222 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



Solomon's Seal, with waxy bells and scarlet berries. On 

 the same knoll rise the airy purple spikes of Prenanthes 

 purpurea, and perhaps the Great Solomon's Seal itself. 

 Polygonatwm verticillatum occurs rarely, in isolated, 

 small groups of three or four stems. Set apart from its 

 kindred by the arrangement of its leaves in whorls, this 

 graceful Solomon's Seal, always of local occurrence, is 

 found in copses near BeUingham in Northumberland, 

 and about the banks of the Tay. So far I have not made 

 any solid success in the cultivation of it. Far different is 

 the case with the May Lily, which now carpets the ground 

 amid the oak-fern. Of Maianihemum bifolium, with 

 pairs of glossy heart-shaped leaves, and fluffy little white 

 spikes of blossom, I have always had the greatest pleasure, 

 and now am naturalising it in the woods — an easy task, 

 seeing that its one station as an English wild plant is 

 in a wood at the other end of Yorkshire. Here and 

 there among the May Lilies, in the darkest places, you 

 may see the dingy, mud-coloured spikes of a little sapro- 

 phyte Orchis, Corallorhiza innata, whose flowers are like 

 sere, rotten imitations of a flower, cut, a la Japonaise, 

 out of lard. This is impossible of culture, and its chief 

 interest is that this, too, is a rare native of our northern 

 woods. As for Epipogon aphyllum, weirdest and most 

 monstrous of morbid beauties, with its fleshy, lurid flower 

 turned the wrong way round (like that of Odontoglossum 

 pukhellum), and its general aspect of bruised, decaying 

 flesh, purplish and livid, this has only twice occurred in 

 England, saprophytic on rottenness by ditch-sides in one 

 Hertfordshire wood, and so incalculably rare is it all the 

 world over that you may think yourself fortunate indeed 

 if ever you come across it in similar positions near stream 

 or hoUow of a Swiss forest. 



Now, as you mount, the torrent begins to course 

 through more open land. The forest thins off, and you 



