[Sidenote: =Chinese Houses=
_Collínsia bícolor_
=Purple and white
Spring, summer
California=]
These are charming plants, from six inches to a foot and a half tall,
with very delicately made flowers. The leaves are smooth or downy and
more or less toothed, with rough edges, and the flowers are arranged in
a series of one-sided clusters along the upper part of the stem, which
is more or less branching. The corollas are about three-quarters of an
inch long and vary in color, being sometimes all white. In the shady
woods around Santa Barbara they often have a white upper lip, which is
tipped with lilac and specked with crimson, and a lilac lower lip, and
here they are much more delicate in appearance than on the sea-cliffs
at La Jolla, where they grow in quantities among the bushes and are
exceedingly showy. In the latter neighborhood the flowers are nearly
an inch long and the upper lip is almost all white and marked with a
crescent of crimson specks above a magenta base, and the lower lip is
almost all magenta, with a white stripe at the center, the contrast
between the magenta and white being very striking and almost too crude.
The arrangement of the flowers is somewhat suggestive of the many
stories of a Chinese pagoda and the plant is common.
[Sidenote: =Blue-lips=
_Collínsia multiflòra_
=Lilac, blue, and pink
Summer
Northwest=]
A very attractive little plant, smooth all over, about six inches tall,
with toothless, light green leaves and pretty flowers, each over half
an inch long. The upper petals are pinkish-lilac, the lower petals
a peculiar shade of bright blue, and the tube is pink; the contrast
between the blue and pink giving an odd and pretty effect. This grows
in the woods around Mt. Shasta.
There are many kinds of Scrophularia, most of them natives of Europe.
They are rank perennial herbs, usually with opposite leaves; the
corolla with no spur and with five lobes, all erect except the lowest
one, which is small and turned back; the stamens five, four of them
with anthers and the fifth reduced to a scale under the upper lip.
These plants are supposed to be a remedy for scrofula.
[Illustration: Blue-lips--C. multiflora.