[Sidenote: =Bird's Eyes=
_Gília trìcolor_
=White and purple and yellow
Spring
Southwest=]
A beautiful kind, with rather hairy, branching stems, from six inches
to over a foot tall, and dull green, rather hairy leaves, prettily cut
into long narrow lobes. The flowers are in clusters, sweet-scented
and beautifully marked, with corollas a half-inch or more in length,
open funnel-shaped, with a yellow tube marked by a white border, and
two dark purple spots in the throat below each of the blue or whitish
corolla-lobes, forming an "eye." The calyx lobes often have purple
margins, the anthers are bright blue, with lilac filaments, and the
pistil is lilac. This is common on low hills in western California.
[Sidenote: =Blue Desert Gilia=
_Gília rigídula_
=Blue
Summer
Arizona=]
A strange little desert plant, stunted-looking but with brilliant
flowers, forming low, prickly clumps of stiff, dry, dull green,
needle-like foliage, suggesting cushions of harsh moss, with numerous
woody stems, two or three inches high, and numbers of pretty flowers,
half an inch across, deep bright blue, with a little yellow in the
center; the stamens, with bright yellow anthers, projecting from the
throat. This bravely opens its bright blue eyes in the desert wastes of
the Petrified Forest.
[Illustration: Blue Desert Gilia--G. rigidula.