CLXXXV.— THE IVY. 
Hedera Helix Linne. 
T HE Order U mbelliflorce takes its name from having the flowers usually in umbels. 
Their flowers are cyclic, heterochlamydeous, polysymmetric, and usually 
perfect ; with an inferior ovary of from one to fifteen carpels ; epigynous petals and 
stamens, the latter generally in a single whorl ; one, or exceptionally two, pendulous 
anatropous ovules in each carpel ; and seeds with a plentiful store of albumen. 
Three Families of very unequal size — the Araliacece, Umbelliferce, and Cornacece — are 
comprised in the Order, nor is there any difference of opinion among botanists as to 
the near affinity of these three groups. 
We call the Araliacece the Ivy Family after its only European species ; but its 
fifty other genera and four hundred species are mostly tropical. It agrees with the 
Cornacece and differs from the Umbelliferce in consisting mostly of woody plants. 
These are trees or shrubs, many of the latter twining or climbing by means of 
adventitious roots ; and they are often downy with stellate hairs. Their leaves are 
scattered, have usually small stipules, and may be simple or compound ; whilst their 
flowers are individually small and usually pentamerous, with one ovule in each of 
the carpels and these generally five, or at least more than two, in number. Though 
generally greenish, not individually conspicuous, and homogamous or nearly so, the 
flowers secrete honey and are visited by insects. The fruit is a more or less 
fleshy drupaceous berry, differing from a true berry and from a true drupe, in 
having a tough endocarp to each carpel and in being polycarpellary and inferior. 
The Family does not comprise the variety of powerful drugs and other useful 
plants that we have in the Umbelliferce. Ginseng, the root of Aralia Ginseng Baillon, 
a native of Korea and Manchuria, is valued as the “ life-giving root,” and sells for 
its weight in gold in China ; and Rice-paper is made from thin sheets of the pith of 
Fatsia papyrifera Bentham and Hooker filius, a native of Formosa. 
The genus Hedera, the name of which is the Classical Latin for the Ivy, contains 
apparently only two distinct species. They agree in being climbing evergreen shrubs, 
with exstipulate leaves, five valvate petals, five stamens, five carpels, and united styles ; 
but the Australian Hedera australiana F. von Milller differs from our northern species 
in having pinnate leaves. 
The Ivy ( Hedera Helix Linne) is a native of the Northern Temperate region of 
the Old World from Japan and the Himalaya to North Africa, Ireland, and the 
Shetland Islands. An extremely variable plant, it may trail with long slender stems 
along the ground, rooting at the nodes but never flowering ; or, unable to stand 
alone, it may send out a crowded double row of unbranched roots along its 
internodes by which it climbs to the summit of a tree, a rock, or a building, and 
there at length produce its flowers and fruit. The stem of this climbing condition 
