172 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



willows, and feathery deodars with artful carelessness on 

 our lawns and shrubberies ; to cover the naked crannies of 

 our poor imitation rock-work with the dainty tracery of 

 ferns and club-mosses. Even now, we have not paid 

 sufficient attention to the ornamental value of the com- 

 mon wind-fertilized plants. They have no gay petals to 

 attract us, like their insect-haunted allies ; they do not 

 strike the eye at once in the dappled meadows, like the 

 buttercups, the fritillaries, the clematis, and the wild 

 daffodils ; yet they have a wonderful indescribable grace 

 and beauty of their own, which nobody can fail to ap- 

 preciate, at least when once attention has been conscious- 

 ly directed to their more modest and retiring shapes. 

 Their flowers usually either hang out loosely in long 

 waving panicles, like the grasses and sedges, or else clus- 

 ter closely together in curious globular or cylindrical 

 heads, like the reeds and the catkins. It is to this class 

 that most of the waterside weeds in England belong ; 

 and they share with all other wind-fertilized plants not 

 only the common gracefulness of habit, but also the 

 common marks of degradation or degeneracy from 

 higher and more conspicuous petal-bearing ancestors. 



Look first at the floating pond- weed here, with its del- 

 icato leaves just basking on the surface of the pool, the 

 older ones of a rich glossy green as they spread along the 

 water's top, the younger ones not yet unrolled and of a 

 pale chocolate brown or fawn-color in the half-opened 

 bud. From the centre, a spike of little greenish flow- 

 ers projects above the level of the water, as plain and 

 unnoteworthy an inflorescence, I must admit, as anybody 

 could wish to see. Yet even here the plant as a whole 

 is made beautiful by its heart-shaped floating foliage, by 

 the long thin transparent sheaths that guard its stem, and 

 by the singularly lovely color of its unopened leaves. 



