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This malformation results in square spikes or somewhat elongated heads consisting only of the greenish bracts. As there are no flowers, the variety is quite sterile, and as it is not regarded by horticulturists as an improvement on the ordinary bright carnations, it is seldom multiplied by layering.
This fact suggests the idea of a common origin for these anomalies, and would lead to the hypothesis that the original ancestors of the whole family, before losing the bracts, exhibited this peculiar mode of cohesion. Bracts and analogous organs afford similar cases of systematic atavism in quite a number of other families.
It is said to grow up through the snow; on the contrary, it always waits until the ground is warm, though with other early flowers it is occasionally buried or half-buried for a day or two by spring storms. The entire plant flowers, bracts, stem, scales, and roots is fiery red. Its color could appeal to one's blood. Nevertheless, it is a singularly cold and unsympathetic plant.
Occasionally, as in violet, a flower arises singly in the axil of an ordinary foliage-leaf; it is then termed axillary. Generally, however, the flower-bearing portion of the plant is sharply distinguished from the foliage leaf-bearing or vegetative portion, and forms a more or less elaborate branch-system in which the bracts are small and scale-like.
I had begun to despair of ever getting a specimen, as it seemed so rare and wild; till one day, about the beginning of January, I found a beautiful shrub with large white leafy bracts and yellow flowers, a species of Mussaenda, and saw one of these noble insects hovering over it, but it was too quick for me, and flew away.
It simply follows the snow line, as so many of the Sierran plants do, and as the snow melts and leaves the valley, one must climb to find it. It is of a rich red color, which glows in the sunlight like a living thing. It has no leaves but is supplied with over-lapping scale-like bracts of a warm flesh-tint.
The scales and bracts are tinged with red and the seed-wings are purple with bright iridescence. Both of the silver firs live between two and three centuries when the conditions about them are at all favorable.
It was also a floresta florida, whose giants are decked with the tender little blossoms of the shrub, and where the bright bracts and yellow greens of this year's growth light up the sombre verdure of an older date. The type of this growth is the red camwood-tree, with its white flower of the sweetest savour. Imagine an English elm studded with pinks or daisies, gardenias or hyacinths.
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