100 SUMMER FLOWERS. 



as well as cultivated in flower-gardens. It forms a much 

 branched, almost sub-shrubby, mass, one to two feet high, 

 quite smooth, the stems furnished with broadish, ovate-lan- 

 ceolate, slightly-toothed leaves, and terminating in close cy- 

 mose panicles of red, rarely white, flowers. In these, the 

 calyx at the time of flowering consists of a border rolled in- 

 wards and entire ; the corolla has a slender tube, projected in 

 the form of a spur at the base, and divided at top into five 

 segments, in a somewhat two-lipped manner;, and there is 

 one stamen, and a slender style. The fruit is seed-like, and 

 the incurved border of the calyx becomes, in the mature 

 state, unrolled into an elegant feathery pappus. An approach 

 towards the structure of Composite plants is very evident in 

 these pappus-crowned fruits. 



The Common Teasel,* which illustrates the Dipsacaceous 

 family, has in outward aspect a kind of intermediate position 

 between the Composites and Umbellifers> as seen in certain 

 capitate-flowered plants of those families, such as Echinops and 

 Eryngium. The free condition of the anthers, however, se- 

 parates them from the Composites, and the opposite leaves 

 and monopetalous corollas from the Umbellifers. The Teasel is 

 a vigorous growing, erect, branched biennial, of some four or five 

 feet high, armed 011 the stems, midribs, flower-stalks, and in- 

 volucres with numerous short prickles. The leaves are sessile, 

 elongate lanceolate, toothed, opposite, the upper ones broadly 

 connate, that is, joined together by their base. The flower- 

 heads, which come on long stalks, have at their base a spreading 

 involucre of from eight to twelve stiff narrow linear prickly 

 leaves or bracts, and are at first ovoid, gradually acquiring a 

 cylindrical form ; the flowers are crowded over their surface, 

 each standing in the axil of a scale which is rather longer than 



* Dipsacus sylvestris Plate 14 D. 



