The English and American flowers differ, although the early colonists brought the English flower with them. Grant Allen tells us: "The English columbine is a more developed type than the American scarlet, is never yellow in the wild state, but often purple, and, sometimes, blue. Larkspur, ranking still higher in the floral scale, in virtue of its singular bilateral blossoms, is usually blue, though it sometimes reverts to reddish-purple, or white; while monkshood, the very top of the tree on this line of development, is usually deep ultramarine, only a few species being prettily variegated with pale blue and white. As a rule, blue flowers are the very highest; and the reason seems to lie in the strange fact, first discovered by Sir John Lubbock, that bees are fonder of blue than of any other color. Still, they are fond enough even of red; and one may be sure that the change from yellow to scarlet in the petals of the American columbine is due in one way or another to the selective tastes and preferences of the higher insects." The colors of the American columbine are dark opaque blues, smoky purples, dull pinks, pale blues, lavenders, reds and yellows--an infinite variety! "The flowering of the 'Columbine Commendable,' as Skelton called it four hundred years ago," says Harriet L. Keeler, "marks the beginning of summer. The reign of the bulbs is over; The windflower and the violet They perished long ago; the petals of the early roses are falling; the elder-blossoms show white along the fence rows; and the season waxes to its prime. "A wild flower of English fields, the columbine was early transferred into English gardens and has held its place securely there for at least five hundred years. Its seeds were among the treasures borne over the sea to the New World and it early bloomed in Pilgrim gardens. This primitive stock still persists in cultivation. "The flower of the columbine is a unique and interesting form. The sepals look like petals and the petals are veritable horns of plenty filled with nectar at the closed ends for the swarms of bees which gather about. The sweets are produced by the blossoms on a generous scale, and to a columbine bed in full bloom the bees come, big and little, noisy and silent--all giddy with the feast. There is no use trying to drive them away for they will not go. Clumsy bumble bees with tongues long enough to reach the honey by the open door, wise honey bees who have learned to take the short road to the nectar by biting through the spur, quiet brown bees, little green carpenters--all are there, 'vehement, voluble, velvety,' in a glorious riot of happiness and honey. "The doubling occurs chiefly with the petals; the sepals, as a rule, hold true to the five, but the petals sometimes double in number, becoming ten spurs in place of five, and each spur becomes a nest of spurs like a set of Chinese cups, though the innermost are frequently imperfect."