THE BOX — continued. 
the truly indigenous character of trees put forward by Daines Barrington in the 
eighteenth century, viz. that they grow in large masses, spreading over a considerable 
area, that such masses never end abruptly save where there is a sudden change of 
soil, and that the seed ripens and germinates freely. Tried by these tests, we can 
hardly claim that the Box is truly indigenous in England. 
The Box is a very slow-growing tree, of great longevity, its shoots seldom 
exceeding six or eight inches of annual length or its diameter increasing more than 
an inch in ten years. In this country it is seldom seen more than twelve or fifteen 
feet high or with its grey stems more than six or eight inches through. The twigs 
are four-angled, and the leaves in opposite and decussate pairs, though often twisted 
into a single plane or spray. When young they are of a bright grass-green, so that 
Herrick, in his verses for Candlemas Eve, writes : — 
u Down with the Rosemary and Bayes ; 
Down with the Mistleto ; 
Instead of Holly, now upraise 
The greener Box for show ” $ 
and goes on to speak of it as “youthful” till Easter. 
A thickened cuticle with four rows of “ palisade cells ” beneath give the leaves 
their leathery texture and dark colour when mature : the sunken position of their 
stomata serves to check transpiration while they persist through the winter season 
of cold soil and torpid root-action ; and the highly polished surface is useful in 
preventing snow from remaining long upon them. 
The little pale yellow clusters of flowers appear in the axils of the leaves in 
April and May. They form a pair of glomerules or sessile axillary cymes, the central 
flower in each cluster being, as in Euphorbia , female, and the others, developed a little 
later and staminate. In addition to minute bracts, each flower has a calyx, consisting 
in the staminate flowers of two alternating pairs of sepals, and in the female flowers 
of six, nine, or twelve, in alternating whorls of three. The male flowers have four 
stamens with long filaments and a quantity of the dry, dust-like pollen characteristic 
of anemophilous plants ; but there is some honey and bees visit the flowers both 
for it and for pollen. The gynaeceum in the female flowers consists of three carpels 
united below into a three-chambered ovary but with three distinct spreading styles. 
This ripens to a dry capsule about half an inch long, which splits explosively into 
three valves, each formed of two adherent half-carpels, so that each of the stylar 
horns splits longitudinally. There are two black seeds in each chamber, and these 
are hurled to some distance. 
