FLOWERS OF THE SHORE AND CLIFFS. 305 



Thrift or Sea- Pink (Armeria maritime?) , whose tufts of thick, 

 narrow, grass-like leaves extend from the wave-washed rocks 

 right up the cliff-side, and over the stony hedges at the top. It 

 flowers sparingly all the year round I have gathered it within 

 a few days of Christmas but the brilliant display is in April 

 and May, when every clump supports many long-stalked, half- 

 round heads of the rosy flowers, that make so beautiful a 

 setting for the nests of the cliff-building birds. Thrift is not 

 absolutely peculiar to the coast, for it is found also on high 

 mountains ; in the Scottish Highlands it occurs at an altitude 

 of nearly four thousand feet above the sea. There is a larger 

 and more rigid species (A . plant agined) that grows on sandy 

 banks in Jersey. 



A relation of the Sea- Pink is the Sea- Lavender (Statice 

 limoniuni), which grows where sand and mud are more 

 abundant than rocks, and in some places covers the sand- 

 hills with a growth not unlike that of the heather on inland 

 sand-hills, and at a distance the purplish flowers are very 

 suggestive of heather in such a situation. They are not 

 gathered into a compact head as in Thrift, but are scattered 

 along a branching spray. It has a creeping rootstock of a 

 woody character, from which all the leaves spring directly. 

 These are oval in general outline, running off to a point at 

 the upper end. It flowers from July to November. 



On the sandy shore where grows the Sea- Lavender there 

 will, in all probability, also be seen a bold-leaved plant, with 

 large, golden yellow flowers, which the tyro in botany will 

 notice at a glance has some sort of relationship with the 

 familiar Eschscholtzia of the garden. It is the Yellow Horned- 

 Poppy (Glaucium luteum}, and the above-mentioned tyro will 

 say that this time the glaucous hue of the leaves (from which 

 this species and Glaux both derive their scientific names) is 

 not wholly due to its seaside habit, for the same hue is 

 characteristic of Eschscholtzia and the Opium Poppy (Papaver 

 somniferuni), which are cultivated flowers. Quite so, but 



