THE TRIUMPHANT BLUEBELL 75 



The bluebell achieves its triumphs by none of the 

 means most " recommended," we might say, by the 

 botanists. So far from having stings, spikes, or a 

 hard stem to resist attack, its flower-stalk is obligingly 

 severed, so that at the slightest pull it comes up from 

 the root, with a long white butt. It suffers itself to 

 be gathered in sheaves that the child's arms can 

 scarcely enfold, and still its battalions confess no 

 diminution. The lane from the wood is strewn with 

 discarded flowers, or the white stems cut off from the 

 bunches of bloom. Every cottage window has a big 

 basin full of blue loveliness. Yet the wood still holds 

 a sea as much more multitudinous as it is more 

 transcendently beautiful. 



Equally the bluebell discards the principles of 

 extreme insurance of cross-fertilisation, of specialised 

 means of seed-disposal, and of great multitude of 

 seeds. Here and there the sea of laughing bluebells 

 is about to be splashed with the bright crimson of a 

 purple orchid. The " long purple " has the orchid's 

 usual elaborate machinery of fertilisation, which the 

 children delight to make fun of by pushing straws 

 along the insect's path and extracting the pollinia. 

 A single spike of bloom results in an almost fabulous 

 number of seeds outnumbering that of several 

 thousand bluebells. But the orchid's seeds are 

 mostly barren, in spite of its anxiety in the matter 

 of fertilisation. The remainder are lamentably small, 

 grains of dust obviously incapable of successful 

 struggle under conditions of free competition, so that 

 " long purples " soon become extinct where children 

 abound. 



The bluebell, with its two or three hundred large, 



