84 LILIACEAE (LILY FAMILY) 
Time of bloom: May to June. 
Seed-time: July to September. : 
Range: Massachusetts to Kansas, southward to Florida and Texas. 
Hatniat: Cultivated crops, fields, meadows, waste places. 
Most of the Green-briers havea preference for woods and thickets, 
where they seldom prove very annoying to the farmer, but this one 
comes out into the open and will invade almost any crop that may be 
growing in the dry and mellow soil 
which it prefers. Birds eat its 
berries and void the seeds unharmed 
-by digestion, and sometimes the 
seeds are distributed while still on 
the dried stalks, in baled hay and 
straw; also the long, knotted root- 
stocks are broken and the tubers 
scattered by farming tools in or- 
dinary cultivation. (Fig. 45.) 
Stem perennial, round, slender, 
set with scattering, rather stout, 
slightly curved prickles; but the 
branches and twigs are angled and 
unarmed. Leaves broadly ovate, 
smooth, entire, five-nerved, covered 
with a bloom on the under side and 
sometimes above, with short petioles 
bearing at the base on each side 
a long tendril; these tendril-bearing 
petioles are persistent even when the 
blades of the leaves fall away in 
autumn. Flowers in umbels on 
slender, flattened, axillary peduncles; they are dicecious, yellowish 
white, very small, with six-parted perianth in two rows of three, soon 
falling away; the sterile flowers have six stamens, with thread- 
like filaments inserted on the very base; the fertile flowers have 
three short and spreading, almost sessile stigmas above a three- 
celled ovary which develops a small, three-seeded berry, ripening 
the first year, jet-black and glossy when the glaucous film which 
covers it is rubbed away. 
Fie. 45.— Saw Brier (Smilax 
glauca). Xi. 
