24 THE PLANT -WORLD IN MARCH. 



by side with some chickweed, alike patronised by the 

 keepers of pet birds; and perhaps an early dandelion is 

 eclipsing the brightness of a group of leafless coltsfoot. 

 We may note the deeply-notched white petals of the chick- 

 weed, each looking like two, and the single row of minute 

 hairs along its stem, which curiously shifts its position from 

 one side of the stem to the other at every pair of leaves. 

 The dandelion springs from a rosette of the deeply-toothed 

 leaves to which it owes its name, its smooth and hollow 

 milky stalk surmounted with recurved green bracts or 

 scales below the head of strap-shaped florets. The coltsfoot 

 on the other hand, like many another flower of spring, 

 produces its flowers in advance of the leaves, and thus is 

 now seen only as a flower-stalk, woolly, and bearing 

 numerous small leafy scales, surmounted by its paler 

 yellow, thistle-like head of florets, of which only the outer 

 ones are long and narrow. 



From the gold at our feet we look up to gold over our 

 heads. Here the hedgerow has become the rendezvous 

 for quite a crowd of busily humming bees, the first we have 

 noticed abroad this year ; for here a large sallow is in all 

 the glory of its golden palm. So too, we now notice, are 

 a group of little prostrate forms, with trailing wiry stems 

 of glossy brown, in the swampy ground near the pond. 

 The low-growing shrub is the hedgerow-tree in miniature. 

 They have burst their brown bud -scales, and the oval 

 cushion of silver fur now appears thickly studded with the 

 gold-headed threads, among which the bees are so hard at 

 work. The legs of the insects are so laden with the golden 

 pollen that they seem hardly able to fly ; yet if we watch 

 them we may trace some of them to another tree yonder, 

 which at once strikes us as different. Instead of the plump, 



