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Hawkweeds are known as a genus in which the delimitation of the species is almost impossible, Thousands of forms may be cultivated side by side in botanical gardens, exhibiting slight but undoubted differentiating features, and reproduce themselves truly by seed.
Grasshoppers hop among the short dry grass; bees and humble-bees are buzzing about, and there are places quite bright with yellow hawkweeds. The furze is everywhere full of finches, troops of them; and there are many more swallows than were flying here a month since. No doubt they are on their way southwards, and stay, as it were, on the edge of the sea while yet the sun shines.
Hawkweeds, which many mistake for dandelions; cowslips, in seed now, and primroses, with foreign primulas around them and enclosed by small hurdles, foxgloves, some with white and some with red flowers, all these have their story and are intensely English.
I am busy with the hawkweeds; that is to say, I am learning to distinguish and to name as many as I can. Why should I be content to say, "Oh, it's a hawkweed"? That is but one degree less ungracious than if I dismissed all the yellow-rayed as "dandelions." I feel as if the flower were pleased by my recognition of its personality.
It travels fast, for it travels like Ariel. In much the same way, the coltsfoot grows on all new English railway banks, because its winged seeds are wafted everywhere in myriads on the winds of March. All the willows and poplars have also winged seeds: so have the whole vast tribe of hawkweeds, groundsels, ragworts, thistles, fleabanes, cat's-ears, dandelions, and lettuces.
Between these two alternatives, many writers have tried to decide, by transplanting their specimens after some time in the garden, into arid or sandy soil, in order to see whether they would resume their alpine character. Among the systematists who tested plants in this way, Nageli especially, directed his attention to the hawkweeds or Hieracium.
Quenrede, protesting her scepticism, but all the same palpably enjoying the magic experiment, picked an indifferent nosegay of the few buttercups, hawkweeds, and late pieces of scabious which were the only flowers available. Then she removed her hair-pins, and, letting down a shower of flaxen hair, commenced her winding pilgrimage among the old gray stones.
Their aspect is very strange, for they consist entirely on the surface, at all events of a yellowish-grey mud, dried hard, and as bare as the high road. A few yellow hawkweeds, a few camomiles, grew in hollows here and there; but of grass not a blade. It is easy to make a model of these Crotonian hills.
Brown lie the acorns, yellow where they were fixed in their cups; two of these cups seem almost as large as the great acorns from abroad. A red dead-nettle, a mauve thistle, white and pink bramble flowers, a white strawberry, a little yellow tormentil, a broad yellow dandelion, narrow hawkweeds, and blue scabious, are all in flower in the lane.
One may cut off all the flowers of a head before the opening of the anthers, and leave the ovaries untouched, and the head will ripen its seeds quite as well. The same thing occurs in the hawkweeds. Here, therefore, we have no fertilization and the extensive widening of the variability, which generally accompanies this process is, of course, wanting.
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