Familiar wild flowers figured and described

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

RIVERSIDE

Ex Libris <
ISAAC FOOT

rvj i N!T.

FAMILIAR

WILD FLOWERS.

FIGURED AND DESCRIBED BY

F. EDWAKD HULME, F.L.S., F.S.A.

" There lives and works
A soul in all things, and that soul is God.
The beauties of the wilderness are His,
That make so gay the solitary place.
He sets the bright procession on its way,
And marshals all the order of the year ;
And ere one flowering season fades and dies,
Designs the blooming wonders of the next."

COWPEE.

Jpourrt) Stoics. ^.J" Vr 4-

WITH COLOURED PLATES.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:

LONDON, PARIS & NEW YORK.

[ALL KIGHTS HESEKVEIX]

CONTENTS.

TAOE

CORN-MINT

1

ANEMONE ... „

5

SAW-WORT . o ,

9

WOOD SORREL .....

13

HEATH OR LING „

17

HOP TREFOIL ...

21

CROSS-LEAVED HEATH

25

TOUCH-ME-NOT

29

RED BARTSIA

. . .33

MOUNTAIN POPPY ....

37

MILK THISTLE .....

. . .41

HAIRY ST. JOHN'S WORT .

. 45

CORN BLUE-BOTTLE ....

. 49

COW-WHEAT

. . . . .63

ORPINE

57

MEADOW SAXIFRAGE ....

. 61

FIELD SCABIOUS

• . <iy

STONE-CROP OR WALL-PEPPER

. 09

TUBEROUS PEA

73

CORN MARIGOLD

M - . . .77

SELF-HEAL. '.....

81

iv CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHARLOCK. . , - . ' ...
SMALL WILLOW-HERB . . . -

QO

FEVERFEW

THRIFT • '

BLADDER CAMPION 101

LESSER EED-RATTLE . X ? • * • • 1C

WATER FIG-WORT . • • ^

SAIXFOIX .
RAG-WORT

KNOT-GRASS

BOG ASPHODEL
WOODRUFF

113
117

CENTAURY

CROSS-WORT 12°

129

MEADOW SAFFRON . . • 13S

FOOL'S PARSLEY . -••..••• 13"

141
145

KIDNEY VETCH .

FUMITORY 153

BROOM RAPE . , . 157

SUMMARY.

IT should be prefaced that this Summary merely professes to give a
brief epitome of each of the plants represented in this volume, and
that it is principally a condensation from the writings of Hooker,
Lindley, Bentham, or other authorities on the subject.*

CORN-MINT, MENTHA ABVENSIS. Nat. Ord., Ldbiatce.— Calyx
tubular, campanulate, equal, five-toothed. Corolla monopetalous,
hypogynous, tubular, nearly regular, four-cleft. Stamens four, diverg-
ing. Ovary one, deeply lobed. Style arising from between lobes.
Stigma two-lobed. Flowers in dense axillary whorls. Achenes four,
within calyx. Leaves opposite, stalked, ovate, serrate, hairy. Stem
square. — Cornfields. July, August, September. Perennial.

ANEMONE, ANEMONE NEMOROSA. Nat. Ord., Ranunculaceas.
—Calyx petaloid, white, often pink or purple beneath, glabrous, of five
to nine oval sepals. Corolla wanting. Stamens and styles indefinite.
Fruit an achene, horned. Flower-stem bearing single flower at its
summit, and having a single ring of three involucral tri-partite
serrate leaves. Eadical leaves of similar character. Boot-stock hori-
zontal, black.— Woods and sheltered hedgerows. March, April, May.
Perennial.

SAW-WORT, SERRATULA TINCTORIA. Nat. Ord., Composite.
—Calyx adherent with ovary. Corolla tubular. Involucre oblong,
imbricated with unarmed or downy scales, glabrous. Stamens five.
Anthers syngenesious, ecaudate at base, appendages obtuse. Ovary
one. Style one, sheathed by anther tube, bifid at apex ; the stigmas
* See Prefatory Note to the Summary, Series I.

vi FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

along each branch. The plant diaecious. Fruit an achene, obovate,
glabrous, compressed ; pappus pilose, hairs filiform, in several rows.
Receptacles chaffy. Flower-heads in corymbs. Lower leaves pinna-
tifid or pinnate; upper ones lanceolate; all finely serrate. Stems
erect, stiff, slightly branching. — Woods and copses, sheltered pastures.
July, August. Perennial.

WOOD SORREL, OXALIS ACETOSELLA. Nat. Ord., Oxalidacea.
— Calyx of five short ovate sepals, membranous, ciliate, tinged with
purple, persistent. Petals five, retuse, ovate-cuneiform, striate with
purple veins ; claws small, yellowish. Flowers solitary, fragile look-
ing, drooping. Stamens ten, five shorter than the others. Ovary
superior, roundish, bearing five erect and filiform styles. Fruit cap-
sular, membranous, five-celled, five-valved. Leaves radical, on long,
slender, naked petioles; each composed of three equal, entire, obcor-
date leaflets, purplish beneath; hairy, spreading, drooping at night.
Flower-stems with two ovate, scaly bracts. Boot-stock creeping,
jointed, scaly. — Woods and shady hedgerows. May. Annual.

HEATH or LING, CALLUXA VULGARIS. Nat. Ord., Ericacea.
—Calyx of four coloured lanceolate leaves, much larger than corolla,
and accompanied by four external small, ovate, pointed, spreading
bracts. Stamens eight ; anthers clustering in a ring round style, and
furnished with two appendages. Corolla monopetalous, campanulate,
marcescent, purple, deeply divided into four segments, drooping. Style
filiform, longer than calyx. Stigma quadrifid. Leaves numerous,
small, spurred at base, opposite, sessile, placed round the small
branches in four rows. Stem upright, wiry, freely branching. Inflo-
rescence racemose. Capsule four-celled, four-valved. — Heaths and
moors. June, July, August. Perennial.

HOP TREFOIL, TRIFOLIUM PROCUMBENS. Nat. Ord., Legu-
minosa;. — Calyx of five unequal teeth. Corolla papilionaceous, petals
narrow, cohering by their claws, persistent; the standard deflexed
after flowering, and striate. Stamens ten, diadelphous. Ovary one-
celled. Style and stigma one. Flowers small, in dense, oval, many-
flowered heads, on long axillary peduncles. Pod scarcely projecting
beyond calyx, two-valved. Leaves alternate, stipulate, trifoliate,

SUMMARY. vii

stalked; leaflets serrate, obcordate. Stipules broad and pointed.
Stem erect and procumbent, freely branched at base.— Dry pastures
and hedge-banks. June, July, August. Annual.

CROSS-LEAVED HEATH, ERICA TETRALIX. Nat. Ord.,
Ericacece.— Calyx of four leaves, hairy. Corolla monopetalous, ovate,
the mouth divided into four reflexed segments, marcescent, rose-
coloured, drooping. Flowers umbellate-capitate, all inclined one way.
Stamens eight. Anthers purple, closing together in a ring, awned
at base. Style filiform. Seed-vessel capsular, four-valved, four-celled.
Leaves in rings of fours, linear, ciliate, revolute at margins. Stalk
shrubby, freely branching, wiry, rough.— Heaths and moorlands.
July, August. Perennial.

TOUCH-ME-NOT, IMPATIENS NOLI-ME-TANGERE. Nat. Ord.,
Balsaminacece. — Sepals four or five, one spurred and recurved, very
irregular in structure. Petals also variable, yellow, orange-spotted,
ordinarily two. Both calyx and corolla coloured. Stamens five,
filaments more or less united and very short. Anthers cohering.
Ovary five-celled. Stigmas five, sessile. Peduncles many-flowered,
slender. Fruit a capsule, having five elastic valves, rolling back sud-
denly when touched, when ripe. Leaves exstipulate, alternate, ovate,
serrate, petiolate, flaccid. Stem succulent, swelling at the joints, and
snapping readily at those points, erect, branching.— Moist woods.
July, August, September. Annual.

RED BARTSIA, BARTSIA ODONTITES. Nat. Ord., Scrophu-
lariacecc. — Calyx tubular, dull red, quadridentate, hirsute, teeth equal
and sharp. Corolla monopetalous, ringent, irregular; upper lip con-
vex and notched ; lower lip divided into three equal obtuse segments.
Stamens four, didynamous, unequal. Style filiform, at first beneath
upper lip of corolla, but afterwards longer. Stigma two-lobed. Fruit
an oval, oblong, compressed capsule, two-celled, many-seeded. Inflo-
rescence, numerous long, erect, racemes, often nodding at summit, and
having the blossoms thrown out in one direction. Bracts lanceolate,
upright, dull purplish. Leaves opposite, sessile, lanceolate, turning
back, slightly serrate, hirsute. Stem upright, freely branching,
hirsute, square.— Cornfields, roadsides, and waste ground. June, July,
August. Annual.

viii I AMI LIAR WILD FLOWERS.

MOUNTAIN POPPY, MF.CONOPSIS CAMBRICA. Nat. Ord.,
Papaveracecc. — Calyx of two deciduous sepals. Corolla of four large,
pale yellow, crumpled petals. Stamens indefinite. Stigma rayed.
Ovary one-celled. Fruit ropsular, oblong, glabrous, many-seeded.
Flowers singly on long peduncles. Leaves stalked, alternate, bright
green; downy or slightly hairy, pinnate, the segments toothed, lobed,
or pinnatifid. Stems erect, round. Whole plant herbaceous. — Eocks
and woods. June. Perennial.

MILK THISTLE, CARDUUS MARIANUS. Nat. Ord., Composite.
Flower-heads on summits of branches, large, purple ; florets perfect,
infundibuliform, with curved tube, segments five, equal, linear. Fila-
ments short, monadelphous; anthers purple. Ovary ovate, sur-
mounted by filiform style. Stigma bifid. Eeceptacle pilose. Fruit
angular, wrinkled, crowned with simple and rigid pappus. Invo-
lucre of many imbricate and recurved scales, spinous at apex and on
margins, subfoliaceous. Leaves large, alternate, sinuate, spiny, veined
with white; lower leaves spreading, pinnatifid; upper ones waved,
amplexicaul, ovate-lanceolate. Stems erect, firm, branched, striate.
Hedges, banks, rubbish-heaps. June, July. Biennial.

HAIRY ST. JOHN'S WORT, HYPERICUM HIRSUTUM. Nat.
Ord., Hypericacece. — Calyx five-partite, inferior, the sepals lanceolate,
acute, with glandular serratures. Petals five, unequal-sided. Sta-
mens numerous, triadelphous. Ovary one. Styles three. Flowers
numerous, in a pyramidal panicle, yellow. Capsules many-seeded,
Stem erect, hairy. Leaves opposite, stalked, slightly downy, ovate,
entire, marked with pellucid dots. — Woods and thickets, more par-
ticularly on the chalk. July, August. Perennial.

CORN BLUE-BOTTLE, CENTAUREA CYANUS. Nat. Ord.,
Composite. — Flower-heads capitate; flowers tubular, five-toothed.
Florets of the ray few, large, bright blue, infundibuliform, neuter;
florets of the disk, small, dark purple, fertile. Stamens five, inserted
on corolla. Filaments distinct, anthers united. Ovary adherent to
calyx. Style single, sheathed by anthers. Stigma bifid. Fruit an
achene, with simple pappus. Seed solitary. Involucre covered with
imbricated brown scales. Leaves alternate, long dull green; lower

SUMMARY. us

ones often toothed at base, upper ones entire and linear. Stem
slender , freely branching, wiry, striate, covered with a loose cotton-
like down. Eoot fibrous. —Cornfields, and in field crops. June, July
August. Annual.

COW-WHEAT, MELAMPYRUM PRATENSE. Nat. Ord., Scrophu-
lariacecc. — Calyx four-toothed, tubular, persistent ; much shorter than
corolla. Corolla monopetalous, irregular, deciduous ; upper lip later-
ally compressed; lower lip thrice-cleft. Flowers axillary, in pairs,
turned one way. Stamens four, didynamous. Anthers obtuse. Style
one. Stigma two-lobed. Capsule two-celled, oblong. Leaves lanceo-
late, opposite, sessile. Bracts in pairs, toothed -at base. Stem slender,
with opposite and spreading branches.— Woods. May, June, July,
August. Annual.

ORPINE, SEDUM TELEPHIUM. Nat. Ord., Crassulacece.— Calyx
minute, fleshy, five pointed segments. Corolla regular, of five lanceo-
late acutely-pointed, pink, flat, widely-extended petals. Stamens
ten; anthers conspicuous. Inflorescence corymbose, dense, terminal.
Ovaries five, verticillate, one-celled. Leaves numerous, upright,
sessile, ovate, serrate, smooth, fleshy. Stalks numerous, erect, clus-
tered, tinbranched, round, solid, spotted with red. — Borders of fields,
waste places, hedge-banks. July, August. Perennial.

MEADOW SAXIFRAGE, SAXIFRAGA GRANULATA. Nat.
Ord., Saxifragacece.— Calyx of five teeth, spreading. Petals five, pure
white, spreading, lanceolate. Stamens ten, inserted at base of calyx.
Styles two. Inflorescence paniculate. Ovary two-celled. Capsule
two-celled, beaked, many-seeded. Leaves exstipulate; lower leaves
on foot-stalks, reniform, lobed; upper leaves sessile or nearly so,
acutely-lobed, small and few in number. Stem erect, with clustering
subterranean tubers at base.— Pastures and downs. May, June.
Perennial. »

FIELD SCABIOUS, KNAUTIA ARVENSIS. Nat. Ord., Dipsa-
cacece.— Flowers in dense and flattened heads, on long peduncles.
Calyx tube adnate with ovary. Calyx of five bristly sepals, and cup-
shaped base. Outer florets large, unequal ; inner florets having equal
segments, all lilac, and all four-lobed. Receptacle hairy. Style one.

x FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

Fruit dry, indehiscent, angular. Radical leaves, large, lanceolate,
serrate, coarse-looking, hairy. Stem-leaves opposite, small, sessile,
slightly lobed, variable in form. — Pastures and banks. June, July,
August. Perennial.

STONE-CROP or WALL-PEPPER, SEDUM ACRE. Nat.
Ord., Crasswtacetc.— Calyx of five ovate, oblong, obtuse sepals, gibbous
at base. Corolla regular, of five golden yellow, lanceolate, acuminate,
spreading petals. Stamens ten. Ovaries five, glabrous, verticillate,
with nectareous scale beneath, and subulate style. Stigma simple.
Fruit of five carpels. Leaves alternate, erect, ovate, gibbous, fleshy,
smooth, bright green, acrid, and on the barren shoots closely imbri-
cated in rows. Inflorescence terminal, cymose. Stems ascending,
succulent, branched. Root creeping and fibrous. Walls and rocks.
June, July. Perennial.

TUBEROUS PEA, OROBUS TUBEROSUS. Nat. Ord., Legu-
minosce.— Calyx five-toothed, obtuse at base, oblique at mouth. Corolla
papilionaceous, purple, veined. Style linear. Stigma one. Stamens
ten, diadelphous. Legume two-valved, several-seeded, long, pendulous,
black, cylindrical. Leaves pinnate, without tendrils, stipulate, three
or four pairs of leaflets. Stipules sagittate. Flowers in axillary
racemes, borne on long peduncles. Stem winged. Eoot tuberous.
— Woods and copses. May, June, July. Perennial.

CORN MARIGOLD, CHRYSANTHEMUM SEGETUM. Nat. Ord.,
Composite.— Calyx adherent, with ovary. Kay-florets, conspicuously
ligulate. Involucre hemispherical, having imbricated and membra-
naceous scales. Stamens five; anthers syngenesious. Ovary one.
Style one, sheathed by anther-tube, bifid at apex. Stigmas extended
on each branch of style. Flower-heads large, on terminal peduncles.
Fruit an achene; disk achenes terete. Receptacle without scales.
Pappus wanting. Leaves amplexicaul, alternate, glaucous, lobed or
serrate, varying in form considerably according to position. Stems
branching freely. — Cornfields. June, July, August, September, October.
Annual.

SELF-HEAL, PRUNELLA VULGARIS. Nat.Ord., Ldbiatce.— Calyx
tubular, ovate, closed on fruit; upper lip three-toothed; lower one

SUMMARY. xi

two-toothed. Corolla monopetalous, hypogynous, irregular ; upper,
lip nearly entire, and arched ; lower one three-lobed. Stamens four,
ascending, parallel; filaments divided into two near their summits,
and one only bearing anther. Ovary one, four-lobed. Style arising
from between the lobes, bifid. Stigma two-lobed. Achenes four,
within calyx, a solitary seed in each. Flowers in dense whorls, brac-
tate. Leaves opposite, stalked, ovate, ordinarily entire. Stem
square.— Moist pastures. July, August. Perennial.

CHARLOCK, SINAPIS AEVENSIS. Nat. Ord., Cruciferce.—
of four linear, spreading, blunt, and hairy sepals. Corolla of four
obcordate, clawed, spreading, yellow petals. Stamens six, two being
shorter than the others ; filaments yellow, tapering. Stigma capitate.
Seed-vessel a two-valved, glabrous, many-seeded, and beaked pod.
Leaves on foot-stalks, spreading, alternate, rough, serrate; upper
ones ovate-lanceolate; lower ones lobed at base. Stem upright,
branched, round, solid, hispid. Root simple, fibrous. — Cornfields and
amongst crops. May, June, July. Annual.

SMALL WILLOW-HERB, EPILOBIUM MONTANUM. Nat.
Ord., Onagracece. — Calyx-tube adnate with ovary, deciduous, limb
divided nearly to base. Corolla of four petals, regular, pink, deeply
notched. Stamens eight, inserted in calyx, erect. Style filiform.
Stigma four-lobed. Capsule slender, four-celled, four-valved, many-
seeded ; seeds tufted. Leaves on short stalks, ovate, toothed, glabrous.
Stem erect, simple, or very slightly branched. — Banks, roofs, and
•walls. June, July. Perennial.

FEVERFEW, MATBICABIA PARTHENIUM. Nat. Ord., Composite
— Flower-heads pedunculate, inflorescence corymbose and terminal.
Involucre hemispherical, scales membranous, imbricated, villous.
Disk-florets tubular, numerous, perfect, yellow, five-toothed. Ray-
florets pistilliferous, white. Stamens five; filaments very short;
anthers forming a tube. Ovary angular. Style short, filiform. Stigma
bifid, spreading. Fruit an achene, angular, furrowed, crowned with
toothed disk. Leaves petiolate, alternate, light green, bi-pinnate,
segments ovate. Stem erect, smooth, branched. Root thick, branch-

xii FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

ing, with numerous fibrous tufts.- -Waste places, hedgerows. July,
August, September. Perennial.

THRIFT, ARMERIA MARITIMA. Nat. Orel, Pliimbaginacea?.—
Calyx tubular, dry, membranous, teeth short. Corolla regular, of
five petals, united at base. Ovary single, one-celled. Stamens in-
serted on corolla. Styles five, hairy. Stigmas five, filiform. Flowers
in dense terminal, globular heads, with bracts, and inverted sheath
clothing upper portion of scape. Capsule one-seeded. Leaves long
and linear, radical, numerous, one-nerved. — Salt marshes. April,
May, June, July, August. Perennial.

BLADDER CAMPION, SILENE INFLATA. Nat. Of-d., Caryo-
phyllacece. — Calyx tubular, monophyllous, five-toothed, persistent,
inflated, reticulated. Corolla of five petals, clawed, deeply cleft,
white. Stamens ten. Ovary one. Styles three. Inflorescence pani-
culate, flowers slightly drooping. Capsule three-celled, many-seeded,
dry, six-toothed, opening at top. Leaves opposite, entire, exstipulate,
ovate-lanceolate, glaucous. Stems tumid and fragile at joints, erect,
glaucous, glabrous. — Eoadsides, hedgerows, meadows. June, July,
August. Perennial.

LESSER RED -RATTLE, PEDICULARIS SYLVATICA. Nat.
Ord., Scrophulariacea. — Calyx angular, glabrous, persistent, inflated,
teeth foliaceous, segments five, unequal. Corolla monopetalous,
irregular, deciduous, ringent, open at throat; upper lip compressed
and arched; lower one flat and three-lobed. Stamens four, didy-
namous, two of them hairy. Style one. Stigma two-lobed. Capsule
two-celled, compressed; seeds angular. Leaves, alternate, pinnate,
deeply serrated. Stem branched and spreading.— Moist pasturage
and waysides. April, May, June, July. Perennial.

WATER PIG-WORT, SCROPHULARIA AQUATICA. Nat. Ord.,
Scrophulariacece.— Calyx persistent, five-lobed. Sepals having mem-
branous margin. Corolla monopetalous, irregular, deciduous, globose ;
two short lips, one two-lobed and straight, the other three-lobed, and
having central lobe decurved, dull purple. Stamens four, didynamous.
Style one. Stigma two-lobed. Flowers in terminal and long panicles.

SUMMARY. xiii

Capsule two-celled, two-valved. Leaves glabrous, opposite, corda,te-
oblong, obtuse, crenate ; bracts small and linear. Stem erect, winged
—By the sides of watercourses. June, July, August, September.
Perennial.

SAINFOIN, ONOBRYCHIS SATIVA. Nat. Ord., Leguminosce.—
Calyx five-toothed, the teeth long and slender. Corolla of five petals,
papilionaceous, wings short. Stamens ten, diadelphous. Inflorescence
racemose, on long axillary peduncles. Ovary one-celled. Style and
stigma one. Legume two-valved, indehiscent, sessile, toothed on
inner margin, coriaceous, flattened, one-seeded. Leaves stipulate,
alternate, pinnate, without tendrils, glabrous; numerous leaflets,
stipules small, finely -pointed. — Open down-land and chalk slopes.
June, July. Perennial.

BAG-WORT, NECIO JACOBCEA. Nat. Ord., Composite.- Calyx
adherent with ovary. Florets all perfect. Involucre having one row
of equal scales, and a few smaller ones at base. Stamens five. Anthers
syngenesious, ecaudate. Ovary one. Style one, sheathed by anther-
tube, bifid at apex. Stigmas on inner surface of the two branches of
style. Receptacle naked. Heads of flowers in corymbs. Fruit an
achene, terete, pappus, pilose. Leaves pinnate or pinnatifid, lyrate,
very variable in form and size, segments toothed, glabrous. Stems
erect, striate, branched near the summit. — Eoadsides, waste ground,
neglected meadows. July, August, September. Perennial.

CENTAURY, ERYTHEMA CENTAURIUM. Nat. Ord., Gentia-
nace®.— Calyx five-cleft, half as long as tube of corolla, persistent,
segments linear. Corolla regular, infundibuliform, pink, limb five-
cleft, spreading, stellate. Stamens five. Anthers twisted. Stigmas
two. Inflorescence paniculate. Capsule linear, two-celled. Stem-
leaves opposite, exstipulate, ovate, oblong. Eoot-leaves spreading,
broader than those of the stem. Stem erect, nearly simple, glabrous-
Whole plant bitter to taste.— Dry pastures. June, July, August, Sep-
tember. Annual.

CROSS-WORT, GALIUM CRUCIATUM. Nat. Ord., RuUacece.—
Calyx adherent with ovary. Corolla regular, yellow, small, rotate,

xiv FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

four-cleft. Flowers polygamous, the fertile flowers sometimes five-
cleft, in small axillary corymbs. Stamens four, inserted on corolla.
Style one, bi-partite. Ovary one. Stigmas two, capitate. Fruit,
dry, a two-lobed pericarp, indehiscent. Sterns erect, hairy, square,
herbaceous, slender. Leaves four in a ring, ovate, hairy on both sides.
—Hedges, banks, and copses. April, May. Perennial.

KNOT-GRASS, POLYGONUM AVICULARE. Nat. Ord, Polygo-
nacvae.— Perianth five-partite, single, coloured, persistent. Stamens
inserted into base of perianth. Ovary superior, with three styles.
Stigmas entire. Flowers axillary. Achene wingless, triquetrous,
striate. Leaves with sheathing, two-lobed, scarious, stipules, lanceo-
late, alternate, entire. Stem jointed and branched, herbaceous, often
prostrate; very variable in appearance.— Waste ground and rubbish-
heaps. May, June, July, August, September. Annual.

MEADOW SAFFRON, COLCHICUM AUTUMNALE. Nat. Ord.,
Melanthacece. — Perianth tubular, rising from a spathe, petaloid, pale
purple, six -partite at summit, tube very long and attenuated. Sta-
mens six, perigynous. Ovary with three cells, many-seeded. Styles
three, thread-like, very long. Capsule three-valved. Leaves linear-
lanceolate, parallel-veined, sheathed at base, radical, eight or ten
inches long. Root bulbous. The leaves and fruit are developed in
the spring, and die away before the flowers appear.— Meadows and
hedgerows. August, September, October. Perennial.

FOOL'S PARSLEY, ^THUSA CYNAPIUM. Nat. Ord., Umbelli-
feree. — Calyx adherent with ovary, five minute teeth. Corolla white,
of five unequal petals, the outer ones the largest ; petals obcordate,
with inflected points. Stamens five, inserted on fleshy disk. Styles
two, short. Flowers in terminal umbels of about twelve equal rays ;
involucre wanting ; partial involucre unilateral, of three linear, con-
spicuous, pendant leaves. Achenes two, combined, ovate or globose.
Leaves numerous, alternate, sheathing the stem, compound, glossy
giving unpleasant odour when bruised. —Fields, gardens, waste ground,
and rubbish-heaps. July, August. Annual.

BOG- ASPHODEL, NARTHECIUM OSSIFRAGUM. Nat. Ord.,
Juncacetc. —Perianth of six sepals, persistent, spreading, lanceolate,

SUMMARY. xv

pointed, green below and yellow above. Stamens six, having their
filaments thickly clothed with a white wool, inserted in base of
perianth. Stigma entire. Capsule three-celled, three- valved ; seeds
numerous. Leaves linear, radical, parallel-veined, much shorter than
stems, sheathing at base. Pedicels with numerous bracts, stiff, erect,
bearing terminal racemes of flowers. — Bogs and moorlands. July,
August. Perennial.

WOODRUFF, ASPERULA ODORATA. Nat. Ord., Rubiacea;.—
Calyx adherent with ovary. Corolla regular, fugacious, infundibuli-
form, pure white, four-cleft. Style one. Stamens four. Ovary one.
Inflorescence paniculate. Fruit dry, globular. Leaves about eight
in a whorl, lanceolate, entire. Stem erect. The whole plant very
fragrant when dried.— Woods and copses. May, June. Perennial.

KIDNEY VETCH, ANTHYLLIS VULNERARIA. Nat. Ord., Legu-
minosce. — Calyx five-toothed, inflated, downy, contracted at mouth.
Corolla papilionaceous. Heads of flowers in pairs at end of stems;
the flowers numerous and sessile. Stamens ten, monadelphous. Ovary
one-celled. Style and stigma one. Legume two-valved, oval, few-
seeded, enclosed in calyx. Leaves alternate, stipulate, pinnate.
Bracts large and palmate. Whole plant covered with soft hair.— Dry
pastures and embankments. June, July, August. Perennial.

FUMITORY, FUMARIA OFFICINALIS. Nat. Ord., FumariacecE —
Sepals two, deciduous, small and scale-like, ovate-lanceolate, acute,
toothed. Corolla irregular, tubular, of four more or less united petals,
one spurred at base. Stamens six, diadelphous, hypogynous. Style
filiform. Stigma lobed. Inflorescence racemose. Fruit globose, one-
seeded, dry, indehiscent. Stems weak and brittle, glabrous, pale
green. Leaves much divided, glabrous, delicate, having twisted
petioles.— Koadsides, gardens, amongst field crops. Flowering all the
summer. Annual.

BROOM RAPE, OROBANCHE MAJOR. Nat. Ord., Orobanchacea.
Calyx of two or four lanceolate segments, bifid, variously divided,
ferruginous, persistent, bract at base. Corolla monopetalous, irre-

xvi FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

gular, ringent, purplish, tube bending downwards, convex ; upper lip
trifid and curved ; lower lip trifid, middle segment the longest. Sta-
mens four, hid under lip, two longer than the others. Style one,
downy, purplish, bent downwards. Stigma two-lobed, obtuse. Ovary
on a fleshy disk. Seed-vessel a capsule, ovate, oblong, two-valves.
Seeds numerous, small, linear, attached to sides of capsule. Inflo-
rescence spicate. Stalk upright, simple, hollow, roundish, channeled,
villous, bulbous at base, clothed with dry scales.— Parasitic on legu-
minous plants. May, June, July. Perennial.

FAMILIAK

WILD FLOWEBS.

THE COKN-MINT.

Mentha arvensis. Nat. Ord., Labiates.

UE, readers will have little
difficulty in finding the plant
here figured, as it is abun-
dantly distributed throughout
Britain, though, like many
plants, it is less commonly
met with as we travel north-
ward. It should be looked for
in fields and moist ground. Its
flowering season is August and
September. Like all the other
native species of mint, it
varies very considerably in
appearance in different plants,
some being much larger than
others, with a more developed
foliage, and a much greater
hairiness of all the parts. All
the species have a strong odour, that becomes more decided
still when the leaves are bruised in any way. The corn-
61

2 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS

mint is a perennial, and in this, as in all the mints, the
root-stock creeps freely, so that when the plant has once
taken hold of the ground it becomes very difficult to
eradicate it. From the low spreading branches that lie
near the ground, the flowering stems are each year thrown
up. The leaves are borne on stalks, and have their outlines
freely toothed. Like the other labiates, the stems are seen
to .be four-angled when cut across, and the leaves spring
from them in pairs. This quadrangular section and opposite
growthx)f the foliage may be very well seen in the white
dead-nettle, the ground-ivy, and the self-heal, or the
stachys, all plants that figure in our series. The upper
leaves in the corn-mint are smaller than the lower, and the
flowers are arranged in rings in their axils. The flowers
themselves are small individually, but the delicacy of their
colour and the dense clusters in which they grow give them
collectively an importance the units may lack, and ring
after ring of these blossoms form as a whole a conspicuous
and welcome addition to the flora of the fields and meadows,
and one that has not escaped the attention of our poets.
Peele, one of the older writers, a poet of the middle of the
sixteenth century, has the following lines : —

" Under the hawthorn and the poplar tree,
The humble florets all delight to be ;
The primrose and the purple hyacinth,
The dainty violet and the wholesome minthe."

The mint is by many of the older herbalists spelt
" minthe/' or we should feel that the recognised licence of the
poet nad been rather exceeded when mint by a perversion of
spelling was 'made to rhyme with hyacinth. In Brown's
*' Pastorals " we are invited to wander " into the meadows

THE CORN-MINT. 3

where mint perfumes the gentle air/' The garden mint is
referred to by Clare : —

" And where the marjoram once, and sage and rue,
And balm and mint, with curled-leaf parsley grew,
And double marigolds and silver thyme,
And pumpkins 'neath the window used to climb."

There is, we fear, little doubt but that practical agricul-
turists consider the corn-mint a nuisance, as its long
creeping roots bind the soil together, and ultimately over-
run a considerable area. It is generally an indication that
the drainage of the land has been neglected.

Gerarde says, "The smell of mint doth stir up the
minde and the taste to a greedy desire of meate ; " and
hence, we may perhaps conclude, the wisdom of the custom
handed down to us from our ancestors of having mint-sauce
with our lamb, though such an addition we prefer to con-
sider rather in the nature of a relish than as a deliberate
stimulus to greedy desire. Even in Roman times the mint
entered into matters culinary. Another use of it, we are
told, is to frighten mice from the dwelling. It is said, with
what truth we know not, that these little depredators are
so averse to the odour of mint that they rather vacate the
premises than endure it. The name Menlha was originally
applied to the mint by Theophrastus. Menthe, we learn
from Ovid, was a nymph who was metamorphosed by Pro-
serpine into the herb we now call mint. The speeific title
refers to the locality where the plant is found. In Wales
it is the Mintys ar-dir.

The various species of mint have much in common, and
have all been held in high medical repute. Westnaacott, a
doctor of medicine, who wrote a little book on plants in the
year 1694, mentions the various sorts, and states that they

4 FAMILIAR WILD FLO WEES.

are very well known to " the young Botanists and Herb
Women belonging to Apothecarys' Shops." We may
mention, by the way, that Westmacott is very fond of
capital letters, a fact that will duly appear as we proceed
with our quotation. " Mints have a biting, aroaiatick,
bitterish Sapor, with a strong fragrant Smell, abounding
with a pungent Volatile Salt, and a Subtil Sulphur which
destroyeth Acids. And herein doth lodge the Causation of
such Medicinal Virtues in this Herb and others of the like
Nature. In the Shops are— 1. The dry Herbs. 2ndly. Mint
Water. 3rdly. Spirit of Mints. 4th. Syrup of Mints. 5th.
The Conserve of the Leaves. Cth. The Simple Oyl. 7th. The
Chimical Oyl." Dodonseus says that " the sauour of sent of
Mynte reioyceth man, wherefore they sow and strow the
wild Mynte in this countrie in places whereas feastes are
kept, and in Churches. The iuyce of Mynte mingled
with honied water cureth the payne of the eares when
dropped therein, and taketh away the asperitie and rough-
ness of the tongue when it is rubbed or washed therewith."

THE ANEMONE.

Anemone nemorosa. Nat. Ord.,
'i Ranunculacece.

S the winds of March sweep
through thp copse and along
the hedgerows, the delicate
anemones or wind-flowers ex-
pand their blossoms to the
breeze; and the older writers
associated the March winds
with the opening flowers, and
made the one dependent on
the other. " The coy anemone,
that ne'er uncloses her leaves
until they're blown on by the
wind/' derives even its name,
which is Greek in its origin,
from this fabled association
with the breezes, for Pliny says
that it was so called because it
never opened its blossoms but

_. _ -V -:- when the wind was blowing.

Culpepper, we see, speaks also of the anemone as " called
wind-flower, because they say the flowers never open but
when the wind bloweth. Pliny is my author; if it
be not so, blame him." Culpepper's language, we may
mention, is often more expressive than polite, and he

\

6 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

has immense faith in himself. In his chapter on the
present plant, for instance, he strongly advises the roots
of the anemone to be chewed in the mouth, as " it purgeth
the head mightily, and is, therefore, good for the lethargy.
And, when all is done, let physicians prate what they
please, all the pills in the dispensary purge not the head
like to hot things held in the mouth.'"

The anemone is one of our most graceful wild plants,
its fresh green leaves and snow-white blossoms rendering
it a fit companion for the purple hyacinth, the nestling,
sulphur-tinted primrose, or the golden stars of the little
celandine. Men of science retain the old name because
they say its flowers appear so fragile as they resist the
keen winds of March, but the poets naturally side with
the old myth ; they more often call it the wind-flower.
Bloomfield, for example, writes : —

"Now daisies blush, and wind-flowers fill with dew ;"

and in Bryant's fine poem on the Autumn1 we find the
following lines : —

" The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the briar rose and the orchis died amid the summer's glow."

The wood-anemone is seen early in the spring, the
copses, woods, and sheltered hedgerows being whitened
with its countless blossoms. In fine, clear weather, the
flowers are fully expanded and face the sun; but when
its vivifying rays are withdrawn at the approach of
evening, or overcast by the rain-cloud, the flowers close
and hang down, thus preserving the inner delicate parts
from injury, and serving as a very good natural barometer
at the free service of those who wander " where, thickly
strewed in woodland bowers, anemones their stars unfold.""

THE ANEMONE. 7

Despite the poetry attaching- to the plant, it shares fully
in the acrid and bitter nature of almost all the plants in
the order Ranunculacese, an order containing the deadly
wolf's-bane or monk's-hood, the hellebore, and the fiery
and blistering- buttercups; and we should certainly our-
selves hesitate to resort to the remedy of chewing- its
root. The specific name of the anemone is nemorosa.
The student who translated Jiors cle combat as war-horse,
would probably tell us that this means that the plant
has nothing of the rose about it; but other authorities,
and those too of more weight, point us to the Latin word
for woody. The Anemone nemorosa, though much the
commonest of all our English species, is sometimes more
definitely specified for the sake of distinction as the wood-
anemone, while in Wales it is the " frithogen y goedwig,"
and in Ireland the " nead coilleah." Some few of the old
herbalists call the anemone the wood-crowfoot, because
its leaves resemble in shape those of some species of
crowfoot. The name is, however, an unfortunate one, as
amongst the crowfoot or buttercup family there is one,
the Ranunculus auricomus, a plant we have already
figured, and a dweller in the woods and copses, that
has a much greater right and prior claim to the name.
The anemone, if we may believe the stories of the
old Greek poets, had a most romantic origin, being
fabled to have sprung from the tears shed by Venus over
the dead Adonis : —

" Alas the Paphian ! fair Adonis slain !
Tears plenteous as his blood she pours amain.
But gentle flowers are born, and bloom around,
From every drop that falls upon the ground :
Where streams his blood, there blushing springs the rose;
And where a tear has dropped, a wind-flower blows."

8 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

Besides the wood-anemone we have the A. pulsatilla,
or Pasque-flower, so-called from its flowering- about the
Paschal season or Easter. It may be found occasion-
ally on open chalk downs, but it is by no means
common. Its flowers are large, violet-purple in colour,
and very handsome. Besides these two we occasionally
find the blue mountain-anemone, or A. apennina, and the
yellow wood-anemone, or A. ranunculoides ; but neither
of these can claim to be truly indigenous, though they
have at times strayed from cultivation and established
themselves in our woods. The first of the two has large
and pale lilac-blue flowers, and when growing in masses
has a very beautiful effect; the second we do not re-
member to have ever seen. The numerous varieties of
anemone grown in our gardens owe their origin to south
and east European species more or less transformed by
cultivation and the florist's art.

THE SAW-WORT.

Serratula tinctoria. Nat. Ord.,
Composites.

OT so striking perhaps in ap-
pearance as many plants of the
order, the saw-wort is not never-
theless without a certain beauty
of its own, in its slender growth
' and small fan-like flower-heads ;
and it gains an additional in-
terest when we remember that
before the days of aniline dyes
and all the products that an
extended commerce brings to
our shores from all over the
world, the saw-wort was one oi
the tinctorial plants of our
forefathers. It was used by
dyers to give a yellow colour
to woollen stuffs, and was fixed
with alum, but as it was inferior to the weld, or yellow-
weed, the Reseda luteola of the botanist, its use was con-
fined to the coarser goods.

The saw-wort belongs to the tribe of Cynafrocephalte.
The order in which it is included is so extensive, that it
has been found desirable to divide it into sub-orders
62

10 FAMILIAR WILD FLU WEES.

or tribes, and these are three in number : the Chicoracece,
the Cynarocejohalce, and the Cory mdif free. Without going
at too great a length into dry and formal botanical details,
we may be able to give an idea of the peculiarities of each,
as the knowledge, once gained, will enable our readers
themselves to assign to their proper tribe any composite
plants which they may find. In the first tribe all
the florets of the flower-head are ligulate and perfect.
Ligulate is a term that refers to the form of the flower ;
it is derived from the Latin ligula, a little tongue. If
we examine any flower-head of this tribe, we shall find that
each floret has its corolla on one side produced into a broad
tongue, or strap-like portion, and this, as in the dandelion,
forms by far the most conspicuous portion of the whole
arrangement. At a cursory glance all small details of
structure are lost, but we can at once give a good idea of a
dandelion by drawing a number of these radiating strap-
like forms. The term " perfect " signifies that every floret
is provided with both pistil and pollen-bearing anthers. The
sow-thistle, the dandelion, the hawkweed, and the chicory
are all good examples of this tribe of composites, and have
all appeared amongst our illustrations. The second tribe,
that to which the saw-wort belongs, has all the florets in
each flower-head tubular instead of ligulate, and all are
perfect in some of the species, or the inner ones are perfect
and the outer ones neuter in others. The various kinds of
thistles and knapweeds and the brilliant cornflower are all
good illustrations of this tribe. The third tribe is a very
extensive one, and, at first sight, less recognisable than the
other two. The greater number of the species which com-
pose it have radiate flowers — such, for example, as the
ox-eye or the daisy — and then they are readily distinguish-

THE SAW-WORT. 11

able. All the florets in the same head are perfect, and
similar in form, or else those of the circumference are fili-
form, tubular, or ligulate. If our readers will gather a
good selection of composite flowers, they will have no diffi-
culty in sorting them into the three tribes, as the first and
second are each very distinct from the third, and from each
other, and all that do not fall naturally into tribes one or
two, must of necessity go to number three. The milfoil,
the daisy, the tansy, the coltsfoot, the ragwort, the leopard's-
bane, the flea-bane, the feverfew, and the corn-marigold
are all characteristic plants of the third great tribe of the
composites, and may all be found represented amongst our
illustrations.

The general habit and appearance of the saw-wort,
when we see it growing, suggest its near relationship to
the thistles, but it has not the formidable prickles with
which those are armed. The general growth is stiff and
erect, and the leading stems spring direct from the root,
and are only slightly branched ; such branching as there is
preserves the general upward direction. The plant is
ordinarily from two to three feet high. The saw-wort is a
perennial, and its blossoms appear about August. It should
be looked for in open woods and thickets. It is fairly distri-
buted throughout England and Wales, but does not appear
to be indigenous either to Scotland or Ireland. The
lower leaves of the plant are pinnate, each of the four or
five pairs of lateral segments being aciitely pointed, and
the terminal member larger than the others. The upper
leaves are either simple in form, or with one or two pairs
of lobes at their base. All the leaves, no matter what
their position on the plant, have their outlines finely
toothed, hence the generic name Serratnla, a name derived

12 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

from the Latin serrnla, a little saw ; notwithstanding1 this
it has occasionally been found with its foliage entirely free
from these serrations. The flower-heads cluster on the
ends of the flowering- stems. Some, it will be seen, are
rather larger and stouter-looking- than the others. The
plant is what is termed botanically diacious, and if we
open some of the heads we shall find that all the florets
have stamens alone, while other heads on the same plant
have pistils alone. The florets are normally purple, but,
like many other purple flowers, and particularly purple
composites, they vary occasionally to white. The involucre,
or flask-like portion within which the florets are contained,
is covered by numerous small and tightly-adherent bracts,
the outer ones being- often more or less coloured towards
their tips. They are at times smooth to the touch, and at
others we find a slight cobweb-like down on them. The
specific name tinctoria, Latin in its origin, refers to its use
in dyeing.

THE WOOD SORREL.

Oxalis acetosetta. Nat. Ord., Oxalidacea.

HE subject of our present illus-
tration is one of the typical
flowers of the woods, and is so
freely distributed that our readers
should have little or no difficulty
in finding specimens for them-
selves. It may also be found
in mountain districts sheltering1
in crevices of the rocks. It
flowers during April and May.
The - love of the plant for damp
and shade naturally makes it a
dweller in the woods, its most
typical habitat, and those who
would transfer it to their gar-
dens must not fail to observe
these essential conditions of suc-
cess. We have seen the plant grow in a Wardian case,
its delicate beauty rendering it a very acceptable addition.
The root-stock of the wood-sorrel is perennial, creeping,
and covered with bright red scales, and from this all the
leaves at once ascend. These leaves are borne on long and
slender stalks, and each leaf is composed of three heart-
shaped leaflets, a delicate yellowish green on the upper

14 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

surface, and ordinarily a rather dark purple beneath.
These leaflets droop at night or on the approach of wet
weather. The flowers are pure white and delicately
streaked with purplish-pink veins. Curtis, in his " Flora
Londinensis," says, " It is said to vary with bluish and
purple-coloured blossoms," while Gerarde mentions some
pink specimens that had been sent to him, but such
variations from the type are very rarely encountered.
Each flower consists of five equal and similar petals, form-
ing- at their period of fullest expansion a deeply cup-like
corolla. The sepals, too, are five in number, small, and
bluntly terminated. The ten stamens are arranged in two
rings, the five opposite the petals being larger than the
other and alternating five. The flowers are more or less
pendulous on the light flower-stalks that support them.
These flower-stalks are about the same length as those of
the leaves, and each carries a single blossom ; about half-
way up two small bracts will be noticed on each stem.
When the seed-vessels are ripe, a gentle pressure will
cause them to open at their angles, and discharge their
seeds to some considerable distance.

A very agreeable acid flavour is perceived on tasting the
leaves, and it is to this feature that the plant owes both its
commonest name and its generic and specific appellations
Sorrel is derived from the same root as the word sour, and
in France the plant from the same reason is the surelle,
while the generic name oxalis is Greek in its origin, and
signifies the same thing, sour or acid. Acetosella is from
the Latin acetum, vinegar. The plant is by some of the
older writers called wood-sour or sour-trefoil. The essen-
tial salt, oxalic acid, extracted from it by crystallisation,
•is largely employed in taking out iron-mould and ink

THE WOOD SORREL. 15

spots from linen, twenty pounds of sorrel- leaves yielding
between two and three ounces of the salt. A conserve of
the leaves was also for a long- time a very favourite remedy
in malignant fevers, in scurvy, and in all ailments sug-
gesting the use of a cooling and acid drink. Gerarde
recommends it highly as making a " better greene sauce
than any other herbe whatsoever/' and also in that it
" cooleth mightily an hot pestilentiall fever, especially
being made in a syrrup with sugar."

The wood-sorrel bears many other names. It is with
some old herbalists the three-leaved grass, grass being a
very general term indeed in mediaeval days. It is also
the cuckoo-sorrel, panis cuculi, or " cuckow's meate/'
from an old belief that the bird in question cleared his
voice by its agency. In Scotland it is gowke-meat, in
Wales suran y coed yyffredin, and in Ireland the
seamsog. We have already given one French name for
it: a second is pain dii coucon. In Italy it is the
Iiiliola. A very common English name for the wood-
sorrel, though it is rarely used now, is the stub- wort,
the plant growing abundantly amongst the " stubs "
and roots of trees, and so getting its name. Another
familiar medieval name was the Hallelujah. Many of
our readers will no doubt be familiar with the legend that
St. Patrick, unable to make his savage auditory at all
comprehend the doctrine of a Triune Deity, saw at his
feet the leaf of the wood-sorrel, and made its familiar
form a symbol of the truth he would fain impress upon
them, and that henceforth the plant became dedicated to
that saint. The monkish name Hallelujah would appear,
however, to have been no song of joy and victory over
converted pagans ; it has been suggested that it derived

16

FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

its force rather from the fact that the wood-sorrel was
blossoming1 between Easter and Whitsuntide, when the
psalms of rejoicing were sung. The plant occurs not
uncommonly in old ecclesiastical decorations; there is a
very good glass quarry, based on its drooping leaves
and buds, in King's College, Cambridge ; and Fra Angelico
and other early painters introduced it. " The triple leaf
of this plant and white flower stained purple probably
gave it strange typical interest among the Christian
painters/'* Considerable diversity of opinion exists as
to what plant may be deemed the true sharm-ock of Erin.
Into the various arguments for and against the clover,
the present plant, and others, we have not here space to
g-o, but the balance would appear to be in favour of the
present plant. It is in full flower on the 17th of March
(St. Patrick's Day), and in a book written about 1603
we find the passage, " They willingly eat the herb sham-
rock, being of a sharp taste."

*Euskin.

HEATH OE LINGL

Calluna vulgaris. Nat. Ord.,
Ericaceae.

OT perhaps so attractive as
jp% the heather, Erica cinerea,
• :v^; already figured by us, the
present species is even more
abundant, and this, too,
although the heather is
found everywhere on our
northern moorland tracts
and the great commons and
wastes in the southern
counties. We get so accus-
tomed to using words without
a full consideration of their
meanings, and what is involved in
them, that we may be forgiven if
we here point out that these great
open commons are often called heaths
from the simple fact that various species of heath form their
most characteristic covering and adornment, and a vast
purple expanse of heath in the sunlight is one of the most
delightful pictures on which the eye can gaze. Though we
naturally associate the idea of the heath with a wide and
breezy expanse, the soil on which it grows is often suitable
for tree-planting. In an essay, entitled, " Wild Plants

18 FAMILIAR WILD VLOWERK.

a Guide to Soils/' we find the heath thus referred to: —
"When it is rank and strong-growing, it indicates deep,
black, mossy soil, poor, and naturally unfertile, but which, if
dry, and the altitude be not too great, will grow Scotch fir and
birch ; if wet, Scotch fir, spruce, and alder. If the heath
be close and healthy, and mixed with moss, tormentil, and
grasses, the soil is more fertile." Many of our poets refer
to the beauty of the heath, its effect in the landscape,
and its uses of various kinds. It is impossible to quote to
any large extent ; but any one who will turn to the writings
of the two great Scotchmen, Burns and Scott, will find
abundant references.

" Of this, old Scotia's hardy mountaineers
Their rustic coaches form, and there enjoy
Sleep, which heneath his velvet caiiopy
Luxurious idleness implores in vain."

The heath is applied to many useful purposes. Houses are
roofed with it instead of with thatch. In Scotland a strong
decoction of it is used in tanning leather, and a very re-
freshing drink is made by brewing together two parts of
heath-top to one of malt. The heath plant, too, is a good
deal used for making brooms, and for heating ovens, while the
turf, full of its fibrous and matted roots, and with the plants
still on it, is cut up, dried, and used as fuel by many a
poor cottager. Woven into a wooden framework it makes
a protective fencing. Neither horses nor cattle seem to
care for it, but in some parts of the country the old heath
is from time to time fired, as sheep enjoy the tender shoots
that afterwards spring up. This custom is referred to in
" Marmion." Its close and sheltering masses form a
home for many a wild animal, and birds and other small
creatures find a meal as well as a refuge in its umbrageous

HEATH OR LING. 19

depths. Grouse thrive on it, for example, and several
species of lepidoptera have the heath as the food-plant of
their caterpillars. Mary Howitt writes in one of her

poems of

" those wastes of heath,

Stretching for miles to lure the bee,
Where the wild bird, on pinions strong,
Wheels round, and pours his piping song,
And timid creatures wander free."

The heath-honey, however, is browner and coarser than that
which is gathered in other districts, and Gerarde, we see, says,
" Of these flowers bees do gather bad honey." It gains a
somewhat strong and distinctive taste that is more objected
to by some persons than by others. Quite recently a new
golden-yellow dye has been, brought out, made from the
woody portions of the heath. The shoots and stems are
crushed, and then boiled in alum-water ; after cooling, filter-
ing, and standing for some three or four days exposed to the
air, the liquid assumes a rich golden tint, and in this
state, says the " Textile Manufacturer," it can be used for
dipping fabrics of all materials. Used alone it gives various
tints of yellow and orange, with oak-bark a rich brown,
with cochineal tints of scarlet; or the colouring-matter
may be precipitated, and then forms a fine yellow body-
colour for wall-papers and many other purposes.

The heath or ling forms a low, straggling, and much-
branched shrub. Its branches are tough and woody, and the
leaves are borne in close masses on the side shoots. They are
very small, and placed in four rows. The flowers, too, are
small and of a purplish tint, or occasionally white. What
at a first glance we might suppose to be the corolla is in
reality the calyx, and the true corolla, having its petals

20 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

much shorter and smaller than the enclosing sepals, may
be seen within on a more critical examination. Outside and
beneath the true calyx may be seen four bracteas, resembling
a secondary calyx. The corolla is deeply cut into four
lobes, and the calyx and bracteal ring have each four parts,
while the stamens are eight in number. Its flowering
season is in June, July, and August. Africa is the true
home of the heaths, and many fine species may be found in
cultivation, but in Europe the ling is the most abundant
representative of the family. Linnaeus, in his " Flora
Lapponica," tells us that large tracts of Lapland are
covered with this heath, and that the people have an idea
that the whole earth is destined to be ultimately over-
spread by two plants, the heath and the tobacco. Their
prediction may not, after all, be so unreasonable as it appears
on the surface, for, leaving out of the question the thousands
of acres of heath in Scotland alone, tobacco in the only
form in which the Laplanders could possibly know it
has encircled the globe. The ling is in Wales called the
grug cyffredin, and in Ireland the fraogh, or the grig.

Hop -Tf^EFOi L

HOP TREFOIL.

Trifolium procumbent.
Leguminosa

Nat. Ord.,

HERE are so many different
species of trefoil, and so many
of them have so strong a simi-
larity, that their identification
is somewhat difficult to those
who have not specially studied
them, but though many of the
species have clustering and
yellow blossoms, the resem-
blance of the flower-heads of
the present species to little
hops is a sufficiently distinctive
and striking characteristic — a feature
that, of course, gains for it its name
of hop trefoil. The Welsh name for
the plant is Meillionen hoppysaidd. This
accidental resemblance in part to another
plant procured for the hop trefoil the name at one time of
the Lnpulus sylvatwus ; we find it thus named, for instance,
in Parkinson's "Theatrum Botanicum" and other books
of that period. Now the modern scientific name for the
hop is the Humulus lupulus, and the first name is from
the Latin word humus, soil or ground. Many of the
plant-names were bestowed by early botanists, whose

22 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

reasons for assigning them to the various plants are
now unknown, and the reasons that induced Linnaeus
thus to associate the hop with the soil are not
forthcoming. Some writers suggest that the name is
somewhat figurative, and refers to the feeble habit
of the plant ; this is a very unsatisfactory explan-
ation, as the hop is a strong and vigorous plant, as any
one can testify who has watched the rapidity with which
it grows over a hedge or upon any support. Another
theory is that the hop, if not supported, would grow and
trail on the ground ; this would-be explanation is too feeble
to need any comment. The best explanation, perhaps, is
that the hop is so-called from the rich soil or mould it
requires ; but this is, after all, only the best explanation
out of a very poor choice, and it largely shares the
unsatisfactory nature of the others. Lupulns is, we fear,
equally unsatisfactory ; it is derived from the Latin word
lupus, a wolf. Pliny calls the hop Lupus salictarius, or
willow-wolf, and it is suggested that it derived this
name from the tenacity with which it clung to the
willow and the injury it caused it. The hop has certainly
no special preference for the willow. Probably we have
lost sight of some ancient legend or other that would
help us to an understanding of the name.

The root of the hop trefoil is small, somewhat fibrous
and branching. Running stalks, some eight or nine
inches in length, spring from the base of the stem and
spread themselves freely all round. They are generally
somewhat weak and procumbent in habit, but at other
times are nearly erect. The central stems are ordinarily
the most upright ; as a rule all the stems are slightly
clothed with downy hair, and they are often reddish

HOP TREFOIL. 23

in tint, and especially near their bases. At the points
where the leaves are given off we find the oval and pointed
stipules growing1 in pairs. The leaves are composed of
three leaflets ; hence the name trifoliitm applied to the
genus, that word being Latin in its origin, and signifying
three-leaved. Each leaflet is broadly heart-shaped, the
central one being on a longer stalk than the others, and
removed to a little distance from them. The margins are
finely toothed, the lateral veins very straight-lined, and
parallel, and conspicuous. The leaf-stalks are ordinarily
shorter than the leaves themselves, thus offering a marked
contrast to those of the T. repens. or Dutch clover, and most
of the other species of the genus. The flower-heads are
borne on long and naked stalks, that spring from the axils
of leaves, and are much longer than those bearing the
leaves. The flower-heads are loosely globular or ovoid in
form, and each contain some thirty or forty blossoms.
These, a bright golden yellow in tint, stand on very
short stalks, so short that they are not visible without
pulling the flower-head to pieces. The various flowers lie
closely together, and give the head the compact and hop-
like character. After flowering, the upper portion of the pea-
like flower droops down over the rest, and the golden yellow
tint is exchanged for a pale warm brown or fawn colour. We
may in many of the flower-heads thus trace the progress of
decay, a few blossoms of the globular mass being brown,
and the rest still of a pure yellow tint. Beneath these
drooping standards of the flowers, and concealed by them,
may be found the ripening pods. The blossoms are of the
usual pea-flower type. A conspicuous standard stands
nearly erect; the wings are smaller than this, and the
keel is very small indeed, and contained within the wings.

21 FAMILIAR WILL FLOWERS.

The standard after flowering continues to increase in size,
and falls over in the way we have just mentioned. The
calyx is very minute in size, membraneous in texture,
yellowish in tint, and terminating in fine teeth, the upper
two of which are shorter than the others. Each pod is
found to contain a single shining and reddish-brown seed.

The hop trefoil is ordinarily to be found preferring rather
dry situations, such as railway embankments, roadside slopes,
dry pastures, open downs, and the like, and in such situ-
ations is abundant almost everywhere. Its blossoms may
be found from the middle of June to the end of August.
Though a detached portion, such as we are obliged to
figure, suggests the idea of a somewhat insignificant
flower, one that might readily be overlooked, this result is
not practically likely to happen, for the plant has a way of
spreading that makes it in the mass sufficiently striking,
and when we come across some yards of it on a dry and
gravelly bank there is no fear of its being overlooked.

CF^OSS-LEA/ED

CEOSS-LEAVED
HEATH.

Erica Tetralix. Nat. Ord., Ericaceie.

INGLED with the purple
heather, Erica cinerea, and the
ling-, or common heatn, Calluna
vulgaris, two familiar wild
flowers we figure in our series,
we ordinarily find the cross-
leaved heath, the subject of
our present illustration. It is
found all over Britain, and is
particularly common in the
west, and is more especially to
be met with on heaths and
moors where the ground is
somewhat moist. Thoiigh
smaller than the other species,

and not so gregarious — if we may apply that word to a thing
inanimate — it contributes its share in decorating and en-
livening the waste. The plant is a perennial, and should be
looked for during July and August by those who would
admire its delicate wax-like bells, for this species, though
not applicable to so many useful purposes as the others, is
not inferior to any one of them in the beauty of its
flowers. These in general are of a pale red colour, while
they may sometimes be found of a pure white — a charming
64

23 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

variety, though the normal state is quite as attractive, and
it is only, perhaps, the comparative rarity of the change
of tint to white that attracts us to it. Comparisons,
we are told, are odious, and we may justly bear that
in mind, for certainly neither tint needs the depreciation
of the other to enhance its beauty. We remember some
little time ago finding a plant of the white variety and
gathering a few of its heads of Howers. A botanical friend
who saw them was anxious to look at the plant itself, a
matter that appeared to present no special difficulty; so
we sallied forth and wandered for a long afternoon in
every direction over the open moorland, but never found it
— the proverbial difficulty of finding a needle in a bundle
of hay being about a parallel case. Our failure need
never have found record in these pages did it not illustrate
at least the comparative rarity of the white variety, for we
must have wandered miles altogether amongst the heath
clumps without finding an example.

The cross-leaved heath bears transplantation better than
some of the others, and will thrive well enough in the garden
if taken up either in the spring or after flowering, but as
large a portion of soil as possible must be moved with it.
It will be noticed that we say that it bears transplantation
better, not transplantation well; the matter is, after all,
comparative, and although we have tried more than once,
we have never been able to get either the purple heath
or the ling to do well in our garden. The things do not
actually die at once, but decadence sets in, and they seem,
like sentient beings, to pine for the free air of the moor-
land. It is of course always necessary to bear in mind, if
we would endeavour to grow wild flowers, that we must as
nearly as possible assimilate the conditions of growth ; this

CROSS-LEAVED HEATH. 27

seems evident enough when stated in so many words, but
we have before now found that it has not occurred to
everybody. People sometimes think that if a certain
plant does well under the hard conditions of its natural
growth, springing from a barren soil on the dusty road-
side, amidst the chinks of an old wall, or swept on the
moorland by all the drenching rain and the strong gusts
and breezes that gather their force on the bare expanse,
that of necessity it will do still better if removed to their
snugly walled-in garden, and planted in a far richer soil.
Experience, however, to say nothing of common sense,
does not confirm their view. In our remarks on the ling,
we refer to the fact that much of the ground on which
heath grows so freely, and which seems so utterly waste,
is really well adapted to the purposes of the woodman.

The cross-leaved heath is ordinarily a smaller plant
than either of the other two common species, and is often
rather overshadowed by them. The stalks are shrubby, and
from nine inches to a foot high. As the plant develops, the
lower leaves fall away a good deal, but the points to which
they were attached remain easily visible, and give a roughened
character to the stem. The leaves grow in fours on the stem,
a fact that is duly illustrated in its title, the cross-leaved
heath. The upper leaves are often gathered up so as nearly to
touch the stem, while the lower ones stand sharply out at
right angles from it. Each leaf has a fringing of soft, stiff
hairs ; these give a marked character to the foliage, though
they vary in degrees of development, and are sometimes,
though rarely, entirely absent. The flowers are ordinarily
somewhat larger than those of the fine-leaved heath, and
are always clustered together at the tops of the branches ;
all the flowers in one cluster turn in the same direction.

28 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

t: There is in this couutrie two kinds of heathe, one of
which beareth his floures alongst the stemmes and is called
long heathe; the other bearing- his floures in tutteys, or
tuftes, at' the toppes of the branches, the whiche is called
smal heath/' Both Ray and Parkinson call the plant
the low Dutch heath ; why this should be we cannot at
all explain, as there have never been any doubts thrown on
the claim of the cross-leaved heath to be considered an
indigenous British plant. They also call it the broom, or
besom heath, a name very applicable to its sister species,
but not so appropriate to the present plant. We might
at first imagine that some error as to the particular kind
had crept in, but Parkinson's description of "the small
greene leaves somewhat having foure together/' and of the
flowers " five or sixe together at the toppes of the branches,
of a pale purplish coloure/' leaves us in no doubt that the
species referred to is identical with the one we here figure.
The cross-leaved heath is the badge of clan Macdonald, as
the ling is of the Macdonnells. The third common species,
the fine-leaved heath, the gayest and most attractive of
them all, is the badge of the MacAlisters.

TOUCH-ME-NOT.

Impatiens Noli-me-tangere. Nat. Ord.,
Balsaminacete.

HOUGH some of our greater and
later authorities have decided
that the touch-me-not has little
or no claim to be considered an
indigenous species, it may very
fairly, we think, claim a place
in our series. A plant that
has naturalised itself for many
years — so many that Gerarde,
unhesitatingly accepts it as a
native, and Hill, writing more
than a hundred years ago, says
distinctly that it is a British
plant — may very legitimately
engage our attention. The

touch-me-not is called locally the quick-in-hand in some
districts, while in France it is the impatiente-n'y-
touehez-pas; and all these names, as we shall see presently,
are very appropriately bestowed on the plant. Touch-me-
not is an erect and branching plant, reaching a height of
some two feet. Its stems are perfectly smooth, rather
succulent, as the stems of most plants are that thrive in
damp situations, and swollen at the joints. The leaves
of the touch-me-not are very simple in form, what

30 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

is botanically termed ovate; it may be described as a
pointed egg-shaped leaf. Tbe leaves have toothed
edges ; in colour they are a rather palish green, and in
texture flaccid and delicate. The plant is found in moist
shady woods in the northern counties of England and
Wales, and much more rarely in Scotland. Its succulent
and fragile character causes it to bear removal very badly, and
even for the purpose of our illustration we found ourselves
obliged to bring several pieces home before we were able
to make the necessary drawing, as piece after piece drooped
and withered in spite of all our care. The slender flower-
stem rises from the axils of the leaves — i.e., the junctions
of the leaves with the main stalk — and each ordinarily bears
one or more specimens of two distinct forms of flowers.
The large and conspicuous yellow and orange freckled
blossoms are very curious in form, and composed of six
gaily-coloured pieces. The spur of the calyx is a notice-
able feature, and calls for observation, as a specific dis-
tinction based upon it is made between the present plant
and the Impatient fulva. In the first of these this spur
is loosely turned back and ends in a blunt and rounded
point, while in the second the same part is tightly bent
back on to the calyx, and its extremity is notched. The gay
flowers of the wild touch-me-not rarely ripen their seed or
form any fruit at all, but on each flower-stem are generally
found some one or more minute blossoms, and it is from
these that the pods are produced. As the seed ripens these
pods burst at the slightest touch and scatter the seed to
some considerable distance, the effect being decidedly
startling to one who is unaware of this peculiarity. We
need, after mentioning this, scarcely explain why the
plant is called Impatiens, and the name, or rather sentence,

TO UCH-XJS-XOT. 3 1

noli-me-tangere, would be so familiar in mediaeval times
from its association with the pictures of our risen Lord,
that it would naturally occur to the monkish herbalists.
" The nature of this plant is such," to quote one of these
old authors, " that if you touch but the pods when as
the seed is ripe, though you do it never so gently, yet will
the seed tiy all abroad with violence, as disdaining to be
touched, whence they usually call it noli-me-tangere. The
nature of this plant is somewhat admirable, for if the seeds
(as I said) be fully ripe, though you put but your hand
neere them, as profering to touch them, though you doe it
not, yet will they fly out upon you, and, if you expect no
such thing, perhaps make you affraid by reason of the
suddennesse thereof/' Its faculties as a medicine appear
to have puzzled the ancients, as they seemed unable to
" affirme any thing of certaintie, but rather by heare-
say." Tragus presented it as a " vomitorie." Hill, in
his "British Herbal/' published in 1756, says that it is1
a powerful but dangerous medicine, and that the leaves
bruised and applied to the skin will raise an inflam-
mation.

Though the "Herbal" of Hill, from the later date of its
publication, is not so quaintly curious as some of the
older herbals, its hundreds of careful illustrations of plants
give it a value of its own. Our edition, published in 1750,
is folio. The illustration on the title-page represents
" .Esculapius and Flora gathering from the lap of Nature
health and pleasure/' while the grand frontispiece shows
us " the genius of Health receiving the tributes of Europe,
Asia, Africa, and America, and delivering them to the
British reader." The genius of Health is a nude and
youthful figure, winged, but standing on the clouds, before

32 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

and below him stand or kneel the representatives of the four
quarters of the globe — a negro of the blackest type, though
not really so black, perhaps, as he is painted, for spear and
shield are laid aside and on bended knee he offers his floral
gifts ; beside him is the red man of America, and behind are
female figures typical of Europe and Asia. In the back-
ground is a group of would-be British readers, though the
artist has not ventured to put them in the habiliments
of every-day life. Clad in flowing togas, they reach
with outstretched arms for the scroll the genius of Health
advances towards them, and here, alas ! the author's
modesty failed him, for the scroll bears the words
"British Herbal, 1756."

/. fulva, the orange touch-me-not, a plant of North
America, has fully established itself, and is very commonly
met with along the banks of the Wey and other Surrey
streams. The flowers are smaller and of a deeper colour
than in the species figured.

RED B/-

EED BAETS1A.

Bartsia Odontites. Nat. Ord.,
Scrophularia-ceee .

HE red bartsia is too common
a plant almost everywhere to
be overlooked, though as Curtis,
in his " Flora Londinensis,"
says, '" it is not remarked
either for its beauty or utility."
It is not a brilliant or at-
tractive plant, and will probably
rarely find itself in the floral
posy of the wayside stroller,
being ordinarily either com-
pletely overlooked, or else held
not fit company for its gayer
contemporaries. At the same
time, as it is abundant by the
roadside, on rubbish-heaps, and
in corn-fields, we may not here pass it by, and more
especially as we may hope that our labours, to those
who are interested in them, may have led to a closer
scanning of the country-side, and those who overlooked
the bartsia before may now turn to our pages for infor-
mation respecting it.

The plant differs a good deal in size according to the
place in which it grows, though except in mere bulk the
65

34 FAX [LIAR WILT) FLOWED.

bartsia seems less subject to variation than many other
species. Amongst the standing corn it may be a foot or
more in height, while by the side of the dusty road we
see it flowering gallantly under harder conditions, and
not more perhaps than four or five inches high. It is
sometimes found with white blossoms, a colour- variation
which, as we have often seen in the case of other
flowers, is by no means rare. One marked variety of the
plant has been found in which all the parts are rounder
and more richly developed, and this has by some botanists
been raised to the rank of a distinct species; but there
seems small justification for this, as there is but little
doubt that the forms are simply the result of more
favourable conditions of growth, and that the plant
does not differ in any essential points from the accepted
type. In corn-fields, and when growing on fairly good
ground, the stems and leaves are often greener and more
succulent-looking than those that have a harder fight for
existence. The roadside plants are frequently almost
entirely purplish-red in colour, and this, added to the
dust and dirt of the highway settling on them, gives
them an appearance that is graphically described in the
term brownweed, one of the provincial names of the
bartsia. The plant, whatever its colour, bulk, or posi-
tion and station in life, has, as we have said, a strong
family likeness running through all the examples, and
its identification under any circumstances is by no means
difficult. The bartsia is an annual, and should be looked
for during June, July, and August, the months when
its flowers are developed.

When we go a little more into detail, and analyse
the structure of the plant, we find that its root is very

RED BAliTSIA. 35

fibrous and woody, while the stems boldly shoot up from it.
These stems branch a g'ood deal laterally, and always in
pairs ; they are in section somewhat squarish, or a form
that may be explained as a square with more or less
rounding of its corners, and are very often somewhat
hairy. The leaves, of which only one true pair is shown
in our drawing, are in pairs on the stem. The other
foliate forms in our sketch are the floral leaves, and
these are often in many plants more or less irregular
in arrangement, even when the stem-leaves follow a rigid
law. This is the case in the present plant ; the alternate
and somewhat irregular arrangement of the flower- leaves
is at variance with the regular pairing off of the lower
and stem-leaves. The leaves, it will be seen, are stalkless
and lanceolate, and have their margins cut into a few
large teeth. Their surfaces are often hairy, and the veins,
though few in number, are conspicuously marked. The
flowers grow in long spikes, all on each spike being
turned in one general direction. We almost invariably
find that these spikes nod or bend a little at the top, a
perfectly natural arrangement, though it suggests the idea
that the piece we have gathered is drooping, and needs the
refreshing influence of a vaseful of water. The flowers
individually are of the usual scrophularious and irregular
type, and are divided into two very distinct lips ; the upper
one is convex, or dome-shaped, and very simple in form,
while the lower one is cut into three very distinct and
fairly equal segments. These lips are very widely distended
on the full expansion of the blossom. The calyx is tubular,
and at its summit cleft into four parts, often hairy. In
colour it is generally a deeper, duller shade of red than the
corolla. The stamens are four in number, and arranged in

36 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

two pairs, one pair being provided with rather longer
filaments than the other. The style is filiform, or thread-
like, and terminates in a small and inconspicuous stigma.
The capsule is of a rounded, oblong character, and is
divisible into two cells, each containing several small
whitish seeds. The bartsia is very closely allied to the
eye-bright, the Eup/irasia officinalis, another very common
plant, and was therefore by many of the older herbalists
called the red-flowered eye-bright ; while it is in some
respects not unlike the cow- wheat (Melampyniiii pratense},
a plant we figure in the present volume, so that some
mediaeval writers, to be quite upon the safe side, gave it
the long compound name of eye-bright cow-wheat, and
almost all these ancient authorities classify it botanically
as the Euphrasia. Linnaeus himself, though he afterwards
made a new genus, Bartsia, for its reception, called it
Euphrasia in his " Systema Vegetabilium,-" published in
1784, as he had previously done in his " Flora Suecica/" a
book that appeared in the year 1755. The bartsia was
so called by the great Swede after his friend Dr. Johann
Bartsch, of Konigsberg.

THE YELLOW OE
MOUNTAIN POPPY.

Mecotiopsls Cambrica. Nat. Ord.,
Papavcracece.

OME of our readers may be
possibly somewhat startled at
the idea of a yellow poppy,
having- all their lives asso-
ciated the very name of the
poppy with a mass of flaunting
flaming scarlet ; but the facts
are, nevertheless, strictly as
we have represented them.
Though the comparative rarity
of the yellow flower makes it
appear strange to us, it is
common enough if we can
only see it in its chosen
habitat. It is a plant of the
rocky solitudes, and should be
looked for amidst woods and shady nooks in hilly dis-
tricts: hence we find it on the grand rocks of Cheddar,
amongst the mountains of Westmoreland, the highlands
of Devon, and abundantly in many parts of North Wales.
The plant is a perennial, and, in any case, it would have
little difficulty in maintaining itself, as the multitudinous
ripened seeds are in autumn freely shed from the numerous

38 - FAMILIAR WILL FLOlVEltt.

capsules, and guarantee an ample succession for the coming
year. We have thus seen it coming up year after year in
the same spot. When we speak of the novelty that a bril-
liant yellow poppy may be to many to whom the plant is
unfamiliar, we must not forget that we have already figured
another yellow poppy, the Common Horned Poppy (Glaucivm
luteum}, to be found on almost every strip of sandy or
shingly beach around our shores.

Poppies are emblems of somnolence, and from one
species of them opium is obtained; but the following is
an interesting instance of a prolonged sleep — a sleep of
centuries in the plants themselves. We were so struck
by the paragraph as it originally appeared in a medical
journal that we make no scruple in quoting it, in the
lively hope that others too may find an interest in it.
" The mines of Laurium are generally known to be largely
encumbered with scoriae, proceeding from the working of
the ancient Greeks, but still containing enough silver to
repay extraction by the improved modern methods. Pro-
fessor Hendreich relates, according to ' I/Union Medicale,'
that under these scoriae, for at least one thousand five
hundred years, has slept the seed of a poppy of the species
Glaucium. After the refuse had been removed to the
furnaces, from the whole space which they had covered
have sprung up and flowered the pretty yellow corollas of
this flower, which was unknown to modern science, but is
described by Pliny and Dioscorides. This flower had dis-
appeared for fifteen to twenty centuries, and its repro-
duction at this interval is a fact parallel to the fertility of
the famous mum my- wheat/' What the precise species
here referred to may be we cannot say, but its relation-
ship to our present -plant must, in any case, be a close

THE YELLOW OR MOVXTAIN POPPY. 39

one, and warrants our reference to a fact in natural history
which is very interesting in itself.

Our yellow poppy was first discovered in its mountain
solitudes, and identified as a true British plant, by the
celebrated herbalist and apothecary, Thomas Johnson,
in a botanical excursion through Wales. Forsaking
the mountain recesses and the haunts of Flora for the
more stirring service of Mars, he sacrificed his life to
the royal cause, and perished by the sword in the year
1644. Parkinson, in 1640, speaks of this poppy in a
very matter-of-course way, and tells us where he found
it, without in any way suggesting that he had made any
rare discovery. It is, in fact, like many other plants,
excessively rare if sought for in the wrong places, but
common enough when the right localities are visited. A
man might search the hedgerows for years, and never find
a water-lily, though its silver chalices floated in hundreds
in a pool hard by ; and those whose lives are spent chiefly
in towns have little idea of the floral wealth of their native
land, and imagine, possibly, that some thirty or forty different
kinds of plants exhaust the list.

The mountain poppy grows to a height of some eighteen
inches, its general character being erect, and the growth
delicate and graceful-looking. The foliage is a bright
fresh green, and often slightly hairy. The leaves are
borne on rather long stalks, and each leaf is of the form
termed pinnate, the three or four pairs of lateral segments
being> again deeply cut at their margins: the total result
is a very rich-looking feathery leaf. The flowers are
large and handsome, as our illustration may in some degree
testify, and are borne singly on long flower-stems, that
rise well above the mass of foliage whence they spring.

40 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

The sepals of the calyx are two in number, and, as in the
other poppies, fall off on the opening of the flower. In
our figure it will be seen that one has already fallen, and
the expanding bud will rapidly throw off the remaining
half. The corolla is composed of four petals ; these are very
delicate and fragile-looking, and very crumpled in sur-
face, especially when first unrolled from the bud. The
whole plant quickly fades when gathered. The flowers,
differing in this respect from most of the other poppies,
have a pleasant odour. The generic name, Meconopsis, of the
mountain poppy is derived from two Greek words, signifying
poppy and resemblance. The plant differs slightly in
botanical structure from the better-known species, and is
put, therefore, into another genus; and we find Parkinson
giving it the title of the "yellow wild bastard poppy of
Wales." The modern specific name, Camlrica, clearly
indicates the association of the plant with Wales, on the soil
of which, as we have seen, it seems best to flourish.

; ! ST L E

THE
MILK THISTLE.

Carduus Marianus. Nnt.
Ord. Composite?.

EW of our native plants are more
striking in appearance than a
good specimen of this plant.
The beautiful milk-white veins
spread thickly on every leaf,
the size of the leaves them-
--• selves, and the grandeur of the
whole growth are points that
must appeal to all beholders who
have any eye at all for natural
beauty, and few plants may
more appropriately be trans-
ferred from the wild state to
the beds of the flower-garden.
It takes up a great deal of room,
but where a garden affords
plenty of space this is anything
but a drawback, as it is a very noble-looking plant. It
is possible, however, that the gardener might object
to the free way in which the seed gets dispersed every-
where, and we know by our own experience that one con-
sequence of introducing it is the necessity of freely weeding
out the superfluous seedlings that spring up all over the
garden. After all, however, they do not give anything-

42 FAMILIAR WILD FLO WEES.

like the trouble that groundsel and many other garden-
loving interlopers do, and the toil of a little preliminary
hoeing is soon forgotten when the plants destined to be
preserved are revealing themselves in all their beauty. The
plant is a biennial, and should be looked for in hedges,
banks, and on rubbish-heaps. It flowers during June and
July ; but the flowers, effective as they are, are not the
crowning glory of the plant. The stalks of the milk-
thistle are ordinarily from four to five feet high, though
we have sometimes seen them over six feet in height. The
lower part is often downy and groovy, the upper part
smooth and finely channelled. The leaves near the root are
boldly spread out into a great rosette, each leaf being a couple
of feet or so in length, and deeply cut into broad and very
prickly -margined lobes. The upper surface is very smooth
and glossy, and marked all over with a broad network of
white veins. It is impossible to even suggest the beauty
of the appearance in the very limited space our plate
affords ; for we can but give an inch or two of the tip of
one of these grand leaves — as hopeless a proceeding almost
as that of the man in classic story who carried about a
brick to give people an idea of his house. Occasionally
the leaves are wholly green, and it then becomes necessary
to avail ourselves of some other means of identification,
none being more efficacious than the strong spiny head
from which the blossoms emerge. The upper leaves are
very much smaller, and clasp the stem tightly by the broad
lobes at their bases ; they are generally boldly bent back
from the stems. The flower-heads are large, and of a rich
crimsonish purple, while the florets are of the usual
character we find in the thistle family. The scales of the
involucre are foliaceous in character, and are armed with

THE .MILK THISTLE. 43

formidable prickles, and after the flowering season is over
the place of the florets is taken by the head of white down
that rises from the seeds below,, and that forms so marked
a feature in the various kinds of thistles — a feature that is
interesting in itself, and most efficacious in securing the
distribution of the seeds. These seeds are numerous,
blackish and shining, each being crowned with a tuft of
stiffish down. They contain a certain quantity of oil, and
have therefore been sometimes used in rural medicine ; but
their principal service, after the necessity of obtaining a
supply of the plant, seems to be to provide a welcome re-
past for the goldfinch and several other grain and seed
eating birds.

Besides the use of the seeds in emulsions, and the
beauty of the plant when transferred to the garden, we
are told that it may be eaten when young as a salad,
though this is a statement that we should rather demur
to, as even in their youngest seedling state they have an
aggressive and well-armed look that would send one off to
the lettuces in preference. We are also given to under-
stand that the young stalks, peeled and soaked to take off
a little bitterness that cannot quite be ignored, are excellent,
either boiled as a table vegetable, or baked in pies like rhu-
barb-stalks. This may be so, but it brings at once to our
mind a similar statement as to the culinary virtues of the
common stinging-nettle. We had read that stinging-
nettle leaves made an excellent table vegetable, so we one
day determined to try them, as any quantity of them were
springing up around our orchard. They were duly pre-
pared, and everybody said the kindest things they could

for them ; but we never had them again. The subject

was tacitly dropped, and we returned in all true allegiance

44 FAMILIAR WLLlJ FLOWERS.

to our kitchen-garden. Pliny tells us " It is not thought
worth while to boil it, the cooking of it being so exceed-
ingly troublesome, it is said." This leaves " us in a very
vague state of mind as to whether the people who disliked
the trouble of cooking it discarded it in consequence or
ate it raw. If we may at all judge their feelings by our
own they probably adopted the former course. Culpepper
says of the mi Ik- thistle, " It cleanseth the blood exceed-
ingly ; and in spring, if you please to boil the tender
plant (but cut off the prickles unless you have a mind to
choak yourself), it will change your blood as the season
changeth, and that is the way to be safe." "Westmacott,
too, writing in the year 1694, .thus sings its praises and
laments " the good old times " : — " It is a Friend to the
Liver and Blood : the Prickles cut off, they were formerly
used to be boiled in the Spring and eaten with other
Herbs ; but as the World decays, so doth the Use of good
old things, and others more delicate and less virtuous
brought in."

ST. JO H fj S V\/CRJ.

HAIEY ST. JOHN'S
WOKT.

Hyperieum hirsutum. Nat. Ord.,
ffypericaeea:.

HE hairy St. John's Wort, or
Hyperieum hirsutum, may be
commonly met with in woods
and in the rank undergrowth
of the copse and thicket,
though it seems to thrive best
when on a soil of chalk. J-t
is a perennial, and those. who
would see it at its best must
visit the localities we have
named during July or August,
when its slender spine bears
its terminal of brilliant yellow
blossoms. The root of the
hairy St. John's Wort is
brown, fibrous, and somewhat
up is erect and rigid, and
ordinarily about two feet in height, though we may
occasionally see specimens that exceed this. It is round in
erection, and on being cut through is found to be solid,
unlike that of its near relative, the square-stalked St.
John's Wort, or Hyperieum quadrangulum, where the rectan-
gular stalk is a prominent specific feature. The stem of the
hairy St. John's Wort is always more or less hairy or down}',

woody ;

stem thrown

46 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

and thus justifies the common English name of the plant ; it
is often reddish in colour, too, though this is a matter that
may or may not be according to the place of growth. We
frequently find that plants which grow in somewhat open
situations, where the struggle for life is somewhat harder,
have tinted stems, while similar plants growing amidst the
surrounding vegetation and in the shelter of a wood or
hedgerow remain green; our present plant is one of the
numerous cases in point. The stem is very stiff and rigid
in character, and is either quite simple or very slightly
branching. This branching, when it takes place at all, is
near the summit. The leaves are a full rich green in
colour when the light shines through them, but, like the
stems, they are so covered with short hairs that their upper
surfaces receive a greyish tinge in consequence. They are
rather larger than in some of the species of Hypericum,
spring in pairs from the stem, have very short foot-stalks,
and are marked with multitudinous, minute, transparent or
pellucid dots, a feature that they share in common with
several of the other St. John's Worts, and which has earned
for them the vulgar name of " thousand holes/'

In the leaf axils we ordinarily find two or four small
leaves : these may be clearly seen in our illustration. At
times these develop into branches, and at others are wholly
wanting, but the normal state of things is as we have figured
it. The calyx is composed of five narrow segments, its edges
being fringed with black glandular dots. Six of the genus
exhibit this glandular development : the trailing St. John's
Wort, or Hypericum humifusum; the flax-leaved St. John's
Wort, or H. Linariifolium; the slender St. John's Wort, or
H. pulchrum; the mountain St. John's Wort, or H. monta-
mim ; the marsh St. John's Wort, or H. Elodes ; and the

HAIRY ST. JOHN'S WORT. 47

species we here figure. The corolla is composed of five bright
yellow petals : it will be noticed that, as in the case of the
periwinkle, Tinea major, a plant we have already included in
our series, the general effect of the corolla is regular and
symmetrical, but that if we examine any one of the five
petals composing it we shall find it un-symmetrical. A
buttercup or a rose petal we could double down the centre
and so get two similar halves, as indeed we could with
the petal of almost any other flower , but it will readily
be seen on turning to our drawing of the periwinkle or
in studying the present figure that it would be impossible
so to halve their petals. We get, therefore, a symmetrical
whole out of a series of unsymmetrical parts. The stamens
of the hairy St. John's Wort are numerous, and on dissection
of the plant will be found to be in three bundles, hence
they are said botanically to be triadelphous. The filaments are
very slender and straight, shorter than the petals, within
which they form a conspicuous feature. The styles are three
in number, simple in character and widely spreading ; and
the seed-vessel is an oblong capsule of three cavities and
three valves or partitions, forming a very pretty section
when a keen-edged knife has made the necessary sharp cut
across it. The seeds within are numerous and very minute.
The older botanists, not paying much regard to niceties of
distinction, appear to have overlooked this species of St.
John's Wort. By superficial observers the discrimination
between this and the H. perforatum is not often observed,
but it differs from it in being a taller plant, in being
covered with hair, in having a perfectly round stem, and in
the glands on the calyx being far more numerous and
conspicuous.

By some of the older writers the hairv St. John's

48 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

Wort was called the H. villosum or the Androsamum
Ursutum. Woodville, in his " Medical Botany," published
in 1790, tells us that the H. perforatum was "in great
request with the ancients, who prescribed it in hysteria,
hypochondriasis, and mania. They also imagined that it
had the peculiar power of curing demoniacs, and thence
obtained the name of Faga dtemonum" Hence its blossoms
were hung by the peasantry both of England, France, and
Germany in their windows to avert the evil eye and the
power of the spirits cf darkness. " Gathered upon a
Friday, in the hour of Jupiter, when he comes to his
operation, so gathered, or borne, or hung upon the neck, it
nightly helps to drive away all phantastical spirits." As
we find that the old writers class many of the species of
St. John's Wort together, and fail to discriminate the hairy
St. John's Wort at all, we may readily assume that the
plant we represent often took the place of other species and
shared to the full in all their mystic virtues, some of which
were of a less sombre character.

COKN-FLOWER, OE
COEN BLUE-BOTTLE.

Centaurea Cyanus. Nat. Orel.,
Composites.

UR present plant forms one of
the brilliant trio that gives
such splendour of colour to
the harvest-field, the golden
marigold being another, and
the scarlet poppy the third;
and nowhere else do we find
the three pure primary colours,
the blue, the scarlet, and the
yellow, in such intensity.
Each of the plants we have
named carries with it its con-
nection with the harvest-field; for
one is the corn-marigold, the other
is the corn -poppy, or corn-rose,

while the subject of our present illustration is called in
an especial degree the corn-flower. The marigold will at
times appear amongst other crops, and all who have seen
the railway embankments ablaze with poppies will not
need to be told that these, too, sometimes wander from their
allegiance to Ceres ; but the blue-bottle will very rarely be
found away from the golden grain, and but few corn-fields
would fail to yield examples of it. Throughout temperate
Europe it is always found in such localities, but in the

67

50 FAMILIAE WILD FLOWERS.

hotter regions of the extreme south — in Sicily, for example
— it deserts the plains, and must be looked for on the
high-lying pastures of the mountain-sides.

Few plants are more hardy than the corn-flower, as its
seedlings, which come up abundantly in the autumn, brave
the severest frosts. The flowers are of the compound cha-
racter with which we are familiar in the Composite order ;
the florets of the disk are small, purple, and numerous,
while the outer radiating florets, that form the conspicuous
beauty of the flower, are fewer in number, but much larger,
widely spread, and of a brilliant blue tint. The anthers,
five in number, of the central florets, form a cylindrical
tube somewhat longer than the corolla whence they
emerge, and form a noticeable feature. The ovoid involucre
from which the flower-head springs was by old writers
supposed to sufficiently resemble a flask to justify them in
calling the plant the blue-bottle. It is covered by numerous
tightly-compressed scales, each bordered by a margin or
fringing of brown teeth. The flowers are scentless. The
plant varies considerably in height, but about two feet
might be considered a very fairly typical size ; the general
character of the plant is upright ; the stems that are thrown
off leave the central stalk at a slight angle, and preserve
the general upright direction and effect. The flower-heads
grow singly at the ends of these long stems. The stems
are somewhat angular, and covered with a loose cottony
down ; their tough, wiry character will be at once appre-
ciated by any one who may attempt to gather the azure coronals
they bear at their summits, a considerable amount of bend-
ing, twisting, and tugging being necessary before they can
be induced to part company. The upper leaves are arranged
alternately on the stalk, and are very long as compared with

CORNFLOWER, OR CORN BLUE-BOTTLE. 51

their breadth ; like the stems, they are covered with more
or less of the white cobwebby down that gives the whole
plant a somewhat dull and grey appearance. The lower
leaves are much broader and blunter-looking than the upper,
and often have a roughly-toothed or jagged outline, a
feature which we do not find in the leaves that, from their
higher position on the plant, more readily attract notice.

Though the brilliancy of its flowers makes it an
attractive plant to the lover of natural beauty, the farmer
regards the corn-flower as a pernicious weed to be carefully
eradicated at sight ; and the reapers bear it no goodwill, for
its tough stems blunt their sickles ; hence by many old
writers the plant is called the " hurt-sickle." On this point
the poet discourses feelingly, in the following scathing
lines : —

" Blue-bottle, tliee my numbers fain would raise,
And thy complexion challenges my praise ;
Thy countenance, like summer skies, is fair ;
But, ah ! how different thy vile manners are.
Ceres for this excludes thee from my song,
And swains, to gods and me a sacred throng.
A treach'rous guest, destruction thou dost bring
To th' inhospitable field where thou dost spring.
Thou blunt'st the very reaper's sickle, and so
In life and death becom'st the farmer's foe."

The corn-flower would appear to injure the farmer not
only materially, but morally, for its presence convicts him
of negligence, and holds him up to public gaze for his want
of energy. Holditch, an old writer, in his " Essay on
Weeds/' includes this plant in his denunciation of the
poppy, the May-weed, and the marigold, and says : " The
above class, with their gaudy colours, proclaim bad farming
to the landlord, the tenant, and the passenger, and announce
the neglect of using clean seed-cern, judicious fallowing,

52 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

and horse-hoe husbandry/' It is sometimes called " blue-
bonnet " or " blue-cap " provincially, and in Scotland it is
the " blawort." The Irish peasant calls it " gormon," the
Welshman the "crammenog yr yd." In Germany its
name is similar to our best-known English name — it is the
"korn-blume/' while in France it is known as the "blavelle/'
" blaverolle/' or ' ' bluet." In Italy its name has the same
signification as the English name hurt-sickle. By some
mediaeval writers it is termed the Flos frumentorum—fru-
mentum being the Latin word for corn. The meaning of
the generic name we have already dwelt on, when speaking
of the knapweed, another plant of the genus. The specific
name, cyanns, is Greek in its origin, and refers to its
beautiful colour. We also find a classical myth of one
Cyanus, a devotee of Flora, and admirer in a general way
of familiar wild flowers, whose chief occupation seems to
have been to weave for the goddess garlands of this and
other corn-flowers. Bauhin called our plant the Cyanus
segetnm, the " blue-flower that appears in the corn-fields/*
a sufficiently appropriate name.

CO\V- V\/H E/S.T OR

COW-WHEAT.

Melampyntm pratense. Nat. Ord.,
Scrophulariacea.

ALTHOUGH the specific name,
pralense, of our present plant
would lead to the idea that the
cow-wheat was a plant of the
meadows, its true home is in
the woods. The specific name
was bestowed upon the plant
by the Swedish botanist Lin-
naeus, and it may possibly be
that he may have found its
habitat in his own country
somewhat different from that
common in Britain ; or we can,
without great disrespect to his
illustrious memory, conclude
that amidst the enormous amount of plant nomenclature
for which he is responsible, some few errors would
naturally creep in, and set this down as probably being
one of these slips. Whichever theory we may adopt,
the fact remains that with us the cow-wheat must
be searched for in the forest, or in copse-land and
thickets. We might, perhaps with advantage, replace
" must be searched for " by the expression " will be found/'
for there are few suitable localities for the plant that will

54 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

not furnish numerous specimens. Any one wandering in
the open spaces in the woodlands any time between the
beginning of June and the end of August will scarcely
fail to see its yellow blossoms amongst the general under-
growth. As the stem is only about a foot or so in height
it does not force itself on the eyes of the unobservant, but
a very slight search for it will scarcely fail to furnish as
many examples as one could wish, for when met with at all
it seems to be always found freely. The cow- wheat is an
annual, but the supply seems unfailing. The stems are
slender and erect, and at intervals, from the axils of the
lower leaves, slender straggling branches are thrown out in
pairs. These lateral shoots spread widely from the central
stem, and the whole plant is smooth to the touch, and bas
not the hairy or downy covering so commonly seen in many
plants. The leaves grow in pairs, with a considerable por-
tion of bare stem between each pair, and each of these is at
right angles to those that are next to it. The foliage is
long and pointed in character, entirely without serration,
and each leaf, as we may clearly see in our illustration,
stands boldly out from the stem that bears it. The floral
leaves are much smaller, much shorter in proportion to
their length, and have one or more pairs of projecting lobes
or points at their bases. A glance at the figure will show
this difference of form far better than any lengthened verbal
description.

A variety, which was at one time elevated to specific
rank under the title of Melampyrum montanum, is found in
some mountainous districts of the north; in this variety
the plant, as a whole, is smaller, and these floral leaves are
what is termed in botanical language entire, that is to say,
they show none of the lobing or toothing that is so cha-

COW- WHEAT. 55

racteristic a feature in those parts in the typical plant.
The flowers are a bright pure yellow in colour that may be
defined as pale gold. It is about intermediate in tint
between the delicate colour of the primrose and the full
rich yellow of the buttercup. The flowers always spring
in pairs from the bases of the leaves, and all are turned in
one direction. This curious feature may be readily noticed
in the figure, where the two pairs on the one piece and the
three pairs on the other all rigidly point in their own
direction. The blossoms are somewhat quaint in form,
and show the irregularity that is so marked a feature in all
the plants of the order ; the lower lip, it will be seen, stands
sharply out instead of hanging downwards, as we find to be
the case in most flowers of like structure. The great
majority of our flowers, when attentively considered, will be
found to be either multi-symmetrical and composed of
several similar parts, as the dog-rose or the apple, or else
bi-symmetrical, and only divisible into similar halves. Of
this latter the pansy is a good example, and this bi-symmet-
rical character is a marked feature in the Scrophulariacese,
as we may very well see by examining the flowers of the
speedwells, the mulleins, snapdragon, foxglove, bartsia, eye-
bright, rattle, or the present plant. Several examples of the
order have appeared amongst our figures, and our readers
will have no difficulty in seeing the point to which we refer.
It must not, however, be supposed that this feature is an
exclusive distinction appertaining to this order. All flowers
that belong to the Scrophulariacese show this structure, but
all flowers that show this structure are not Scrophulariacese.
We see it again in the Labiates, for example, the dead nettle,
the stachys, the self-heal, and the ground ivy being ready
illustrations.

56 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

The cow-wheat owes the origin of its generic title to two Greek
words signifying "black " and " wheat " • the seeds bearing
some little resemblance to that grain. An old name for the
plant was the Triticnm vaccinium, and another English name
for the plant that we find in the hei'bals is the " horse-floure."
In Flemish it is the " peerd-bloeme." Linnaeus tells
us that in fields where this plant is abundant, the butter
is peculiarly rich, and in the Middle Ages the some-
what extraordinary belief was held that the small seeds as
they fell were turned into wheat. This belief could so
readily be disproved that one finds it difficult to imagine
how it could ever have obtained credence. Dodonseus tells
us that " the seede of this herbe taken in meate or drinke
troubleth the braynes, causing headache and dronkennesse;"
and certainly those who started the harvest theory troubled
their " braynes " with the planfc to very little good.

OEPINE.

Scdum Telephium. Nat. Ord.,
Crassulaceee.

HE plant here represented is one of
the numerous species of house-
leeks, of which the common
stonecrop, another plant in our
series, supplies us with a
second example. They are also
called collectively stonecrops.
The first name refers to the
habit that many of the species,
and notably the Sempervivum
tectoTum, or common house-
leek, have of spring-ing up on
old thatched roofs or the tops
of walls. The first half of the
word is sufficiently explanatory

in itself ; the second half is from the Anglo-Saxon leac,
a plant, literally therefore the house-plant. The second
name, the stonecrop, will need no explanation to those
who have seen the old stone walls and rocks in many parts
of the country one mass of golden blossom from the flowers
of the Sedum acre, or common stonecrop. Of the stonecrop
we have more to say elsewhere, but as the house-leek does
not appear in our series, we may just pause to refer to it.
It is a native of the mountain-ranges of central and southern

68

58 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

Europe, but the strangeness of its growth and its quaint
appearance have led to its wide introduction, and it may
now abundantly be found throughout the country, its largo
rosettes of great fleshy leaves being prominent on many an
old roof in country districts.

We write these lines in a district surrounded by great
swelling chalk downs that appear to cut it off in its
isolation from the rest of the world, and the whole district
is permeated with superstitious folk-lore ; one example of
this will suffice. We were struck with the beauty of
some flowering-stems of house-leek on a cottage wall, and,
not then knowing their occult power, were desirous of
plucking one or two of them, with a view to closer
examination, and a possible sketch. We at once found,
however, that this was a totally inadmissible idea. Two
heads of the flowers had, in spite of strong remonstrance, been
gathered the previous season, and before the year had run its
course a brother and an uncle had died. As the evil appeared
to descend upon the dwelling thus violated, we could only
bow to circumstances, and leave the household fetish alone.

All the plants of the order have fleshy and succulent
leaves, but the orpine is easily distinguishable from most of
the others from the fact that while its leaves partake of the
fleshy character of all the other species of stonecrop, it has
flattened leaves, a peculiarity that is only shared by the
rose-root, or Sedum Rhodiola. The root-stock of the orpine is
perennial, rather large and swollen-looking, and containing
within itself a store of nutriment to maintain the plant
in the somewhat sterile places in which it may ordinarily
be found. The true home of the orpine is in the hedge-
banks and on waste ground sheltered by bushes, though
the beauty of its flowers and leaves often leads to its being

OllPIXE. 59

transplanted to the cottage garden. Our illustration is
taken from a field specimen, which we gathered off a
hedge-bank. In its wild state the plant is from one to
two feet high, but in the garden we have seen it a yard
high. The stalks thrown up are numerous, upright,
unbranched, round, and solid-looking, and generally a rich
red in colour, their upper portion especially being often
in addition a good deal spotted and streaked with a deeper
red. The leaves are numerous and coarsely toothed. In
some plants the upper leaves are rounded at their bases,
and are without stems, while in others we find them at-
tenuated and tapering at their bases, and borne on a short
stem. In colour they are a bluish green, giving the whole
plant when seen as a mass in the hedgerow a somewhat
cold greyish appearance. The flowers are carried in com-
pact heads at the tops of the stems, and form a brilliant
mass of crimson colour. The spreading and acutely -pointed
petals ranging boldly out from the centre, and the ten
conspicuous stamens, are very noticeable.

The generic name is derived from the Latin verb sedo,
to sit, in allusion to the way that many of the plants
of the genus appear to drop themselves on rock or brick-
work or thatch, with little or no earth in support. The
present species, the orpine, has a wide distribution, and in
sunnier climes than ours it is a plant of the mountains.
Liudley, we see, gives its true habitat as mountainous woods,
and Casalpinus, an early herbalist, calls it the Crassala
Montana, but it grows freely with us in lowlier situations.
It may possibly have been an introduced plant originally,
but it is so tenacious of life that it has become thoroughly
at home with us. This tenacity of life has gained for it
the name of live-long. We have heard of its being used in

60 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

some country districts as a decoration for a fireplace-
screen or chimney-board, a framework of wood being
covered with the plant. We are told that if this be
sprinkled with water about once a week it will continue
fresh and green-looking for some months. This vitality
led to another old custom. On Midsummer Eve betrothed
maidens used to gather two plants of orpine, and set
them on a trencher, and estimate their lovers' fidelity (or
possibly their own fickleness) by the continued flourishing
and well-being or the reverse of one or the other plant.
Hence its name got a considerable addition to it, and was
sometimes given as live-long-love-long. Its most familiar
English name, orpine, is a curious illustration of the
perversity we sometimes meet with in old plant nomen-
clature. It is derived from auripigmentum, the gold-
coloured pigment called orpiment, a most appropriate name
for the stoneci'op and several other plants of the genus,
but, by a perverse ingenuity, applied to almost the only
plant that does not possess the brilliant hue of orpiment.

MEADOW
SAXIFRAGE.

Saxifraga granulata. Nat,
Saxifragacete.

Ord.,

EADOW saxifrage is abun-
dant in many parts of
Britain on hedge-banks and
in the meadows and pastures,
especially where the soil is
of a gravelly nature, though
some large districts of Eng-
land and Ireland are with-
out it, and in Scotland it
seems almost confined to the
southern half of the country.
The plant is a perennial.
The root-stock has adherent
to it a number of clustering,
subterranean bulbs and tubers ; these are of ten of a bright red
colour, though they are more or less covered with brownish-
white scales. When cut open they are found to be hard
and solid. Internally they are white in colour, and have an
astringent and disagreeable taste, a point that it may at
first sight appear no one would take the trouble to ascer-
tain ; but the plant, as we shall shortly see, enjoyed at one
time a considerable medicinal reputation, and it was on
these little granules, or bulbous bodies, that its efficacy was
supposed to depend. They give the specific name, too, to

62 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

the plant, the title granulata being bestowed on the
plant from this peculiarity of growth. The stems are
few in number and very simple in character, any branching
there may be being ordinarily of the very slightest
extent, and very frequently entirely absent until we
reach the divergent stems that bear the clustering
blossoms. The stems of the meadow saxifrage are
about a foot in height, and more or less covered with
short but closely-set hairs. This hirsute character is more
especially marked near the base of the stems : as we travel
upwards and near the blossoms the hairiness changes in
appearance somewhat, and becomes reddish in colour and
glandular in character. The stems look longer than they
really are on account of their bare appearance, the leaves
being only very sparsely placed on them, and by far the
greater part near the base, that part of the plant which,
amidst the general verdure of the hedge-bank, is least
striking.

The meadow saxifrage seems to have but a very slight
attachment to the soil ; we have found time after time
that the gentle tug that we gave at the flower-heads
has sufficed to put us into possession of the whole plant.
The leaves which grow near the root spring from long
footstalks having broad and sheathing bases ; they are what
is termed botanically reniform or kidney-shaped, hairy, and
divided into numerous blunt-looking lobes. One of these
lower leaves we have plucked and introduced in our draw-
ing : it will readily be seen how different in character it is
to the stem-leaves that are also figured. The stems are
frequently reddish in colour, and very often most of the leaves
have a certain tinting of red on their margins. The upper
leaves are very small and few in number ; as they ascend

MEADOW SAXIFRAGE. 63

the stalk we find their stems getting- shorter and shorter in
gradual and progressive diminution, until the uppermost
are seen to be entirely stemless. The lobes or fingerings
into which they are cut are often very acute. The calyx is
covered with the glandular hairs that we have also seen
are characteristic of the upper part of the stem, and the
fine lobes into which its extremity is cleft spread boldly
out. These lobes share the reddish tinge we find in the
upper part of the stem, and the whole calyx is somewhat
viscid to the touch. The corolla is composed of five white
spreading petals, their bases and veining being slightly
yellowish. The stamens are ten in number, five shedding
their pollen before the alternating five : styles two in
number, terminating in two expanding and diverging
stigmas. The capsule is of a pale brown colour, oval in
shape, terminating in two peaks, and tilled with numerous
black and very minute seeds. Bauhin, one of the older
botanists, called the meadow saxifrage the Sax if rag a
rotundlfolia, from the rounded character of its lower leaves.
It will be remembered that a similar name is bestowed for
a like reason on the little harebell, a plant we have already
figured. The name of Campanula rotundifolia at first
glance seams a peculiarly inappropriate one, as all the
leaves that ordinarily come under observation are very long
and narrow, and it is only as we approach the root we find
the rotund form of leaf. As the rotundiform leaves are
to the others as about one to half a dozen, the name does not
appear in any case a peculiarly happy one, so that the
feeling of inappropriateness which we have mentioned as
the result of a first glance may possibly continue in some
degree after a more lengthy inspection. Clusius, another
ancient botanical authority, calls the meadow saxifrage the

64 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

Saxifraga tuberosa radice; this name, which clearly refers
to the tuberous root, a very marked feature in the plant,
is not by any means a bad one. The various species of
saxifrage are chiefly dwellers amongst the rocks, and
ordinarily flourish in greatest perfection on the high
mountain-ranges of Europe, only two or three of the
numerous species being found elsewhere ; those, therefore,
who would seek them in Britain must visit the high
mountain regions of Cumberland and Westmoreland, the
Welsh mountains, or the Scottish ranges for the greater
part of them, and many of them are well worth the
seeking.

The word saxifrage is derived from the Latin words
signifying a rock, and to break, for it was believed
that the penetrating roots of the plants disintegrated
the rocks, hence in some old herbals it is called breakstone,
and its names in French, German, and Dutch carry a like
significance.

FIELD SC/\BIOUS.

THE
FIELD SCABIOUS.

Knautia arvensis. Nat. Ord.,
DipsacacecK.

EVERAL species of scabious
are more or less abundant
almost everywhere; some,
as the field scabious, our
present plant, are more
especially at home in corn-
fields and meadows, while
not a few are herbs of
cultivation, and grace the
garden by their beautiful forms
and tints. The Scabiosa succisa,
or deviFs-bit scabious, finds a place
in our series, and has already
been described at length : it is
a plant of the open meadows and
commons. The S. Columbaria, or
small scabious, is not so common a

species. Its flowers are of a pale purplish blue, and
should be searched for in pasture-lands and waste ground.

The species we have here figured is abundant through-
out Britain, though we occasionally find districts where
it does not occur; and it seems, so far as our experience
goes, to flourish best on the chalk. It should be looked
for in meadows, in the tangled mass of floral beauty that
69

66 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

bedecks the hedgerows, or amidst the standing1 corn. The
last of these localities is especially characteristic. The
field scabious is a perennial, and should be sought in flower
towards the end of June and during July and August.
Its large blossoms and general habit of growth tend to
make the plant one of the more conspicuous denizens of
the pasture or the harvest-field, while the delicate beauty
of the tint of its flower-heads always renders it one of the
most attractive. The general look of the flower-head is
very suggestive of the structure of the composite order;
and the order to which it really belongs, the Dipsacacese, is
closely allied to the composite.

The root of the field scabious is perennial, dark in colour,
somewhat woody in texture, and by its subordinate root-
lets takes such a hold of the ground that it is with great
difficulty eradicated. The plant is ordinarily some two
or three feet in height. The stems are round in section
generally, but slightly branched. They are somewhat
coarse to the touch, a good deal clothed with short
whitish hairs, and somewhat bare of leaves except near
their bases. The leaves vary much in character in different
plants, and in different parts of the same plant, some
being much more finely divided than others, though there
is a quite sufficient general resemblance amongst them to
prevent any real difficulty arising in identifying the plant
wherever we see it, even when we have not its grand
flower-heads to make assurance doubly sure. The leaves
grow in pairs on the stems, and share fully in the general
hairiness of the plant. The radical leaves, the lowest of
all, are stalked, very simple in character; they are lanceolate
or lance-headed in shape (a form that may be perhaps
better known to our readers in the foliage of the well-

THE FIELD SCABIOUS. 67

known privet), about five inches long and barely one
inch broad, and their margins cut on either side into some
seven or eight bold serrations. The leaves that
immediately succeed them are of about the same length,
but possess the character shown in our illustration, though
in many cases the intervals between the lateral lobes are
not so great, and in some instances the terminal lobe is
decidedly larger than any of the others. The flowers of
the field scabious are all terminal, and borne on long
stalks. The heads are large, and in general outline con-
vex. The outer florets in the flower-head are large, and
have very unequal segments. The inner florets are much
smaller, but all are cut into four lobes or segments, those of
the inner florets being equal in each floret. The buds — packed
tightly yet with beautiful regularity before any of them
have expanded — form a very quaint and interesting feature.
The character of the supporting ring of floral leaves or
bracts beneath the flower-head, which in botanical language
is called the involucre, can be very clearly seen in our
illustration, as we have purposely turned one of the flower-
heads from us to display the appearance of the back or
under part of the flower-head. In this view we see only the
radiate bracts of the involucre, the form that by the older
botanists was in such cases called the common calyx, and
the larger segments of the outer ring of florets. In
the deviFs-bit scabious, the outer florets are scarcely
larger than the inner, and in the small scabious the florets
are five-lobed. The stamens of each floret of the field
scabious are four in number, and, from their length and the
size of the anthers, form a conspicuous feature. The fruit
is rather large, somewhat four-cornered, and crowned by
several short bristly hairs, that radiate fan-like from its

68 FAMILIAR WILL FLOWERS.

summit. Botanically the plant is either the Scabiosa
arvensis or the Knautia arvensis, the second name being
selected by some writers to form a new genus, as the plant,
in some few and slight respects, which we need not here
discuss, differs from the other scabious flowers in structure.
The first generic name has reference to the old belief in
the efficacy of the plant in cutaneous affections, while the
second, bestowed by Linna3us, is in honourable memory
of Christian Knaut, a Saxon botanist of considerable
eminence, who flourished in the latter half of the
seventeenth century, and died in the year 1716. The
field scabious (or field Knautia if we desire to be very
accurate indeed), seems to possess no great store of familiar
names ; the only deviation from the accepted title that we
have been able to find is blue-caps, and this cannot be
considered a very happy name, as there is nothing cap-like
in the form, while in colour it is certainly not blue.

W/UL-PEPPEf\

STONE-CEOP, OE
WALL-PEPPEE.

Sedum acre. Nat. Ord., Crassulacea.

HE common stone-crop will
doubtless be familiar to most
; of our readers, as it is not only
frequently found in a wild
state,, but is, like the primrose,
the foxglove, and many other
plants, often transplanted to
the garden, where it clothes
readily with its verdure any
old wall-top or rockwork. Its
great fault, indeed, is its too
great readiness to make itself
at home. We remember once
thinking how capital an edging
it would make to some flower-
borders; its close, compact, evergreen foliage, delighting the
eye, to be in the flowering season transformed into a band
of golden yellow still more striking. "We put our idea into
practice, but soon found how encroaching it became, as it
spread beyond all reason into the body of the border ; but
by running a planting cord along each face, we were able
with a sharp spade-edge to chop all neat and true again,
and to diminish its width to reasonable proportions. " All's
well that ends well/' and the reverse of this is as true an

70 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

axiom ; we found that every little piece chopped off, if not
carefully removed, would grow, and the task became so
onerous that we were glad to root it all up, and be
thankful to feel that we had seen the last of it as a garden
edging. It is surely, without exception, the easiest thing
possible to plant: root, stem, or anything else seems to
grow ; the top, half an inch or so in length, of one of the
stems can be put into a hole made by a small piece of stick —
right way up or wrong is immaterial — and in a very short
time it will show signs of full vitality; and when put into
the interstices of rock-work it will, unless carefully watched,
do much more towards clothing the whole than is altogether
desirable. Another of our wild borderings was much more
successful — a line of the cinquefoil. Both foliage and flowers
are beautiful in form and colour, and the plant throws
out long suckers and grows with rapidity. Like the
stone-crop, it will soon, if not watched, grow out of bounds ;
but its larger size makes it more amenable to discipline.

The stone-crop should be looked for, in a wild state, on
old walls, on rock, and on sandy ground. The old stone or
flint walls one sees in many parts of the country furnish,
in their rugged sides and uneven tops, many a crevice
that gives welcome foothold to the plant ; and dry, sandy
heaths form another favourite habitat. It flowers some time
during June or July, and is then a mass of golden blossom,
but the flowering season is ordinarily very soon over.
Those who have chanced to come upon an old wall or stone
fencing when the hundreds of blossoms are all expanded in
the sunlight will realise the meaning of the old name,
golden moss, bestowed on it, as the ordinary green appear-
ance is completely lost in the more intense hue of its
brilliant stars.

STONE-CROP, OR WALL-PEPPER. 71

The root of the stone-crop is perennial and very fibrous,
its minute threads penetrating into the smallest crevices.
The stalks are numerous, growing- in tufts, many of them
trailing, flowerless, and of no great size, others erect
and bearing the clusters of flowers. These latter are
ordinarily from one to three inches high; but the plant leads
a somewhat hard life, and may often be found much
dwarfed in consequence, while at other times, as when
amidst other foliage or rockwork, it is drawn up to a
considerable height. The stems branch a good deal, and
are clothed with numerous leaves. The little, upright, and
very succulent leaves that so closely overlap on the flower-
less stems form a characteristic in itself sufficient to dis-
tinguish the 8. acre from the other yellow-flowering species
in the genus. The foliage has a semi-transparent look, and
the leaves are not flat, as in most plants, but so fleshy in
substance as to be almost round in cross section. The
flowers are of a brilliant yellow tint ; the sepals, five in
number, are very small and inconspicuous, but the five
acutely pointed and spreading petals form a noticeable
feature. The stamens are ten in number, and about equal
in length to the parts of the corolla, and the anthers at
their summits agree in tint with the petals.

The generic name refers to the ready way in which the
plant can make itself at home on hard rock or brick, with
the slightest possible modicum of soil ; it is derived from
the Latin verb meaning " to sit." The specific name alludes
to the sharp, pungent taste of the leaves. This pungency
of flavour has procured for the stone-crop the names of
wall-pepper and wall-ginger. The name by which it is
known in Germany is equivalent to wall-pepper, while in
France it is the ' ' pain d'oiseau." It is curious that in

72 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

some parts of England also the stone-crop is called "birds'
bread." There would appear to be no special appropriate-
ness in the title. So far as we are aware, the plant is un-
touched by birds. Prior, in his •' Popular Names of British
Plants/' we see, says " apparently from no better reason
than its appearance in blossom when young birds are
hatched ; " but there is, probably, some old legend or
belief that is at the bottom of it, if we only knew where to
find it. Lobel called it vermicular is, partly, we are told,
from the grub-like shape of the leaves — though we may, en
passant, observe that a grub is not quite the same thing as
a vermis, or worm, either in name, nature, or appearance —
and partly from its medical efficacy, real or reputed, as a
vermifuge. The medicinal value of the stone-crop seems
to be only vaguely known. Culpepper, we notice, says of it,
"It is so harmless an herb that you can scarce use it amiss ;"
while Curtis says, " According to the account which some
medical writers give of this plant, it appears to possess
considerable virtues ; while others, from the durability of its
acrimony and the violence of its operation, have thought it
scarce safe to be administered. Applied to the skin, it ex-
coriates and exulcerates it." Linnaeus recommended it for
the scurvy and dropsy.

THE
TUBEEOUS PEA.

Orobits tuberoaus. Nat. Ord.,
Leguminosce,

E have already given several
illustrations of what the old
writers call " peasou and his
kindes," and the present
species, though lacking the
delicate beauty of the wood
vetch, the rich purple clusters
of the tufted vetch, or the
graceful habit of the meadow
vetchling — all plants we have
already figured — has a quiet
attractiveness of its own that,
joined to its abundance, gives
it full right to a place in our
series. In Wales our plant rejoices in a somewhat long
name, and is known as the " pysen y coed gnapwreid-
diawg." As we are acquainted with some half a dozen Welsh
words only, we may, perhaps, be excused if we make the
most of our knowledge, and hasten to explain that " coed "
means a wood ; this we learnt from a native of picturesque
Bettws y coed : a name that, we are told, signifies the village
in the wood. We may next make a happy guess, and
assume that " pysen/' of the Welsh, means much the same
thing as peason did in England in the Elizabethan era,
70

74 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

and, combining our knowledge and our assumption, we may
affirm that the first three words are equivalent in meaning
to wood pea. We have not, however, got half-way through
the Cymric name yet, but for obvious reasons we now change
the subject.

In Ireland the tuberous pea is the "carmel." The
old Gaelic name for our plant is the ' ' caermeal," and we
find it still in the North called the corr, the carmylie, the
cairmeil, or the cormeille ; the similarity of these names to
the Irish appellation is obvious and striking. The tuberous
pea is often called the wood pea or the heath pea, and we
shall throughout the rest of our remarks use any one of
these terms indiscriminately., as the more distinctive term,
tuberous, is somewhat long and cumbersome.

The wood pea may be searched for in copses and open
spaces in woods or under sheltering hedgerows during May,
June, and July. The root-stock is perennial, and consists
largely of many small black tubers and a few fibres ; these
tubers are edible. " The nuts of this pease being boyled
and eaten are hardlier digested than be either turnips or
parsneps, yet do they nourish no less than the parsnep ;"
but one good parsnip, as far as bulk is concerned, would
cut up into a hundred or more of these tubers of the wood
pea, so that ordinarily they can surely scarcely have paid for
the trouble of digging up. Bryant, in his " Flora Dietetica,"
writes as follows of the tuberous pea : — " The roots of this,
when boiled, are said to be nutritious. They are held in
great esteem by the Scotch Highlanders, who chew them as
we do tobacco, and thus often make a meal of them ; for
being of a sedative nature, they pall the appetite and allay
the sensation of hunger." This caermiel, as the Highlanders
call it, is supposed to be the " chara " referred to by Caesar

THE TUBEROUS PEA. 75

in his " History of the Gallic War," and is probably the same
as that referred to by another Roman historian as furnishing,
when mixed with milk, a sufficient sustenance for a time,
when the army of Valerius outran their commissariat
department. The Scottish mountaineers grind these tubers
into a kind of flour for bread-making purposes in time of
dearth, and prepare an intoxicating drink from them ; they
also believe that they are efficacious for lung affections.
This lowly plant is, therefore, at once meat, drink, and
medicine, though it is doiibtful whether it fulfils any of
these functions very satisfactorily : in the same way that
when we buy a penknife that is also a measure, a file, a cork-
screw, a punch, and has some few other uses, we discern that
its efficiency in any one of these modifications is, after all,
not great, and that, on the whole, we should have done better
to have got any one of these things unencumbered with the
rest. A weapon that aspires to be at once bayonet and
saw, a tool that professes to be at once axe and hammer,
ends in being neither in any efficient degree.

The generic name of the wood pea, Orolus, is uncertain
in its significance, but it has been suggested that it is derived
from two Greek words signifying an ox and to strengthen,
on account of its yielding food to cattle. Whether it ever
does to any appreciable extent furnish provender to cattle
is a very doubtful point, as the situations in which it
thrives best are scarcely those in which we can expect to find
stock at all. It is, at all events, no more a strengthener of
the ox, we should think, than some fifty other plants that
receive an occasional bite as they spring up by the hedge-
row or skirt the copse. The foliage of this plant is a good
deal eaten by some grub or insect of a species unknown to
us, so that it is very difficult to find a piece uumutilated.

76 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

We have indicated this in the lowest leaf in our sketch. In
a drawing it is easy enough to remove all trace of these
depredations and to restore the broken outline, but when
one desires to find a good specimen for pressing, drying, and
preserving, the case is altered. Dried plants, though of
great scientific value, are generally poor relics of departed
beauty, and this is the case with this plant especially,
as it seems impossible to prevent it from drying a dull
black or a dismal brown. In some parts of the country
the heath pea is called the nipper-nut, a very meaning-
less-looking name on the face of it; but when we also
find it called nappart, we see that, like the knapweed,
some knob-like part of the plant has caused the name
to be employed. In the present plant the tubers have
given it the name of knob-wort, or knap-wort, or nappart,
and so by a further corruption from the original idea we
at length arrive at nipper-nut.

I v

ij v ^

f^ARIGO ID.

THE
CORN MARIGOLD.

Chrysanthemum segetum. Nut.
Ord., Compositce.

MONGST all the localities
that various plants favour,
none bear away the palm
for brilliancy from our
cornfields. Our hedgerows
are gay with the pure
white blossoms of the sloe
or the delicate pink of the
rose; the moorland is dotted
over with the golden stars
of the asphodel, the white
tufts of the cotton grass,
the brilliant yellow of the
furze, or the rich sheet of
crimson of the heather-bells; while
the river bears on its surface the
silver chalice of the water-lily,

or reflects in its waters the clusters of purple blossom of
the loose-strife; but the cornfield has an intensity of colour
all its own, for here we find in perfection the glorious
corn-flower, one of our finest blue flowers, the intensely
scarlet poppy, and the great golden discs of the corn
marigold. Such a nosegay as a good handful of these
three flowers would make should form a good test for the

78 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

detection of colour-blindness, and their representation not
only taxes the powers of the colour-box to the uttermost,
but leads us in despair to cast aside our poor pigments
as we revel in the splendour and intensity, the wonderful
depth and force of colour of any one of the three flowers in
the bunch we have gathered. Nature paints with tints
no human art can rival, and the nearest approach one can
make to the colour of a poppy looks mere brickdust when
laid by the silken splendour of the petals of the wayside
weed.

Some botanical names do not strike us as being particu-
larly happy in their choice, or as conveying any special
meaning or appropriateness, but the scientific title of the
corn marigold cannot be included amongst these, for its
generic name signifies the golden flower, and its specific
title that which pertains to corn-fields. It is the especially
golden flower of the harvest field. Some authorities tell us
that the English name is really what a glance at it would
suggest — that it is the golden flower dedicated in monkish
times to the Virgin Mary; but it is probable that this
meaning is an afterthought. The marsh marigold derives
its name from the Anglo-Saxon words " mersc " and
" gealla •" signifying " marsh " and " golden flower/' and
other bright yellow flowers, like the present species, though
they may have no connection with the marsh, receive the
name of marigold. Some old writers call the plant merely
the golde, and in Wales it is the " Gold yr yd." There
is a rich auriferous look about the first word of this name
that, even in one's ignorance of Gaelic, gives justification
for including the Welsh title amongst the others, and
claiming for it a similar intention and meaning. A local
name for the plant is the bigold ; which Prior, in his

THE COltN MARIGOLD. 79

excellent work on the popular names of British plants, tells
us signifies tinsel or false gold, applied to the present
species because it is not the true golde, or Calendula
officiualis. The white ox-eye, or C. leucanthemum, a plant
we have already figured and described, belongs to the same
genus, so that our marigold naturally sometimes gets called
the yellow ox-eye. Gerarde calls it the golden cornflower,
and its association with the true cornflower, or blue-bottle
(Centaurea cyanus), in the harvest has, in some parts of
the country, earned for it the name of yellow-bottle.

The corn marigold is almost everywhere abundant,
farmers would say too abundant, and will be found in
flower throughout the summer and autumn, until the
sharp sickle of the reaper lays it low. On turning over
our -own botanical notes, we see it recorded that we
found a specimen, still well in flower, on December the
thirty-first ; but June to October, inclusive, would be
about the normal state of affairs. Both here and abroad,
the strong arm of the law has been invoked for its
destruction ; Threlkeld tells us that, in Britain, "Mannour
courts do amerce careless tennants who do not weed it out
before it conies to seed," and we find enactments against
those who do not keep it under in their fields, not only in
England and Scotland, but in Denmark and Germany.

Gerarde's description is very pithy ; it is as follows : —
" Corne marigold, or golden corne floure, hath a soft
stalke, hollow, and of a greene colour, whereon do grow
great leaves, much hackt and cut into divers sections, and
placed confusedly, or out of order ; vpon the top of the
branches stand faire starlike floures, yellow in the middle,
and such likewise is the pale or border of leaves that
compasseth the soft bal in the middle, of a reasonable

80 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

pleasant smel." So many of the composite flowers have a
strong- and somewhat disagreeable odour, that the fact of
our present plant being " reasonable pleasant " is dis-
tinctly worth record. Another old writer says of it " Smelling
a little sweete ; " he again, it will be noticed, being careful
not to commit himself too deeply to an expression of
approval of its fragrance. Those plants that grow in
rich soil assume a soft luxuriance compared to those that
by stress of circumstances have had to make a harder fight
for existence ; the pampered children of fortune having
less of the richness of outline that is so pleasant a feature
in the foliage of this plant. "We have heard of the plant
being used as a pot-herb, but have never experimented on
it ourselves ; it has a soft and succulent look that rather
suggests such an application, but, probably, we shall
remain content with the suggestion.

SELF-HEAL.

Prunella vulgarls. Nat. Ord., Labicda,

EAV of those who have sufficient
interest in our wild flowers to
take up our book at all will find
the self-heal a plant unfamiliar
to them, for its heads of purple
. flowers spring1 up amidst the long-
grass in profusion in almost any
piece of meadow-land and pasturage.
The plant is an annual, and every
year there is a bountiful dotting
over of rich violet in the long waving
grass of the hay-field. The self-heal
is ordinarily a sign of poor land,
and grows most freely in moist
situations, in what one hears farmers call a "cold"
soil. Its blossoms should generally be looked for in
June and July, but on hedge-banks and other situations
where the mower's scythe does not cut short its career
it may at times be found flowering throughout August.
The root of the self-heal is exceedingly fibrous. The stems
creep a good deal, and send down roots from their lower
joints, and the flower-branches ascend to a height varying
from a few inches to a foot or more. In open and exposed
situations the plant is diminutive, while in more sheltered
71

82 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS,

spots it is larger in all its parts. The specimen we selected
was fully a foot in height, but then it grew amidst the
long grass of a country churchyard, and so got drawn up
to the light in the general struggle for existence. The
stems are often deeply grooved and rough to the touch ; but
here, again, the circumstances of the plant's life largely in-
fluence the habit. Like many another denizen of earth, a
hard lot furrows and roughens it, while the sunshine of
prosperity removes many an angle. The stems, and
especially the lower portions of them, are often tinted with
reddish -purple, and the whole branches freely, lateral stems
being thrown off in pairs at almost every node, and increas-
ing in length the lower their position on the main stems.
The leaves are placed in pairs opposite to each other, and
are borne on short foot-stalks. In form they are what is
termed ovate — oval, with a more pointed extremity. It will
be seen in our illustration that they stand boldly out
from the stem : a very characteristic feature in the plant.
They are often a little harsh and rough to the touch, from
a number of little prominent points on their upper surface,
and their outline is either one continuous line, as in the
example before us, or they are very slightly indented along
their margins. Though our British examples are very
much of one character, the self-heal on the Continent is
found to vary a great deal in many respects, such as size
and colour of the flowers, and more especially in the foliage,
the leaves in foreign specimens being sometimes deeply
lobed. The flower-spikes are terminal on the branches ; at
first very short, compact, and cylindrical, but presently
opening out somewhat. It maintains much the same size
throughout its length, and does not show the gradually
tapering form that we often see in the inflorescence of many

SELF-HEAL. S3

other flowers. Immediately beneath each spike of blossoms
we always find one of the pairs of leaves, sometimes stand-
ing out, like the other leaf-pairs, at about a right angle
with the stem, but perhaps more frequently thrown down-
wards, as in the illustration . The' flowers are arranged in
dense whorls or rings, and a pair of broad floral leaves is
associated with each ring, and adds to the compact, tense look
of the whole. There are ordinarily six flowers in each
whorl, but they by no means come out simultaneously in
any one ring, so that a somewhat ragged-looking head of
flowers is produced. The calyx is tubular, and composed of
two conspicuous parts, the uppermost of which is flat, and
terminated by three small teeth, and the lower one rounder,
and divided into long and pointed segments. The corolla
is ordinarily of a rich violet colour, though we sometimes
find it white or of a reddish-purple tint. When the plant
is gathered the blossoms are found to shatter very easily.
The tubular part of the corolla projects a little beyond the
protecting tube of the calyx, and then opens out into two
distinct portions. The upper lip is hollow and dome-like,
and very simple in form ; the lower lip is cut into three
conspicuous segments, the central one having its margin
finely toothed. The stamens, four in number, are very
curious in form, and any one finding a flowering plant
should go in for a little amateur dissection of the parts.
The filaments are long and tapering, pale violet in colour,
and two of them longer than the other two ; each is very
curiously forked at its summit, and on one of each of these
pairs of forks we find the anther, the other fork having no
very visible raison d'etre. The style is thread-like, much
shorter than the stamens, and terminating in a bifid
or twice-cleft stigma. The calyx, after the flowering-season

84 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

is over, closes up in a very curious manner, to preserve the
seeds ; these are tour in number, rather small, smooth,
and brown.

The older name of the plant was " Brunella;" we hud it
thus given by Dodouseus, Rivinus, and the more modern
writer Ray; and on taking down ourTournefort — " L'Histoire
des Plantes," published in 1732 — we find that he, too, adopts
the old spelling. Linnaeus, Bauhin, Fuchs (the botanist
in whose honour the fuchsia is named), and other writers
call it " Prunella/'' preferring- the softer sound of the word,
but in so doing losing sight of its meaning. Hooker says
that the name of the plant is derived from the German
word " braiine/' the quinsy; and Parkinson tells us, "this
is generally called prunella, and bruiiella from the Germans,
who called it bruunellen, because it cureth that disease
which they call die bruen, common to soldiers in campe,
but especially in garrison, which is an inflammation of the
mouth, throat, and tongue/-* Amongst the old herbalists'
names for it we find the carpenter's herb, sickle-wort, hook-
heal, and slough-heal.

CHAELOCK.

Sinapis arvensis, Nat. Ord., Cruciferee.

ARTON, in one of his poems,
on the Spring, has the fol-
lowing lines : —
" O'er the field of waving broom,
JSlowly shoots the golden bloom ; "

and these lines naturally occur
to us when the charlock comes
into our thoughts. It is one
of the most troublesome weeds
with which the farmer has to
contend, and as we watch the
gieeii cornfields during June slight
indications of charlock are first seen,
and day by day, as more blossoms
expand, the streak of yellow becomes
larger and more pronounced, until some-
times the interloper appears at the dis-
tance to be some legitimate field-crop, so largely does
it take possession of the ground, while the whole
expanse glows with its golden yellow. There are three
plants that are most especially found in cornfields, that
are all fairly common, and that are apt to be indis-
criminately called charlock ; these are the present plant, the
Sinapis alba, and the llaplianus rtifihanislri/ni ; the first and

86 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

the lust are by far the most abundant, but the Sinapis
arvetisis, the plant we here figure, is the true charlock, and
the most noxious of the three. The appreciation in which
it is held may be seen in the " cornfields, too frequent,"
of Hooker, and the " one of the most abundant weeds of
cultivation throug-h Europe, and but too common all over
Britain/' of Bentham. Some of the earlier blossoms may
be found towards the end of May, but June is the month
in which ordinarily it is most abundant, though in some
localities specimens may be found in July. Linnaeus
and others of his time not only considered that it was
injurious to the growing corn, but they had an idea, too,
that its seeds would get amongst the grain and impart
some hurtful effect to the flour ; there would appear to be,
however, no proof of this : on the other hand, the plant is
a favourite with bees, and this means a plentiful yield of
honey to their despoilers, and the whole plant, when
young, is often eaten by agricultural labourers, and forms
a by no means bad substitute for other vegetables.

The charlock varies very much in appearance in different
plants and under varying conditions of growth ; when
found amongst the standing corn it is taller and less
branched than when growing on roadside rubbish ; it varies
too in degrees of hairiness, and the stems are sometimes
green, sometimes purple or crimson, but the flowers do not
seem subject to any variation of tint. The plant is an
annual, and may therefore be comparatively easily eradi-
cated if it be pulled up before seediug-time ; hence the
farmers are often put to a considerable expense in up-
rooting it from the growing crops.

The plant is from one to two feet high, the stems
upright, branching, grooved, and clothed often with short

CHARLOCK. 87

hairs. Our specimen is a young and succulent plant
that was grown amongst the sheltering corn ; specimens
that have grown in more exposed situations are more
solid-looking, partially or wholly red in tint, and covered
with hairs. The leaves are arranged alternately on the
stalks, are borne on short stems, are thrown boldly out
from the plant, and are rough to the touch. The veins
are conspicuous, and the margins indented or coarsely
serrated. The upper leaves, as may be seen in our illus-
tration, are simple in form, while the lower often have one
or more lobes at their bases, and present a more irregular
outline. The flowers are rather large, the four heart-
shaped petals standing boldly out in a cross form. Like
all the other cruciferse, the charlock has six stamens, two
being shorter than the other four, but as they are simi-
lar in colour to the petals they do not attract attention.
The calyx, it will be noticed in our figure, is very
spreading, and consists of four sepals. The seed-vessels
seen in the drawing are at an early stage of their history;
when they reach maturity they form rounded pods, some
one and a half inches in length, terminating in a pointed
beak. The ripening pods are often reddish or purplish
in colour, and each contain some six or seven small
blackish seeds. Pigeons and other birds are very fond of
these.

Dodonsus discourses about the plant as follows : —
" Charlocke growethe in all places alongst the wayes,
about old walles and ruynous places, and oftentimes in the
fieldes, especially those where as turneppes and Nauewes
have been sown, so that it shoulde seeme to be a corrupt
and evill weede or enimie to the Nauew. This herbe is
called of the later writers Rajjistrum, and of some also

88 FAMILIAR WILD PLOTTERS.

Syttapi ; iu French, Yelus or Torielle ; in high Douche,
Ilederich j in base Allemaigne, Herricke. This herbe of
the late physitions is not used iu medicine, but some with
this seede do make mustarde, the whiche they eate with
meate in steede of mustarde, although it be not al thing so
good. It was reckoned of Theophrast and Galen amongst
those seedes wherewithall men used commonly to pre-
pare and dresse their meates/' Another old writer gives
amongst " the vertues/' the following : — " The seede that
growethe naturally wilde is hotter than that which is
manured and sowen, and more bitter also, whereof some do
make use instead of mustarde seede, or mingle it there-
with/' He also commends the oil expressed from the
seeds as a preferable substitute for " the Traine Oyle which
is made of the Whale/-1

The generic name Sinapis is derived from the Greek word
for mustard; while the specific title a rvensis indicates the
locality where it flourishes.

SMALL
WILLOW-HEEB.

Epilobium montanum. Nat, Ord., Ona-
gracece.

E have already included in our
series one species of Epilobium,
and a much finer plant than
the present ; the small willow-
herb, however, if not so striking
a plant as the great willow-herb,
the E. kirsutum, is quite as familiar
a wild flower, and, therefore, claims
full recognition at our hands. It
has a grace and lightness, too,
of its own, that makes it no unfit
companion for the large number of
beautiful plants with which it here
finds itself associated — the silver-
starred anemone, the ruddy orpine, the curious milk-thistle,
the hardy thrift, the golden stone-crop, the delicate bladder-
campion. The small willow-herb is very abundant nearly
everywhere in Britain, and, in fact, seems to be almost
cosmopolitan. It should be looked for — or rather, we will
say, it may be found, for a plant so common needs little
searching after — on waste or cultivated ground, the roadside
or the garden, often on the thatch of the cottage roof, on
old stone walls, or in woods. It is a perennial, and flowers
during June and July. Some of the old cottage roofs
72

90 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

become quite gay as the thatch grows old and somewhat
furrowed, as there thus becomes a holding-ground and the
necessary dampness for the propagation of various seeds
that find their way there. How they ever manage to do it
is a puzzle. The seeds of the willow-herb, being light and
feathery, will find their way anywhere, like those of the
thistles, hawk-weeds, and groundsel ; but we remember
this summer often noticing one particular roof on which,
besides the plants we have mentioned, and grasses, and
many other things, there were handfuls of poppies and
several sturdy wheat-plants. Possibly, an ear or two of
wheat may have been retained in the straw after thatch-
ing, though in that case we should imagine they would
have thrown up their delicate green blades the following
season, and would not have waited till lapse of years had
made re-thatching one of the immediate questions of the
future. And how, in any case, did the poppy-seeds find
their way there ? The same thing often strikes one in the
case of the grand flower-borders that often fringe the sum-
mits of the walls of old ruined abbeys and other buildings.
In a place that seems inaccessible, and where no foothold
seems possible, we may see the wild rose throwing out
branches a couple of yards long, and elders with stems
as thick as a man's wrist, to say nothing of ox-eye daisies,
stone-crop, corn-marigolds, poppies, ivy-leaved toad-flax,
snapdragon, wall- flowers, and many another gay adornment
of the old flint walls, all thriving where the nourishment
is of the scantiest, the drought the most searching, the
wind the keenest.

The small willow-herb is a great pest when found in cul-
tivated ground, and when it is once fairly established in a
garden, it seems to be impossible to eradicate it. It has two

SMALL WILLOW-HERB. 91

features that enable it to command the situation — a long
and very fibrous root, of which the smallest portions left in
the ground possess a wonderful vitality; and an apparently
unlimited supply of seeds, all duly provided, like those
of the dandelion, with the means of wafting themselves
away from the parent plant and scattering themselves far
and wide.

The stem of the willow-herb is upright, and ascends
to a height of some two feet, or even a little more if
amongst other plants ; it is round in section,- very slightly
downy, often quite simple in character, but occasionally
branching a little near the summit. When it branches
at all, these branches are in pairs. When the plant grows
amongst others in the shelter of a garden, its stems and
leaves are alike green ; but in more exposed situations
the stems are often a deep crimson in tint, and the lower
leaves are various tints of brown, crimson, and yellow,
gradually passing into the bluish-green of the upper leaves.
The leaves are generally in pairs, but we may occasionally
find a plant in which they are arranged in threes or fours — a
variation to which most of the species of willow-herb seem
subject. Most of the leaves are on short stalks, but some
of the upper ones will be found almost or entirely stalkless.
They are of the form botanically termed ovate, a good deal
pointed at their extremities, and having their margins
finely notched, like the teeth of a saw. The lines of the
veining are rather prominent, and the upper surface of the
leaf is often slightly hairy or downy. The calyx crown-
ing the long tapering ovary is deeply cut into four lobes.
The corolla is composed of four heai't-shaped petals, deeply
notched, of a pale purplish-pink tint, and, when fully
expanded, spreading widely outward. The stamens are

92 FAMILIAR WILD f LOWERS.

eight in number, four being considerably longer than the
other four ; the stigma four-cleft ; the lobes spreading, and
forming a cross-like form at the summit of the style ; the
capsular fruit long and slender, splitting open when ripe,
and disclosing the numerous small and downy seeds. As
the segments of the fruit dry and curl back, the seeds are
liberated, and, by means of the tuft of hairs with which
they are each terminated, they are dispersed by the wind.

The generic name, Epilobium, is a very happy one; it is
derived from two Greek words, signifying upon and pod,
from the growth of the flowers on the summits of the pod-
like ovaries. Montanum is Latin, and signifies pertaining
to mountains, a not very appropriate designation for a
plant that is abundant almost everywhere. The English
names, willow-herb and willow-weed, were suggested
evidently by the shape of the leaves, though the leaves of
the various species of willow, while partaking of much of
the character of the plant we figure, are more slender in
proportion to their breadth.

FEVEBFEW.

'Matricaria Parthenium. Nat. Ord.,
Composite.

O many plants present to the un-
trained eyes features not dis-
similar in many respects to those
of the present plant that the
uninitiated may be excused if
they hesitate to affirm offhand
that they know the feverfew
directly they see it. The com-
posite order comprises in almost
every region of the world an
enormous number of species.
The English plants alone are
placed in over forty genera,
and some of these in turn, as
Hieracium, contain many species. However they may
differ in minor points, the one great feature in which
they agree is the composite flower-head, each so-called
flower of the ordinary observer being in reality the
aggregation of a considerable number into one head.
In many the florets of the disk and of the ray are
alike yellow — the hawkweeds, the goafs-beard, and the
dandelion are examples of this ; and in others, as in
the present plant, the centre is yellow, and the sur-
rounding rays are white — the ox-eye and the daisy are

94 FAMILIAR WILD V LOWERS.

very familiar illustrations of this. Others, as the salsify
(Tragopoyon ])orrifolius),axQ purple, or blue, as in the blue
sow-thistle (Mulgedium alpitmni), the chicory (Cichoriu-m
Inti/bus), or the corn-flower (Centaur ea Cyanus) ; but the
greater number of species are either some tint of yellow,
or a combination of yellow and white. The tint of the
yellow varies a good deal in various species ; in some it is
almost orange, in others a clear, pure golden yellow, and
in others, again, sulphur-coloured. The present plant
suggests the idea of a number of daisy-heads that have
somehow left their low estate and had a rise in life, though
we miss the rich crimson tipping of the under surfaces
that we all know so well.

The root-stock of the feverfew is perennial. The
stems attain to a height of some two feet, and branch a
good deal at the upper extremities, though, as all the
branches leave at a slight angle, the general upright look of
the plant is preserved. This freedom of branching and the
upright effect of the plant as a whole may be very clearly
seen in our illustration. The leaves, it will be seen, are of
the kind termed pinnate, or feather-like — a central line and
lateral portions given off from it — and each larger mass is
again cut into, so as to produce the form known botanically
as bi-pinnate, or twice pinnate. The upper ones, the only
ones that the small size of our page would allow us to
show, are simpler in form than those lower down the plant,
and do not show either the depth of cutting into or the
number of segments seen in the latter. Even in the few
we have represented the progression in form is very marked,
those nearest the flowers showing a great simplicity of
form when contrasted with the one nearest the bottom of
the pages. Besides the larger segments and divisions the

FEVERFEW. 95

leaves have their outlines clearly and sharply toothed.
The foliage is of a bright, fresh-green colour, and, if we
may be allowed the expression, rather flimsy to the touch.
This latter peculiarity causes the plant to quickly assume
a withered appearance when gathered and carried in the
hand, though a prompt plunging into water will quickly
restore matters again. The delicacy of the leaves makes
them speedily show either injury or care taken with them.
The flower-heads are numerous, from half an inch to an
inch in diameter, and as the lower ones are on longer
stems than the upper, the general mass of blossom in the
plant is all at about the same level. The numerous flowers,
with their brilliant golden eyes and pure white rays, give
the plant a very bright and cheery look. The whole plant
has a somewhat strong smell, and the leaves have a
decidedly bitter taste ; and it has been suggested that a
decoction of it might be efficacious as a tonic. It does
not, however, follow that, because tonic medicines are
often bitter, we may assume that bitter things are therefore
tonic.

The feverfew should be looked for on waste ground and
in the hedgerows. It is generally dispersed over Britain,
but does not seem to be anywhere very abundant; Bentham
suggests that it may not perhaps be truly indigenous. It
is one of the later flowers of the year, and should be
searched for from July to September. As it has long been
held in medicinal repute in rustic practice and precept, it
may not uncommonly be found in the cottager's garden,
and a very double variety may often be found in gardens
of higher pretensions. In the garden variety the only
difference is in the compact, almost ball-like, flower-heads ;
the foliage and general growth resemble that of its hedge-

96 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

row brother. The name feverfew, like the monkish febri-
f uga, testifies to the belief in its remedial powers, for fevers
are few, and fly away where this plant is held in proper
estimation. With some old writers the name is featherfew,
and this suggests some connection between the name and
the pinnate character of the leaves ; but there is little
doubt but that featherfew is only a perversion and corrup-
tion of the more ordinary name. Gerarde, we see, gives
it as fedderfew.

Feverfew "dryed and made into powder, and two
drammes of it taken with honey, or other thing, purgeth
by siege Melancholy ; wherefore it is very good for such
as have the giddinesse and turning in the head or swim-
ming ; for them that are purse or troubled with the short-
uesse of winde, and for melancholique people, and such as
be sadde and pensive and without speach. The greene
leaves, with the flowers of feverfew stamped, is good
to be layde to the dissease called the wilde fyre, or Saint
Anthony's fyre."

THKIFT.

Armeria maritima. Nat. Ord.,
Plumbag'macccB.

.HEREVEE we get a piece of
muddy sea-shore, there we may
feel little doubt of finding
any quantity of the thrift,
or sea-pink. By far the best
place to look for it is where
some river, after many a devi-
ous curve through the lowlands,
brings its tribute of muddy
water to the clear and bright
salt water of our encircling sea.
On the shores of such a river
large banks of sediment are
formed, often creating salt
marshes for some distance in-
land, into which at high tide
the sea penetrates by many a winding channel. We
remember to have seen such spots on the Sussex Adur,
the mouth of the Ribble, in Lancashire, and where the
sluggish Axe and Parret bear in the west their contributions
of mud and water to the estuary of the Severn ; and in all
these river deposits the ground was thickly covered with
the verdure of the thrift — so covered, indeed, that at a little
distance the effect was that of a meadow by the water-side.
73

98 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

In our boyish days we spent many an hour wander-
ing over such marshes. The restless hurry and motion of
the sea dies away as its waters penetrate by innumerable
channels into the low-lying land, and many a clear pool of
salt water holds within its quiet bosom quaint forms of
sea-life or the rich colours of the sea- weed. There too we
may find the samphire and many another lover of the salt
water; but in such a place the soft turfy cushion that
receives us as we spring across the water-channels is the
dense foliage of the thrift.

The root of the thrift forms perennial tufts from
which numerous grass-like leaves ascend. It is a particularly
easy plant to transfer to the garden, and it is curious
that it should be so, for as Drummond points out that
the sweet rose would die if transferred to the salt sea
moisture, so we should imagine that the salt air and
moisture in which the thrift grows so healthily would be
more essential to its well-being than seems to be the
case. We have any quantity of the plant in our own
garden some sixty miles from the salt sea foam. It makes
a very beautiful garden edging, and is full to us of
present enjoyment and of happy memories of the past.
The plant increases very fast, and can be taken up each
year and freely divided at the roots; a long broad
edging of it — a mass of verdure below, and above this
its countless crimson flower-heads — is a really beautiful
feature in the garden. Its charms have appealed to
many a generation, for we find Gerarde writing that the
plant is "found in the most salt marshes in England,
as also in gardens, for the bordering up of beds and bankes,
for the which it serveth very fitly ;" and when he comes to
the usual heading of " the vertues, " he is fain to

THRIFT. 99

confess that " their use in physic as yet is not knowne,
nor doth any seeke into the nature thereof, but esteeme
them onely for their beautie and pleasure/' Parkinson,
from the general appearance of the plant, included it amongst
grasses, and, as he cannot definitely assign it any valuable
medicinal qualities, assumes them, rather than disappoint
himself and his readers, for he says : " It is generally held
that the root of the sea quick-grass is as effectuall as the
ordinary or common sort, and therefore for the qualitie
I shall referre you to be enfbrmed there where I speake of
it, that so I may avoide a double repetition of the same
things. This difference between theese and those of the
land hath beene observed that cattle will not feede on the
leaves of these by reason of their hardnesse, roughnesse,
and sharpnesse, whereas they refuse not the other/'
This latter fact we should have thought would have set
the old herbalist on his guard, for we never see any
cattle or horses browsing in these sea-meadows, and
where they so readily detect that thrift, after all, only
has the appearance of grass, and none of its true nature,
it is hardly fair to suffering humanity to assume that
practically it all comes to the same thing which is
used. Can our old author have had a dim suspicion
that it did really come to very much the same thing
which broken reed his patients trusted to ?

It is a very curious thing that this plant, so character-
istic of the low-lying salt marshes, and so thoroughly at
home there, is equally at home in a very different locality,
the breezy summits of some of the highest Scotch
mountains.

The flowering stems of the thrift are simple in
character, and rise at once from the cushion-like tuft of

100 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

verdure. On each plant they are very numerous, and as
the thrift blooms from May to September, a constant
succession of them is thrown up. They vary somewhat
in height, and would ordinarily be a little longer than
those we have figured, in some cases half as long again.
In some cases these stems are only three or four
inches in height, but ordinarily the blossoms appear
to be well lifted above the mass of foliage from which
they spring. Each stem bears on its summit a globular
head of bright pink flowers, having a curious inverted
cylindrical sheath beneath, a peculiarity that can be
readily noted in the figure. The blossoms vary occasionally
in strength of colour, and are sometimes found pure white.
As the flowers die they fade into a pale brown, and
the harsh, paper-like scales that are intermixed with the
flowers in the head become conspicuous. The corolla is
formed of five regular petals; the calyx tubular,
terminating in five short teeth; the styles and stamens
each five in number.

AGRICULTURAL LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

CITRUS RESEARCH CENTER AND
AGRICULTURAL EXi^KI.YjilNT STATION
. CALIFORNIA

BLADDER CAMPION.

Silene wflata. Nat. Ord.
Caryophyllacece.

WO or three of the campions —
the white lychnis, the ragged
robin, and the corn cockle — we
have already illustrated in our
series, and the only two other
species that are sufficiently
common to call for a place in
our pages are the pink campion
and the present species. Each
year, at the same spot in our
garden hedge, a specimen of
this graceful and delicate plant
springs up for our admiration ;
and while the gardener has
full liberty in the matter of
dandelions, groundsel, and many
another wilding that has been

so unfortunate as to display its attractions where they
are unwelcome, our Silene is hedged about by household
legislation that protects it from the spoiler. The
stems are erect and loosely branching at their base, the
few divisions into which they separate all preserving
the general upright and slender character of the
plant. These stems are ordinarily from one to two feet

102 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

high, though on open pasturage and exposed roadsides they
sometimes fail to reach the former height, while we have
sometimes seen them, when they spring up amidst a shelter-
ing hedge or beneath the shadow of trees, attain to a
greater height than the two feet we have given as the
outside measurement of average plants.

The form of the foliage is simple, and the outlines are
merely continuously waved lines; there are no lobes or
serrations. The leaves, too, are always in pairs, and the
stem thickens at the points whence they are given off.
We see this opposite growth of the foliage and swollen
stem in all the campions, and, indeed, in all the members
of the order. Garden pinks and carnations supply a very
good illustration of this. The bladder campion varies some-
what in the size and shape of its leaves, some specimens
showing either larger or more attenuated leaves than those
we see in our illustration ; but the departure from the type
is not extreme in character, and those who have our illus-
tration before them will have no difficulty in identifying any
specimen of the plant that comes in their way, as it is a
very typical piece. The flowers are fairly numerous as
they grow in graceful terminal clusters on the summits
of the slender stems, and the purity of their colour tends
to make them more conspicuous and attractive. It will be
noticed that they are ordinarily slightly drooping. The
petals are five in number, though each is so deeply cleft
that, at a hasty glance, they appear much more numerous.
There is often a small scale on each petal at the point
where the broad and spreading part terminates, and these
form a little ring or crown round the centre of the flower.
These little scales may, however, be much better seen in
some of the other species, as in the bladder campion they

BLADDER CAMPION. 103

are always small, and are often entirely absent. The
calyx, from its size and inflated character, is a very con-
spicuous feature ; it rapidly increases in size as the buds
swell and open and develop into fully-expanded flowers,
and these in turn give place to the fruit. The calyx is
very light in colour, of a more yellowish green frequently
than the rest of the plant, and very prominently veined and
reticulated. The whole is of one piece, or what is botani-
cally termed monophyllous, but it bears at its summit five
large teeth. The stamens are ten in number and the styles
three. The bladder campion should be looked for in pasture-
land, on railway banks, waste places, and by the roadside.
Its flowering-season is from June to August. It is com-
monly distributed over Britain.

The word campion is said to be derived from the
use of the flower as a wreath for the champions at
the public games in the middle ages. This may
possibly have been so, but it seems in the last degree
unlikely, as the plants would have to be searched for
far and wide to procure them in sufficient quantities for
any considerable number of chaplets, and all the
campions droop very quickly after gathering. Many
other and more suitable plants could be obtained for the
crowns of the victors. The prefix to our present
species refers, of course, to its bladder-like calyx, and
the specific title inflata scarcely needs translation, so
evidently does it bear its meaning on its face. The plant
was once called the cucubalus, a word derived from the
Greek words signifying a bad or noxious growth. It is
evident that the name, first employed by Pliny, has been
diverted from the plant to which he applied it, and to
which it may have been most appropriate, and has by some

104

FAMILIAR WILL FLOWERS.

mediaeval misconception been given to a plant altogether
innoxious. The bladder campion is in some parts of
the country called white-bottle. We are told by some
authorities that the young shoots of the plant may be
used as a substitute for asparagus, but on the whole
we should think asparagus as a substitute for campion
would be preferable. The leaves, too, are said to be
not unpalatable when boiled, but we imagine there is
much more theory than practice in these recommenda-
tions ; we can hardly imagine any one laboriously blanching
the young shoots, or filling a basket by slow degrees with
the foliage of the plant. The bladder campion, though
commonly distributed, is not to be found in abundance in
every pasture ; and those who would desire to collect its
leaves would have to wander throughout a long summer's
afternoon before the basket got filled. " It is said to be so
effectual against the scorpion, that this herbe cast upon one
doth make him of no force to envenome any/' A plant so
potent may be well content to forego culinary fame.

LESS E F\

I LESSER RED-RATTLE.

Pediciilaris sylvatica. Nat. Ord.,
Scrophulariacece.

gUR name for the present plant
sufficiently indicates the ex-
istence of a second species,
for a lesser red-rattle im-
plies a greater red-rattle,
but we have selected the
present species, though it is
the smaller of the two,
because it is considerably
the more common. It is
a perennial, and should be
looked for in moist pastures
and swampy heaths and
wastes. The plant begins
to blossom in the spring,
and lasts . all through the
summer, so that any time
from April to August we ought to finds its delicate
pink blossoms. Our expression, " should be looked
for/' is a sufficiently accurate one, for though the
plant is commonly distributed over Britain, its small
size does not make it by any means noticeable. The
piece we have chosen for our illustration was springing
up amongst the roadside grass, and is an exceptionally
74

106 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

drawn-up specimen; the plant ordinarily nestles more closely
to the ground, and varies from three to five inches in height.
The stems are prostrate and spreading, branching a good
deal at the base. The leaves of the lesser red-rattle are
very deeply cut into lateral and numerous segments. The
calyx is smooth on the exterior, but woolly within at the
mouth, broadly inflated, and marked over with a fine
reticulation of veins. At its summit it is cut into five
unequal lobes of a foliaceous or leafy character. The
corolla is tubular Avithin the calyx, and opens out at its
extremity into two very distinct parts, an upper lip of very
simple form, dome-like, but compressed at the sides, and a
lower lip flatly expanded and cut into three very distinct
lobes, forming altogether both in form and colour a very
quaint and attractive-looking flower. The stamens are
four in number, two being longer than the others ; one
pair has numerous hairs near the summit, the other pair
being perfectly smooth.

We have already figured a near relation of the present
plant — the yellow- rattle or Rhinanthus crista-galli. These
plants all derived their names from the fact that
as the seeds ripen they may be heard rattling within
their capsules when the plant is shaken. "There be
two kindes of rattel grasse, one which beareth redde floures
and leaves finely jagged or snipt, the other hath pale yellow
floures and long narrow leaves snipt like a sawe round
about the edges. The first kind hath leaves very smal,
jagged, or dented, spreade abroade upo the ground. The
stalkes be weake and smal, whereof some lye along trayling
upon the ground and do beare the little leaves, the rest do
growe upright as high as a man's hand, and upon them
growe the floures from the midle of the stemme round about

LESSER RED-RATTLE. 107

even up to the top, somewhat like to ye floure of the red
nettle. The which being falle away there grow in their
place little flat powches or huskes wherein the seede is con-
tained." Many of these old descriptions, quaint as they
are in expression and spelling, go closely home to the root
of the matter, and in most cases describe very accurately
the details of the various plants. The foregoing is from
Lyte's translation of Dodouseus.

The presence of the red-rattle is ordinarily an indication
of defective drainage, but this clearly is no fault of
the plant, though it has had to bear a good deal of
unmerited abuse in consequence. It is a great pity
that a delicate and beautiful plant should be called foul
names, but we are bound to add that the name by which
it is best known and by which it is called by all the old
writers, is " louse-wort/' This libellous epithet arose from a
belief that sheep eating it became diseased and covered
with parasites ; but when the sheep suffer it is not because
of this plant, but because they have been put into marshy
and unwholesome pastures. The little rattle is in reality
a benefactor, for it indicates where the marshy places are,
and marks the spots that need the farmer's attention. The
generic title pedicularis refers to its supposititious vermin-
producing qualities, and hands the libel down to posterity.

On taking down our Parkinson, the " Theatrum
Botanicum, or the Theater of Plants/' to see what he had
said on the subject, the following line in the index was
rather startling :— " Yellow Rattle and Red Rattle, 713;
The Indians' Rattling God, 1666." We naturally lost little
time in turning to page 1666, and were so far edified that,
though we are afraid the plant cannot claim much kinship
with our pedicularis, except in its power of rattling, we are

108 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWED.

sure our readers will be glad to share our find with us : —
" The Portugals possesse a certain country in America called
Morpian, which is ful of very good fruits, and among the
rest the Nana or Pinas. There is also growing a tree
whose fruit they call cobyne, having leaves like to those of
the bay-tree, and fruit as bigge as a melon, formed like
unto an estridge egg, which, although it is not eaten by
any of them, yet is very beautifull hanging on the tree.
The savages used to make drinking cuppes of them, but
besides that they commit idolatry therewith, which is
wonderfull and to be lamented, for having emptyed and
made hollow these iruites, they fill them with the seeds
of milium or some such thing, which, being shaken with
one's hand or withe the winde, will make a noyse; then
do they fasten a pole into the ground and sticke this
fruite full of those seede on the toppe thereof, and fasten
about it the most beautifull feathers of birdes they can
get. Every house hath two or three of these fruits decked
up in this manner sticking on the jpoles, which they have
in great reverence, thinking some god to be in them,
because when they are shaken they make a noyse."

WATER FIG-WORT.

Scrophularia aquatica. Nat. Ord.,
Scrophulariacece.

:HEREVER we find a river,
weed-bordered pool, or water-
course of any kind, there we
may fairly hope to find the
plant here figured, though, as
it has little to commend it,
when we compare it with its
fellows, the forget-me-not, the
water-lily, the flowering rush,
or the purple loose-strife, it, no
doubt, ordinarily gets over-
looked. The blossoms have
a lurid colour and fantastic
shape, that give the plant a
somewhat weird and uncanny
look, and one finds it difficult
to imagine that any one could
even have thought it a remedy for any of the ills of
life, though its generic name is a sufficient indication
that it has in the past been so held. Curtis, in his " Flora
Londinensis," admits that the plant in its wild state
has little to commend it as an ornamental plant,
but he adds that when variegated few exceed it in
beauty. He further tells us that in this state it was in his

110 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

day not uncommon in the nurseries about the metropolis.
What the degree of variegation was he does not inform us,
or whether it consisted of a mottling of the leaves or a
change in the colour of the flowers ; but the whole habit of
the plant is so spare, and the flowers so minute in proportion
to the plant as a whole, that any possible modification could
scarcely hold its own amongst gayer plants, and the
necessity of planting it in a very moist soil would tell still
further against its general usefulness as a plant of the
flower-border. Even in a wild state the dull dark purple of
the flowers is sometimes changed into white, a modification
that almost all red or purple flowers are subject to, as we
may see in the bugle, hyacinth, meadow crane's-bill, and
many other plants. Cattle do not seem to care for the
plant, and its leaves have a decidedly disagreeable smell
when bruised ; but the bees are very partial to its sombre
flowers, and the larva? of some few species of moths feed on
its foliage — a proceeding that tends possibly to its utility in
the grand scheme of Nature, but which certainly does not
add to its beauty. We almost invariably find the leaves
more or less eaten by these caterpillars.

The root of the water fig-wort is perennial, and
throws out numerous large fibres. The plant varies
much in size, but a height of five feet would be a fairly
typical measurement, though at times we find the plants
more nearly approaching eight. The general character of the
stem is distinctly upright, though from the rigid straight
line of the main stem smaller lateral branches are thrown
out. In texture the stem is smooth, a feature observable
in most water plants, and when cut across the section,
is seen to be four-sided, the angles being strongly developed.
The stems are often more or less strongly reddish-purple in

WATER FIG-WORT. Ill

colour. The leaves are placed in pairs on the stem, each
succeeding pair being at right angles with the pair below
it ; all are on foot-stalks, and each pair is ordinarily separated
by some considerable interval of bare stem from its
neighbours. In form the leaves are somewhat heart-shaped,
but often more oblong than those we have figured, and the
veining is very conspicuous. Hooker truly says that they
are " crenatc-serrate, cordate-oblong, obtuse," and we leave
this statement in all its simplicity, unmarred by any
explanations of our own, to the consideration of our readers.
The flowers are terminal, and surmount the whole ; the
inflorescence is paniculate, and at each branching we find a
little floral leaf, or bract. The calyx has five conspicuous
lobes, and these are fringed by a rather ragged-looking
brown membraneous border. The corolla is almost globular,
the lobes at its mouth being very short and broad ; the two
upper ones stand boldly out from the flower ; the two lateral
ones take the same general direction as the upper, but are
much shorter ; and the fifth is turned sharply downwards.
There are four anther-bearing stamens, and ordinarily a
fifth and barren one beneath the upper lip of the corolla.
After the flowering is over we find the roundish capsules
each containing numerous small brown seeds.

The water fig-wort is sometimes called the water betony,
a name at one time the more common of the two. It was
bestowed upon it from the resemblance of its leaves to the
wood betony, but as it differs entirely from that plant in
every other respect, the name may well be allowed to drop.
The name fig-wort is derived from the form of the root in
one of the species of Scrophularia. The S. nodosa, or
knotted fig-wort, the species in question, is a fairly common
plant. It derives its name from its thick and knotty roots,

112 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

the short stock giving forth a number of small tubers.
The knotted fig-wort much resembles in its general habit
the plant we have figured, though an inspection of the two
together would sufficiently illustrate their specific distinc-
tion. Its leaves are much more acutely heart-shaped than
those of the water fig-wort, and the calyx has only a very
narrow margin to the lobes. The stem, too, has not the
decided projections at its angles that we see in the plant
more especially before us ; and the plant, though found in
rather moist, cultivated, or waste ground, and in damp
woods, is not distinctly an aquatic, like the water
fig-wort.

The water fig-wort varies so far in foliage and other
respects that a variety called the 8. Ehrharti has been
recognised; while other writers give it full specific value,
and recognise its claim to independent existence as a true
species. The rare balm-leaved fig-wort, S. Scorodonia, is
another species of the genus that in many respects resembles
our plant : in fact, a strong family likeness runs through
all the different kinds of fig-wort.

SAINFOIN.

SAINFOIN.

Otiobrychis sat'wa. Nat. Ord.,
Leguminosfe.

AINFOIN, though it is better
known probably to most per-
sons as one of the field-crops of
the agriculturist^ has a full claim
to appear in our pages as a
familiar wild flower. It is in-
digenous to Britain, and should
be looked for in its wild state
on dry chalky hills, in limestone
districts, and on the great open
expanses of down so characteristic
of some parts of Southern Eng-
land ; while its value to the
farmer as a forage-plant has led
to its wide distribution almost
everywhere, though it thrives
to best advantage on dry and
high-lying lauds, and on soils of similar geological
character to those it naturally affects. The plant is
a perennial of light and graceful aspect, and those who
would seek its pink clusters of pea-like blossoms must
search the spots we have indicated during the months of
June and July.

The stems of the sainfoin are numerous, at first somewhat
75

114 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

prostrate, but at the flowering-season freely ascending and a
good deal branched. The leaves are a very good illustration
of what botanists call pinnate or feather-like leaves, where
several leaflets are thrown off on either side of a central stem,
that bears them all in the same way that the central part of
the quill of a feather has its lateral fringing. The leaflets
are numerous, six to eight pairs to each leaf being about
the average number ; all are about equal in size, and the
terminal leaflet shows no marked difference in bulk. At the
base of each leaf we find small and finely-pointed stipules,
but the plant has no tendrils. The flower-stalks are
terminal and spring from the axils of the leaves, and being
considerably larger than the leaves themselves are at once
conspicuous ; the cluster of flowers occupies about one-half
of their length. The flowers are at first densely packed
together, but as the blossoms expand the stalk lengthens
and the intervals between them increase considerably.
Much of the piece we have figured is yet in the early or bud
stage, as it was necessary to show as much as possible of
the history of the plant in the limited space available, but
even here the elongation and spreading-out of the lower
portion is distinctly visible. Where the flower-clusters are
thrown out laterally they have often a gentle curvature up-
wards. The flowers are of a delicate purplish pink tint,
the standard being a good deal streaked with a darker tint
of the same character.

The sainfoin possesses high economic value as a fodder-
plant, and on hard chalky soils no plant can be cultivated
to greater advantage ; but in rich alluvial valley deposits
its near relative, the lucerne, should be substituted, as the
sainfoin will not prosper except in dry soils. When once
planted it will, if need be, last a dozen years or so. Long

SAINFOIN. 115

before it was utilised in England the plant was known on
the Continent as a valuable one for agricultural purposes ;
and though it is indigenous the earlier supplies of seed
were imported from abroad ; hence one of its old names, the
French grass, the original sources whence the seed was
derived being France and Flanders. It seems to have crept
into use by slow degrees about the middle of last
century, but not to have been fully established till about
its close. In 1640, Parkinson speaks of it as "a singular
food for cattle," but it seems to have been little if at all
used in England at that date. Henze asserts that the plant
was not introduced into England until the year 1651, and
in this same year Hartlib, another writer, blames the
English for neglecting it. Two years afterwards, in 1653,
we find Blith referring to it as a French grass very little
known in England, but as having been sown on some of the
chalky uplands of Kent; and later on, in 1671, we find
another writer saying that " divers places in England
received great benefit from it." Its establishment appears,
therefore, to have been very gradual, a fact that may per-
haps be accounted for by the fact that though it thrives
excellently in the localities that are suitable to it, many
districts do not prove adapted to its cultivation, and the
wilder uplands where it thrives best are more removed from
the influence of new ideas. A small quantity of trefoil should
be mixed with the sainfoin seed to assist in making a crop for
the first year, as the latter is somewhat thin and feeble at
first, but when it is once well cultivated it can well stand
alone and rely on its own merits. Its common name is
French in its origin, being derived from the words sain and
foin, signifying wholesome hay. It was therefore, by some
old writers, called the SaiiiAui fatnuM, or the

116 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

Lyte and some other authors give it
as Saintfoin, Hudson as St. Foin, and this was rendered
by other old writers as holy hay; but the whole thing is a
misconception, that when once started was in harmony with
mediaeval feeling and usage, and so got readily taken up,
though there is no real reason for associating any saintly
influences with the plant. Ouolryclus is from two Greek
words signifying the ass and to bray, the idea, of course,
being that the animal thus testifies his impatience to
partake of so agreeable a provender. Some of the older
botanical writers give the sainfoin the sonorous title of
Hed//sarum Onobrychis. The first of these names is from
the Greek words for sweet and spice, while the second
we have already explained, the grand total signifying
that toothsome, sweet, and spicy herb that appeals so
strongly to the asinine palate, that the donkey cannot
refrain from expressing his feelings and desires, when
opportunity offers for their gratification.

R y\ G W

KAG-WOBT.

Senecio Jacobaa. Nat. Ord., Composites.

UE present plant suffers from
the misfortune of its common-
ness. Hooker, we see, speaks of
it as " too plentiful." Were
it not so familiar a plant, its
sturdy growth and golden mass
of star-like flower-heads would
doubtless render it a favourite,
out what people can see almost
any day they soon cease to regard.
We have seen many a tender plant
•carefully nurtured in the hothouse
that has not the inherent beauty of
the rag-wort, but then one comes
from Java and the other can be got
in the next field, and everybody
understands what a difference that makes.
Where the pastures are mown for hay the
plant may be kept down, as the rag-wort, though a
perennial, seems unable to thrive under such treatment,
unlike many plants that only shoot up more strongly
and bushily than ever after being cut down. In pasture-
lands and meadows that are not thus annually cleared
the rag- wort escapes the bite of the horses and cattle and

118 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

develops into a large rank growth, occupying much room,
and propagating itself abundantly by its downy seeds.
A meadow well sprinkled over with the plants, each of
them three or four feet high, and a mass of golden
blossom at their summits, is a strikingly picturesque
feature in the landscape, though possibly the human
occupier of the ground may resent their presence. It is,
however, a sight that one so often sees — some meadows
having the plants in scores — that we can only conclude that
the farmers either lack energy or do not think the space
it encroaches on as being of much, value ; for a boy sent
in for half a day would soon level them to the ground and
lay their beauty low. It may quickly be pulled up by
hand, if only the operation be performed in moist weather ;
if any considerable fibres be left in the ground the roots
strike again. All such plants as the rag-wort or the
various species of thistle should, if not absolutely eradi-
cated, be cut down before their seeds ripen and get
dispersed over the whole country-side ; and this is a parti-
cularly easy thing to do, as they can be attacked at most
advantage when their golden or purple tufts of flowers
render them most conspicuously visible. It has been
suggested that the plant might be used for dyeing, but we
are not aware that the matter has ever been put to the true
test of experience. Many people conclude that if a plant
has bright and showy red or yellow or blue flowers, that
such plant should yield a good red, yellow, or blue dye;
but the properties that make them valuable as tinctorial
plants are rarely found in the blossoms, and some of the
best vegetable dyes come from plants that have little out-
ward beauty, while the dyes they yield do not agree in
tint with the colour of their blossoms.

RAG-WORT. 119

In some parts of the country the rag-wort is accredited
with the power of preventing infection. When people
visit any one who is suffering from any illness that may be
transmitted, they carry with them into the sick-room, a
piece of the plant, and thus, as they believe, are preserved
from taking the complaint, whatever it may be. Some
little time ago we heard of a case of an old village woman
who had adhered to the practice ever since she was a girl,
and still preserved a robust faith in the herbal specific.

The plant is called rag-wort, or rag-weed, from its very
finely divided and somewhat ragged-looking leaves, " wort,"
of course, being the old name for a plant ; thus we find
awl- wort, bladder- wort, butter- wort, lung- wort, and
many other examples. The leaf-segments seem to be more
numerous and finer in proportion to the dryness of the
soil ; a moist soil develops ranker-looking plants, but the
foliage, though larger, is not so deeply divided and cut
up. The plant is in various parts of the country known
under the names of St. James's wort, segrum, or seggrum,
stammer-wort, and stagger-wort, and in Wales and Ireland
it is known under the somewhat lengthy titles of " carnedd
felen wrryw " and " pfullan buih balkisan " respectively.
The apostolic title is a relic of medieval days; in old
herbals it is the Ilerlia Sancti Jacobi, or the Sancti Jacobi flo$}
and in France one of its names is the Fleur de S. Jacques. The
Latin word Jacobus is the equivalent of the modern James.
Parkinson, we see, names the plant the Jacobcea vulgar is.
11 Stamrner-wort " would seem to indicate a belief in its
efficacy as a remedy for impediment of speech, and the
other old names all refer to its supposed value to the
veterinary surgeon and cattle-doctor. In an old herbal we
find it put down as "a certaine remedie to help the

120 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

Staggers in Horses ; " while for the diseases of humanity
Culpepper tells us that " Rag-wort is under the command of
Dame Venus, and cleanseth, digesteth, and discusseth.-"
It is commended as a valuable remedy for sore throat,
quinsy, catarrh, and the healing of wounds. It is also
highly esteemed as a soothing application.

Entomologists will appreciate the rag-wort as the food-
plant of the caterpillar of the beautiful cinnabar moth
(Callimorpha Jacob feee], its second, or specific name, clearly
testifying to its connection with our plant. The colour of
the upper wings of the moth is a delicate brown, that bears
on it a narrow crimson stripe and two crimson spots, and
the hind wings are crimson throughout with a bordering of
black. This beautiful moth is common and generally dis-
tributed in England, though in Scotland it is an entomo-
logical " find/' from its great rarity. The larva or cater-
pillar is slightly hairy, has a black head, and its body is
black, ringed with orange-yellow. It should be looked for
on the rag- wort during July and August, and will ordinarily
be found in companies.

CENTAUt\Y.

CENTAUEY.

Erythraa Centaurium. Nat. Ord.,
Gcntianncea;.

EW of our wild flowers make a
gayer appearance in proportion
to their size than the centaury,
as its slender stems are crowned
by a mass of buds and starry
blossoms, that, by the beauty of
their colour and the grace of
their form, assert themselves
conspicuously amidst the sur-
rounding verdure. The centaury
should be searched for in dry
pasturage, in sandy and barren
fields, on heaths, and more rarely
in the open spaces, in woods.
It is an annual, and flowers
from the latter part of June,
through July and August, and
often well into September ; and it is commonly dis-
tributed throughout Britain, where the conditions are
favourable to its growth. It is a distinguished adherent
to the good old principle of " early to bed and early to
rise," and proves its efficacy as far as healthiness is con-
cerned ; for its early retirement for the day (generally
about three o'clock in the afternoon) by no means impairs
76

122 FAMILY Alt WILD FLOWERS.

its vigour, and if its health does not suffer then doubtless
it gains the two other points in the adage, and is both
" wealthy and wise/' for health is wealth, and its preserva-
tion is wisdom. It closes, too, in damp weather, and when-
ever the sky is overcast. Culpepper, in the fantastic blend-
ing of botanical science with astrological folly, so charac-
teristic of the writings of some of the old herbalists, asserts
that the plant is " under the dominion of the sun, as
appears in that the flowers open and shut as the sun either
sheweth or hideth his face." The " dominion " in this
case has some little show of reason, but in most instances
the assignments of the plants to various heavenly bodies
appear of the most arbitrary nature ; thus the little
celandine is a plant of Mars, the chickweed is under the
dominion of the moon, cinquefoil is an herb of Jupiter,
the columbine owes allegiance to Venus, and the cross-wort
is a plant of Saturn.

"Work of an artistic nature is best done in a room having
a northern aspect, as the light is more equable ; but we soon
found that we need expect no co-operation from our little
centaury in favour of that idea, for piece after piece that
we brought home we found rapidly closing, and it was
only when we took our water-jar and its contents into a
room with a southern aspect, and stood them in the direct
sunlight, that the flowers could be induced to remain open.

The root of the centaury is fibrous and woody, and from
this the stiff and upright stem ascends to a height of from
seven or eight inches to a foot. The stem is smooth to
the touch and angular in cross-section ; it branches con-
siderably at the summit, though the lower part is ordinarily
without any lateral developments of sufficient size and
importance to break the rigidity of its aspiring ascent.

CXSTJ.U&Y. 123

The lowest leaves are broader than the others, and form u
spreading- tuft at the base of the plant, while the smooth
and stalkless stem-leaves grow in pairs at somewhat dis-
tant intervals on the stalk. The stem-leaves are often
very upright in general direction, as may be seen in the
lowest pair in our illustration, and all have the three
principal veins or nerves very sharply indicated on their
upper surfaces. The flowers are borne in numerous clusters
on the freely-forking- stems, and form a rich -looking
terminal mass of colour. The calyx is composed of one
piece, but this is deeply cut into five pointed segments ;
these segments taper towards a point instead of spreading
outwards, as we find them doing in so many other plants.
The whole forms a long and slender tube. The corolla,
too, is tubular for some little distance, and then expands
into a broad star-like form, the five sharply-cut segments
in which it terminates standing- boldly out. Though the
flowers of the 'centaury are ordinarily a rich yet delicate
pink in colour, we may occasionally come across a specimen
where they are pure white. Curtis, in his " Flora Londi-
n en sis," speaks of this variation from the type as " not
uncommon," but we do not ourselves remember having
ever seen an example of it ; and Parkinson, in writing of
the plant, says that " it is found in our owne countrie in
many places, the ordinary sort almost everywhere in fields,
pastures, and woods ; yet that with the white flowers more
sparingly by much than the first." He is very careful,
too, to make us understand that this colour-variation is, so
to speak, an accident that concerns the flowers alone, and
holds out no justification whatever for considering it a
different plant at all, for, in speaking of it, he says with
quaint decision, " This small centory dift'ereth not from

1-24 FAMILIAR WILD

the former, neither in stalke nor leafe, neither in forme or
height, but only in the colour of the flower, which is white
as the other is red." The stamens are live in number;
their anthers have a curious way of twisting themselves
round after they have shed their pollen. This spiral twist
is a very marked feature in the genus ; though a point too
small to show in our illustration, it may be readily nated
in the living plant. It is one of the distinctive points
between the plants of this genus and those of gentiaua,
many of the plants of which greatly resemble the centaury
in general structure. The style is single, but terminates
in two stigmas. Almost all the plants of the order
Gentianacefe possess eminently bitter and medicinal quali-
ties, and the centaury is no exception. It is, indeed, so
bitter that the old herbalists call itfel terra, or earth-gall,
and the Anglo-Saxon name is equivalent in meaning to
this. As this bitterness had a healing and tonic effect
attributed to it, we sometimes find the centaury called the
Febrifuga ; Culpepper, we see, says of it, " 'Tis very whole-
some, but not very toothsome."

CROSS-WORT.

Cfalium cruciattun. Nat. Ord., Ittib'Mcece.

ROSS- WORT, graceful as it
is when examined, does not
appeal particularly to the eye
when seen growing, for all
the forms are so minute and
delicate that a mass of it
amidst the vegetation only
tells as a point of yellowish
green colour. Yet the plant
is one that we always wel-
come, for it is one more in-
dication that the winter is over
and gone, and that the promise
of the spring is maturing into
the wealth of summer. The
cross- wort is very commonly
met with on hedge-banks where
it can be somewhat in the
shade, in copses, woods, and such like spots, and its
blossoms may be found in all their delicacy and frailty
from April to June. It is rather curious that though the
plant is widely distributed, and in many places abundant
in England, it is less so in Scotland, while in Ireland it
appears to be wholly unknown.

126 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

The root-stock of the cross-wort is perennial, and the
flowering-stems that ascend each spring from it stand
boldly erect to a height of from six inches to over a foot,
a good deal depending upon the thickness of the surround-
ing vegetation amidst which the plant has to tight its
way upward to the air and light. The leaves are arranged
at somewhat distant intervals on the stems, in rings of four.
The leaves are ovate in shape, and, like the stems, thickly
covered with hairs. Each set of leaves is immediately over
the ring beneath it ; in most other plants the following ring
just alternates in direction, and fills in the interval, so that
the rings if looked down upon show eight leaves, four
above, and a second four coming below and filling up the
intermediate spaces; but in the cross-wort all the leaves
take the same direction, and if one leaf points due north, all
the corresponding leaves on all the rings would point due
north too. The numerous flowers are found in crowded
clusters in the axils of the leaves, ring after ring of leaves
on the stem having nestling within it these flower-clusters.
Almost all the flowers in each ring are stamen-bearing
only, and have a conspicuously four-cleft corolla ; the few
fertile flowers are often five-cleft. After flowering-time,
and when the blossoms have faded away, the little stems on
which they were severally borne bend downwards, and so
remain until the plant decays.

The cross- wort is one of the numerous indigenous species
of bedstraw,but the markedly cruciform arrangement of both
foliage and petals has earned it its special distinctive name.
It is in some old herbals called the crusialis, and in medi-
eval French it was the croise. In Germany it has the same
name as its near relative the woodruff, a plant we else-
where figure and describe, but to distinguish it it has

CROSS-WORT. 127

the very appropriate prefix of golden. A common old
English name for the plant is the May-wort, a term of
the same nature as Lent-lily, pasque-flower, and fair maids
of February, and descriptive of the season when the plant
may be found in flower. Other old names for it are the
mug-wort, mugget, or golden mugwert. The second and
third appear like corruptions of the first, but it would
appear that they have good claim to an independent
existence. A plant was once called moth-wort, and
moghe is the old English word for moth ; but the plant
that bore this name was the wormwood, and it is difficult
to see how the corrupted form of mug- wort can have been
transferred to the cross-wort. Mugget and mugwert are
corruptions of the French mnguet, a somewhat depreciatory
word, signifying a fop, or dandy. Charming as our plant
may be, it assumes no offensive airs on the strength of it,
and we, on the whole, consider that it is hardly used by such
an association of ideas. The same name is in France ap-
plied to the graceful lily of the valley. The generic name
Galium is derived from the Greek word for milk, some of.
the plants of the genus having been used formerly by the
dairy-maid to curdle milk with. Hence another old name
for the genus was cheese-rennet, and in France caille-lait.
The specific name is from the Latin word for a cross. Parkin-
son calls the plant the Cruciata vulgaris, while with Bauhin
it is Cruciata Mrsuta, the hairy nature of the plant making
this latter name a happily- chosen one. We have already
seen that its familiar name in Germany coincides with that
of the woodruff or Asperula odorata, plus the distinctive
addition of the adjective golden, and in the writings of
Lngdunensis we find this same idea reproduced, as we may
say, in fac-simile, for he calls the cross-wort the Asperula

128 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

aurea, the golden woodruff. The madder has whorled
leaves, and is sometimes in the olden herbals called the
Rubia cruciata, or cross-wort madder, but the true cross-
wort is the plant we here figure. To this plant the name
may most appropriately be ascribed, for its leaves always
follow the cruciform arrangement, while the madder varies
from four to six leaves in each whorl or ring. Numerous
species of the genus Galinm are indigenous to Britain, one of
the commonest, and at the same time most attractive, being
the yellow bedstraw, G. verum, a plant so slender and
graceful in growth that it was by the olden botanists
called the ladies' bedstraw. This species and the cross-wort
are the only two bedstraws with yellow flowers ; all the
other species have white blossoms. A strong family like-
ness runs through them all, owing to the uniformity of
colour in their flowers, and to the fact that in all the species
the leaves are arranged in rings at intervals on the stems.

K N OT-G (\ASS.

KNOT-GKASS.

Polygonum aviculare. Nat. Ord.,
Polygonacece.

OME of our readers may well
be excused if they imagine
that a mistake has been made
in describing the plant figured
before us, for whatever else it
may be, it cannot certainly be
considered a grass : it is, in
fact, not grass, if the dignity
of our subject will allow of
such verbal trifling. How-
ever, the plant really bears the
name we have ascribed to it ;
and the explanation of the
anomaly may be found in the
fact that the wisdom of our
ancestors manifested itself, amongst other
ways, in calling many plants, such as
the present and the clover, grasses, if they were eaten
by cattle, or could be used as fodder-plants, though they
might bear no similitude to the true grasses, and would have
no claim in any way really to rank amongst them.

The knot-grass is one of our most common plants, es-
pecially on a sandy or gravelly soil ; we find it on banks, by the
roadside, in corn-fields, and in fact almost everywhere. Cattle
77

130 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

in general are fond of it, and pigs in particular eat it with
great avidity, hence one of its old names is swine's grass.
In the " Grete Herball " we see it is called swynel -grass.
The "Grete Herball" was published in England in the year
1516, and had so great a measure of popularity that it
passed through several editions. It was printed in the old
black letter, and illustrated with particularly rude wood-
cuts, which in some cases bore no resemblance to anything
whatever, and in many the same illustration had to do duty
for more than one plant. Our readers will readily see the
inconvenience of this to those who would refer to the book, if
they will imagine that we, for the saving of a little trouble
and expense, had not troubled to draw the knot-grass at
all, but had quietly described it, and slipped in an old plate
of the primrose instead. Though the botanical merits of
the work are naturally not great, botanical science being
then practically unknown, it is full of interest as being,
with one exception, the very inferior herbal of Macer,
the first book, and for a long time, the only book,
on the subject in the vulgar tongue.

When a plant of knot-grass grows singly in a
favourable soil, and clear of other vegetation, it wrill often
cover a circle of a yard or more in diameter, the stems
being almost prostrate on the ground, and the leaves broad
and large ; but when it has to grow thickly together, and
share the accommodation with other plants, the stalks be-
come more upright, and all the parts are frequently smaller.
Our specimen is a very fairly typical one. In its natural
growth it was evidently in an upright position, and we see
this at once on looking at the leaves: had it come from a
trailing plant all the leaves would have turned one way — the
way in which, when the plant was growing, all had turned

KXOT-GRASS. 131

upward to the %ht. It is a very variable species: its
stems are sometimes long and delicate-looking, and the
leaves sparsely developed, while in others they branch
freely, and are densely crowded with foliage. The plant
is an annual, and begins flowering in May; it may be
found in blossom any time between then and September
or October.

To pass from the general to the particular, we
may point out that the root is very fibrous, and takes a
strong hold of the earth, so that in hard ground it is
with great difficulty eradicated, generally breaking off at the
level of the ground when the attempt is made. The stems
are numerous, and, as we have already indicated, either
trailing or upright in their growth, tough and wiry, and,
like all the polygonums, much jointed. When gathered,
the stem generally snaps at one of the joints. The leaves
vary a good deal in form, for, though they all have the
general oval character our figure indicates, in some well-
nourished plants they are almost as broad as long, while
in the starvelings they become very attenuated. The
variation is chiefly in the breadth; they rarely increase
much in length beyond what we see in the illustration.
They are a bluish green in tint and smooth to the touch.
The leaves of this plant, as in all the other species in the
genus, are arranged alternately on the stems, and each
springs from a membranous, whitish, and sheathing stipule
that surrounds the joint, its upper edge being irregularly
notched or cut. The flowers are borne in small clusters in
the axils of most of the leaves ; though small in themselves,
they are so numeroiis that in the aggregate they make a
fair show of blossom. The perianth is divided into five
segments, varying in colour from a light to a deep pink,

132 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

or, more rarely, white. The stamens are eight in number,
their yellow anthers being very visible on a closer ex-
amination of the flower, and the style is cleft into three
parts. The seeds are blackish and three-angled.

The generic name Polygonum is compounded of two
Greek words signifying many joints, and the name is
certainly a very appropriate one, while the specific title
aviculare is from the Latin aviculns, which is, in turn a
diminutive of avis, a bird. Great numbers of our
smaller birds feed on its seeds, and give a full appro-
priateness to its title. It is in some old herbals
and in provincial parlance called bird's-tongue, or sparrow-
tongue, but these names arose from the shape of its little
pointed leaves; and it is curious that one of its modern
Italian names is similar in meaning to the second of
the two we have named. Pink-weed is another old name
for the plant that evidently arises from the long lines
of delicately-tinted flower-clusters, and ninety-knot no
less clearly refers to its numerous joints.

MEADOW S/\ F r f\0 N.

MEADOW SAFFBON.

Colchicum autumnale. Nat.
Ord., Melanthacece.

EW of our flowers are more
delicately beautiful than the
meadow saffron. Its refined
colour is too pale for an
altogether satisfactory repre-
sentation on our white paper,
but those who have seen it
springing up amongst the
grass of the pasture or the
weeds of the hedgerow will
scarcely have failed to have
noticed and admired its
delicate and fragile grace.
This "leafless orphan of the
year/' much as we may ad-
mire it, is a most unwelcome
plant to the farmer, and the more
so because if found at all it is
ordinarily abundant. We have in
some places seen quite a purple flush of colour on the
meadows from the presence of countless blossoms, but it
is a sad blot on the pasturage to the eye of the owner, for
it takes the place of much that might be edible. Though
animals ordinarily carefully shun it, many instances have

134 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

occurred of fatal result to horses and cattle from an im-
prudent neglect of the warning instinct, and an indulgence
in "the baneful juice which poisonous Colchian glebes
produce/'

The meadow saffron derives its generic name from
Colchis, where it was said to be found abundantly, and
where its medicinal properties were first discovered ; while
the specific name clearly indicates the date of its flowering.
The familiar name indicates its resemblance to the true
saffron, the Crocus sativus of botanists. The meadow
saffron is a somewhat local plant, being found in profusion
in some districts of England and Ireland, while others may
be searched in vain ; in Scotland it seems to be distinctly
a rare plant. The feature that will at once strike even
the most unobservant is that it is absolutely leafless at the
time when its lilac blossoms render it most conspicuous, so
that we may gather a handful of flowers, but any verdant
additions we may deem our nosegay to require must come
from another source. The flowers rise from the ground to
a height of some four or five inches, supported on the
slender tube that rises from the subterranean bulb. The
lower part of each blossom is enclosed in the membranous
sheath that enwraps them all. After the season of flowering,
the leaves appear, and then the seed-capsule, but all withers
again before the recurring autumn blossoms. The leaves are
by no means inconspicuous, for they often attain to a length
of nine or ten inches, and have a breadth of over an inch ;
but as one never finds the leaves and flowers together, this
verdant spring foliage is naturally not often associated in
people's minds with flowers that will make no sign until
all this show of foliage has died away. The ovary is
within the tube of the flower, but so low down as to be

MEADOW SAFFRON. 135

subterranean, and those who would desire to see the plant
in its entirety will need to gather it with due care. The
long-, slender, almost thread-like styles that run the whole
length of the floral tube are an interesting feature that a
hasty gathering of the flowers is very likely to destroy. The
general habit of the plant suggests the crocus, but the
organs of reproduction differ considerably from those of
that genus, and amply warrant its removal from it. The
Crocus nudiforus, or naked crocus, so called from its
blossoms being thrown up from the ground in autumn,
after the leaves have withered, furnished Paley, in his
" Natural Theology/' with a good illustration of what he
terms compensation. As all he says is equally true of the
present plant, we may be forgiven a quotation. He writes :
"I have pitied this poor plant a thousand times. Its
blossom rises out of the ground in the most forlorn con-
dition possible, without a calyx, or even a leaf, to defend
it ; and that, not in the spring, not to be visited by summer
suns, but under all the disadvantages of the declining year.
When we come, however, to look more closely into the struc-
ture of this plant, we find that instead of its being
neglected, Nature has gone out of her course to provide for
its security, and to make up to it for all its defects. As
this plant blossoms late in the year, and probably would
not have time to ripen its seeds before the access of winter,
which would destroy them, Providence has contrived its
structure such that this important office may be performed
at a depth in the earth out of reach of the usual effects of
frost. The maturation of the seed, which in other plants
is exposed with the rest of the flowers to the open air, is
here carried on during the whole winter within the heart,
as we may say, of the earth."

136 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

The bulb of the meadow saffron has for ages had
medicinal repute, and on turning to the modern Phar-
macopoeia, we find various preparations of the plant duly
set forth. The bulb should be gathered during July and
August, its period of greatest activity; but Dr. Lindley
says that he has seen many hundredweights sent up to town
after the flowering-season, the flowers being broken off to
conceal the fraud. We see at once that while it would be
very difficult to find it in the interval between the dying
of the leaves and the springing of the flowers, any one
could collect the bulbs when they were guided to them by
the blossoms. Colchicum is irritant in its effects, and in
large doses is an acrid poison ; and while it has a distinct
value in allaying paroxysms of pain, the relief is perhaps
bought at too high a price, as its general effect on the system
is hurtful. Both the bulb and the seeds are used in medical
practice. In France it is called Mort au Chien.

FOOL'S PAISLEY.

FOOL'S PARSLEY.

JEthusa Cynapiiim.

Umbel 'lifer c

Nat. Ord.,

HE light and graceful plant
which we have figured in the
accompanying illustration may
be very commonly met with
in fields,, on rubbish-heaps,
and in the garden, and it may
readily and at once be dis-
tinguished from all other
plants more or less similar to
it by the three long, slender,
leaf-like strips that spring
from beneath each little cluster
of flowers. Many of the
umbel-bearing order of plants
have a strong family likeness
that tends to make their iden-
tification difficult; but such
difficulty need never arise in
the present case if the pecu-
liarity we have referred to be borne in mind, as it is
a characteristic belonging to this plant alone. One
great value of the study of botany is that it enables
us rightly to ascertain the natures of plants, enabling
us to discriminate between those which are useful

78

138 FAMILIAR WILD FLO WEES.

to us as food, and those which experience has taught
us are harmful. Two plants may grow in the same soil,
possibly in the same bed in the garden, and to the casual
glance they are so similar, that the undiscriminating think
them alike ; yet the one maybe a valuable herb for medicine
and food, and the other only a deleterious and noxious
weed. The plant now before us presents us with an
admirable illustration of this, for it is sufficiently like the
garden parsley for fatal mistakes to have arisen ; and
though its name implies that foolish people only would
make the mistake, the world will probably, school-
boards notwithstanding, have to reckon on a certain
percentage of such persons, and it becomes very much
the interest of those who might suffer by their folly to
enlighten them. Dwellers in the country who have to
deal with, a certain amount of rustic simplicity, which is
nevertheless sufficiently opinionated at times, will do well
to plant only the curled-leaved parsley in their gardens, as it is
then scarcely possible for mistakes to occur. Some of the old
herbalists classed the plant as a deadly species of parsley, but
for practical purposes we may point out the following dis-
tinctions : — The leaves of the true parsley are of a much
more yellowish green; besides, the darker bluish green
leaves of the ^Kthusa are much more finely divided, and
have a gloss on them that we do not find in the pot-herb.
Again if we bruise the leaves of the true parsley we at
once get the strong but not disagreeable smell with which
most of us must be familiar, while the leaves of the fooPs
parsley have very little smell at all. When the stranger
has thrown up its flower-heads, the bearded clusters form
an invariable indication of its nature, but even the com-
parison we have drawn between the leaves alone should

FOOL'S PARSLEY. 139

prove a sufficient safeguard. It flowers during July and
August. Haller, in his book on Swiss plants, published at
Berne in 1768, quotes many authorities to show that this
plant, on being eaten, has been productive o£ the most
violent symptoms, ending in some cases with delirium,
stupor, and death. Parkinson calls it the fool's hemlock,
but it may readily be distinguished from the hemlock,
not only by the pendulous floral leaves to which we
have already referred, but as being every way smaller,
and not having the strong disagreeable smell that
characterises the leaves of the hemlock, though Gerarde,
we notice, says " the whole plant is of a naughty
smell/' Such things are, after all, only relative, however,
and our assertion holds good, for though Gerarde's remark
is fairly true, the hemlock has a much naughtier smell, and
the difference in degree is sufficiently striking to distinguish
the one plant from the other. In addition to this, the
stems of the hemlock are freely spotted over with dull red
markings, a peculiarity that we do not find in the fool's
parsley : we have, therefore, two distinct characteristics by
which the hemlock and the fool's parsley can be distinguished,
not only from each other, but from everything else — the
spotted stem of the one, the curious floral leaves of the other.
Hill, in his British Herbal, calls our plant the small hem-
lock, and Gerarde gives it the name of the "wilde hem-
locke." This latter term at first view seems a great
misnomer, for one plant seems as wild as the other, the true
hemlock as the fool's parsley ; but incidentally we find an
interesting little fact concealed in this name. The refer-
ence no doubt is this, that in those old days many indigenous
plants were cultivated in the gardens of the herbalists and
apothecaries, and the hemlock, dangerous as it is, has

140 FAMILIAR WILD FLO WEES.

medicinal properties that render it valuable, and therefore
brought it into cultivation in such collections of medical
plants, while the fool's parsley had no virtues assigned to it,
and was consequently valueless and left in its wild state.
If we can only once get over a feeling of prejudice against
the " nasty poisonous thing/' we shall have no difficulty in
deciding that there is much delicate grace and beauty in
the plant. It is a flower that we are always glad to see
springing up in our own garden, though we are free to
confess that, having first admired it, we with a certain
amount of regret carefully eradicate it. We do not find
that it is eaten by any animals ; even insects and their larva
seem to let it alone. We do not remember to have ever
seen any jagged and ragged outline to its foliage, suggest-
ing that some caterpillar has been making a meal. Our
own live stock we have never tempted with it, as the risk
of seeing one's animals succumbing to its effects is greater
than we care for, interesting as it might be to record that
a small armful killed a cow in an hour and a quarter.

30 G AS

BOG ASPHODEL.

Narthecium ossifragum. Nat. Ord.t
Juncacea.

E can well remember the satis-
faction with which, after a
long tramp on the Yorkshire
moorlands, we first made
acquaintance with the bog
asphodel. All who have any
practical knowledge of the
wild moors of the north and
the mountains of Wales or
Westmoreland will be fami-
liar with the subject of our
illustration, as it is in the
swampy and marshy bits of
ground in these localities
that one so often finds that
the asphodel nourishes.
Those who would gather it
must not attach over much
importance to such a detail as keeping one's boots dry, or they
will have to be content with beholding it from afar, and
the beauty of the plant richly deserves a closer inspection.
The bone-breaking repute that it carries in its specific
name bears record to an old belief that the bones of sheep
feeding upon it become brittle and snap ; but the plant

142 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

carries no such terrible power. Sheep, probably, would not
even touch it if they bad the opportunity, and a wise shep-
herd will not give them that opportunity; not, indeed,
because he need dread the innoxious asphodel, but because
he dreads the place wherein it grows. It is not the plant,
but the wet, boggy ground in which it nourishes that
proves a bane to the flock.

The star-like perianth of the flower is composed of six
spreading and acutely -pointed parts of a brilliant yellow,
and within these the anthers form a conspicuous feature.
Each stamen, too, will be found to have the greater part of
its filament — the slender part bearing the anther, or head —
clothed with a thick, wool-like substance; and as this
is white in colour, it readily attracts our notice on an
inspection of the flower. The flowers form a stiff terminal
raceme, rising well above the leaves, and the leaves all
stand somewhat rigidly around the flower-stem, rising
from near its base, and sheathing it. The foliage is very
similar in form to that of the daffodil, but the leaves are
much smaller ; the whole plant is only a foot or so in
height, and the leaves are about half this. The flower
scape bears numerous scales. The plant is a perennial, and
the roots creep a good deal, so that when the plant is once
established it soon takes possession of the ground, and
covers it with its golden spires.

The generic name, Narthecium, is derived from the
Greek word narthex, a rod, probably from the straight
upward growth of the flower-stem. The earliest botanists
gave the name to a quite different species — the fennel, a
plant equally characterised by a sturdy upward growth.
Linnaeus classed it as an Anthericum; and Dr. Hooker
points out the curious fact that by an entirely undesigned

BOG ASPHODEL. 143

coincidence the name of the genus in which it is now
placed contains exactly the same letters : the words form
an anagram. The word asphodel was applied by ancient
Greek writers to a plant that cannot now be satisfactorily
identified, but the general balance of evidence would appear
to be in favour of the narcissus, and the name of a close
relative to this — the daffodil — is itself a corruption of the
word asphodel. Why the present plant, which only bears
a very distant resemblance to either the daffodil or the nar-
cissus, should have got the name of asphodel, we are unable
to say. Parkinson describes two species — a greater and a lesser
marsh " asphodill ; " but there is no such distinction really,
and we can only suppose that two plants sent to him were
so unequal in development that he thought they must
be really different species, and his illustrations, rude in
character as they are, bear out this idea. He says of
them : — " Both these sorts have beene found in our owne
land, as well as beyond sea, in the marrish and wet gronds,
the former not only in Lancashire, as Gerarde hath
recorded, but in divers other places, and the last likewise
by Egham, not farre from the river side there, and in the
west parts of the land also."

The older writers always endeavoured to find a " vertue"
for everything ; and Gerarde records that in some parts of
the country young women used the bog asphodel to dye their
hair of a yellowish tint, and called it maiden-hair. He also
calls it King's Speare, Asphodelus luteus, and Hastula
regia. Though he evidently prefers the name Lancashire
Asphodel, and gives an illustration which he entitles
Asphodelus Lancastria verus, he is not so utterly beyond
conviction that the plant may be found elsewhere, as
Parkinson seems to think. He shall, however, conduct his

144 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

own defence in his own words on the subject, which are as
follows : — <e The Lancashire asphodill groweth in moist and
marish places neere unto the towne of Lancaster, in the
marish grounds there, as also neare unto Maudsley and
Martom, two villages not far from thence, where it was
found by a worshipfull and learned gentleman, a diligent
searcher of simples, and feruent louer of plants, who
brought the plants thereof vnto me for the increase of my
garden. I received some plants thereof likewise from
Master Thomas Edwards, apothecarie in Excester, learned
and skilfull in his profession, as also in the knowledge of
plants. He found this asphodill at the foot of a hill in
the west part of England, called Bagshot Hill, neere vnto
a village of the same name." As a plant of the high
moors, it is naturally more abundant in the north and
west of England than in the south and east, as the former
districts have thousands of acres of undrained, uncultivated
upland, that supply it with all that is congenial to its well-
being.

W OODf^UFF.

WOODKUFF.

Asperula odorata. Nat. Ord.,
Jtubiacece.

W floral displays are more
attractive in the early sum-
mer than a large mass of
the woodruff in flower. Its
rings of leaves cover the
ground with a dense mass
of living glowing green, and
from this rise in plentiful
abundance the flower-stalks
bearing above this ground-
work of tender verdure the
thousands of pure white
blossoms. It is one of the
misfortunes of illustrations
that those flowers which are
the most pure and delicate
in tint lose most by their representation
in colour, and those who would see the
ox-eye daisy to perfection, realise the delicacy of the
lilac of the meadow saffron, or the intense white of
the woodruff, must turn to the great book of Nature,
and see them amidst their natural surroundings. The
beauty of many of our flowers, too, in nature is increased
by their aggregation ; we gaze not on one, but on
79

146 TAMILIAN WILTt PLOTTERS.

hundreds of blossoms. A primrose anywhere is a thing
of beauty; but a hedge-bank in spring one mass of its
blossoms is still more beautiful. The hyacinth has a
delicate grace and richness of colour that makes even a
single specimen a delight; but he who would see wild
hyacinths at their best must wander at spring-time into
the woods, and find himself in a purple sea of flowers
stretching beneath the trees as far as eye can reach.

The woodruff is plentiful in most woods throughout
the country, and is conspicuous at any time owing to
the form and density of its foliage ; but those who would
seek it in flower must wend their way to its woodland
home in May or June. A large bunch of it should be
brought home; it will last for some time in water; but
when it begins to show signs of fading, instead of
throwing it aside, it should be tied into a bundle and dried,
when it will for months give forth a delicious fragrance.
Placed between the leaves of a book, its fragrance remains
intact for many years, and in some parts of the country
it is put away in drawers amongst the clothes, partly
because, like lavender, its odour is appreciated, and partly
from an idea that it keeps away the moths. It is also
in some rural districts made into a tea, but whether it
is drunk on its own merits or as a medicine we are
unable to say.

Gerarde, we see, suggests that the woodruff should
be made up into garlands and " hanged up in houses
in the heat of summer, as it doth very well attemper
the aire and coole and make fresh the place, to the
delight and comfort of such as are therein •" and he
farther suggests that it should be put into wine " to
make a man merry, and to be good for the heart and

WOODRUFF. , 147

liver/* He also commends it as a " vulnerarie herbe," to be
applied to cuts and wounds. Other old writers give it
all the credit that Gerarde does, and much more. One,
we see, commends it as "good against the plague, both
to defend the heart and vitall spirits from infection, and
to expell the noysome vapours that are received/' and
another advises its use " in epelepsies and palsies/' Every
old writer could furnish illustrations, more or less numer-
ous, of its value, and we can therefore only wonder how
our ancestors ever came to be put beneath the lichened
stones that now form their memorial.

The root of the woodruff is perennial, and puts forth
many creeping subterranean stems, which in turn send
down into the earth numerous fibres at short intervals
along their course, and freely throw up the flowering-
stems. Dodonaeus says: " In this countrie they plant it
in all gardens, and it loveth darke shadowie places, and
deliteth to be neare old moyst walles. Woodrowe
floureth in May, and then is the smell most delect-
able/' We have ourselves in the shade of the north side
of our house a large bed of it that never needs the least
attention, and is always a beautiful object. The stems
rise to a height of some six or eight inches, are four-
cornered in section, and smooth to the touch. The leaves
grow in rings round the stem, generally eight in number
in each whorl, and above these the stem branches
slightly and bears its terminal masses of white blossom.
The flowers are cross-shaped, and shatter very readily, and
these are succeeded by little globular burr-like seed-bearers,
each containing a single large seed.

Amongst old names for it we find cordial-is and stellaria
— the first, of course, from its supposed efficacy in heart-

148 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

disease, and the second from its star-like foliage and flowers ;
but ordinarily its names are more or less like that hy
which we have described it. We find wood -ro well, wood-
roofe, wood-reeve, and several others of like character.

In Anglo-Saxon it is woodderowffe. Wood-rowell
refers to the rings of leaves that suggest in their
form and arrangement the rowel of a spur, while our
ordinary word woodruff would appear to find a resem-
blance in the foliage to the mediseval ruff, of which
the portraits of Queen Elizabeth always give so
noteworthy an illustration. These derivations, inte-
resting as they are, are probably af ter- thoughts ; for
the plant had its Anglo-Saxon name bestowed upon it
long before ruffs were worn or the word rowel, from the
French rouelle, a little wheel, was in use. Dr. Bosworth
gives row as the Anglo-Saxon for sweet, and there can be
but little doubt that the literal meaning of the word is
the woods weet.

K I D fJ E Y-V ETCH.

KIDNEY-VETCH.

Atithtjllls vulneraria. Nat. Ord.,
Legiiminoste.

-HE genus to which the kidney-
vetch belongs is a very small
one, and the subject of our
illustration is the only
British species. What the
generic distinctions between
this and the birdVfoot
trefoil, Lotus coniiculatus,
or other well known pea-
flowers, may be, would take
us into matters too technical
for the present pages to
properly elucidate, but all
may be found duly set forth
in the pages of Hooker and
Bentham, and other well-
known and trustworthy authorities. The kidney-
vetch is fairly distributed throughout Britain,
and should be sought for on dry pasturage,
railway embankments, and such-like high-lying ground.
The plant is more especially common in hilly and moun-
tainous districts, and may there be looked for amongst
the rocks that stand exposed to sun and air. It is a peren-
nial, and begins flowering early in June, continuing

150 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

ill blossom throughout the summer. The stem, unlike that
of some of the Leguminoste, such as the meadow vetchling
or the tufted vetch, needs no external support, but stands
boldly up in sturdy self-reliance to a height of about
a foot. Both the stem and the leaves are more or less
evidently covered with soft and silky hairs. As these,
instead of standing out from the foliage and stems, are
closely appressed to the stem, they are not at first
sight very obvious, but they are perceptible by their smooth
silkiness, and by the grey and bloom-like appearance
that strikes the eye. The leaves vary in form according to
their position on the plant. All are composed of a terminal
leaflet and several pairs of laterals, but in the upper leaves
the pairs of leaflets that fringe the leaf-stem are more
numerous, and all, both terminals and laterals, are very
similar in form and size. In the lower leaves the terminal
leaflet is broader, larger, and every way more important-
looking than the scanty leaflets associated with it. The
lowest of all have only one or two pairs of lateral leaflets,
while the highest may have any number from four to eight ;
and as we examine the plant we see the gradual, but sure,
progression from one form to the other. The leaflets are
what is termed botanically entire, that is to say, without
any marginal lobiugs or serrations of any kind, and all, as we
have already seen, are clothed with soft downy hair. The
natural grey tint of the leaves is often exaggerated in effect
by the roadside dust that freely covers them. The flower-
clusters are ordinarily in pairs on the summit of the
stems ; this peculiarity may be very well seen in each of
the plants we have figured, and each cluster has beneath it
a large leaf-like bract, cut into long and numerous segments.
The higher of our two figures shows this most clearly, but

KIDNEY- VETCH. 1 5 1

we can readily see that were the lower piece turned from
us instead of towards us, a similar form wouH be presented.
This form of bract is, in botanical parlance, said to be
palmate or digitate, two words of very similar significance.
Palma is the Latin word for the palm of the hand, while
digit us is a finger, and the finger-like radiation of the
segments from the base of the bract is sufficiently evident.
An old country name, suggested, doubtless, by this feature
of the plant, is " ladies' fingers/''

The flowers are crowded closely together, and are
numerous in each bunch. The flower is of the characteris-
tic pea-blossom type, and though ordinarily golden-yellow
in tint, it varies at times from a very pale lemon-yellow or
cream-colour to a dark red. The rich yellow tint is far the
most common and typical, and it has been noticed that
when the plant varies from this it is ordinarily in specimens
growing near the sea. When they wither the flowers turn
a rich reddish-brown ; this may be seen in our figure, where
several of the blossoms in one of the clusters have faded,
and assumed this tint. The calyx is very much inflated
about midway, and narrows rapidly above and below, so
that it has a cushion-like appearance — an effect greatly in-
creased by the mass of soft grey hairs with which it is
closely covered. This soft grey padding is a very curious
and striking feature, and one that will go a long way in
aiding our readers to identify a doubtful specimen as being
truly the flower they are in search of. These delicate downy
calyces have been the cause of the bestowal of another
common name, the " lamb-toe." On close examination,
the five teeth at the mouth of the calyx are readily found.
The ten stamens are all united into one sheath, though in
most of the pea-flower order we find the following curious

152 FAMILIAR WILD FLO WEES.

arrangement : nine of the ten united: into one brotherhood,
and the tenth isolated. The pod is small, only contains
some two or three seeds, and is enclosed within the calyx ;
a little gentle vivisection with a sharp penknife will
readily bring it to light when the flowering-time is over,
and when we may fairly judge that the plant ought some-
how to be in fruit, if we could only find it.

The commonest English name, the kidney-vetch, bears
reference to an old belief in the healing-powers of the plant,
and in the specific name, Tulneraria. from the Latin
vulmis, a wound, we see an allusion to its supposed
vulnerary qualities ; probably its soft and downy flower-
heads suggested the idea that they might be efficacious in
stopping bleeding, and another old name, " staunch," seems
to indicate its utility in this direction, but we greatly
doubt whether any one ever really used it for such a purpose.
The generic name of the kidney- vetch, Antkyllis, is Greek
in origin, and refers to the down-covered calyces.

FUMITORY.

Fttmnria qflicinnlin. Nat. Ord.,
Fiunariacca:.

N old writer has said : " There
be divers herbes compre-
hended under the title of
Fumitorie : some wilde, and
, others of the garden." The
common fumitory is an an-
nual ; it may be found almost
everywhere on dry land, on
high-lying fields, and by the
roadside, though it seems to
prefer fields under cultiva-
tion ; it. often appears in the
garden, and, in such situations,
it may be found in flower
during the whole of' the sum-
mer and the greater part of
the autumn, if it be sufficiently
fortunate to escape the weed-
cleansing hoe. Small and insignificant as the plant
appears, it has won a place for itself in our literature,
for we find it referred to by Clare, Shakespeare, and
other less well-known writers. In the middle ages the
fumitory was boiled in milk and used as a cosmetic by
80

154 FAMILIAR WILT) FLOWERS.

the belle of the village and her rivals. The fumitory may
be considered as a sign of bad husbandry, and it is in
this sense that the plant is introduced by Shakespeare.
To enforce the idea of the sorrowful plight of King Lear,
he is represented by our great poet as

" Crowned with rank f limit or and furrow weeds,
With harlocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn."

The fumitory, nuisance as it may be in the garden or the
fields, is a particularly easy plant to pull up, as its long,
slender root may be drawn out on the most gentle
handling. We confess that we have great doubts whether
we ourselves are quite the sort of person who ought to have
a garden at all, for our gardener's assiduity in weeding out
all these wild growths only finds faint echo in our own
mind ; and, on the whole, we prefer the fumitory to many
of the substitutes for which it is ruthlessly eradicated.
We were just in time to rescue the piece we have figured
from the pitiless hoe ; and when we carefully .carried it
indoors for drawing purposes, the gardener's look was more
eloquent than his language probably might have been.
He thought we were siding with the enemy, evidently.

The stems of the fumitory vary in height from .about
six inches to eighteen, enlarged at the joints, and spreading
a good deal. In some plants the stems stand boldly erect in
their own strength, but in others the plant assumes a weak
and trailing appearance. The stems are in any case very
delicate and fragile-looking. The leaves are arranged
alternately on the stem ; they are very much subdivided,
the leaflets being ordinarily cut into three conspicuous
lobes. This feature may be very well seen in our figure.

FUMITORY. 155

The leaves are what is termed twice-pinnate. In a pinnate
leaf several lateral leaflets are given off on either side
of the central leaf -stem, and when these lateral members
are in like manner cut up into subordinate leaflets, the
form is bi-pinnate, or doubly feathered. The leaflets vary
greatly in appearance ; in some plants they are long and
narrow, and in others flat and broad, and all the foliage is
of a pale bluish-green tint. The flowers are arranged in
racemes, the flower-bearing stems being either terminal or
opposite the leaves. Before development the buds are
closely packed together, but as the flowers open the stem
elongates, causing a considerable interval between the
blossoms. This early crowding and subsequent elongation
may be noticed in our illustration. The sepals, two in
number, are very small. The four petals of which the
quaint-looking corolla is composed are arranged in two
pairs, though they are all more or less united; and the
curious prolongation or spur of the flower must be duly
noted. The stamens, six in number, are arranged in two
bundles of three each. The form of the seed-vessel may
be seen in our figure ; when we open the small globular
fruits, we find that each contains a single seed. Some of
the old herbalists compare the flowers to little birds, and
one of the German names for the plant is the Tauben-
/i-rojtp, tauben being the Teuton for doves ; while a
provincial English name for the fumitory is wax-dolls.
In Wales it is the Mwg y ddaear cyffredin, and in
Ireland the Cuman Scarraigh. There is a curious
uniformity in the meaning of many of its names, and yet
when we endeavour to analyse the significance that runs
through them all we find a wide divergence. The generic
name, Fumaria, is derived from the Latin word fuiitus,

156 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

smoke ; in many parts of the country the plant is called
colloquially earth-smoke ; and in France it is the ftime-
de-terre, and in Germany the Erdranch, names of like
significance. The English word fumitory follows the same
idea; it may more readily be detected in its older guisej
the fumiterrie. When, however, we would seek the com-
mon idea involved in the various names we have given, our
difficulties commence. In the " Ortus Sanitatis," published
in the year 1485, we find a belief that the plant was pro-
duced from the vapour rising from the earth, that it was
not propagated by seeds, as other plants, but was a veritable
child of the mist. Pliny, who recommends the use of
the plant as an eye-wash, tells us that on its first application
to the eyes it causes them to smart and water as smoke
does. Another writer tells us that the plant is called the
fumitory from its smoke-like stem ; while others, again,
point to the tender spreading mass of grey-green leaves,
and ask us to see in them a similitude to a whiff of passing
vapour on the earth — a fumiterrie, or earth-born cloud.
All ends, alas ! as it began, in smoke and misty ambiguity.

BF^OOM R^.PE

BKOOM-KAPE.

'•• Orobanche major. Nat. Ord., Oroban-
chucea. ,

HE extraordinary-looking1 plant
here presented to us is by
no means uncommon, though
the singularity of the colouring
would lead one at first sight
.'; to suppose that it is merely
some dead and withering plant
.: amongst the surrounding ver-
dure, and thus it would natu-
rally get overlooked. A closer
examination will, however,
amply repay us, as the plant
is full of quaint interest, and
what at first glance seemed a
mere dingy brown mass will
reveal itself as a long line
or spike of grotesquely-shaped
flowers. Another curious
feature is that the plant does not grow directly from
the earth, but is parasitic on the roots of other
plants. The plant on which it more especially grows
is the common broom, but it may also be found on the
furze and other leguminous or pea-flower plants. The
stem of the broom-rape is from a foot to a foot and a half

158 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

high, very upright, unbranched, hollow in the interior,
round in general section, but a good deal channeled on the
exterior, and of a dull purplish-brown or rusty-red tint. It
is freely clothed with dry and withered-looking scales, a
feature that may be clearly seen in our illustration, and
at its base it expands into a bulbous-looking mass, closely
clothed and covered with numerous overlapping scales.
As the stem ascends these gradually become less crowded
together. The plant has no true leaves. The flowers,
like the stems, vary in tint from a dull purplish brown to
one of a more reddish tinge, a tint that all our readers who
own a colour-box will readily recognise when we call it a
burnt sienna; there is often a purplish bloom too that adds
to the beauty, and altogether the dry and withered-looking
thing will on closer view prove wonderfully varied in quiet
gradations of yellow, red, brown, and purple, and by no
means unworthy of the pencil of many who would probably
cast it aside. On picking off one of the members we find
it in all its parts a true flower, duly furnished, like the
golden broom which waves above it, with calyx, corolla,
stamens, and all else that is essential to a typical blossom.
The corolla is irregular in form, and with a widely-
opened mouth. The tube of the corolla curves con-
siderably, and gives a quaintly grotesque look to the
plant, that may be more readily seen in our figure
than appreciated by any verbal description. The mouth
of the flower is deeply cut into two prominent lips;
the upper of these is concave and slightly cut into three
segments, while the lower and larger lip is similarly cut,
but the cuts are much deeper. Of the three lobes or
segments thus formed, the central one is considerably the
largest. All the segments are very much waved and

BROOM-RAPE. 159

crinkled, so that the forms are somewhat difficult to trace,
and the flower is consequently by no means an easy one
to draw.

The literal translation of the Greek word Orobanche
is " strangle-tare." The term was originally used by
Theophrastus, and we find it again applied by Pliny and
Dioscorides to another plant. What the plant of the first
of these writers could be we have now no certain means
of knowing1, though the words he employs to describe it
clearly indicate a climbing plant ; but the Orobanche of the
other two old writers agrees entirely in its description with
the plant we have figured, and leaves little or no doubt
on our minds that the name has been borne by the same
plant for more than a thousand years. From its habit of
living on other plants, and weakening them for its own
support, it was called in some parts of Italy, we are told
by Matthiolus, the wolf-plant. Its pernicious effects are
confirmed by a later Italian writer, Micheli, who mentions
its being proscribed in Tuscany by public edict. The Eng-
lish name is derived from the Latin rapa, a turnip. The
tuberous mass of scales at the base of the stems is sup-
posed to resemble a turnip, but the resemblance is of the
slightest possible character. It is a fairly globular mass
at the base of the stem, and that is really all that can be
said ; in colour, size, and almost every other respect, it is
wholly unlike it. The mediaeval title, Rapum genista, is
evidently only a translation into Latin of the common
English name. Curtis says that the strong astringency of
the plant makes it a useful vulnerary, but the plant has a
slightly uncanny look that would probably make many
people rather chary of meddling with it. Both Parkinson
and Gerarde refer incidentally to it when the broom comes

160 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS.

under their notice, and give a fairly good drawing of:
the broom plant and this parasite adherent to its roots.
Parkinson speaks of it as follows : ' ' From the rootes hereof
in many places (but more often where no broome growethe,
namely, by fields and hedgesides, and upon heathes)
growethe another plant whose stalke is of the bignesse of
a finger or thumbe, having a show of leaves on them and
many flowers at the toppe, somewhat like unto the flowers
of orchis, but larger, and of a deadish yellow colour/' He
commends the stems as a substitute for asparagus, but
says they are far more bitter, and it appears, according to
him, to be " a singular good helpe " for divers complaints.
His reference to the broom-rape being more often than not
found away from the broom, does not invalidate its name,
but only indicates that it is parasitic on several species
of leguminous plants.

,

Date Due

Demco 293-5

Hulme, Frederick Edward :
rs.

Q.K81
H91

Hulme, Frederick Edward
Familiar wild flowers.

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