3 o THE PLANT-WORLD IN MARCH. 



will be when they rise erect to flower. Here and there a 

 pointed glossy-green shoot, well wrapped round with its 

 leaves, marks the coming of the cuckoo-pint, or lords-and- 

 ladies, next month ; and perhaps a spreading rosette of 

 polished leaves, irregularly blotched snake -like with 

 purplish red, may similarly herald the early purple orchis. 

 From tawny heaps of decaying leaves the curled fronds of 

 ferns are beginning to show themselves, and we find in this 

 and other respects considerable difference between the 

 open coppice where we are standing, which was felled in 

 the autumn before last, and the denser thickets where the 

 spring sun has not yet made itself felt. 



Here, however, at our feet, is an interesting little plant 

 which we were nearly overlooking, among dog's-mercury 

 and wood-anemones. Its little leaves resemble in form those 

 of the latter, but are of a brighter and lighter green. Its 

 flower-stalk bears two leafy bracts, like the three in the 

 anemone, and its little head of green flowers at first sight 

 looks like the fruit of the anemone when the flowers have 

 fallen. It is the moschatel, musk crowfoot, musk-root, 

 hollow root, or bulbous fumitory, so called from its musky 

 odour, which is strongest at evening, and its thick white 

 hollow underground stem. It is difficult to think of it as 

 the near ally of the elder and the honeysuckle; but its 

 little flowers are well worth looking at. There are five of 

 them, forming five sides of a cube of which the stalk 

 occupies the base: the upper flower has four little green 

 petals and eight stamens, and the four side ones have each 

 five petals and five deeply two-forked stamens, the whole 

 forming a cube hardly half an inch in diameter. Close to 

 it is growing the hairy wood-rush, which differs from the 

 true rushes in having flat, grass-like leaves, and grows 



