378 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
This beautiful plant may be easily cultivated, and is much 
improved by cultivation, the spikes being increased in length 
and in the size of the flowers. It grows readily in any garden 
soil, and may be propagated by layers or cuttings. 
There are several other species of clethra which might be in- 
troduced, especially the acuminate, the panicled, and the downy, 
which would doubtless flourish, as they are natives of the higher 
parts of the Southern States, and have been successfully culti- 
vated in the open air in England. The first of these is a small 
tree. They all continue in flower from July to October. 
XX. 6 THE GROUND LAUREL. HPIGAE MA. L. 
Creeping, tufted, roughish, evergreen, American under-shrubs, 
with alternate, entire leaves, and fragrant flowers in dense, ax- 
illary and terminal racemes. ‘The calyx is deeply five-parted, 
with three bracts at the base; the corolla salver-shaped, villous 
within, with a five-parted, spreading border; stamens ten, with 
anthers opening inwards from top to bottom ; capsule five-celled, 
many-seeded, encircled by the persistent calyx. There are two 
Species, one found on mountain tops, in the Antilles, the other 
here. 
Tue May Frower. EE. répens. L. 
Often from beneath the edge of a snow-bank are seen rising 
the fragrant, pearly, white or rose-colored, crowded flowers of 
this earliest harbinger of the spring. It abounds in the edges of 
woods about Plymouth, as elsewhere, and must have been the 
first flower to salute the storm-beaten crew of the May Flower 
on the conclusion of their first terrible winter. Their descend- 
ants have thence piously derived the name, although its bloom 
is often passed before the coming in of the month of May. 
The trailing stem runs along for several feet just beneath the 
covering of leaves on the surface of the ground, throwing out 
from the sides or joints, at distances of two or three inches, 
bunches of fibres or long fibrous roots, and ascending flower- 
and leai-bearing shoots, which usually enlarge upwards. The 
extremities spread on the ground, brown, hairy and rough. The 
