254 



HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



Pouter," he says, "has them all' growing in his 

 grounds, at a small village called Twickham, neere 

 London, who is a most cunning and curious grafter 

 and planter of all manner of rare fruits, also in the 

 ground of an excellent grafter and painful planter, 

 Master Henry Banbury, of Touthill Street, neere unto 

 Westminster, and likewise in the ground of a diligent 

 and most affectionate lover of plants, Master "Warner, 

 neere Hornsey Down, by London, and in divers 

 other grounds about London." The Katherine pear 

 was considered the best in Gerard's time and stood at 

 the head of his list, as Pyrus superba sive Katherina. 

 It is a small brilliant-coloured but ill-flavoured fruit 

 which is occasionally met with in the present day in 

 old orchards and also seen in the markets, as it ripens 

 ■early, Tlie bright colour furnished an illustration to 

 the poet Suckling ; in his ballad upon a wedding, he 

 compares the streaks of red on the lady's cheek to 

 those on 



A Catherine pear 

 The bide that's next the sun. 



And the schoolmistress of Shenstone speaks of the 

 lovely dye of the Catherine pear. 



{^To be cotitinued.) 



ON ACCESSORY BUDS. 

 By John Gibbs. 



ACCESSORY buds have received less attention 

 from botanists than the frequency of their 

 occurrence would lead us to expect, or than their im- 

 portance in the organic structure of plants makes 

 them deserve. That more than one bud sometimes 

 appears in the axil of a leaf, is a fact with which it is 

 easy to become familiar. In a vigorous young stem 

 of the common bramble we may often find two or 

 three buds in one axil, the uppermost being most 

 vigorous. When they grow into branches, as often 

 comes to pass, before the leaf to which they are axil- 

 lary ceases to be green, the second and weaker branch 

 comes under the first. In Galium Aparine, where 

 two opposite leaves have buds in their axils, neither 

 of them is limited to have only one bud, but a second 

 branch may be frequently seen growing under the 

 first. So it is with the pimpernel and many herba- 

 ceous plants, whether annual or perennial. The growth 

 of several buds from the same node of a stem does not 

 often give rise to fasciation of the branches, because 

 of the subordination which prevails among them, one 

 of the buds being always forwarder and stronger than 

 the others, usually, but not always, that which is 

 uppermost. Every plant seems to have a law of its 

 own for these matters. When several buds are on a 

 level they differ in character when developed, as in 

 the pumpkin plant and other sorts of gourd, which 

 have three buds in each axil, one of them commonly 

 opening into a flower, another growing into a leafy 

 branch and the third becoming a tendril. When, as 



now and then happens, two of them are flower-buds 

 they tend to cohere by their pedicels, or, it maybe, by 

 their ovaries. A gourd plant with no tendrils may 

 have a second leafy branch instead. The stinging- 

 nettle when in flower, has branches growing in the 

 axils of its leaves, and the inflorescence comes on 

 each side of these axillary branches, as if the stipules 

 were bracts, each subtending a flower-stalk. In the 

 black horehound and other labiate plants the inflore- 

 scence (an axillary cyme or fascicle) takes precedence 

 of the leafy branch, which may be often found below 

 it as developed from an accessory bud. On plants 

 with indefinite inflorescence it happens now and then 

 that, instead of a solitary flower in the axil of a leaf, 

 there are two or three. The best botanists have been 

 bewildered by such incidents and imagined that they 

 had to deal with a contracted cyme, inasmuch as the 

 flower that was uppermost expanded first, and that 

 below it afterwards. But in a contracted cyme we 

 may observe diminutive bracts, which are seldom 

 wanting from the stalk which bears a solitary flower, 

 but is capable of branching. The stalk that bears a 

 single flower in our wild convolvulus or bindweed 

 represents that which bears three, five, or seven 

 flowers in our cultivated species of Ipomoea, and its 

 true character appears in the pair of bracts, which are 

 never missing from below the flower unless they be 

 converted into leaves, when the flower becomes ter- 

 minal. In the common money-wort or the yellow 

 loosestrife, on the contrary, when a flower appears 

 below another flower in the same axil, there is no 

 bract upon the stalk. When three flowers blossom 

 in the axil of one leaf, as is the case with a sort of 

 Lysimachia that I have only seen in cultivation, and 

 which may possibly be a garden variety, the second 

 and third flowers do not grow on opposite sides of 

 the first, but below it, and the third is below the 

 second. Recognising the true character of these 

 accessory buds we perceive the constancy with which 

 plants of the order Primulacese adhere to the char- 

 acters of indefinite inflorescence, not having a central 

 flower in the umbel of a cowslip, nor a contracted 

 cyme in the axil of a leaf of Lysimachia. 



If it had one of these forms of definite inflorescence 

 we might expect to find the other within the limits of 

 the order. 



In the order Onagraceae the inflorescence is as con- 

 stantly indefinite as in that which contains the prim- 

 roses. The great hairy willow-herb bears flowers 

 which may seem to be terminal because the first of 

 them opens before the top of the stem which bears 

 many more has grown above it, but any one who 

 examines the plants later in the season will find the 

 arrangement of their flowers identical in Epilobium 

 hirsulnm, in which one or two flowers blossom at a 

 time, and E. angtistifolium, in which a handsome 

 spike of flowers is in bloom at once. The fuchsia, 

 being a plant of the same order, also has axillary 

 flowers, but when an accessory bud appears, as it 



