BY BANK AND COPSE. 31 



nearly a foot high, its slender stem bearing long, scattered 

 hairs, and each branch ending in a solitary chestnut-brown, 

 rush-like flower. Rushes seem indeed to be but fallen 

 representatives of the grand lily tribe; but by a happy 

 accident we light hard by upon two far less common and 

 nearer representatives of that group. This little yellow 

 star-of-Bethlehem is decidedly lily-like. It has a little bulb 

 (though the plant is so rare I should be sorry to pull it up 

 to demonstrate the fact), one long narrow sheathing 

 hyacinth-like leaf and a little umbel of six-rayed greenish- 

 yellow stars. These greenish-yellow flower-leaves are, it has 

 been suggested, an ancient survival, the ancestral type of 

 how the first petals arose from altered yellow stamens. 

 But if this little plant be a lily, what shall we say to this 

 sturdy prickly little shrub ? My friends will hardly believe 

 me when I say that this butcher's-broom too is a lily. Yet 

 so it is. Its tough green stems, the only woody ones 

 among British members, not only of the lily family, but of 

 the great class of which that family is but a small part, are 

 simply palm stems in little, and afford interesting proof of 

 this under the microscope. Butchers still use it as a broom 

 in some country towns ; and in the New Forest, where it is 

 plentiful, it is known as knee-holm or knee-holly from its 

 height, its evergreen character, and its prickly points. The 

 little greenish flowers you see are in the centre of the broad 

 flat pointed leaf-like structure, though botanists tell us that 

 flowers never grow on leaves ; but those are not the leaves : 

 they are the minute scales you see below each of these 

 leaf-like branches. Here one of last winter's scarlet berries 

 remains, like that of the lily of the valley or the asparagus, 

 and this last-mentioned plant is indeed one of the nearest 

 allies of the butcher's-broom. 



