NATURE NOTES FROM ACADIA

TWINFLOWER AND HAIRBELL

On the seventh day of September, while watching the beavers at Marshall Brook, we came upon a number of fresh blossoms of the charming little Twinflower (Linnaea americana). In late spring and early summer we encountered its pretty pink fragrant blooms time and again, but to find it now, in a month which belongs partly to autumn, was a most delightful surprise.

The accompanying illustration, drawn one and one-half times life size, gives the reader some conception regarding the appearance of this flower. The paired and exceedingly fragrant corolla is dominantly pink in color with some white, and is borne on a slender stem. The leaves are opposite, roundish in outline, and sparingly crenate. In places along the margins of certain woodlands, several square feet of ground are covered by this trailing little evergreen. Asa Gray, in his new "Manual of Botany," writes that it is "dedicated to the immortal Linnaeus, who first pointed out its characters, and with whom the European type of this pretty little plant was a special favorite."

The lovely violet-blue Hairbell (Campanula rotundifolia) continues to bloom well into September. This dweller of cliffs and rock ledges grows close to the ocean as well as near the summits of the mountains on the island, but seems to be most abundant in the former situation. Lord Tennyson must have found a flower like our Hairbell, gracing the bold face of some otherwise barren mass of rock, to write -

"Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."