S12 The Romance of Wild Flowers 
Grass (Sisyrinchium augustifoliwn), a plant that 
has curiously got there from North America, but 
which appears, in Kerry at least, to be truly wild. 
Its rooting portion consists of a tuft of rigid fibres, 
and before the flowers appear the leaves might be 
mistaken for those of grass. These flowers are less 
than an inch in diameter, blue inside, and from one to 
four in an umbel. In America it is abundant in 
meadows, and its grassy appearance is thus explained. 
Romulea (Romulea columne) is similar to the last- 
mentioned in its rarity as a British plant, but the 
home of the species is the Mediterranean region, the 
west of France, and the islands of the Azores, so that 
its appearance in the Channel Islands and at Dawlish 
in Devon is not so remarkable as the case of Sisyrin- 
chium. Romulea approaches nearer to the Crocus, 
and has a corm the size of a pea as an underground 
base, whence proceed the slender, half-cylindrical, and 
wiry leaves, and the short flower-scape, with its two 
or three greenish flowers lined with white and 
streaked with purple. 
Two species of Crocus are naturalised here—the 
Autumnal Crocus (Crocus nudiflorus) and the Vernal 
Crocus (C. vernus), the former considered by some 
authorities to be a native. As everybody knows, 
they have underground corms, for these are con- 
spicuous in the seedsmen’s shops every autumn, and 
from these the grass-like leaves rise in a bundle, the 
outer series wrapping the inner and giving such 
support that they serve as a stem. In the majority 
of species the leaves appear with the flowers; such is 
the case with the Vernal Crocus, but there are others 
that agree with the Autumnal Crocus, whose flowers 
