EZRA B R A I NERD 



SPRINGSIDE 

 MIDDLEBURY. VT. 



May 25th, 1922. 



Dear Mr. Dean: - 



I am much interested to discover what Mrs. 

 John E. Thayer's "naturally bright-yellow violet" is. Your 

 two letters of May 19th and 22d and your postcard of the 23d 

 seem somewhat at variance. In the first you write Mrs. Thayer 

 "showed me in her garden a white, purple- streaked violet, stem- 

 less^with flower stems ( peduncles? ) shorter than the leaves. 

 I don't know where it came from, it was given to her and is 

 flourishing. I Enclose a flower and leaf and bud. Rootstock 

 fleshy, thickened. Beard of lateral petals knobbed. Can you 

 name it? I shall press a specimen she gave me in case you 

 want to see more." 



This description and the scanty material sent I ex- 

 amined most carefully, and found that it agreed remarkably 



in 



well with an albino of V. papilionacea Pursh cited A the Violet 

 Bulletin, page 23 number two, from Glastonbury and New London, 

 Conn., now abundant in my garden. 



But in your letter of May 22d you say Mrs. Thayer's 

 violet was " bright yellow; the flowers turned white in going 

 to you. I pressed a specimen of the same plant, and when I 



opened the press the flower had turned white." Such behavior 



would be quite unprecedented. It must have been the white- 

 flowered plant that you described in your first letter that 

 you put into the press, and not a bright-yellow one. Note 

 that in our Northeastern flora there are only two stemless 



