ii2 SUMMER 



recently appeared one summer on old and well-trodden turf 

 in the sanatorium garden of a Berkshire public school. 

 Is this really a first appearance, or does the bulb or seed 

 take a rest of a human generation or two in the soil, waiting 

 for times of refreshment ? We can see the dandelion seed 

 travelling on the autumn wind, and now and then the water 

 hemlock seed borne down by the Lammas floods ; but it 

 is very difficult to account for the dispersal by land of a 

 minute seed which cannot fly, and so far as we know is not 

 eaten by any bird. Yet suddenly the bee orchis makes 

 its appearance across miles of cornfield and wood. 



Of the other chalk-loving orchises the man is not rare in 

 Kent, and is aptly named ; for from each green blossom 

 there hangs the image of a little manikin, as if snipped 

 out of paper. Of the two rare Thames-side orchises the 

 military and its variety the monkey both are pink, and in 

 both cases the little hanging figure has a tail. In either 

 case this detracts from the verisimilitude of the comparison, 

 red monkeys and tailed warriors being both rare. The lizard 

 has a larger spike of spotted blossoms, with the tail vastly 

 prolonged and agreeably twisted. Here the comparison is 

 at least ingenious. But inspiration failed in naming the 

 butterfly orchis, which has nothing of the butterfly but 

 lightness and the semi-transparency of a butterfly's rubbed 

 wing. It is a strange, shadow-haunting plant, full of a 

 sweet and heady scent at evening ; two or three spikes will 

 perfume half the rooms of a house. More concrete beauty 

 is shown by the white helleborine, which half opens its 

 almondlike buds to show the lemon-tinted heart of the 

 blossom in the shade of beechen groves on the chalk. It 

 is more local than the butterfly, but sometimes abundant 

 beneath the shadow of a group of beeches. The broad- 

 leaved helleborine is a smaller and less handsome orchis 



