The larger bur marigold, B. chrysanthemoides, does its best to retrieve the family reputation for ugliness, and surrounds its dingy disk-flowers with a circle of showy golden rays which are strictly decorative, having neither pistils nor stamens, and leaving all the work of the household to the less attractive but more useful disk-flowers. Their effect is pleasing, and late into the autumn the moist ditches look as if sown with gold through their agency. The plant varies in height from six inches to two feet. Its leaves are opposite, lance-shaped, and regularly toothed.
Smooth False Foxglove.
Gerardia quercifolia. Figwort Family.
Stem.—Smooth, three to six feet high, usually branching. Leaves.—The lower usually deeply incised, the upper narrowly oblong, incised, or entire. Flowers.—Yellow, large, in a raceme or spike. Calyx.—Five-cleft. Corolla.—Two inches long, somewhat tubular, swelling above, with five more or less unequal, spreading lobes, woolly within. Stamens.—Four, in pairs, woolly. Pistil.—One.
These large pale yellow flowers are very beautiful and striking when seen in the dry woods of late summer. They are all the more appreciated because there are few flowers abroad at this season save the Composites, which are decorative and radiant enough, but usually somewhat lacking in the delicate charm we look for in a flower.
The members of this genus, which is named after Gerarde, the author of the famous “Herball,” are supposed to be more or less parasitic in their habits, drawing their nourishment from the roots of other plants.
PLATE LIX
SMOOTH FALSE FOXGLOVE.—G. quercifolia.
The downy false foxglove, G. flava, is usually a somewhat lower plant, with a close down, a less-branched stem, more entire leaves, and smaller, similar flowers.
Tansy.
Tanacetum vulgare. Composite Family (p. [13]).
Stem.—Two to four feet high. Leaves.—Divided into toothed leaflets. Flower-heads.—Yellow, composed of tiny flowers which are nearly, if not all, tubular in shape; borne in flat-topped clusters.