34 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS. 



for illustration. Under unfavourable conditions, the bunches 

 of blossom are smaller and less compact ; but where cir- 

 cumstances are favourable and the support is adequate, the 

 plant will grow to a height of five or six feet, and it is 

 then that its beauties are displayed to their full advantage. 

 It is a common plant almost everywhere, and should be 

 looked for on bushes, in hedgerows, and in copses. It 

 flowers during the months of July, August, and Septem- 

 ber, after which the pods appear ; these are of the charac- 

 teristic pea-like form, green in colour, and about an inch 

 in length, each pod containing some seven or eight seeds. 



Curtis, in his " Flora Londinensis/'' published a little 

 over a hundred years ago, is so far enamoured of the 

 tufted vetch that he would introduce it, not indeed in the 

 garden, where its beauties might be eclipsed by more showy 

 plants, but in a locality far more suitable. He says, 

 " gentlemen who wish to decorate the hedges of their 

 plantations cannot select a more proper plant, as it is not 

 apt, like the great bindweed, traveller's joy, and other 

 strong growing plants, to suffocate the shrubs which 

 support it." The tufted vetch is certainly too fragile a 

 plant to do much harm, but we should imagine that what 

 little influence it exercised would be in the wrong direc- 

 tion, and a practical woodman would be inclined to strip 

 down all such extraneous growths. The other plants 

 Curtis mentions are undoubted offenders, beautiful as 

 they are in themselves. Immediately in front of us, 

 as we write these lines, is a hedge with a most con- 

 spicuously weak and evident gap in it ; but in summer 

 this space will be filled by the foliage and blossoms 

 of the beautiful traveller's joy, Clematis vitalba, its 

 grace and fragrance being the more or less perfect 



