A Florida Sketch-Book by Bradford Torrey
page 20 of 151 (13%)
page 20 of 151 (13%)
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better in Spanish," he continued, as if by way of apology; but he went
on in perfectly good English: "If you put one of them under your pillow, and think of some one you would like very much to see,--some one who has been dead a long time,--you will be likely to dream of him. It is a very pretty flower," he added. And so it is; hardly prettier, however, to my thinking, than the blossoms of the early creeping blackberry (_Rubus trivialis_). With them I fairly fell in love: true white roses, I called them, each with its central ring of dark purplish stamens; as beautiful as the cloudberry, which once, ten years before, I had found, on the summit of Mount Clinton, in New Hampshire, and refused to believe a _Rubus_, though Dr. Gray's key led me to that genus again and again. There _is_ something in a name, say what you will. Some weeks later, and a little farther south,--in the flat-woods behind New Smyrna,--I saw other flowers, but never anything of that tropical exuberance at which the average Northern tourist expects to find himself staring. Boggy places were full of blue iris (the common _Iris versicolor_ of New England, but of ranker growth), and here and there a pool was yellow with bladderwort. I was taken also with the larger and taller (yellow) butterwort, which I used never to see as I went through the woods in the morning, but was sure to find standing in the tall dry grass along the border of the sandy road, here one and there one, on my return at noon. In similar places grew a "yellow daisy" (_Leptopoda_), a single big head, of a deep color, at the top of a leafless stem. It seemed to be one of the most abundant of Florida spring flowers, but I could not learn that it went by any distinctive vernacular name. Beside the railway track were blue-eyed grass and pipewort, and a dainty blue lobelia (_L. Feayana_), with once in a while an extremely pretty coreopsis, having a purple centre, and scarcely to be distinguished from one that is common in gardens. No doubt the advancing season brings an |
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