caule) hides itself in cool canyons of the Pacific coast and reflects the differences in its home environment by producing fewer flowers on shorter stems.

Larkspurs have come to be quite partial to bumblebees, and their nectar is so well protected by the spur which forms an extra covering for the honey sacs that smaller bees cannot bite through and steal it.

So rapidly does the honey flow and so busily do the bumblebees work that they are able to visit the same cluster of blossoms several times in succession. Red larkspurs also attract humming birds, which seem partial to this color, and their long bills are well adapted to extract nectar from the slender spurs.

Monkshood (Aconitum columbianum Nutt. Plate II, figure 5).-Like sentinels on guard, the slender spikes of monkshood stand straight and tall among the grasses and herbs of moist mountain meadows. On shady brook banks they stretch up to a height of six or eight feet and grow in closely clustered groups with other moisture-loving plants.

Birches and maples form an arching canopy, and in their cool shadows, with roots reaching down toward the waters of the rushing brook, the dark blue-purple or white spikes of monkshood bloom through the summer, with rosepurple fireweeds and huge white-flowered cowparsnips as their companions.

Like the columbine and larkspur, the monkshood conceals its relationship to the buttercup by a fanciful disguise. Instead of wearing a saucy dunce's cap, as the larkspur does, it masquerades in a queer blue bonnet with floating ribbons. Peeping beneath the hood, one expects to see a tiny face, but finds instead the familiar cluster of stamens and separate pistils so characteristic of the buttercups.

The nectaries are neatly tucked away in the upper cowl-shaped sepal and take the form of tiny cornucopias on slender stalks. Long tongues are necessary to reach the honey, and so dependent are monkshoods on the services of the bumblebee that their very existence is at stake. It is a curious fact that countries, such as New Zealand, Australia, Arabia, and South Africa, which have no native bumblebees, also lack native monkshoods.

The bee alights on the ribbonlike lower sepals, grasps the side sepals with its front legs, and, as it sucks the nectar, moves its body back and forth over the stamens and stigmas. Besides helping itself to the honey so freely offered, it scrapes off the pollen clinging to head and body, packs it into pollen baskets in its legs, to be carried home and made into pollen bread for the baby bees.

Like its relative, the larkspur, the monkshood is careful of its pollen, not only protecting it against wetting, but ripening the anthers by twos and fours and thus maintaining a continuous supply for a week or more.

With the exception of southern California, the blue monkshood may be found throughout the West. There are several species in the Alleghenies that may also be quickly recognized by the peculiar helmet-shaped sepal.

The cultivated monkshood (Aconitum napellus) yields the drug aconite, which is used in medicine in various ways. Since many of the species have this poison in flowers as well as roots, they should never be planted near the kitchen garden or the children's garden. Otherwise, they are attractive and satisfactory garden plants, affording ornamental foliage as well as flowers.

POPPY FAMILY

Papaveraceae

Creamcups (Platystemon californicus Benth. Plate III, figure 1).-Strikingly like pale buttercups in form and structure, the light yellow blossoms of creamcups flutter airily in the sea breezes and spread a riot of springtime bloom in the sandy soils of shore, field, and roadside. They are often at their best on dunes, where they are companioned by pink abronias, yellow senecios, golden California-poppies, and baerias.

Wherever there is space, the plants are spreading, from six to nine inches tall, with numerous hairy branching stems and many flowers. In the adobe soil of cliffs, where water is harder to get than from loose sand, the entire plant becomes dwarfed, with but one to three stems two or three inches high, tiny blossoms, and small leaves only at the base. When growing in the shade of shrubs or overtopped by other herbs, the plants reach toward the light to a height of 15 inches or more and are thin-leaved and sparsely hairy, with larger flowers.

Usually the blossoms are a pale straw color or creamy white and the petals cupped, so that the common name is not only pretty, but descriptive.

Though creamcups are placed in the same group with the poppies, they actually occupy the borderland between these and buttercups, sharing the features of both.

Wind Poppy (Papaver californicum Gray. Plate III, figure 2). The vermilion-red disks of the wind poppy glow here and there like bright flecks of flame in the shelter of the chaparral-covered slopes or in shady dells. They bloom throughout the spring in central and southern California and on Mount Tamalpais, but are so fragile that the petals fall at a touch. Unfortunately, the seeker after spring blossoms may not know this, and many a delicate beauty has been plucked only to be at once thrown aside.

So far as known, all the poppies produce poisonous alkaloids, and children especially should be warned against tasting or chewing any part of the plant. The opium poppy is of considerable value in commerce, the seeds yielding an oil that is used as a substitute for olive oil in cooking and as a drier in painting. Opium is obtained from the milky juice of the seed pods. Besides being used as an intoxicant, it is valuable as morphine for relieving pain and inducing sleep.

California-poppy (Eschscholtzia californica Cham. Plate III, figure 3).-Magic carpets of gold are flung far and wide over hillside and valley as the California-poppy comes into bloom. At the height of its glory, in the spring, when

the winter rains have been seasonable and sufficient, the blossoms may cover many square miles so thickly as to be visible at great distances. One poppy bed, 20 miles long by 10 wide, has been seen as a sheet of yellow from a peak 40 miles away. Another, composed entirely of the orange-red variety, was of such brilliant hue and so thickly sown as to look from afar like the bare red earth of a great Permian exposure.

The California-poppy is exceedingly variable in all its parts. The color may range from white, turning to pink with age, through all shades of yellow, from pale lemon to pure canary and deep orange-red. The various forms are sometimes named as different varieties or even species; but, whether kept separate or grouped together, these "cups of gold," as the Spaniards called them, are at home along the coast and in interior valleys, in sand and dunes of the seashore, in bunchgrass prairies, along roadsides, and in fields throughout California, northward to Oregon and Washington, south into Mexico, across the Colorado Desert and Arizona, and eastward into New Mexico.

For more detailed information concerning California's State flower, see the National Geographic Society's publication, "The Book of Wild Flowers."

Bush Poppy (Dendromecon rigidum Benth. Plate III, figure 4).-With its wealth of large, bright yellow flowers and grayish green foliage, the bush poppy lends a sunny aspect to the chaparral, even on cloudy days. It is especially fond of burned-over ground and often occupies this quickly and completely, though it usually occurs as scattered individuals here and there among the shrubs of southern and middle California.

Poppies are known as pollen flowers, since they have no nectar and rely on an abundance of this golden powder to attract their insect friends. The flowers of the bush poppy have a fresh smell like cucumbers, but are ornamental only if left undisturbed, for the petals fall soon after the blossoms are picked. This habit of the poppy flowers has been immortalized by Robert Burns' poem, in which the fleeting nature of pleasure is likened to the quick destruction of the poppy blossom when plucked.

These plants exude a bitter milky juice which, like all milky saps, has enjoyed some popular repute in the removal of warts. An oil extracted from the seeds has a use similar to that of castor oil.

FUMITORY FAMILY

Fumariaceae

Pink Dicentra (Dicentra formosa DC. Plate III, figure 5). The pale waxen flowers of the pink dicentra hang pendant from curving stems and brighten shady places here and there in moist woods. The diligent seeker for shy blossoms may find these through the summer in favored spots of the Coast Ranges and in the Sierra Nevada up to 9,000 feet. They are especially large and showy in Paradise Valley, but in the Yosemite may be easily overlooked, since the plants are seldom found in flower, although the delicate gray-green leaves beautifully cut

into a graceful fringe are sufficiently attractive in themselves.

The dicentra of the East (Dicentra cucullaria) is called Dutchman's-breeches, and, although the dainty blossoms are white or pale pink, their two petals, baggy at one end and tapering to two narrow extensions, look for all the world like this picturesque apparel hung upside down on a clothesline. This is one of the earliest harbingers of spring in the woods of the Allegheny Mountains and westward to Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri.

Only recently has this charming plant been found to be dangerously poisonous to stock, although long known in certain localities as staggerweed, because of its effect on cattle grazing upon it. Another common eastern relative (Dicentra canadensis) is a white-flowered form with pink tips, called squirrel-corn because of its many small tubers.

Golden Eardrops (Dicentra chrysantha H. & A. Plate III, figure 6).-Standing up stiffly here and there in the chaparral, the tall yellowgreen stems of this yellow dicentra bear aloft loose clusters of golden blossoms that perch jauntily erect instead of drooping gracefully, like other bleeding-hearts. In contrast to the stiff stems, often five feet tall, the finely cut, fernlike leaves, a foot or more long and a pale shining green, seem unusually graceful.

The plants are not very abundant, but may be found scattered through sandy washes and in the chaparral of central and southern California, blooming in May and June.

Golden Corydalis (Corydalis aurca Willd. Plate III, figure 7).-A lover of the open spaces, the golden corydalis covers gravelly soils with masses of feathery foliage and adorns them with loose clusters of bright yellow blossoms on delicate stems. When moisture is lacking, the plants may become dwarfed to an inch or two in height, but where conditions permit luxuriant growth a single plant may grow a foot tall and cover an area two feet across.

The genus is closely related to the bleedingheart and Dutchman's-breeches, though it has but one spur and the flowers are yellow instead of pink. The earliest blossoms appear in March, and in the mountains laggards may be found in late summer and early autumn.

CAPER FAMILY

Capparidaceae

Plate

Bladderpod (Isomeris arborea Nutt. IV, figure 1).-Dotted over hills and cliffs of southern California and extending to the edge of the desert, the low shrubs of the bladderpod, with their smooth green leaves and loose clusters of clear yellow flowers, add a pleasing note to the uniform gray of the coastal sagebrush.

Though the flowers themselves are not illsmelling, the bruised foliage has a strongly pungent odor that is distinctly unpleasant to most people, and thus enables this species to become a member in good standing of the "Flower Self-Protective Association."

A distinctive characteristic of the plant is its large leathery pods, which droop on long stalks