Elegant slender branching annual plants with linear or lanceolate leaves and solitary or racemose flowers. Parts of the flower in fours. Petals clawed, often deeply 3-lobed.

Capsule linear, many-seeded; seeds neither plumose nor winged. Only four species are known, all from North-west America. Named after Captain Clark, a traveller.

1. C. pulchella (fig. 105). This grows from 18 inches to 2 feet high, with glabrescent linear leaves and large flowers having deeply trilobate petals with a pair of small opposite teeth on the claws. Under cultivation this has given birth to a double variety, and the flowers vary in colour from lilac-purple to white. There is also a variety with entire petals.

2. C. elegans. - A rather smaller flowered species. Leaves lanceolate, dentate. Petals entire, without teeth on the claw.

C. gauroides, syn. C. rhomboidea, is a less attractive species with smaller purplish flowers.

Fig. 105. Clarkia pukhella. (1/6 nat. size.)