From these it has escaped so freely in many sections of the North
and East as to be counted among the local wild flowers. Unless
the young offshoots are separated from the parent and given a nook
of their own, the flower quickly reverts to the original type. Euro-
ag cultivators claim that the most brilliant colors are obtained

yy crossing annual with perennial phloxes.
Wild Sweet William (P. maculata), another perennial much
sought by cultivators, loves the moisture of low woods and the
neighborhood of streams in the Middle and Western States when
it is free to choose its habitat ; but it, too, has so freely escaped
from gardens farther north into dry and dusty roadsides, that any


35


From Blue to Purple


one who has passed the ruins of Hawthorne’s little red cottage at
Lenox, for example, and seen the way his wife’s clump of white
phlox under his study window has spread to cover an acre of
hillside, would suppose it to be luxuriating in its favorite locality.
This variety of the species (var. Candida) lacks the purplish flec
on stem and lower leaves responsible for the specific name of
the type. Pinkish purple or pink blossoms are borne in a rather
narrow, elongated panicle on the typical Sweet William.
Most members of the phlox family resort to the trick of coat-
ing the upper stem and the peduncles immediately below the
flowers with a sticky secretion in which crawling insects, intent
on pilfering sweets, meet their death, just as birds are caught on
limed twigs. Butterflies, for whom phloxes have narrowed their
tubes to the exclusion of most other insects, are their benefactors;
but long-tongued bees and flies often seek their nectar. Indeed,
the number of strictly butterfly-flowers is surprisingly small.
