My Garden in Spring 



sharply pointed and greyer in colouring than other forms, 

 so that it is a light and graceful-looking plant, showing 

 some family resemblance to its not very distant relations, 

 the Asparagus family. 



R. hypoglossum, on the other hand, has very broad 

 cladodes and fine, long tongues growing out of them, really 

 the bracts from between which and the cladode the flowers 

 ought to spring forth. This plant is not over hardy here, 

 and so does not flower often, and alas ! has never fruited. 

 Close to them are some Docks. Rumex flexuosus is as mad 

 as any plant well can be, for it has long, narrow leaves so 

 brown in colour that they look more like a seaweed than 

 a land plant. In early Spring when they first appear 

 they have a most peculiar effect. The same plant has 

 sown itself rather freely among the joints in the paved walks 

 of the Pergola garden, and springing from between the 

 stones looks wonderfully like some Laminaria on rocks 

 between tide marks. Later on they throw up a tangle of 

 slender, straggling flower-stems from which I suppose the 

 specific name is derived, and then they look rather untidy, 

 but if cut down a fresh crop of seaweed soon appears. 

 R. scutatus with grey-green, arrow-shaped leaves, grows 

 next to the brown species, and a little further along is the 

 Fiddle Dock, Rumex pulcher, a rare British plant from 

 Romney Marsh. This looks very much like an ordinary 

 weed of a Dock, unless the leaves have developed the curious 

 narrowed tuck-in on each side that suggests their musical 

 name. Plantains are strongly represented. There is the 

 Bush Plantain, Plantago cynops, a very strange, narrow- 

 leaved slender bush that no one would dream was a Plantain 

 unless they saw its characteristic flower spikes. P. argentea, 

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