TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface List of Illustrations Blue to Purple Flowers Magenta to Pink Flowers White and Greenish Flowers Yellow and Orange Flowers Red and Indefinites Appendices: Fragrant Flowers or Leaves Unpleasantly Scented Plants and Shrubs Conspicuous in Fruit Plant Families Represented "Let us content ourselves no longer with being mere 'botanists' - historians of structural facts. The flowers are not mere comely or curious vegetable creations, with colors, odors, petals, stamens and innumerable technical attributes. The wonted insight alike of scientist, philosopher, theologian, and dreamer is now repudiated in the new revelation. Beauty is not 'its own excuse for being,' nor was fragrance ever 'wasted on the desert air.' The seer has at last heard and interpreted the voice in the wilderness. The flower is no longer a simple passive victim in the busy bee's sweet pillage, but rather a conscious being, with hopes, aspirations and companionships. The insect is its counterpart. Its fragrance is but a perfumed whisper of welcome, its color is as the wooing blush and rosy lip, its portals are decked for his coming, and its sweet hospitalities humored to his tarrying; and as it speeds its parting affinity, rests content that its life's consummation has been fulfilled." - William Hamilton Gibson. "I often think, when working over my plants, of what Linnaeus once said of the unfolding of a blossom: 'I saw God in His glory passing near me, and bowed my head in worship.' The scientific aspect of the same thought has been put into words by Tennyson: 'Flower in the crannied wall I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all in my hand Little flower, - but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.' No deeper thought was ever uttered by poet. For in this world of plants, which, with its magician, chlorophyll, conjuring with sunbeams, is ceaselessly at work bringing life out of death, - in this quiet vegetable world we may find the elementary principles of all life in almost visible operation." - JOHN FISKE in "Through Nature to God." FROM BLUE TO PURPLE FLOWERS "If blue is the favorite color of bees, and if bees have so much to do with the origin of flowers, how is it that there are so few blue ones? I believe the explanation to be that all blue flowers have descended from ancestors in which the flowers were green; or, to speak more precisely, in which the leaves surrounding the stamens and pistil were green; and that they have passed through stages of white or yellow, and generally red, before becoming blue." - Sir John Lubbock in "Ants, Bees, and Wasps." VIRGINIA or COMMON DAY-FLOWER (Commelina Virginica) Spiderwort family