150 THE LIFE OF THE PLANT 



aspect of the whole vegetation of a locality. Everybody 

 knows, for instance, the meadow plantain, consisting of a 

 bundle of leaves gathered into a rosette and lying almost 

 flat upon the ground. In this case the stem is scarcely 

 developed at all, and this is why the leaves are so closely 

 brought together. Something of the kind, only on a 

 larger scale, is illustrated by the American Agave, which 

 grows out of doors in southern Europe, and also in our 

 greenhouses here in the north. That plant consists 

 simply of a bundle of very large, fleshy leaves almost 

 seven feet in length, which once in ten years throw out 

 a flowering stem like a huge candelabra about twenty- 

 eight feet high. We find a stem very slightly developed 

 also in a certain extremely curious African plant. 

 Picture to yourselves a vast expanse of barren steppe, 

 on some parts of which are what appear to be stumps or 

 logs scarcely rising above the soil, and slightly hollowed 

 like funnels with little furrows across them. On both 

 sides of the stump, from the furrows at its edges, there 

 stretch two broad strap-like objects from four to seven 

 feet in length coarse and leathery, at first greenish in 

 colour but turning brown at the edges, and torn into 

 narrow strips looking, in fact, quite tattered. Here and 

 there at the edges of the stumps there grow small 

 branches with minute cones like those of the fir-tree. 

 This is Welwitschia, surnamed mirabilis, wonderful, 

 on account of all its remarkable characters. The 

 significance of its various parts is as follows : the 

 stump, always half-buried in the soil and merging 

 gradually into the root, is the trunk of this tree ; it is 

 seldom more than two feet in height, although the 

 plant itself may live to be a hundred years old. The 

 two tattered shreds described above are a pair of leaves 

 which the plant keeps during the whole of its existence ; 

 dying at the edges they gradually grow from the base, 

 and reach a very great age. 



Let us pass from these stunted almost stemless 



