THE YELLOW TOADFLAX 155 



came from Seaford, in Sussex. The flowers are 

 small, rose-coloured, and only found near the ends 

 of the stems. A notable feature is the great length 

 of the sepals. It is really a plant of South Europe, 

 but as a weed of cultivation, the seeds being 

 originally bought with corn or other things, it has 

 found a home with us. Gerard, writing in 1633, 

 merely states that "it grows wilde amongst corne 

 in divers places," and accepts it as frankly as a wild 

 plant as any other in his book, so that it has for 

 centuries been in our midst. 



A near relative of the two snapdragons, and a 

 plant that grows equally well in one's rock-garden, 

 or on an old bank or wall, is the common toadflax, 

 Linaria vulgaris, throwing up a compact head of 

 brilliant sulphur-yellow flowers with bright orange 

 lips and long spurs, and that grows fairly freely in 

 most country districts. 



Some little while ago we had to adjudicate and 

 award prizes on the best collection of wild flowers, 

 and after we had done this we took at random the 

 sets of twenty-four competitors and analysed their 

 contents, and the results were very curious. We 

 suppose, for instance, that most people would 

 imagine that such plants as the daisy or dandelion 

 would recur most frequently, but the only plant that 

 occurred in every set was the bird's-foot trefoil, the 

 hop trefoil a good second being in twenty-three 

 sets out of the twenty-four, and the toadflax, red 



