CC.— THE WINTER-GREEN. 
Pyrola media Swartz. 
T HE highly organised Order Umbelliflore , with its massed flowers with adherent 
receptacular tubes, seeds well adapted for dispersal, and leaves often of a 
complex differentiation, has in most modern arrangements of Flowering Plants been 
taken as concluding the series of the Polypetale. In Engler’s system, in which the 
old group Incomplete is merged with the Polypetale under the name of the Series 
Archichlamydee , it forms the last of twenty-three Orders, or, as they were once 
termed, Cohorts. 
We now pass on to the still more highly organised Series Sympetale , in 
which, as the name indicates, the inner of the two perianth-whorls is almost always 
gamophyllous. In this group, which has previously been known as Monopetale or 
Gamopetale — all three names having really the same signification — Engler recognises 
nine Orders, only one of which, the mainly tropical Ebenales , is without British repre- 
sentatives. The first of our eight British Orders is the Ericales , which have usually 
polysymmetric perfect flowers, either tetramerous or pentamerous, generally with two 
whorls of stamens, which are seldom epipetalous. The ovary may be superior or 
inferior within the limits of a single Family. Three considerable Families are 
comprised in the Order, the mainly Australasian Epacridacee, familiar in our green- 
houses, and the two represented in Britain, the Pyrolacee and the Ericacee , which are 
so closely related to one another as to have been very generally united. 
The Pyrolacee consist of some ten genera with thirty species, three genera, with 
six species, occurring in Great Britain. The Family belong to the Arctic and the 
colder part of the North Temperate Zone in both the Old and the New Worlds, 
not extending into India, Africa, or South America, and only represented in the 
mountains of Greece and Turkey. Two very different habits of growth occur 
within the limits of this Family : some of them, like the Yellow Bird’s-nest ( Monotropa 
Hypopitys Linne) of our Pine and Beech woods, are brownish saprophytes, living 
among dead leaves, with no green colouring-matter and with their leaves reduced to 
scales ; whilst the others are biennial or perennial evergreen plants of no great size, 
with slender creeping rhizomes and mostly radical simple leaves. 
Pyrola , the largest genus in the Family, belongs to the latter group. The short, 
unbranched stem is almost woody and the leaves are thick and smooth, with broad 
petioles. The name Pyrola , used from the time of Brunfels, whose “ Herbarium ” 
was published in 1530, is a diminutive from Pyrus, a pear, with reference to the 
form of the leaves in some species ; whilst the name Winter-green , which is Turner’s 
translation from the old German Winter-griin y refers to their evergreen character. 
The flowers are in a bracteate raceme and hang to one side of the peduncle, t.e. they 
are, as it is termed, “ secund.” Their parts are all in fives, the globose corolla being 
made up of orbicular petals, hardly united at their bases, strikingly “ connivent ” or 
