THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 177 



seed each year, like peas, or wheat, or poppies; 

 they make a stem and leaves ; they produce their 

 flowers ; they set, and ripen, and scatter their 

 seed ; and then they wither away and are done 

 with for ever. Hundreds of such plants occur in 

 our fields and gardens. Even these annuals, how- 

 ever, differ greatly in the amount of their stem and 

 branches. Some are quite low, humble, and suc- 

 culent, like chickweed and sandwort ; others have 

 tall and comparatively stout stems, like wheat, 

 oats, and barley, or still more, like the sunflower. 

 As a rule, annuals are not very large; but a few 

 rich seeds produce strong young plants which 

 even within a single year attain an astounding 

 size; this is the case with the garden poppy, 

 the tobacco plant, and the Indian corn, and even 

 more so with certain climbing annuals, such as 

 the gourd, the cucumber, the melon, and the 

 pumpkin. 



Many plants, however, find it pays them better 

 to produce a hard and woody stem, which lasts 

 from year to year, and enables them to put forth 

 fresh leaves and snoots in each succeeding season. 

 Among these, again, great varieties exist. Some 

 have merely a rather short and stout stem with 

 many bundles of water-vessels, as in the pink and 

 the wallflower. Their growth is herbaceous. Others, 

 however, produce that more solid form of tissue 

 which we know as wood, and which is made up of 

 cells whose walls have become much thickened 

 and hardened. Among the woody group, again, 

 we may distinguish many intermediate varieties, 

 from the mere shrub or bush, like the heath and 

 the broom, through small trees like the rhododen- 

 dron, the lilac, the hawthorn, and the holly, to 

 such great, spreading monsters of the forest as 



12 



