Beautiful Flowering Shrubs 



familiar Red Currant ; the specific name, sanguineum, 

 was given to the shrub about 1811 by Pursh, an 

 American botanist, because of its brilliant colouring. 

 Prof. Church points out that the red pigment that 

 flushes the blossoms and bracts is not dependent on 

 light for its appearance but is a product of the normal 

 process of food manufacture. If a shoot on which the 

 winter buds are just bursting is placed in water in a 

 warm light room, the dwarfed clusters of flowers that 

 emerge will be white, not red, because they are starved 

 of their usual food supply. 



Let us next turn to examine minutely the lovely 

 hanging flower clusters. Twenty to thirty blossoms 

 compose each. Each flower has five pink sepals 

 spreading star-wise ; within, standing up as a little 

 tube, are five petals, quite white when the flower first 

 opens, but gaining a rosy hue as time passes. The tube 

 dilates a little at the base to accommodate a large drop 

 of honey. Alternating with the petals, and a little 

 shorter and somewhat concealed by them, are five 

 stamens containing white pollen, while in the very 

 centre of all is a thickish green column standing on a 

 flattened ovary, its base bathed in honey, while its tip 

 forks into a stigma. This stigma, sticky to catch 

 fertilising pollen, is held well above the stamens to 

 prevent any possibility of self-fertilisation, a precaution 

 doubly safeguarded by the fact that the stigma is 



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