XXXIV.— LADY’S TRESSES. 
Spiranthes spiralis C. Koch. 
A MONG the voluminous artistic and scientific memoranda of that universal 
genius Leonardo da Vinci are many studies of the spiral. One of the most 
perfect of spiral staircases is reputed to have been designed by him, and in these 
memoranda we have, side by side with purely geometrical diagrams, beautiful 
drawings of the curves exhibited by living plants. Marvellous at once in their 
mathematical precision and in their resultant beauty are many of these natural spirals. 
The various spirals in which leaves succeed one another on shoots, or in which the 
florets of a Daisy or the stamens of Magnolia are crowded, or the spiral growth that 
produces the circumnutation of the shoots of twining plants, are less obvious than 
some spirals of external form. One of the Hepatic <e, Riella helicophylla Montague, is 
a flattened, spirally-coiled thallus, and the abnormally flattened or “ fasciated ” stems 
of Teazles and other plants are frequently twisted in a spiral, as the result apparently 
of circumnutation. No more beautiful spirals are to be seen among plants than the 
inflorescences of the genus Spiranthes , named from the Greek aneipa, speira, a spiral ; 
avdos, anthos, inflorescence. 
As many as eighty species of this genus have been described, natives of Tropical 
and Temperate latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, and we have three British 
species, the geographical distribution of which is noteworthy. S. spiralis C. Koch, 
the only common form, is unknown in Scotland, Northumberland, Cumberland, 
Durham, or the north of Ireland, and only occurs on the Continent from Denmark 
southward to North Africa. S. aestivalis Richard may once have been less rare, since 
it is now only known in such isolated bogs as those of Wyre Forest, Worcestershire, 
and the New Forest ; but its Continental area is slightly more southern than that 
of S. spiralis , for it is unknown north of Belgium. Far more puzzling is the hand- 
some S. Romanzofpana Chamisso, which has been known for a century in Ireland, in 
boggy meadows, mostly not far from the coast, in Cork, Armagh, Antrim, and 
Londonderry, though otherwise only a native of North America and Kamtschatka. 
The only other species in our flora to which such an American origin is attributable 
are the little Pipe-wort, Eriocaulon septangulare Withering, which occurs in Skye and 
Connemara ; the beautiful Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium augustifolium Miller, which 
occurs in Cork, Kerry, Clare, and Galway ; and the even more puzzling S. calif ornicum 
Aiton, found at Rosslare in 1896. 
In all our British species of Spiranthes the root consists of two, three, or more 
tubercles, of a more or less cylindrical form ; there are several radical leaves ; the 
fragrant, white flowers are borne in the striking spirally-coiled spike ; the lip is 
fringed but has no spur ; the anther is hinged at its base to the back of the column 
and persists ; there are four powdery pollinia united in pairs, without caulicles, 
attached to one retinaculum ; and there is a rostellum, which becomes bifid. 
