THE FLOWER 75 



like bracts; this involucre is scarlet-red and boot- 

 shaped in the former, and cup-like and glandular in 

 the latter. The showy garden plant lal-pata (Eu- 

 phorbia pulcherrima), with cymose heads of flowers, 

 has at the base of each head of flowers a number 

 of large scarlet-red bracts. The bagan-bilas has a 

 cymose group of three flowers inserted on the mid- 

 rib of a large pale-purple bract. Dichotomous cyme 

 or dichasium is very common, but trichotomous 

 CYMES are sometimes met with, as in sheuli {Nyctan- 

 thes Arbor-tristis) and Jasminum. 



In plants with suppressed stem, or with under- 

 ground stem, the flowering axis seems to arise 

 apparently from the root, and bears either a single 

 flower or a number of flowers. Such a flowering axis 

 is called a scape, and plants producing scapes are 

 said to be scapigerous or scape-bearing. A scape 

 may be single-flowered, as in padma or Lotus, or 

 racemose, as in murga (see fig. 258), or spiked, as 

 in rajani-g^andha, or umbellate, as in Onion, Many 

 aquatic and marshy Monocotyledons are scapigerous 

 herbs. 



CHAPTER XII 



THE FLOWER— PART I: MODIFIED SHOOT 



A flower is a bud or shoot metamorphosed for the 

 purpose of reproduction. The flower, however, looks 

 so very different from a shoot that it is difficult to 

 realize their identity at first sight. But that identity 

 is clearly established by the following considerations. 

 We have learned that a shoot consists of an axis 

 divided into internodes, with leaves inserted on each 



