Blue Nemophila

BLUE NEMOPHILA, Nemophila insigni

IT would be a difficult task to find a more familiar garden flower than the blue nemophila; for it is one of the first favourites of the amateur gardener, and never ceases--as some first favourites do--to retain a hold upon his affections, even when he has bloomed into the veteran horticulturist. The beginner may doat upon the clumps of lovely blue flowers that appear in the borders where, for the first time in his life, he has sown some seeds; but if he goes on as he began, taking constant interest in flowers, he may chance to see this same plant in a shape that tells emphatically its popularity. On all the great flower-seed farms it is grown in astonishing quantities, and the growers amuse their visitors by measuring the lines to state the sum-total in parts of a mile. The last measurement we witnessed amounted to three-quarters of a mile.

This plant represents a series of hardy annuals obtained from California in the early days of exploration in the "Far West," by David Douglas, who was sent out by the Horticultural Society of London to secure new floral treasures for British gardens. He was eminently successful, for he not only collected plants that have proved of immense value in this country, but he also contributed important papers to the "Horticultural Transactions" and to other publications of his time. This man ranks amongst the "martyrs of science," and the very best of our hardy annuals may be regarded as memorials of his honourable labours and of his unhappy end. He was born in Scotland in the year 1798, and early in life devoted his mind to the science of botany. Being in the employ of the Horticultural Society as a plant-collector, he explored the Columbia River and California in the years 1825 to 1827, securing in the interest of British horticulture a great many of our now most valued hardy plants. From the Pacific coast he proceeded to the Sandwich Islands, where he met with a dreadful death on the 12th of July, 1834. It was the custom then in the Sandwich Islands to capture wild cattle by means of pitfalls. Into one of these pits the unhappy Douglas fell, and, meeting there a captured bullock, was attacked by the beast and gored to death, no help being near and nothing being known of the event until the next day.