LADY’S-SMOCK— continued. 
though they have the pungency of the Family in a very slight degree and may be 
eaten as an ornamental and harmless salad, they have no real medicinal value. 
As we have seen, the genus, in which the closely-allied Dentaria is often sunk, 
belongs to the Tribe Arabide^e^ its most distinctive characters being the small, simple, 
capitate stigma ; the long, narrow, compressed pod, with no veins in its elastic 
valves, and the slender thread-like funicle. The fifty species, natives of Temperate 
and cold regions both north and south, include both annual and perennial forms : 
they are usually glabrous and have pinnate leaves, the name Bitter Cress (belonging 
strictly to C. amara Linn6, one of our four or five British species) being often 
extended to the whole genus. 
While De Candolle justified the separation of Dentaria from Cardamine by the 
thick funicle of the former and the slender funicle of the latter, Robert Brown 
suggested the union of the two, on the ground partly that the thickened rhizome 
of the Lady’s-smock is not very dissimilar to that of the Coralwort. A general 
tendency of the plant to vegetative methods of reproduction shows itself moreover 
in the occasional production of lateral stolons or suckers. 
Varieties have been described, in one of which the leaflets of the pinnate radical 
leaves, normally roundish, are more decidedly angular, the Cardamine dentata of 
Schultz, a more robust plant ; and in another the leaflets are more numerous, 
smaller, and narrower, while the flowers are also smaller, with white, narrower petals, 
this being the Cardamine Hayneana of Reichenbach, which may be a hybrid with 
C. hirsuta Linn6, which it resembles in these characters. 
In autumn the Lady’s-smock very often becomes viviparous, producing buds 
upon the radical leaves which grow into new plants, a process familiar to us in our 
ferneries, in the case of Asplenium bulbiferum Forster, and other species, and occurring 
also occasionally in Chelidonium majus Linn6, Drosera longifolia Linn6, and other 
Flowering Plants, and commonly made use of in the multiplication of Begonias and 
Gloxinias. An even more remarkable abnormality is not very uncommon, in which 
buds, often forming new flowers, develop in the axils of the petals. 
The flowers of the Lady’s-smock are larger than those of most other species in 
the genus, and secrete honey from four nectaries at the bases of the stamens. They 
are visited by various insects and are stated to be self-sterile^ refusing, that is, to set 
seed when the stigma is pollinated with the pollen of the same blossom. 
The valves of the pod open, when ripe, from below upwards so as to jerk 
the seed to some distance, though they are not so explosively elastic as those of 
Cardamine impatient Linn6. 
A double variety of the Lady’s-smock is a showy garden plant, which is 
multiplied by division of the rhizome or by cuttings. 
