115 WAYSIDE AND WOODLAND BLOSSOMS. 



Grass of Parnassus (Parnassia palustris). 



It is a singular thing that some of our most beautiful plants 

 grow in the most unpleasant places. We remember a back- 

 water of the River Thames that used to receive the waste 

 waters from a large soap-works, and in the evening, when this 

 waste was poured out, the stench arising from the ditch was 

 unbearable. Yet, with its feet in this vile liquid, the Meadow- 

 sweet grew luxuriantly, but truth compels us to add that its 

 sweetness was thrown away ; it could not overcome the other 

 smell. Black bogs and mossy swamps are the- particular 

 haunts of floral beauties, such as the marsh violet, the bog 

 buckbean, the marsh marigold, the bog pimpernel, the sundew, 

 the bog asphodel ; and it is in such resorts we must look for the 

 Grass of Parnassus, a plant so pretty and elegant of form that 

 it must first have grown upon Mount Parnassus. At any rate, 

 the English name is a mere translation of that given to it by 

 Dioscorides, among the six or seven hundred plants mentioned 

 by him. 



It is a perennial, with a stout rootstock. With few excep- 

 tions the leaves are radical ; they are heart-shaped, smooth, 

 with untoothed edges, and on long stalks. The flowering stems 

 are long, angular, with a stalkless leaf nearly half-way up. At 

 the summit is the solitary large flower. The fine thick sepals 

 are slightly conjoined at their bases, the petals white, veined and 

 leathery. The ovary is large, and on its summit, without the 

 intervention of a style, are the four rayed stigmas. Around the 

 ovary are five stamens there should be ten, but five have 

 been transformed into scales, which alternate with the perfect 

 stamens, and are fringed with white hairs, each ending in a 

 yellow knob ; on the face nearest the ovary each scale bears 

 two small honey-secreting glands. The perfect stamens ripen 

 in succession, and as each becomes mature, it raises itself until 

 the anther comes on top of the stigma, but with its back to it. 



