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Updated: May 2, 2025
Mediterranean region, 1640. A small-growing and slender species, with oblong-lanceolate leaves 2 inches long, and producing small yellow flowers in terminal heads. There is a smaller growing form known as H. hircinum minus. The plant emits a peculiar goat-like odour. H. MOSERIANUM is a beautiful hybrid form with red anthers. Nepaul, 1823.
In the middle of the enclosure is a bottle full of water, in which the food soaks and keeps fresh. These three last nibble more particularly the anthers, more rarely the petals, never the leaves. A sorry intellect and sorry manners, which hardly repay the minute cares involved in the rearing.
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.
These anther-less filaments seem to be an endeavour of the plant to produce more stamens, as would appear from some experiments of M. Reynier, instituted for another purpose: he cut away the stamens of many flowers, with design to prevent their fecundity, and in many instances the flower threw out new filaments from the wounded part of different lengths; but did not produce new anthers.
And, lastly, that the anthers and stigmas are real animals, attached indeed to their parent tree like polypi or coral insects, but capable of spontaneous motion; that they are affected with the passion of love, and furnished with powers of reproducing their species, and are fed with honey like the moths and butterflies, which plunder their nectaries. See Botanic Garden, Part I. add. note XXXIX.
About noon, when the anthers are covered with dry-dust-like pollen they can be pinched out with forceps and carried to the seed-bearing spikes in a covered dish to protect from wind. The anthers may be taken separately in the fingers, or with forceps, and lightly brushed over the stigmas, which should be erect and open if they have reached the receptive stage.
The flowers are produced on the top of the stem, four or five together, and are large, handsome, brick-red in colour, the tube 2 in. long, clothed with yellowish, green-tipped scales, and little clusters of hair-like bristles. The arrangement of the petals, and the cluster of yellow anthers in the centre, give the flowers the appearance of Camellias, if looked at from above.
It is good to watch the opening of the apple bloom: pink buds swelling and puffing out each day, the woolly stems elongating, the five overlapping incurving petals spreading and growing big, the stamens, about twenty, straightening up and lengthening their filaments that are attached on the flower-rim; the big light yellow anthers shedding pollen; the five green styles in the center.
Some holly-trees bear only male flowers, which have four stamens producing rather a small quantity of pollen, and a rudimentary pistil; other holly-trees bear only female flowers; these have a full-sized pistil, and four stamens with shrivelled anthers, in which not a grain of pollen can be detected.
This may be done by means of a small camel-hair brush, which should be moistened in the mouth and then pushed among the anthers till covered with pollen, which may then be gently rubbed on to the stigma. A warm, sunny morning is the most suitable time for this operation, as fertilisation takes place much more readily under the influence of bright sunshine than at any other time.
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