164 SUMMER 



might very well fit the round shining seed-heads of the 

 garden honesty has been given to a little campanula with 

 purple starry blossoms. The special feature of the plant is 

 its large, swollen seed-capsules, which are as fully developed 

 when the flower first opens as they are in most plants when 

 it fades. 



Mouthed or lipped flowers are represented among the 

 smaller cornfield species by several attractive little plants. 

 Of the snapdragon tribe, in which the lip of the flower is 

 tightly closed, there are two minute examples in the least 

 toadflax and the fluellin. The least toadflax is a wiry, bushy 

 dwarf, often only some three or four inches high ; its flowers 

 are of the typical tight-lipped pattern, with the lower jaw 

 yellow and the rest of the blossom purple. Fluellin is a 

 creeping plant with long stems, and broad leaves set alter- 

 nately on the opposite sides. The blossoms are spurred as 

 well as jawed, like the toadflaxes; and small as they are 

 they are conspicuous from the sharp contrast between the 

 deep purple or crimson-brown of the upper lip and the yellow 

 lower one. Often the leaves are sharply angled, like an 

 arrow-head, and this makes the plant more noticeable among 

 the corn or late summer stubble ; but they are often smoothly 

 oval. Sharp-leaved fluellin and round-leaved fluellin are 

 frequently separated as two distinct species ; but gradations 

 between the two forms can be found so freely in the same 

 field, and even on the same plant, that they can hardly be 

 regarded as more than very inconstant varieties. As for 

 open-lipped or ' labiate ' flowers, the most striking cornfield 

 representative of that ample tribe is the large-flowered hemp- 

 nettle, which grows among the oats and barley in Scottish 

 glens and wet Welsh valleys. It is a large yellow dead nettle, 

 splashed with purple, and a more handsome flower than the 

 yellow nettle, or archangel, of English hedges in May. The 



