Page:British Flowering Plants.djvu/39

Rh Another name by which it is known in England is the Virgin's Bower.

Pasque Flower—Anemone Pulsatilla

(Plate II)

This is a spring flower, met with occasionally in dry pastures, in chalk or limestone districts, in several parts of England, but not commonly. The flowers grow up before the leaves expand, the stalk lengthening till it is 5 or 6 inches high. The leaves, when they expand, are bifid or trifid, and deeply cleft at the extremities of the leaflets. The outside of the calyx (of 6 sepals), the stalks, etc., are very silky; the corolla is absent. In the ripe fruit the carpels are separate, round, and surrounded by long tufts of white hairs or awns.

The fresh juice of the plant has an irritant effect on the skin. Preparations from the plant are sometimes employed in cutaneous diseases, and also in whooping cough. It is, like aconite and belladonna, one of the principal medicines used by homœopathists.

Wood Anemone—Anemone nemorosa This is a much commoner flower in Britain than the last. It is a smaller and much more slender plant, with the leaves less deeply cleft, and a white flower of 6 sepals, often more or less tinged with delicate pink on the outer sides. The carpels are pointed, but destitute of an awn. It is very common on hedge-banks, open places in woods, and similar localities in spring.

On this plant feeds the larva of Adela Degeerella, one of the most beautiful of the smaller moths, which appears in June, and sports in the sun. The forewings are of a long oval, three-quarters of an inch in expanse, and are varied with yellow and violet-brown; beyond the middle is a transverse yellow band; the hindwings are brown, and are fringed with long hairs. But what renders this pretty moth and its immediate allies remarkable is the extraordinary length of the slender antennæ,