128 SUMMER FLOWERS. 



" Fair flower, chat lapt in lowly glade 

 Dost hide beneath the greenwood shade, 



Than whom the vernal gale 

 None fairer wakes on bank or spray, 

 Our England's Lily of the May, 



Our Lily of the Yale!" 



— this little gem among flowers, has a creeping rootstock, 

 forming buds and tufts of roots at intervals. From these 

 grow the radical leaves^ two or three in a scaly sheath, and 

 having the long stalks enclosed one within the other, so as to 

 resemble a stem ; they are four to six inches long, oblong, 

 tapering to both ends, and somewhat striated. The flower- 

 stalks issue from one of the lower scales, and are slender, 

 shorter than the leaves, supporting the loose racemes of droop- 

 ing, bell-shaped, pure white, deliciously scented blossoms. ^'No 

 flower amid the garden fairer grows, than the sweet Lily of 

 tlie lowly vale, the queen of flowers.^^ Its blossoms consist of 

 a bell-shaped shortly six-cleft perianth, six erect stamens, in- 

 serted near the base, and a simple style, with a blunt three- 

 cornered stigma. The three-celled ovary becomes a scarlet 

 berry, with one- seeded cells. 



Another extensive and important division of the Monocoty- 

 ledons has what are called glumaceous flowers, that is to say, 

 their parts are not at all petal-like, as in those we have been 

 considering, but dry and husky-looking, as seen in the husks 

 of the grasses and the corn plants. This, however, is not their 

 chief peculiarity, or at least not that by which they may be 

 most readily known, for in some of the groups to which we 

 have already referred, something of the same texture in the 

 parts of the flower has been spoken of The most obvious and 

 characteristic difference consists in the position of the parts of 

 the flower, which in those we have already considered are 

 arranged in whorls, whilst in the glumaceous series they are 



