THE two names by which this plant is known to the happy peasant, corn-flower and blue-bottle, demand no explanatory disquisition. Before the flower expands, the ovoid involucre bears a very fair resemblance to a bottle, but the completion of the growth makes a great change in the general configuration, the resplendent blue florets forming a series of stars, so that the bottle is now hidden by its adornments. As a garden plant it varies much in color, and a pale variety has been selected for the present figure.

This occasional occupant of the corn-fields is regarded by the botanists as of South European or West Asiatic origin, having been spread abroad from its original habitat by commerce. It has had the good fortune, owing doubtless to its conspicuous beauty, to be recognised by all who have written about plants. In Hippocrates it figures as an astringent herb, which may be infused in wine as a corroborant. In Turner's Herbal (1568) it is thus introduced to us:--"Blewbottel, otherwise caled Blewblawe, is named in Greek, Kyanos; in Latin, Cyanus, or Ceruleus; in Duche, Blaw Cornblumen; in Frenche, au fioin, or blaueole, or bleuet. Some herbaries call it baptisecula, or blaptisecula, because it hurteth sicles, which were ones called of olde writers seculae." After a few words of description Turner gives us two touches of romance, thus:--"About mid-summer the chylder use to make garlandes of the floure. It groweth much amongst rye, wherefore I thinke that goode rye in an euell and vnseasonable yere doth go out of kinde into this wede." But it was quite a common belief of the time that a plant might, in growing, change its nature without the aid of the ages and the slow-working influences required by the modern doctrine of evolution. The staying of the sickle by the corn-flower is noticed by many of the old writers. Gerarde calls it "hurt sickle," and saith "it hindereth and annoieth the reapers by dulling and turning the edges of their sickles in reaping of corne."

Whether the old generic and specific name Cyanus be commemorative of a beautiful youth, or whether it refers directly to the blue colour of this flower, we would not venture to declare. Cyanus is the name of this flower, and cyaneus colour is necessarily a blue colour. The juice of this flower, treated with alum, yields a beautiful blue dye, which, however, is now scarcely known in the arts, because long since superseded. Thus, our plant is excluded from the utilities, unless we reckon as one of them what is said by Turner, that "about midsummer the chylder use to make garlandes of the floure." However, there is a large constituency to vindicate the flower on the ground of the most commonplace usefulness, for it supplies breakfast, dinner, and tea to any number of bees and butterflies, which literally rush upon it, so that to the butterfly collector it often proves a profitable decoy. The Painted Lady, amongst many others, has a particular liking for the hypothetical beautiful youth.

Amongst the hardy annuals that will bloom abundantly in any kind of soil in a sunny garden there are four good blue-bottles--namely, C. cyanus, now before us, the height of the plant two to three feet, silvery in stem and leaf, the flowers varying in colour from white to dark purple; C. crocodylum, the crocodile flower, the plant averaging from one to two feet in height, the flowers being purple and white; C. depressa, which is never depressed in spirits, but only in stature, being but one foot high--a silvery plant, with flowers rather less showy than those of our great, true, weedy, and wonderful "corn-flower;" and C. inrolucrata, a very involved crater, the involucre curious in structure, the flowers yellow. The last-named is a somewhat ugly thing, that the florist may with propriety hand over to the botanists and the artists.

The perennial centaureas comprise a few fine plants, such as C. Babylonica, a gaunt grey weedy herb, like the tower of Babel, of noble stature, bearing unattractive yellow flowers; a truly fine plant for the shrubbery, and a proper companion to any of the mulleins; C. dealbata, a neat silvery-leaved plant, bearing red flowers that serve as sham rubies to set off the lustre of the "albata plate;" C. montana, a good border plant, producing flowers like those of C. cyanus, but larger, and with a wider range of colour in its variations.