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Updated: July 1, 2025
We have hardly eyes for Gavarnie, so completely is our gaze fascinated by the large luminous gold and silver stars gleaming conspicuously from the brilliant turf. These are the glorious flower-heads of the white and yellow Pyrenean thistle that open in sunshine as do sea-anemones, sending out lovely fringes, sunrays and moonbeams not more strikingly contrasted.
They and the rare periwinkles and the furze are the only flowers of this season. It is too much love doubtless which fills them. They must be born in spite of the ice. The white little bands of their flower-heads are tinged with violet at the ends, and surround the flowers which are greenish yellow like the under side of an old mushroom. The muddy roots feel the plowed fields.
In some countries the young shoots are used for flavoring cakes and other culinary preparations. From the very persistent underground parts annual, usually unbranched stems, sometimes 3 feet tall, are produced in more or less abundance. They bear much-divided, oval, oblong leaves and numerous small, yellow flower-heads in usually crowded corymbs.
The idyllic picture of children wandering in spring, filling their hands with flower-heads torn from bank and copse, appeared to Hugh as only painful. Man, from first to last, seemed to spread a ruthless destruction around him.
Here it should be remarked that the indication alluded to was not the appearance of the expected character of doubling in ever so slight a measure. It was only a guide to be followed in further work. The real character of double flower-heads among composites lies in the production of rays on the disk. No increase of the number of the outer rays can have the same significance.
At the beginning of this lecture I stated that no selection is adequate to produce either a pure strain of brightly crowned flower-heads without atavism, or to conduce to an absolute and permanent loss of the anomaly. During a series of years I have tested my plants in both directions, but without the least effect.
Each new generation was thereby as sharply selected as possible with regard to both parents. All flower-heads were of course closely inspected. Not the slightest indication of real doubling was discovered, even in the summer of 1899 in the fourth generation of my selected race. But among the best the new character suddenly made its appearance.
Nearly allied are quite a number of garden-plants with double flower-heads, among which are the double camomiles. My attention was first drawn to the structure of the heads and especially to the number of the ray-florets of the corn-marigold. The species appertains to that group of composites which have a head of small tubular florets surrounded by a broad border of rays.
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