BELL-FLOWERS AND DAISIES 175 
flower; but when a cutting was driven through it, the 
next spring saw the sides sprinkled with countless yellow 
heads. Had the seeds lain dormant for years down 
below? or were these all planted from the parachute 
seeds of other plants? The nearest I 
knew of were miles away, but that need 
not have made their voyage impossible. 
The heavy refuse of brickfields is also 
a site frequently chosen, and upon it, as 
one may well imagine, the coltsfoot seed 
is at least safe from too fierce a com- 
petition of other plants. When, after 
flowering, the plant sends up its leaves, 
they grow to a considerable size, six or 
eight inches across, and send down their reserve stores to 
the creeping root-stock. The Butter-bur, which groups 
its compound heads in thick club-shaped spikes (all of a 
dirty flesh-colour) is similar in habits, for its leaves come 
late, but they are of enormous size, sometimes spreading 
a yard across. 
Of the Burdock, the seeds of which are carried far 
afield by the hooks on the involucre which encases them, 
and of the Carline Thistle, in which the bracts close right 
over the pollen when the air is damp and threatens 
danger, mention was made in earlier pages, and we must 
now leave the Composite, and just glance at two allied 
groups, represented by the Bedstraws and the Honey- | 
suckles. 
To the first belong the Dyer’s Madder ; the Goose-grass, 
the prickly twining stems and hooked pairs of seed- 
vessels of which you can find on every hedgerow ; the 
Woodruff, with its whorl of leaves, its cluster of white 
flowers, and its scent of new-mown hay; and, a more 
COLTSFOOT LEAF, 
