410 Wild Flowers — Their Cultivation, ifc. 
raised with greater ease. The roots should be washed if from a 
tenacious soil, or the earth shaken off, if from a sandy soil. 
This discovery we conceive of some importance to the farmer, 
as it will enable him to clear his fields of a pestiferous plant, and 
if he chooses make it profitable. 
Now, if some of our chemists would discover some useful pur- 
pose for which the Canada thistle might be appropriated to ad- 
vantage, they would be hailed as benefactors of the age. 
WILD FLOWERS— THEIR CULTIVATION, &c. 
In our last number we gave a short catalogue of wild or native 
flowers, worthy and susceptible of cultivation, and promised to 
extend the list some other time. We now redeem that promise 
and give the following, which are not only susceptible of cultiva- 
tion, but highly meritorious. 
For the following description of the purple side-saddle flower 
we are indebted to Dr. James Eights of this city. 
Purple SmE-SAUDLE Flower — Sarracenia purpurea. Who- 
ever may have occasion to wander out among the numerous 
sphagnous swamps that diversify the sandy plains in the neighbor- 
hood of our city, any time during the month of June, will not fail 
to have his attention directed to singularly beautiful clusters of 
reddish purple flowers, each one nodding on a solitary footstalk, 
that ascends from a whorl of far more singularly constituted 
leaves. This is the Sarracenia purpurea. It has received its 
generic appellation from Tournefort, a distinguished French 
botanist, in honor of Dr. Sarrazin, an eminent physician, who 
died at Quebec about the commencement of the eighteenth 
century, and by whom it was for the first time made known to 
Europe. It is exclusively an American genus, and is composed 
of six well defined species, five being confined to the southern 
states, while the present one appears to be equally disseminated 
from the shores of the Mexican Gulf, as I'ar north as Hudson's 
Bay. The flowers are large, and of a deep reddish purple color, 
with the petals greatly incurved, whilst the pale yellow stigma 
occupying" the centre, expands in such a manner as eflfectually to 
conceal the more important organs of fructification from the sight. 
