[Sidenote: =Hardhack, Steeple-bush=
_Spiraèa Doúglasii_
=Pink
Spring, summer
Wash., Oreg., Cal.=]
A handsome shrub, from three to five feet high, with rather coarse
leaves, smooth, but with a dull surface, and pale with close down on
the under side, and bearing many beautiful, compact spires of small,
pink flowers, warm in tone and deeper in color towards the center, with
numerous, long, pink stamens, which give a very feathery appearance.
The flowers are slightly sweet-smelling and bloom first at the top
of the cluster, so that the effect of the whole spire, which is six
or eight inches long, is light pink and fuzzy at the top, deepening
below to the raspberry-pink of the buds. This grows along the edges of
meadows and near brooks.
There are two kinds of Chamaebatiaria, both western; low shrubs; the
flowers with five sepals, five petals, and about sixty stamens; the
pistils five, more or less united.
[Sidenote: =Fern-bush=
_Chamaebatiària millefòlium_ (_Spiraea_)
=White
Summer
Arizona=]
A pretty and unusual-looking shrub, about three feet high, with
reddish stems and shreddy bark, the downy leaves, pale yellowish-green
in color, arranged at intervals along the branches in soft feathery
bunches. The flowers are like small strawberry blossoms, slightly
fragrant, and form pretty clusters. This grows on rocks, along the rim
of the Grand Canyon, clinging to the edge and overhanging the depths.
There is only one kind of Coleogyne.
[Sidenote: _Coleógyne ramosíssima_
=Yellow
Spring
Southwest=]
The plateau in the Grand Canyon is covered for miles with this low
shrub, which gives the landscape its characteristic pale desert
coloring. The flowers, over half an inch across, with one or two
pairs of three-lobed bracts at base, grow singly at the tips of the
twigs and, unlike most of this family, have no petals and only four,
spreading sepals, bright yellow inside, two of them pointed and the
alternate two more round in shape. The ovary is enclosed in a yellow,
hollow, urn-shaped receptacle, surrounded by numerous stamens inserted
on its base, the yellow anthers with threadlike filaments. The very
small, narrow, toothless leaves are evergreen, leathery and stiff,
opposite, grayish in color and imperceptibly downy, clustered in small
separate bunches along the rigid twigs, which are set almost at right
angles to the reddish-gray branches and rather swollen at the joints.
The whole shrub is from two feet to four feet high, stiff, almost
thorny, and rather forbidding in appearance, but the odd little flowers
are pretty.
[Illustration: Coleogyne--ramosissima.
Hardhack--Spiraea Douglasii.