Page:Wayside and Woodland Blossoms.djvu/294

144 enlarged ovary, two cells of which have aborted. Flowers April and May.

The Oak forms the world of a great number of insects, many of which are either parasites (gall-flies which produce Oak-apples, bullet-galls, spangles, and other forms of gall) or their lodgers. Several fungi, too, specially select old Oaks upon which to live freely. Chief among these is the remarkable Beef-steak fungus (Fistulina hepatica), of which in October a hundred-weight might be quickly gathered in an oakwood.

The Hazel is one of the most look-ahead kind of trees, for almost before this year's nuts have all dropped off, or been picked off, she puts out the tiny, cylindric grey bodies that continue to lengthen all the winter and by February have become loose and open. Then it can be seen that these catkins consist of male flowers, for the yellow stamens are evident, and soon every breeze shakes out a little cloud of yellow pollen. Looked at analytically, the catkin is seen to be made up of a large number of scaly bracts, of which one large and two small go to a flower, and these are so arranged as to form a pent-house roof over the eight stamens. The female flowers are altogether different. They each consist of a two-celled ovary, with two slender, crimson styles, and enclosed in a kind of calyx, three-parted. Two of these flowers are then associated in a bud-like involucre, situated at the end of a twig. In spring, before the leaves appear, these open and the crimson stigmas are put forth to catch a little of the flying pollen. By September one cell of the ovary has developed into a hard shell containing one large seed (kernel) and clasped by a large raggedly-cut hood—the developed involucre.

When the tips of the nutshells become brown-tinged, then appear boys, squirrels, dormice and nuthatches, and by their