PIGWEED FAMILY. Chenopodiaceae. 
covering. Spinach and Beets belong to this family; many 
are ‘‘weeds,” such as Lamb’s Quarters. 
There are two kinds of Grayia, named after Asa Gray; 
low shrubs; the stamens and pistils in separate flowers, on 
the same or on different plants. 
An odd and beautiful desert shrub, 
Eee SABC ihe about three feet high, very dense in form, 
rayia spinosa af i = 
(G. polygaloidesy With interlacing, angular, gray branches, 
Greenish, with spiny and crowded with small, alternate, 
red bracts toothless leaves, pale-green and thickish, 
ee but not stiff. The flowers are small and 
Dik, Ane inconspicuous, but the pistillate ones are 
enveloped in conspicuous bracts, which 
enlarge and become papery in fruit, something like those 
of Docks, and often change from yellowish-green to all 
sorts of beautiful, bright, warm tints of pink, or to magenta, 
and the branches become loaded with beautifully shaded 
bunches of these curious seed-vessels, giving a strange, 
crowded look to the shrub, which in favorable situations, 
such as the Mohave Desert, makes splendid masses of 
color, especially when contrasted with the pale gray of 
Sage-brush. 
There is only one kind of Cycloloma; leaves alternate, 
smooth or downy, irregularly toothed; flowers perfect or 
pistillate, with five sepals, five stamens, and two or three 
styles; fruit winged horizontally. 
Very curious round plants, six to 
Sap twenty inches high, usually purple all 
atriplicifolium . OV€T, sometimes green and rarely white, 
Purple or green giving a brilliant effect in the fall to the 
Summer _ sandy wastes they inhabit. They are a 
pubes mass of interlacing branches, with hardly 
any leaves, except at the base, and very 
small flowers. When’ their seeds are ripe, and they are 
dry and brittle, the wind easily uproots them and starts 
them careening across the plain, their seeds flying out by 
the way. They turn over and over and leap along, as if 
they were alive, bringing up at last against a wire fence, or 
some such obstacle, where perhaps a traveler sees them 
from the train and wonders at the extraordinary-looking, 
dry, round bunches. There are other Tumble-weeds, 
such as Tumbling Mustard, Sisymbrium allissimum, and 
Amarédnthus dlbus, not of this family. 
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