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Updated: May 19, 2025
These plants, which are mostly natives of mild climates of the old world, are characterized by having square stems; opposite, simple leaves and branches; and more or less two-lipped flowers which appear in the axils of the leaves, occasionally alone, but usually several together, forming little whorls, which often compose loose or compact spikes or racemes.
Bates assures us, are exactly like flower buds, and take their station in the axils of leaves, where they remain motionless waiting for their prey.
The plant figured is a young one, showing the spines much longer than is usual on mature specimens. Stem 7 in. high, and 5 in. in diameter at the base; tubercles large, swollen, somewhat flattened, pale green, watery, woolly in the axils, the tops crowned with about a dozen brown spines, 1 in. long, one central, the others radial.
The long linear ribbon leaves, often exceeding a foot, spreading in wavy masses round the tall stem, which has a palm-like tuft of them at the summit, are a more ornamental feature than the flowers, which are moderate in size and come late in the axils of the upper leaves. H. angustifolius. A neat and elegant species, which I first raised from seed sent by Mr. W. Thompson, of Ipswich.
Three years ago my shoot was sent off from its parent branch; that year it grew but four inches, bearing leaves on its sides, in the axils of which developed buds for the winter and at the end a larger terminal bud. Let us call this shoot 1918.
I could not imagine what had formed this wood, and it remained a complete puzzle to me until the following spring, when I found in the expanding shoots, that, wherever a flower-cluster was present, there were one or two pairs of leaflets already well developed in the axils, and that the next season's buds were forming between them, while the internodes of these leaflets were making quite a rapid growth.
The flowers are produced in the axils of the tubercles from all parts of the stem, a large tuft of stems being thickly studded with circles of tawny yellow petals, which are only about ½ in. long. The berries are bright coral-red, and about the size of a date stone. There are several varieties of this species, under the names of intertexta, rufescens, rutila, subcrocea, and supertexta.
Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of waterplants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.
The trunk is rough and furrowed, and the leaves have from six to ten pairs of leaflets and an odd one. They are smooth, strongly serrated and rather pointed; the color is a light, bright green. The catkins are green, from four to seven inches long, and hang from the axils of the last year's leaves. The leaves are much longer than those of the locust, and the leaf-stalk is downy.
Lilac. Same, less reduced. 3. Branch, with leaf-buds expanded. 4. That the scales are modified leaves is plainly shown by the gradual transition they undergo, and also by the fact that buds are developed in their axils. If any of these can be shown to the pupils, remind them of the experiment where the top of a seedling Pea was cut off and buds forced to develop in the axils of the lower scales.
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