FAUN LILY 



are pure yellow, paler outside than in, with dark spots 

 near the heart of the flower where they join the stem; 

 each has upon either side a tiny, ear-shaped lobe. The 

 flower is extremely sensitive to the sunlight, expands 

 in its warmth and nearly closes at night. 



The secret of these beds of Adder's-Tongues lies in 

 the manner of the plant's reproduction. It has two 

 ways of spreading: one by means of seeds, and the 

 other through corms. Deep underground, at the base 

 of the long, slender stem, lies the corm, about the size 

 of a small hickory-nut or a large pea. A corm is the 

 swollen base of a stem and is bulb-like in form but 

 is solid, not made of layers like a bulb. It is a store- 

 house for plant food and also a means of spreading the 

 species, for from each corm there grow little corms 

 called cormels and each one of these produces a sepa- 

 rate plant, and as a result these are all crowded to- 

 gether. 



John Burroughs, writing of the Adder 's-Tongue as 

 he found it in grass-covered meadows, called attention 

 to the brittle white threads which appear among the 

 plants and sometimes above the ground. These he 

 found were connected with the immature corms from 

 which they penetrate the soil in various directions. 

 A careful study has been made of the plant, and it is 

 now known that these white threads are smooth, 

 scaleless, subterranean runners, heavily charged with 

 starch and that the tip encloses a bud which will in 

 time become a corm. The corms formed at the end of 

 the runner will send up a single leaf and will then send 

 out more runners, and so the process is repeated until 

 a very considerable bed is formed. It requires four 

 years to develop a blooming corm, and the corm does 



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