n6 SUMMER 



to brood on the passing of time ; there is something deeply 

 impressive and yet satisfying in watching day by day this 

 silent registration of the year. The tallest torch is upheld by 

 the common great mullein, with its flannelly leaves. When 

 the little speckly mullein moth caterpillars are hatched, it is 

 curious to see how deep they have to dig through the leafs 

 woolly coating before they come to the succulent green. 

 Black mullein has a handsomer individual blossom, with a 

 crimson eye ; but its spikes are usually shorter, although they 

 are more often borne in a cluster. This plant is the black 

 mullein, because the other is so white ; its leaves have no 

 woolly covering, and are actually a rather deep green. It is a 

 rare pleasure to find mulleins flowering in a dense mass. In 

 this respect they are far excelled by the purple torches of the 

 foxglove, which in cleared copses on gritty soils are some- 

 times massed almost by the acre in June and July. In a cleft 

 on the Longmynd in Shropshire a bed of dry rods was once 

 found in winter where the white mulleins must have bloomed 

 six months before in a dense mass ; but their fire was out, 

 and they gleamed in the valley like dry bones. 



One of the most striking contrasts in the colours of 

 flowers is their relative translucence or opaqueness. The 

 mullein's yellow has the clean hardness of the colours in a 

 mosaic pavement ; but the blue of the viper's bugloss, which 

 often branches so luxuriantly on the midsummer warrens, 

 has the liquid depth of a jewel. Like the other plants of 

 warrens and dry gravelly fields, the bugloss varies greatly in 

 vigour in different seasons ; but in a good year it forms one 

 of the most brilliant displays of any English plant, when it 

 covers wide stretches of soil with tall radiating stems of 

 sky-blue blossom. It is one of the plants best loved by 

 the humming-bird hawk moth, which emerges about mid- 

 summer after feeding the year before in the larval stage on 



