HOW PLANTS DRINK. 7 1 



daffodils, snowdrops, crocuses, and the various 

 kinds of squills and jonquils are familiar ex- 

 amples of plants which lay by in one year ma- 

 terial for the next year's flowering season. But 

 our wild flowers do the same thing quite as much, 

 though less obtrusively. Our earliest spring but- 

 tercup is the bulbous buttercup, which has a 

 swollen root-stock, full of rich material ; and 

 this enables it to flower very soon indeed, while 

 the fibrous - rooted meadow - buttercup, which 

 closely resembles it in most other respects, has 

 to wait a month later, and then to raise a much 

 taller stem, in order to overtop the summer 

 grasses, which by that time have reached a con- 

 siderable height. Still earlier, however, is an- 

 other buttercup-like plant, the lesser celandine, 

 which has material laid by in little pill-like tubers; 

 and these have given it its curious old English 

 name of pilewort. Other early spring wild- 

 flowers are the wood anemone and marsh-mari- 

 gold, with rich and thick almost tuberous root- 

 stocks ; the bulbous wild hyacmth, the tuberous 

 meadow orchid, and the common arum, or " lords 

 and ladies," with its starchy root, very rich in 

 food-stuffs. Indeed, in every case where a plant 

 flowers very early in spring, you may be sure the 

 material for its flowering was laid up by the plant 

 in the previous year — that it is really rather a 

 case of delayed than of very early flowering. 



This is especially true of trees, like the black- 

 thorn or the flowering almond, where the flower- 

 buds are usually formed over winter, and only 

 fully developed in the succeeding spring. The 

 same thing happens with gorse ; only here, a few 

 bushes always break into bloom in October or 

 November, while others burst spasmodically into 



