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In certain plants there is an underground stem or rootstock, which grows perennially, and each year produces a plant from a bud at its end. This underground rootstock would represent the continuous germ-plasm of successive generations; the plants which yearly arise from it would represent the successive generations of adult individuals, composed mainly of somatoplasm.
Fully 6 feet high; growth upright; rootstock less spreading than the last two; leaves on very short stalks, broadest at the base, ovate tapering by a long narrow point; flower disk narrow, but rays large and orange-yellow; flowers showy, 3 inches across; they come out late in August. I had this plant from Kew.
To this shorter lines are attached at intervals, each one being supplied with a fish hook baited with a piece of the tender rootstock of a certain water reed, of which the ducks are very fond. The main cord and lines are then imbedded in the sand, the various baits only appearing on the surface, and the success of the device is equal to its cruelty.
The Christmas fern, with its glistening leaves of holly green, has a stout, creeping rootstock, which must be firmly secured, a few stones being added temporarily to the hairpins to give weight.
Above the ground she stores it in drupe and pome and berry, nut and nutlet and achene, and below the ground in rootstock and rhizome, corm and tuber, pumping them full with strokes quick and strong in these grand climacteric days of the summer. All the water which seemed so useless in April, all the rain which seemed so superfluous and so dreary in May and June, has been used.
Stems globose, from 2 in. to 3 in. in diameter; the rootstock woody; the tubercles arranged in about thirteen spiral rows, swollen at the base, and bearing each a star-like tuft of about twenty-four stiff, brown, radial spines, without a central one; the length varies from ½ in. to 1 in., and they are comb-like in their regular arrangement.
For this reason the species is called acaulescent, indicating that it has no other stem than the subterranean rootstock. But on closer inspection we observe that the flower stalks are combined into little groups, each group occupying the aril of one of the basal leaves.
It is one of the most beautiful of all Mamillarias; but it is, as yet, rare in collections. It requires the same treatment as M. longimamma, except that, owing to the woody nature of its rootstock, and its long, tap-like roots, it should be planted in pans instead of pots, using a compost of rough loam, mixed with lumps of broken brick or limestone. Mag. 3634, as M. Lehmanni.
The rootstock of this plant once established in a spot, it can be extirpated only with the greatest difficulty. The plough may draw deep furrows over it, yet it puts forth new shoots, and grows up again amid the grain, still marking the old division lines.
The keys of the soft maple will soon be ready to fall and send out rootlets, and the winged seeds of the white elm already lie thickly beneath the leafing branches. Each flower invites admiration and study. Dig up the root of the Solomon's seal, a rootstock, the botanists call it.
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