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CHAPTER XX.

PLATE XXXVI.CUSCUTA EUROPÆA.

This plant is a native of England, and is found in hedges, on clover, or on beans, where it proves exceedingly injurious to the crop. It flowers from June to August. The drawing was taken from a specimen which grew in the Physic Gardens, Oxford. It is represented twining about some nettles, on which it annually attaches itself.

“Of all the parasitical plants, the dodder (cuscuta) tribe are the most singular, trusting for their nourishment entirely to those vegetables about which they twine, and into whose tender bark they insert small villous tubercles serving as roots, the original root of the dodder withering away entirely, as soon as the young stem has fixed itself to any other plant; so that its connexion with the earth is cut off." English Botany, p. 55.

CHAPTER XX.

PLATE XXXVII.—THE AUTUMNAL CROCUS.

The colchicum autumnale. This plant before us exhibits a mode of fructification scarcely paralleled among British vegetables. The flowers appearing very late in autumn, the impregnated germen remains latent under ground close to the bulb till the following spring, when the capsule rises above the surface accompanied by several long upright leaves, and the seeds are ripened about June, after which the leaves decay. See British Botany, vol. i. p. 133. The plant is represented as it appears in spring; the root is divided to show the seed vessel near the bulb. The flower is remarkable for the length of its tube.

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