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Soon his prison-house becomes a stomach for his absorption. Its duty of digestion done, the leaf in all seeming guilessness once more expands itself for the enticement of a dupe. To see how much the sun-dew must depend upon its meal of insects we have only to pull it up from the ground.
"There be land-rats and water-rats" in this carnivorous sun-dew family. Aldrovanda, of the warmer parts of Europe and of India, is an aquatic plant, with bladdery leaves, which were supposed to be useful in rendering the herbage buoyant in water.
In the neighbourhood of Torquay, fir-cones are designated oysters, and in Sussex the Arabis is called "snow-on-the-mountain," and "snow-in-summer." A common name for Achillaea ptarmica is sneezewort, and the Petasites vulgaris has been designated "son before the father." The general name for Drosera rotundifolia is sun-dew, and in Gloucestershire the Primula auricula is the tanner's-apron.
What fine old names they have, great with the blended dignities of literary and rural lore; archangel, tormentil, rosa solis or sun-dew, horehound, Saracen's wound-wort, melilot or king's clover, pellitory of Spain!
This plant when eaten by cows communicates a disagreeable taste to milk and butter. ROUND-LEAVED SUN-DEW. Drosera rotundifolia. Very common on marshy commons, and is said to be poisonous to sheep, and to give them the disease called the rot. SEA BARLEY-GRASS. Hordeum maritimum.
It has its birth on the great lone moor, cradled in a wonderful peat-smelling bog, with a many-hued coverlet of soft mosses pale gold, orange, emerald, tawny, olive and white, with the red stain of sun-dew and tufted cotton-grass. Under the old grey rocks which watch it rise, yellow-eyed tormantil stars the turf, and bids "Godspeed" to the little child of earth and sky.
I gathered five in the hope of finding one free from insects, but the cups of all were full of dried flies and ants, looking much as flies do when they have been clutched for a few days by the hairs of the "sun-dew."
This imagined treachery might well have been suggested by the behaviour of certain alluring plants that so far from repelling thieves, or discouraging pillagers, open their arms to all comers with purpose of the deadliest. Of these betrayers the chief is the round-leaved sun-dew, which plies its nefarious vocation all the way from Labrador to Florida.
Then the Sun-dew denied her pity; the blue Forget-me not, constancy; the Iris, pride; the Butter-cup, gold; the Passion-flower, love; the Amaranth, hope: all because the Spark should gift her with every one of these, and burn the gift in deeply. So they all dropped and died; and she could never know the flowers of life, only its fires.
He has seen farther into the pine-tree than any other poet; his "May-Day" is full of our spring sounds and tokens; he knows the "punctual birds," and the "herbs and simples of the wood:" "Rue, cinque-foil, gill, vervain, and agrimony, Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawk-weed, sassafras, Milk-weeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sun-dew." Here is a characteristic touch:
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