that so abundantly surrounds them should be intelligently en- 
joyed and conserved. "With the extension of automobile roads 
into remoter parts of the mountains the need will of course 
increase, for it is notorious that the automobile and the decline 
of raid life, animal and plant, go together. 
Charles Francis Saunders. 
Pasadena, California. 
The Phymosia Remota. 
Think of possessing a void flower so rare that it grows 
naturally in but one place on the earth ; and that place an island. 
in a river, in our own state of Illinois ! Dr. Millspaugh, Director 
of the Botanical Department of the Field Museum of Natural 
History, gave us some seeds of this flower, the Phymosia remota, 
to see if it would be possible to raise it in the more severe climate 
of southern Wisconsin. We had an island with a gravelly soil 
which repeated the conditions in which this plant was found. 
But taking no chances of its being smothered by the rank growth 
there, we started the seeds first in the glass house. That was 
in 1918. 
The poor little weak seedlings gave small promise of success 
but the next summer they grew taller and the third season, 1920. 
they were some two and a half feet high, spindling and weak- 
stemmed but bearing a few blooms. In the Spring of 1921 we 
planted two of them on the gravelly island and two close to the 
glass house in rich soil. Of the first two we have heard nothing 
but they may assert themselves later on. By July the two in the 
garden had become enormous bushes eight feet high, each one 
with a spread of six feet. The leaves are charming in color and 
shape, somewhat resembling the Maple leaf, for the plant belongs 
to the Mallow family; the effect of the shrub is rich and attrac- 
tive even without the flowers but when these come it is an 
exquisite picture. They are like small Wild Koses, white shading 
to pink, appearing in the axils of the leaves so that each stem 
bears from ten to twenty flowers. With its wide-spread 
horizontal-growing leaves and its masses of delicate bloom the 
Phymosia remota becomes an important acquisition for any 
garden. 
Xow whether this delicate stranger will endure our winters 
is still a question for they are long and severe, the thermometer 
at times dropping to twenty below zero, but it is not our heavy 
frosts nor our bitter winters that are trying for certain plants 
but the warm early springs that encourage the poor things to 
come forth and then, when they are at their most delicate stage, 
almost invariably comes a blast from Mackinac which freezes 
the buds and tender young leaves. Our Forsythias give us full 
measure only about once in five years. 
However, we have saved plenty of Phymosia seed so that if 
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