132 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



f^reatly improves the quality of the strain. Add that 

 every stem produces some thirty or forty heads, each 

 containing more than a hundred florets, with winged 

 seeds that fly about everywhere, and can you wonder 

 that thistles are so plentiful ? Even the less developed 

 types, like the melancholy thistle of the Highlands — so 

 called from its gracefully nodding or drooping head — 

 get on well enough, though that particular species 

 differs from all others in not being prickly, and depends 

 for its defence entirely on its stringy nature. Centaury 

 and corn -bluebottle, too, are others of the same tribe, 

 which have differentiated themselves in less unpleasant 

 ways than the true thistles ; while the common burdock- 

 has turned the prickles on its head into small clinging 

 hooks, which help to disperse the seeds in a somewhat 

 different manner, by clinging to the legs of animals : 

 and it is a significant fact that the burdocks are most 

 essentially wayside weeds of the waste places in culti- 

 vated lands. But in its own particular group — that is 

 to say, among the purple central composites — the creep- 

 ing thistle in the Home Close is certainly the highest 

 existing product of vegetable evolution ; and that is 

 what makes me bestow upon it, after all, a certain 

 extorted meed of grudging admiration. It lays itself 

 out to be troublesome, and it succeeds to perfection. 



