168 TYPES OF BRITISH PLANTS 
pollen, which falls on the lower part of the style. There 
it is held by hairs, until some bee comes to force his way 
down to the honey, smearing himself with the pollen. 
In an older flower we shall find that the stamens have 
withered away and left the road clear to the nectar, but 
the pistil has now been roused to a sense of its duties, 
and the two arms spread out, barring the bee’s way. Of 
course he soon pushes over them, but not before they 
have swept his body and obtained their due of pollen. 
An interesting cousin of the Hairbell is the Nettle- 
leaved Bell-flower, which may be found in hedges and 
ditches, and which imitates the Stinging Nettle with 
even more skill than the White Dead-Nettle mentioned 
in the last chapter. It is every bit as harsh in texture, 
and the leaves are sharply toothed at the edge, but when 
you get quite familiar with both, you will notice that the 
leaves of our harmless blue-flowered friend are just a 
little narrower for their length. The flowers stand bolt 
upright, with wide-open mouths. And here is another 
puzzle. They seem calculated judiciously to catch all the 
rain and dew drops, to drown their pollen and dilute 
their honey, and yet they seem quite indifferent to the 
dangers against which other plants make such elaborate 
preparations. The leaves may serve to some extent as 
a shelter, but it can only be a very partial one. 
The little Sheep’s-bit Scabious, which is usually classed 
with the Bell-flowers, leads us on to the great order of 
the Composite, with its smaller allied order of the 
Teasels. We have seen that various plants, such as the 
Heaths, bear their flowers in a close cluster, and in 
the Composité this principle is carried to its extreme 
limits, so far that in common speech all of us speak 
of the 250 minute flowers which compose one head of the 
