Toward a more tender blue![[12]]
This roadside weed blossoms in late summer. It is extensively cultivated in France, where the leaves are blanched and used in a salad which is called “Barbe des Capucins.” The roots are roasted and mixed with coffee both there and in England.
Horace mentions its leaves as part of his frugal fare, and Pliny remarks upon the importance of the plant to the Egyptians, who formerly used it in great quantities, and of whose diet it is still a staple article.
Blue and Purple Asters.
Aster. Composite Family (p. [13]).
Flower-heads.—Composed of blue or purple ray-flowers, with a centre of yellow disk-flowers.
PLATE XCVIII
CHICORY.—C. Intybus.
As about one hundred and twenty different species of aster are native to the United States, and as fifty-four of these are found in Northeastern America, all but a dozen being purple or blue (i.e., with purple or blue ray-flowers), and as even botanists find that it requires patient application to distinguish these many species, only a brief description of the more conspicuous and common ones is here attempted.
Along the dry roadsides in early August we may look for the bright blue-purple flowers of A. patens. This is a low-growing species, with rough, narrowly oblong, clasping leaves, and widely spreading branches, whose slender branchlets are usually terminated by a solitary flower-head.
Probably no member of the group is more striking than the New England aster, A. Novæ Angliæ, whose stout hairy stem (sometimes eight feet high), numerous lance-shaped leaves, and large violet-purple or sometimes pinkish flower-heads, are conspicuous in the swamps of late summer.