C. purpureus bears "flowers axillary, solitary, stalked."
P.S.—I think you said that the purple {tree} at Weirleigh does not seed, whereas the C. purpureus seeds freely, as you may see in enclosed. C. Adami never produces seeds or pods.
LETTER 730. TO E. HACKEL.
(730/1. The following extract refers to Darwin's book on "Cross and Self-Fertilisation.")
November 13th, 1875.
I am now busy in drawing up an account of ten years' experiments in the growth and fertility of plants raised from crossed and self-fertilised flowers. It is really wonderful what an effect pollen from a distinct seedling plant, which has been exposed to different conditions of life, has on the offspring in comparison with pollen from the same flower or from a distinct individual, but which has been long subjected to the same conditions. The subject bears on the very principle of life, which seems almost to require changes in the conditions.
LETTER 731. TO G.J. ROMANES.
(731/1. The following extract from a letter to Romanes refers to Francis Darwin's paper, "Experiments on the Nutrition of Drosera rotundifolia." "Linn. Soc. Journ." {1878}, published 1880, page 17.)
August 9th {1876}.
The second point which delights me, seeing that half a score of botanists throughout Europe have published that the digestion of meat by plants is of no use to them (a mere pathological phenomenon, as one man says!), is that Frank has been feeding under exactly similar conditions a large number of plants of Drosera, and the effect is wonderful. On the fed side the leaves are much larger, differently coloured, and more numerous; flower-stalks taller and more numerous, and I believe far more seed capsules,—but these not yet counted. It is particularly interesting that the leaves fed on meat contain very many more starch granules (no doubt owing to more protoplasm being first formed); so that sections stained with iodine, of fed and unfed leaves, are to the naked eye of very different colours.