PERENNIAL SUNFLOWERS. 



27 



food of some tribes of the American Indians. The Jerusalem 

 Artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) is largely cultivated in this 

 country for its potato-like tubers. 



In Russia at this very moment, when famine is devastating 

 whole districts, the starving thousands are, we are told, being 

 maintained chiefly on the seeds of the cultivated H. annuus, 

 which there attain a large size. The many different forms, and 

 the many altogether wrong names we have found in the course 

 of our investigations, may be placed under at most thirteen 

 species, including such plants as I have named II. divaricatus 

 and H. Maximiliani, and which I am not quite certain would 

 not have been better associated with H. decapetalus and 

 H. giganteus, so near do these plants (altered by cultivation) 

 approach the latter-named species. We are extremely fortunate 

 in the fact of the late Dr. Asa Gray having worked among living 

 as well as dried plants, and also in the fact of Asters and Heli- 

 anthuses being his especial favourites. When over in England 

 in 1882 he visited the principal public and private collections of 

 Sunflowers and Michaelmas Daisies, and so modified or enlarged 

 his descriptions in his " Synoptical Flora of North America " as 

 to include most of those then in cultivation. 



The number of species given in Bentham and Hooker's 

 " Genera Plantarum " is put at fifty. This, however, includes 

 the genus Flourensia in its entirety, as well as Linsecomia, 

 Echinomeria, and Harpalium. Dr. Gray in his " Synoptical 

 Flora" modifies this somewhat, reducing the number of species 

 to forty, but keeping up in part the genus Flourensia,'and putting 

 Peru, Chili, Mexico, and California outside his boundary. 



The great centre of distribution in North America will be 

 found to range between latitude 30° and 50°. One or two, how- 

 ever, extend to British Columbia, and beyond almost to Hudson 

 Bay. Their wide geographical distribution and the varied nature 

 of many of the habitats might well suggest some other treat- 

 ment than that to which they are subjected in our gardens. Some 

 are found in dry Pine and Oak barrens, in wet ground and in 

 moist shady woods, prairies, plains, and rocky slopes, dry gravelly 

 soils, moist alluvial ground, and along the banks of streams. In 

 the face of all this, however, we have only to look around us 

 to-day to see ample proof of the skill and perseverance of the 

 English gardener who, it may be not unlikely, grows many of 



