Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/791

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PLANT LIFE OF THE CANARY ISLANDS.
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larkspur, poppies, and other highly colored flowers rush into bloom on the first approach of spring, making the fields look like veritable gardens of the gods. The roadsides and hills and neglected fields produce numerous gorgeously colored yellow, purple, and red

The Agave in Blossom. A Spanish fort and the city of Las Palmas in the background.

thistles, of a great variety of genera, very beautiful to look at, when one has not been trying to pick them.

Some plants which have been introduced for cultivation have become partly or completely naturalized. The aloe, which we know as the "century plant," makes hedges along the pathways, and is planted up the mountain sides in rows. It is used as fodder for goats and as thatch for peasant houses, and from the fiber are