456 



HUTCHINSON'S POPULAR BOTANY 



wind-pollination are more elaborate than among the Gymnosperms. " The 

 anemophilous angiosperms," says Hermann Miiller, " have for the most 

 part enormously developed stigmas, which project in the form of long tails, 

 brushes, laminae, or discs; their male flowers are very seldom immovable, 

 but are generally easily shaken by the wind, either the axis of the male 

 inflorescence or the peduncle of the male flowers, or the filaments them- 

 selves, being long and pendulous ; in some cases the stamens are explosive, 

 and project all the pollen into the air." 



We may take as our first example the flowers of the Hazel (Corylus 



avellana). Most people 

 are familiar with the 

 long pendulous " lambs r 

 tails," as the children 

 call them, which make 

 their appearance on the 

 Hazel in the autumn, 

 and which, in the South 

 of England, open in 

 January or February. 

 These are the male in- 

 florescences or catkins * 

 (fig. 519). The female 

 inflorescences are the 

 small cone-like growths 

 (strobiles}, sometimes 

 rather loosely described 

 as "female catkins," 

 which appear in the 

 axils of the new shoots. 

 The tiny groups of 

 crimson threads project- 

 ing from the tops of the 

 strobiles are bunches of 



FIG. 561. HAZEL (Corylus avellana). 



Abnormal male ilower 

 origin and ends in 



A single catkin ha 

 hunch of twenty- fiv 



anclied at half an inch from" its 

 iort catkins. Natural size. " 



forked stigmas. The 

 anthers open while the 



hazels are still bare of leaf, and roll out their pollen into the trough-like 

 depressions of the flower's scaly bracts, which retain it "until the tassels 

 are set swinging by a gust of wind." Then the yellow dust, with no foliage 

 to impede it, is blown hither and thither, and the stigmas of a great number 

 of female flowers are sure to get pollinated. 



That pendulous flowers, no less than pendulous inflorescences, should 

 facilitate the scattering of pollen by the wind goes without the saying. Many 

 species of Rumex, the genus to which our Broad-leaved Dock and Sheep's- 

 * The more technical name for a catkin is an amentum. 



