222 



HUTCHINSON'S POPULAR BOTANY 



by thickened nodes, as in the Grasses, is a culm : while a pithy stem 

 without thickened nodes is a calamus. We have good examples of 

 this sort of stem in the Rushes. Our English Grasses, it must be con- 

 fessed, give but a poor idea of the dignity of a culm, and one must 

 make a journey to India, or South China, or the Eastern Archipelago, 

 where the colossal Bamboos abound, in order to obtain a truer idea. 

 Every one of those polished jointed stems is a culm. Sometimes as many 

 as a hundred of them " spring from a single root, not seldom as thick as 

 a man. and towering to a height of eighty or a hundred feet " (Hartwig). 



Miss Gordon Gumming tells 

 us that in Ceylon these 

 giant Grasses " peep above 

 ground during the rains, 

 about July, and shoot up 

 at the rate of twelve inches 

 in twenty-four hours. The 

 Malacca Bamboo [Bambusa 

 maxima], which is the 

 largest known species, con- 

 tinues growing till it attains 

 a height sometimes con- 

 siderably above a hundred 

 feet, with an average 

 diameter of nine inches." 

 Picture for a moment the 

 grace of our meadow 

 Grasses, united with the 

 lordly growth of the Italian 

 Poplar (Populusnigrci), and 

 we shall have a faint idea 

 of the beauty and dignity 

 of this form of stem. 



Branches occasionally 

 take remarkable and mis- 

 leading forms. The dark 



green leaf-like expansions of the Butcher's Broom (Ruscus aculeatus) are 

 really branches flattened branches or cladodes on which the little 

 greenish flower is borne. This is one of the most curious of our native 

 plants, and the only woody monocotyledon indigenous to British soil. In 

 the southern half of Britain it is common locally in woods where the 

 surface soil is clay, sand, or gravel, and on windy heathlands one is pretty 

 sure to meet with it. The cladode shown in fig. 283 is -not a cladode of 

 the Butcher's Broom, but of a Jamaica shrub, Phyllanthus angustifoliiis, 

 which belongs to quite another family and order. There is also a small 



FIG. 277. BOTTLE-TREE (Delabechia rupestris). 

 A native of tropical Australia. 



