THE ORPINE — continued. 
In one of the interesting little moral tales for the young of a century ago, 
“Tawney Rachel, or the Fortune-Teller,” attributed to Hannah More, it is said of 
one of the heroines — 
“ she would never go to bed on Midsummer Eve without sticking up in her room the well-known plant called 
Midsummer Men, as the bending of the leaves to the right, or to the left, would never fail to tell her whether her lover was 
true or false.” 
That this was then no modern superstition was curiously shown, just about the 
date when this story was published, by the digging up, near Cawood in Yorkshire, 
of a small gold ring of fifteenth-century workmanship, which is described in 
“ Archaeologia ” as bearing the device of two orpine plants joined by a true-love 
knot, the stalks bending towards each other. 
As to the scientific names of the plant, it is called Sedum Telephium because 
identified with the TeXecpiov, of Dioscorides, which was said to be the plant 
employed by Achilles to heal the grievous wounds which he himself had inflicted 
upon Telephus, the son of Hercules, who was king of Mysia. 
Matthioli called it Fabaria^ and John Bauhin, Faba crassa, i.e. thick bean, from 
the resemblance of its thick leaves in form to the leaflets of the Broad Bean ; but 
Fabaria was used by Koch as the specific name of a closely-related form, the 
S. purpureum of Tausch. 
There is a short, thick rhizome and numerous long, tuber-like, descending, 
adventitious roots, or, as Parkinson puts it, “ divers, thicke, round, white, glandulous 
or tuberous clogges.” The erect, fleshy, but brittle aerial stems rise from six to 
twenty-four inches in height and are often tinged with the red colouring-matter of 
the inflorescence, so that Koch distinguished Linne’s type as S. purpurascens. The 
close-set ascending leaves are sessile, ovate, flat, or slightly concave on their upper 
surfaces and slightly serrate ; and the rose-coloured flowers are grouped in a 
corymbose terminal cyme and have their floral organs in whorls of five, their 
stamens maturing so well in advance of the stigmas that self-pollination is improbable. 
The carpels are furrowed at the back. S. purpureum Tausch is mainly distinguished 
by having slightly stalked leaves and no furrows on the carpels. 
Though often an escape from gardens, this tallest of our British species of 
Sedum may sometimes be truly wild, growing, as Parkinson says, “ in the shadowie 
sides of fields and woods,” and flowering in July. 
