which is the elementary form, was doubtless the reason for the cuttings 
reverting in the manner described. The petunia is the most variable 
plant in existence, and hence is an interesting study, though exasperating 
at times. 
Here in California, where petunias are really a perennial, dealers 
often hold over plants for a couple of seasons and sometimes the re- 
sults are surprising. Colors change and blossoms are reduced in size 
until the original plant is unrecognizable. Then later in the season it 
resumes its original form. 
Some of the conditions are produced by colder weather or more 
moisture, and others are caused by conditions heretofore recessive in the 
plants. Probably the royal purple described was a better established 
plant or the cuttings were taken from nodes true to type, while those 
taken from the white and lilac contained retrogressive elements. 
This is simply my own solution of the question, which has puzzled 
me not a little, but I do not claim that it is infallible. 
Myrtle Shepherd Francis. 
£elf*H>resenmtton among plants 
To those of us who are fortunate enough to spend much time in 
our gardens, there comes an opportunity to study the traits and charac- 
teristics of the various plants, traits which greatly interest and puzzle — 
at least, the amateur. 
Some plants exhibit what seems so like the same intelligence dis- 
played by members of the animal kingdom in their instinct toward self- 
preservation, that one is led to wonder if the vegetable world, too, has 
been endowed with a certain order of intelligent sagacity. 
For example, nearly all young seedlings have, as near neighbors, 
weeds so like them in form as to be hardly recognizable from the flowers 
they imitate, and many farm crops suffer from like impostors. 
Every one has seen the little weed, called by children "cheese- 
cake," nestling close to hollyhocks, until the latter outgrow them and 
further deception is useless. Young Phlox shoots are often accom- 
panied by a weed almost identical with them in form and color, pyre- 
thrum, poppies and coreopsis nearly always start their spring career with 
a double close beside them, while, quite recently, a well established 
edging of campanula carpatica was almost entirely forced out of exist- 
ence in a few weeks by a growth of sorrel which, undetected, grew and 
became so interwoven with the campanulas that weeding destroyed the 
flower plants — this, too, directly under the eye of a rather militant 
gardener. 
Further examples might be given, possibly at the expense of the 
reader's patience, but one last, most curious instance cannot be omitted. 
Each season for several years in the writer's garden there has boldly 
