190 



RAMBLES IN SARK. 



bruised, and by the large seed vessels which gape open as they 

 dry, disclosing the brilliant orange red seeds within. Butcher's 

 Broom is a stiff, prickly, dark green plant that produces round 

 berries of a vivid scarlet on the back of its leaves. A 

 curious point about this plant is that these so-called " leaves " 

 are not leaves at all, but simply flattened branches ending in a 

 sharp spine, while the real leaves are minute scales hardly 

 visible without a magnifying glass. 



One of the most singular of Sark plants is Dodder, a 

 parasite that grows on gorse bushes and other things, covering 

 them with a mantle of silky threads of a fine purplish or 

 yellowish red. It has no leaves, but consists simply of a mass 

 of long slender stems that in autumn are covered with little 

 round bunches of pink flowers. Another very curious plant, 

 not a conspicuous one like Dodder, but quite tiny and 

 insignificant, is a little gem of great rarity in England, and 

 much prized by botanists in consequence, although hardly one 

 person out of a hundred would ever suspect it to be a 

 flowering plant at all. It is the mossy Tillaa (these minute 

 things seldom have popular names) and it may be found in 

 dry stony places here and there on the cliffs by those who care 

 to search in early Spring, for it withers and disappears under 

 the May sun. The entire plant is not more than an inch long, 

 but it is of a bright ruby red colour, somewhat like a Stone- 

 crop in miniature, and the flowers are microscopic. 



By way of contrast let us now look out for bigger things 

 than these. Here on the hillside is a beautiful cluster of tall 

 and stately Foxgloves, with their dappled purple bells, perhaps 

 the most showy and effective of all the gay blossoms on these 

 cliffs ; and there a little further on is another plant that 

 resembles it in growth and general appearance, except that it 

 has yellow flowers. This is the Great Mullein, a soft woolly 

 plant that under favourable conditions will sometimes attain a 

 height of five feet or more. 



Perchance in the course of our wanderings we may find a 

 specimen or two of Teasel, upright and rigid, with prickly 

 stem and rough leaves, the upper pair of which are united 

 together where they join the stem, so that they form a basin- 

 like hollow in which rainwater collects, and wandering insects 

 are drowned. By this character alone, and its large round 

 head of lilac-blue flowers, Teasel may always be recognised. 

 But a far more showy plant than this is Viper's Bugloss, with 

 its bristly leaves and handsome trumpet-shaped flowers that 

 are reddish purple when they first open, and then afterwards 

 become deep blue. 



