living. 



But with all its "weedy role" in the eyes of 

 the farmer, there is beauty in the field daisy 

 and as much sentiment. What maiden has not 

 on its "petals" told her fortune with the for- 

 mula, "He loves me, he loves me not," or has 

 failed to find a blossom that would declare to 

 her that her Prince Charming's heart was at 

 her feet? 



But whether it be with the eyes of the farmer 

 that you see the daisy, beholding only its per- 

 sistent invasion of his domains, or whether 

 with the eye of the beauty lover who is called 

 by admiration and not to battle, or whether 

 with the eye of the sentimental who love it for 

 the fortunes it has told, the daisy is by all 

 awarded the honor of being an alien that has 

 no hyphen in its disposition. It is an immi- 

 grant, unlike its closest relative, the black- 

 eyed susan ; but it has all the enterprise, all the 

 spirit of winning its way in the world, all the 

 Yankee resourcefulness of a flower to the man- 

 ner born. It long ago found Europe too 

 crowded for comfort and discovered that it 

 could come to America as a stowaway. Over 

 here it traveled on the wind, in wagons, by 

 river steamboats, on railroad trains, any way 

 that offered it the chance to find a new field 

 in which to lay the foundations of a new 

 colony. 



The daisy's prosperity is due no less to the 

 form of its bloom than to the tactics it employs 

 in fighting for its position in the field. The 



497 



