204 
.V.47'rA’£ XOTES 
The advance of summer brings in its train flowers which 
for the most part are old friends, or at least not uncommon, 
in our hedgerows and coppices. Railway-banks everywhere 
hide their rude contours and ugly ballast in masses of golden 
broom. By the roadside the corn feverfew, Matyicavia inodorata, 
that little plant so renowned among our forefathers as a cure for 
fever, shines in patches of white and yellow against the dusty 
grass. Another herbal plant, Stachys sylvestris, the woundwort, 
is also not uncommon. If the soil is slightly damp, the eye is 
arrested at once by the variously coloured masses of Polygala, 
red, blue and white, the red variety being the commonest ; and 
this plant is often accompanied by Pediculavis paliistns. 
As the Loir, a sandy, shallow, rapid-flowing stream, has 
a great tendency to flood after the least heavy rain, or when the 
sun begins to melt the snows of Auyergne, high banks have 
been built to protect the towns and villages from the inroads 
of sudden floods. These are a veritable happy hunting-ground 
for botanists. The most prominent objects are the silver stars 
of Ornithogalum umhellatum and the handsome pink flowers of the 
common soapwort, which thrust out their heads from among 
the thick matted brambles. 
Many interesting flowers are always to be found in crannies 
of the old walls and in the cliff's, which are still inhabited by 
human beings, as they have been, many of them, from before the 
dawn of history. The various species of Sedttm make the walls 
white and yellow : wallflowers grow high up above the cornices 
of these modern troglodytes, and the larger snapdragon, Antiy- 
yliiniim majus, is not uncommon. To the French peasant it is 
not the fabled dragon that this flower represents, but rather the 
pest that still lurks m the depths of the forests, the wolf ; their 
name being the giteule de loitp, “ wolf’s throat.” 
That interesting parasite, the mistletoe, is very abundant in 
Touraine, growing everywhere. The peasantry still recall the 
old days, long since passed away, when the Druids went at 
New Year into the heart of the woods to cut the sacred mistletoe 
with their sickle-shaped knives. They present each other with 
whorl-shaped cakes which they call “ Aguianeu ” — d gui, I'an 
neu{f) — “ to the mistletoe, ’tis the New Year.” So many centuries 
of Christianity have failed to eradicate this remnant of paganism 
from the race. 
While magnolias flower in their gardens and peaches and 
apricots ripen like apples in the open, the wild flowers of 
Touraine are not so very different from those of England. The 
old poets — the “ Pleiade ” as they were called — Ronsard and 
his companions, could celebrate the same flowers as the old 
English poets, for nearly all the “ Pleiade ” lived round Tours. 
The house of Ronsard, an old timbered farm on the banks of 
the Loir, is still to be seen. It was round Tours that that 
gentlest of poets sought in Nature the inspiration for his poems, 
and there he sang to Helene, mourning the time when she. 
