WHITE 



MILD WATER-PEPPER. 



Polygonum hydropiperoides. Buckwheat Family. 



Stem. One to three feet high, smooth, branching. Leaves. Alternate, 

 narrowly lance-shaped or oblong. Flowers. White or flesh-color, small, 

 growing in erect, slender spikes. Calyx. Five-parted. Corolla. r None. 

 Stamens. Eight. Pistil. One, usually with three styles. 



These rather inconspicuous but very common flowers are 

 found in moist places and shallow water. 



The common knotweed, P. aviculare, which grows in such 

 abundance in country door-yards and waste places, has slender, 

 often prostrate, stems, and small greenish flowers, which are clus- 

 tered in the axils of the leaves or spiked at the termination of 

 the stems. This is perhaps the " hindering knotgrass " to which 

 Shakespeare refers in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," so 

 terming it, not on account of its knotted trailing stems, but be- 

 cause of the belief that it would hinder the growth of a child. In 

 Beaumont and Fletcher's "Coxcomb" the same superstition is 

 indicated : 



We want a boy 

 Kept under for a year with milk and knotgrass. 



It is said that many birds are nourished by the seeds of this 

 plant. 



CLIMBING FALSE BUCKWHEAT. 



Polygonum scandens. Buckwheat Family. 



Stem. Smooth, twining, and climbing over bushes, eight to twelve feet 

 high. Leaves. Heart or arrow shaped, pointed, alternate. Flowers. 

 Greenish or pinkish, in racemes. Calyx. Five-parted, with colored mar- 

 gins. Corolla. None. Stamens. Usually eight. Pistil. One, with three 

 stigmas. Seed- vessel. Green, three-angled, winged, conspicuous in autumn. 



In early summer this plant, which clambers so perseveringly 

 over the moist thickets which line our country lanes, is compara- 

 tively inconspicuous. The racemes of small greenish flowers are 

 not calculated to attract one's attention, and it is late summer or 

 autumn before the thick clusters of greenish fruit composed of the 



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