Page:Wayside and Woodland Blossoms.djvu/187

Rh &mdash;being covered with flinty hooks. The rambling botanist, when playfully inclined, detaches a yard-length from the hedge and deftly throwing it against his unconscious companion's back, causes a hundred hooks to catch in the warp or weft of his coat. It belongs to the Bedstraws, a genus comprising nearly a dozen British species, and distinguished by having minute flowers, yellow, white or greenish, calyx minute, a mere ring, the corolla four or five-lobed, honeyed. Stamens four, styles two, united at their bases. The leaves are borne in whorls of from four to ten, at distant intervals on the square stem. In G. aparine the leaves vary from six to eight, the flower-cymes arise from their axils, the flowers are white, the fruit first green then becoming purplish. Flowers June and July.

On page we gave a figure of Lychnis flos-cuculi, and descriptions of that species and L. diurna, the Red Campion. The present species was classed by Linnaeus as a mere variety of L. diurna, the two being combined under the name of L. dioica. In general characters the White Campion agrees with the Red, but the calyx is more greenish, and the petals are entirely white (occasionally reddish). The plant is larger and more coarse than its diurnal relative for, as its name signifies, L. vespertina opens in the evening and is fertilized by night-flying moths. It is a fragrant plant, but its fragrance is reserved for its flowering time not that its nocturnal visitors require the scent to direct them to the flowers, for they glow and gleam in the dark field and hedgerow from May to September.