other flowers without first trying to suck them. Apparently she
satisfied her feminine conscience with the reflection that the
flower which made dining so difficult for its benefactors
deserved no better treatment.


FIELD or BRANCHED LARKSPUR; KNIGHT'S-SPUR; LARK-HEEL
(Delphinium Consoilda) Crowfoot family

Flowers - Blue to pinkish and whitish, 1 to 1 1/2 in. long, hung
on slender stems and scattered along spreading branches; 5
petal-like sepals, the rear one prolonged into long, slender,
curving spur; 2 petals, united. Stem: 1 to 2 1/2 ft. high.
Leaves: Divided into very finely cut linear segments. Fruit:
Erect, smooth pod tipped with a short beak; open on one side.
Preferred Habitat - Roadsides and fields.
Flowering Season - June-August.
Distribution - Naturalized from Europe; from New Jersey
southward, occasionally escaped from gardens farther north.

Keats should certainly have extolled the larkspurs in his sonnet
on blue. No more beautiful group of plants contributes to the
charm of gardens, woods, and roadsides, where some have escaped
cultivation and become naturalized, than the delphinium, that
take their name from a fancied resemblance to a dolphin
(delphin), given them by Linnaeus in one of his wild flights of
imagination. Having lost the power to fertilize themselves,
according to Muller, they are pollenized by both bees and
butterflies, insects whose tongues have kept pace with the
development of certain flowers, such as the larkspur, columbine,