XX.— BUTCHER’S BROOM. 
Ruscus aculeatus Linne. 
T HE various Tribes into which the great Family Liliace <e is divided are largely 
distinguished by the characters of their underground structures and their 
fruits. The former may be a corm, bulb, or rhizome ; the latter capsular or 
berry-like. 
While the examples of which we have hitherto been speaking have mostly short 
and thickened underground stems and capsular fruits, we have now to deal with a 
berry-bearing series with rhizomes. 
The Butcher’s Broom is a curious little plant, belonging to Western Asia, 
North Africa, and Central Europe, and probably in the south of England a relic of 
our earliest and most natural forest. It has a stout creeping rhizome from which it 
sends up many much-branched, rigid stems to a height seldom much exceeding two 
feet. These stems are round but furrowed, dark green, and glabrous, and are of 
considerable interest to the student of microscopic anatomy. They are the only 
woody stems among British Monocotyledons, being in many respects in cross-section 
like a miniature Palm. Below their epidermis and cortical tissue, the outer layers of 
which contain the green colouring-matter, is a band of dense woody tissue known as 
the pericycle , and within this the bundles or strands of vascular tissue are scattered 
through the pith-like ground-tissue, as in all Monocotyledons. 
The ultimate branches or twigs are represented by flattened, leathery, leaf-like 
structures or phylloclades^ ovate, ending in a sharp point and so twisted at the base as 
to be inverted. As these last for two years, the plant is termed an evergreen ; but 
the true leaves are minute deciduous scales, in the axils of which the phylloclades 
originate. A slight difference in the width of the phylloclades which has been taken 
as a varietal character is in reality sexual, the narrower form bearing staminate flowers. 
Flowers are not produced until the second year, between February and May, 
and at the close of that season the shoots commonly die down to the ground. Near 
the middle of what is in fact the under surface of the inverted phylloclade, a flower, 
about one-eighth of an inch in diameter, is produced in the axil of a minute bract. 
Its perianth consists of two whorls each of three pale green leaves, the three outer 
ones broader than the inner ones. The bushes nearly always bear flowers 
exclusively staminate or carpellate, that is to say, they are dioecious ; but this is not 
entirely the case: they are, in fact, sub-dioecious, an occasional staminate flower 
occurring on a carpellate plant, and vice versa. The six stamens are united, their 
filaments forming a purple tube round the rudimentary ovary, while their yellow 
anthers form a curious zigzag margin to it. One anther is united to a second by 
their upper extremities, the second to the third by their lower ends, the third to the 
fourth by the upper, the fourth to the fifth by the lower, the fifth to the sixth by the 
upper, and the sixth to the first by the lower. In the carpellate flowers the purple 
