Beautiful Flowering Shrubs 



to spring up. The column immediately rubs on the 

 bee's abdomen and is smeared with any pollen that has 

 been lying there ; the stamens, on the other hand, in 

 their sudden rise throw up a little cloud of pollen that 

 dusts the abdomen. When the bee departs there is 

 no readjustment of parts, the keel and wings still hang 

 limply, the whole flower yawns, a sign to all and 

 sundry that it has played its part for good and all. 

 This minute explosion can be produced and watched by 

 merely depressing the keel of a newly opened flower 

 with a pencil or the finger. 



The little green pod grows and blackens, and then 

 it, too, has its day of explosion. One day, in the heat 

 of the July sun, it suddenly cracks with vehemence 

 and shoots out its seeds. Sitting in the garden near 

 a Broom bush, the succession of "crack cracks" 

 suggests somebody cracking nuts or a bird pecking. 

 There is a very old superstition that the Broom cracked 

 its pods as a warning when Judas entered the Garden 

 of Gethsemane. 



In the middle of the 'eighties a M. Edouard Andre* 

 found among some Common Broom in Normandy a 

 plant that was a variation of it, a " sport " or " muta- 

 tion." In this sport the wing petals instead of being 

 a golden-yellow were dyed a rich crimson-brown, while 

 a touch of the same colour was also on the standard. 



He secured the plant, cultivated and propagated it, 



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