ACCORDING TO SEASON 



Scirpus 

 Cyperinus 



Chair- 

 maker's 

 rush 



not be a grass, as its " sheathing leaves " were 

 neither " split nor open on the side opposite the 

 blade." Yet it looked so easy. 



When persuaded that the lovely, rollicking 

 thing was neither grass nor sedge, I found that 

 the family description of rushes left the inside of 

 their stems to the imagination, and so far as 

 stems were concerned (and I began to rejoice in 

 my primitive method of classification) it seemed 

 to me that I was free to call it a rush. So I 

 christened it " Moorland Princess " and felt al- 

 most (but I will frankly admit not quite) as happy 

 as when I learned later that despite the mislead- 

 ing hollowness of its stem, my Moorland Princess 

 was nevertheless a sedge and was legally entitled 

 to the not altogether euphonious name of Scirpus 

 Cyperinus. 



On the next hunt I had better luck. Out of 

 the black water where the sundews and bladder- 

 worts had laid their clever little traps, grows a 

 wilderness of triangular, grass-like leaves (as they 

 seemed to me), from each of which, near its nod- 

 ding summit, protrudes a bunch of brown knobs. 

 It was easy to see that what looked like the 

 plant's leaf was its stem or " culm " ; that this was 

 " solid," as the culm of a sedge should be, and 

 " sharply triangular," as the particular sedge 

 called " chairmaker's rush" must be, for after 



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