104 MOUNTAIN AND MOORLAND 



phorum vaginatum), whose white flags are so con- 

 spicuous in late summer on the boggy moors, up to a 

 height of nearly 3,000 feet. It is not a Grass, but a 

 Sedge, one of the Cyperacese a family including 

 many frequenters of swampy ground, one of which 

 furnished long ago the papyrus that came before 

 paper. The Cotton Grass is a perennial plant, whose 

 presence always indicates the need for drainage or 

 the difficulty of effecting it. The flower-stalk rises 

 about a foot from the ground and bears a tuft of 

 spikelets. Round the base of each of the flowers 

 of the spikelet there are numerous bristles which 

 afterwards grow long and become the beautiful white 

 "cotton" of the fruit. The wind carries the pollen 

 from one flower-head to another, and the wind scat- 

 ters the three-cornered nutlike fruits to which the 

 cotton forms a parachute. 



Only three others dare we mention. On the sides 

 of the ditches of a peaty bog near the sea we have 

 often found the perennial Bog Pimpernel (Anagallis 

 tenelld), first cousin of the annual Scarlet Pimpernel, 

 or Poor Man's Weather Glass, of fields and waste 

 places. The finely veined rosy corolla of the Bog 

 Pimpernel seems to us the most delicately beautiful 

 flower in Britain. In bogs, from sea-level to a height 

 of 1,000 feet, the Marsh Pennywort (Hydrocotyle vul- 

 garis) flourishes, with a white threadlike creeping 

 stem, with leaves like circular shields, and pinkish- 

 green flowers, so small that they are difficult to 

 find. 



One of the finest of the Saxifrages is the Grass of 

 Parnassus (Parnassia palustris), characteristic of 

 bogs from the sea-level to a great height. There is 



