Flowers and Gardens 



They give prominence to the lower 

 swelling by spreading over it like the 

 open fingers of a hand, and serve wher- 

 ever they go to emphasise the undula- 

 tions of the surface which they have to 

 traverse. 



Now all this in the Purple Crocus is 

 far less exquisite. The upper curve is 

 less beautifully rounded at the tip, and the 

 lower less distinctly marked, so that the 

 corolla is almost funnel-shaped in the 

 neck. As the lower curve is unimportant, 

 dark parallel stripes, like those of the 

 Yellow Crocus, are, of course, not needed 

 to enforce it. These stripes have accord- 

 ingly vanished, and are replaced by mere 

 feather-shaped patches of deeper violet, 

 which are all that is needed to insist 

 upon the shape of the flower, and to guide 

 the eye downwards into the tube. Stripes 

 would here be inconvenient as well as un- 

 necessary, because the inner petals are 

 striped, and a somewhat monotonous tone 

 in the outer petals is needed for variety, 

 as well as to convey that general ex- 

 pression of the flower of which we shall 

 presently speak. When we come to exa- 

 mine the full form of the petal at the back, 

 its inferiority in shape becomes still more 

 manifest. Not only have we lost that 



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