Beautiful Flowering Shrubs 



stem. Its base consists of five tiny white sepals pink- 

 tipped, and of a bell-like corolla which narrows at its 

 mouth into a small pentagonal opening, through which 

 can just be seen the green knob of the stigma the 

 end of the column from the ovary. A lens shows 

 further that this knob has five rounded bosses upon it. 

 Some white hairs just inside further fill in the 

 opening, with the double purpose of protecting the 

 honey secreted at the base of the seed-case within, and 

 keeping in the pollen that falls from the anthers. It 

 is not till the bell corolla is slit up that one discovers 

 how quaint these anthers are. There are eight of them, 

 and the end of each carries two horns curving upwards 

 and outwards into the bell ; thus the sixteen horns 

 form a radiating barricade about one-third of the way 

 up. Now an anther opens by an oval gap at its tip, 

 but since all tips are at first pressed together, the 

 pollen within cannot fall out. However, when a bee 

 or other insect comes clambering among the blossoms 

 in search of the honey away high up in the bell, it 

 pushes its proboscis in and strikes on the barricade of 

 horns, and consequently disturbs the anthers to which 

 they are fixed ; so the latter are pressed apart and the 

 pollen falls on to the intruder. Previous to this the 

 sticky shining bosses of the stigma have annexed any 

 pollen that the bee has brought with it from a 



previously visited flower. Humble-bees, particularly 



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