CHAPTER XXVI

HONEYSUCKLE AND ELDER

We have gone through most of our acquaintance of the many-petalled flowers with stamens on the calyx, and now we begin on those which have all their corolla in one, so that when it drops it looks for a little while as if the whole flower had fallen. We start with the honeysuckle, or woodbine, far from a regular flower, though constant to the rule of five. Delightful honeysuckle! a dweller indeed by our paths and homes, and a constant longenduring friend, its stem becoming hard wood, and growing on and on till perhaps generation after generation have been born and died within the house where it spreads and luxuriates, and the children who have gathered its fragrant blossoms have grown old, still owning them as an unchanged part of their home.

A constant, early, hardy friend it is, its twin leayes coming out first of all, even in the midst of winter, bringing cheerful promise of spring, and hanging on the bare boughs through many a return of cold and storm, bearing the chill crystals of hoar frost as merrily as if they were but dewdrops of a summer morning. A constant friend, indeed, as many a hazel stick can testify, so constant that it becomes part of the very wood itself,

actually one with it, assuming the same bark, and giving it a strange twisted, whorled appearance, as if a snake had twined round it. Most boys have met with these twisted sticks, and in that case the friendship has generally ended in the death of both, for who could resist cutting such a precious walking-stick, unless, indeed, it was in a wood where such cutting was forbidden!

There are two sorts of wild honeysuckle; one is all white outside with the interior of a pale glazy cream colour, and with leaves making a cup round the stem. It blooms in the autumn. The other is red on the outside,

and has leaves in pairs. points, such as the long, pin-like pistil, the five slender stamens, the corolla with its very long throat, the little drop of perfumy nectar at the bottom, and the top deeply cut into two divisions one long and thread-like, the other broad and notched into four scallops, so as to keep up the pentagon character. Then look at the bud, how the wide part is doubled down, and the slender linear division closes down over it, with a red edge marking its form, buds and fully opened blossoms all standing in graceful, bending, diverging positions on the common receptacle, guarded a little way down by leaves embracing the stem, one of the most elegant, the sweetest, and most charming of all our plants. The fruit is a red, glossy berry, which you may often find in clusters in the winter.

They are alike in all the main

There is besides the French honeysuckle, with small sweet blossoms out of very red buds and long red shoots; and the pretty variegated Chinese honeysuckle, whose few blossoms are delicious.

Of the same tribe is the pretty white Snowberry with its little pink flowers in pairs. It came originally from Canada, but it likes our climate so well, and has been

planted in so many woods for pheasants to eat, that it may soon be looked upon as being naturalised among us.

The elder tribe has cymes irregularly branched, and the small white blossoms have three stigmas instead of only two, and their fruit is a single hard seed, enclosed in a berry.

Elder blossoms are delicious in smell, as you pass along some shady lane, where they raise those fine broad flat cymes, valued by the makers of elder flower water, and afterwards bearing dark rich purple berries so useful for making elder wine, while little boys have scarcely less liking for the tree, the branches of which may furnish them with pop-guns when they have pushed out the soft pith. This pith is so large that we have a good opportunity of seeing in it what plants are made of. If you look at a thin slice of it, or at the pith of a rush in a magnifier, you will see that they are something like a honeycomb, divided into six-sided compartments or cells. These cells, tiny as they are, are larger in the elder pith than in almost any other plant, for they are found in every vegetable that grows, in stalk, leaf, and blossom; the whole is a tissue of these minute cells, formed of a thin skin, or membrane, colourless itself, but holding in each cell a drop or grain, green, red, blue, or whatever may be the colour we see in flower or leaf. How beautifully arranged these little cases must be, to give the delicate shading in one flower, and the sharply -defined tints in another—a blush rose, and a tulip for instance. It is the white shining membrane through which we see the colour, that makes flowers have their satiny polished look, and indeed that polished surface is of great use in turning off wet, being such that dirt cannot stick to it. Inside the petals the colour is generally liquid; in the

leaves there is a little grain in each cell, lying in the midst of a green liquid, which dries up as autumn comes, while the grain turns yellow, red, or brown.

A good deal like the elder in appearance are the white blossoms of the wayfaring tree, so called because it grows by roadsides, and cheers the eye of the dusty traveller. It has large ribbed leaves covered with short white cotton, and its berries when half ripe are most beautiful, being a pale waxy yellow, shaded on one side with deepening red. Of a bright clear scarlet are the berries of the pretty wild Guelder rose, which blossoms in a very peculiar manner. All the outermost flowers in the cyme are large, and of a much brighter white than those within; but on examination you will find that they contain no stamens or pistil, and only serve as an ornamental border to the smaller flowers within, which are perfect in all their parts. The Guelder rose, cultivated in shrubberies, and called by children the snow-ball tree, bears nothing but these imperfect flowers, which, instead of being merely an edging, occupy every branch of the cyme, and form those beautiful white globes, so brightly white and so soft. Most delightful playthings are those summer snow-balls, coming with Whitsuntide, and joined in all our pleasant remembrances of May and June, and long warm evenings, when they look so white and moon-like in the midst of the dark foliage of some shady path. The snow-ball tree is said to have been first brought from Flanders, and to have taken the name of Guelder rose from the duchy of Gueldres.

Laurustinus, gay even in winter, with evergreen leaves, pink buds, and white blossoms, is a native of the south of Europe and north of Africa.

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CHAPTER XXVII

LIPPED FLOWERS

THE Figwort tribe follows, led off by the English glory of the woods in late summer.

In the south of England the foxglove peals of bells have in general ceased to ring before the 1st of August. The foxglove, the special fairy flower, called in Ireland fairy-cap, and where the little elves are said to hide themselves when a human foot approaches to disturb their evening dances, and I believe the English name is properly folks'-gloves, the fairy folks. Beautiful foxgloves! the purple bells hanging in profusion on their tall proud stalks, growing in whole multitudes on the sunny dry bank, or lifting tall spires among the gray dark ruined walls! how fair and bright they are, and yet it is half sad to greet them, for they first come to tell us of the decay of summer.

They are loved by little children too for the loud popping noise made by enclosing the air within them and then cracking them, for which reason they are apt to call them poppies, though this is a silly name, and does not belong to them.

The foxglove is one of the largest of a numerous tribe of flowers, called Labiate or lipped, and therefore its parts