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The name multiflorus is established by long usage, and perhaps was originally given in contrast to the few-flowered habit of H. annuus, for the type of the species is more floriferous than the variety of which Asa Gray says that it is "known only in cultivation from early times, must have been derived from decapetalus," a statement which gardeners would hardly have accepted on less indisputable authority, as they will all think the habit and appearance of the two plants widely different.
The variety multiflorus has several forms; the commonest form is double, the disk being filled with ligules much shorter than those of the ray flowers, after the form of many daisy-like composites. In this double form the day flowers are often wanting. It is common also on old plants in poor soils to see double and single flowers from the same root.
More beautiful is the lovely smooth or blue aster, the aster laevis, with clasping, oblong tapering leaves and sky-blue heads, sometimes violet, fully an inch across. The aster multiflorus, or dense flowered aster, is bushy with small rigid, crowded leaves, and a multitude of small heads crowded on the spreading branches, the rays generally white like big balls of snow.
A hybrid-bean between Phaseolus nanus and P. multiflorus, and some hybrids between the yellow daisy, Chrysanthemum segetum and the allied Chrysanthemum coronarium or ox-eye daisy which also arose spontaneously in my garden between parents cultivated at recorded distances, might further be noted. Further details of these experiments need not be given.
We are warned that the following species are "difficult of extrication," either confluent or mixed by intercrossing. H. doronicoides. I place this the third in merit among perennial sunflowers, H. rigidus and H. multiflorus being first and second. It is 6 feet or 7 feet high, upright in growth, with many stalks.
Helianthus multiflorus, or, according to Asa Gray, speaking botanically, H. decapetalus hort. var. multiflorus, is mentioned first, because it is the subject of the colored illustration.
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