274 THE RIB-AVORT FAMILY. 



the Armeria vulgaris. (E. B. iv. 226.) This charming little plant, 

 which often gives a roseate tinge to pastures that slojje towards the 

 water-side, as on the southern shores of the Bristol Channel, though 

 it best loves the ocean breeze, grows equally well when remote from 

 it. The neat, dense, cushion-like mode of its growth, adapts it excel- 

 lently for the edgings of flower-borders, to which purpose, under the 

 name of "thrift," it is frequently applied in ^Manchester gardens, 

 innumerable flowers decking them prettily in early summer. The 

 leaves are numerous, radical, linear, an inch or two long, evergreen, 

 though winter sometimes treats them imgraciously ; the flower-stalks 

 simple and leafless, three to eight inches high, with a globular head 

 of pink or sometimes white blossoms, intermingled with which are 

 numerous chafij' scales, the outer ones forming a kind of basket or 

 " involucrum," and the two outermost prolonged downwards into a 

 sheath that surrounds the stalk. The styles are hairy at the base. 



Several species of Statice, with panicles of lilac flowers, are grown 

 in green-houses, along with some tall and elegant half-shrubby plants 

 called Plumbago. 



LXXXL— THE RIB -WORT FAMILY. Plantaginea. 



A family of about one hundred and twenty little herbaceous plants, 

 usually stemless ; the leaves oval, lanceolate, or pinnatifid, and growing 

 either in upright tufts, or in flat rosettes a few inches in diameter, and 

 lying close upon the surface of the ground. When oval or lanceolate, 

 the leaves are provided with strong ribs. (Fig. 43.) Flower-stalks 

 radical, leafless, bearing at the summit a dense and oval, or long and 

 cylindrical spike of minute blossoms, the parts of which are in fours, 

 and generally dry and chaffy. Stamens four, with long and flaccid 

 filaments ; anthers large and conspicuous. Fruit a tiny capsule, 

 opening transversely like that of the pimpernel (p. 266). In certain 

 exotic species of PlanU'tgo the stem is developed, and becomes branched 

 and leafy ; and in the Littorella the flowers are unisexual, or nearly 

 so, and instead of growing in spikes, are solitary and terminal. 



Plantaginea) are found all over the world, but chiefly in temperate 

 countries, growing in dry and waste places, in meadows and pastures, 

 and by the sea-side, often close to high-water mark. Their foliage is 

 .slightly bitter and astringent. Six species occur in England, and all 

 but one of them grow near Manchester. 



