222 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
Solomon’s Seal, with waxy bells and scarlet berries. On 
the same knoll rise the airy purple spikes of Prenanthes 
purpurea, and perhaps the Great Solomon’s Seal itself. 
Polygonatum verticillatwm occurs rarely, in isolated, 
small groups of three or four stéms. Set apart from its 
kindred by the arrangement of its leaves in whorls, this 
graceful Solomon’s Seal, always of local occurrence, is 
found in copses near Bellingham in Northumberland, 
and about the banks of the Tay. So far I have not made 
any solid success in the cultivation of it. Far different is 
the case with the May Lily, which now carpets the ground 
amid the oak-fern. Of Maianthemum bifolium, with 
pairs of glossy heart-shaped leaves, and fluffy little white 
spikes of blossom, I have always had the greatest pleasure, 
and now am naturalising it in the woods—an easy task, 
seeing that its one station as an English wild plant is 
in a wood at the other end of Yorkshire. Here and 
there among the May Lilies, in the darkest places, you 
may see the dingy, mud-coloured spikes of a little sapro- 
phyte Orchis, Corallorhiza imnata, whose flowers are like 
sere, rotten imitations of a flower, cut, a da Japonaise, 
out of lard. This is impossible of culture, and its chief 
interest is that this, too, is a rare native of our northern 
woods. As for Epipogon aphyllum, weirdest and most 
monstrous of morbid beauties, with its fleshy, lurid flower 
turned the wrong way round (like that of Odontoglossum 
pulchellum), and its general aspect of bruised, decaying 
flesh, purplish and livid, this has only twice occurred in 
England, saprophytic on rottenness by ditch-sides in one 
Hertfordshire wood, and so incalculably rare is it all the 
world over that you may think yourself fortunate indeed 
if ever you come across it in similar positions near stream 
or hollow of a Swiss forest. 
Now, as you mount, the torrent begins to course 
through more open land, ‘The forest thins off, and you 
