116 FLOWERS OF THE WOODS AND COPSES 
flowering stem. The leaves are egg-shaped in pairs, stalked, erect, 
smooth, lance-shaped, veined, one of them exceeding the other, bright 
green. The leaf-stalks are round, long, the outer one dotted with red, 
tubular, drooping, enclosing the inner solid one. 
The scape or flowering stem is lateral, as long as the leaves, naked, 
smooth, erect, semi-cylindrical. The bracts or leaflike organs are 
membranous below each flower. The flowers are in drooping racemes, 
white, bell-shaped. The segments of the corolla are turned back. 
The fruit is a red berry. 
This plant is 6 in. in height. It flowers in May and June. — Lily-of- 
the-Valley is perennial and propagated by the underground stems. 
The flowers are honeyless, but contain much pollen and the tissue 
a sweet sap. The flowers are visited by numerous insects. The 
flowers are homogamous, anthers and stigma being ripe together, or 
the anthers first, and in the absence of insects self-pollination occurs. 
When the flower expands, the stigma, longer than the anthers, is 
already covered with long papillz or wart-like knobs before the anthers 
are mature; but if the anthers are ripe and rubbed over it, little pollen 
adheres. When they have opened the stigma is sticky and _ pollen 
adheres to it. The flowers are pendulous, and bees cling on, and 
thrust the head and fore leg into the bell, touching the stigma first 
with pollen from another flower. It sweeps the pollen with the brushes 
of its fore legs into its baskets, and dusts its head with pollen, which 
is carried to the next flower. The stigma is 3-lobed, and the anthers 
stand close to it. 
The fruit is a rounded berry, which is red when ripe and falls to 
the ground, but may rarely be dispersed by birds. The plant generally 
grows in wide patches, indicating that it is mainly dispersed by its own 
agency. 
The Lily-of-the-Valley is a lime-loving plant flourishing best on a 
lime soil, but requiring humus. The leaves are attacked by ezdrum 
convallarie. 
A beetle, Crzocerzs flit, and a fly, Parallelomma albipes, are found 
on the Lily-of-the-Valley. 
Convallarca, Linnzeus, is from convallis, a valley, its usual habitat, 
and mazaézs indicates the flowering period, May. 
This pretty flower is called Conval-Lily, Great Park, May and 
Wood Lily, Lily-among-thorns, Lily-conval, Lily-of-the-Valley, Liri- 
con fancy, May Blossoms, May Lily, Mugwet, Valleys. 
They say at St. Leonards it sprang from the blood of St. Leonard, 
who, encountering a mighty worm or “‘fire-drake” in the forest, fought 
