Annual. — Flowers from June to September. 
Root fibrous. Stems prostrate, floating, or creeping, from 4 to 
9 inches or a foot long, square, often striking root from the joints, 
branched, leafy, smooth, reddish. Leaves opposite, stalked, in- 
versely egg-shaped, or somewhat spatulate, tapering into the pe- 
tiole, smooth, quite entire, hardly an inch long, the midrib often 
reddish. Flowers very small, opposite, in the axils of the leaves, 
solitary, nearly sessile, reddish. Calyx greenish-white, tinged 
with red, very large in proportion to the petals, the limb cut into 
12 teeth, of which the alternating ones are smaller and turned back. 
Corolla and Filaments of a pinky red, petals inserted on the calyx, 
very fugacious, sometimes 6, but more frequently only 1 , 2, or 3, 
and very often altogether wanting. Capsule small, globular, mem- 
branous, very thin and pellucid, of 2 cells, the partition membran- 
ous, corresponding with the external groove of the capsule (see 
flg. 6.). Receptacle (placenta) fleshy, roundish, a little com- 
pressed, fastened to the partition on both sides. Seeds minute, 
about 30 in each cell, inversely egg-shaped, convex on one side, 
flat on the other. 
Peplis Portula is not unfrequent in most parts of England, as 
well as in many other parts of Europe, in a sandy or gravelly soil, 
in places where water has stagnated in the Winter, but which have 
become dry, or nearly so, in the Summer. 
In an excursion made in company with my son, in June 1831, in the neigh- 
bourhood of my native place, Rugby in Warwickshire, for the purpose of as- 
certaining what plants grew wild in its vicinity, with a view of some time 
publishing a Flora of that part of the county, we found this plant in great 
abundance in the upper street of the village of Hillmorton, nearly opposite the 
Plough Public House; and again a little way out of the village we observed it 
in still greater profusion, in the ditches on the right hand side of the road going 
from thence towards Barby, just before you come to Mr. Abel’s house. — How 
often is a little simple flower the source of most delightful and pleasing recol- 
lections ! Hillmorton is the birth-place of my Mother, and the circumstance of 
merely recording the name of this humble plant, after having seen it in such 
abundance in the place above mentioned, seems to lead me back to the happy 
days of my childhood, many of which were spent amongst my relations and 
friends in that pleasant village. 
“ It is not through the eye alone 
We gather either bale or bliss, 
From scenes which.it may gaze upon: 
Their sweetest tint, their deepest tone, 
That which most saddens or endears, 
Is shed on them by thoughts and feelings, 
Which rise at Memory’s still revealings, 
From dreams of former years! 
The scenes that met our early gaze. 
The very turf we trod on then, 
The trees we climbed ; as fancy strays 
Back to those long-past hours again. 
Revive, and re-appear, as when 
The soul with sorrow kept no strife ; 
But, in its first imaginings, 
Unfurled its own ethereal wings, 
And sprang to light and life.” 
B. Barton. 
