Burdock (Arctium lappa).
The Burdock is a plant well-known to artists and boys; the former being interested in it as a fine foreground plant, the latter on account of its hooked bracts, which make the fruit-head an admirable instrument of torture, or an ornament for decorating some other person’s clothes. In its young state the plant is suggestive of the Butterbur, the fine bold lower leaves having a densely cottony underside as in that plant. But there the similarity ends, for in Butterbur there is no rising stem, whereas in Burdock this ordinarily reaches a stature of three or four feet. We encountered a fine specimen near Chessington, Surrey, in June, 1894, that had reached the height of seven feet three inches, and as it had only just commenced flowering it would probably put on a few additional inches before its growth ceased. The stem is stout, the leaves alternate, heart-shaped, thick. The flowers are in dense heads, like a thistle, but without any spreading rays. The involucre globose, of many leathery bracts ending in long stiff hooks, by means of which the ripe heads become firmly attached to the coats of animals, and the seeds are thus carried far and wide. Corollas, five-lobed, purple. Common in all waste places. Flowering from June to September. According to Hooker this is the only British species, but the “splitters” have made four or more species out of it.
The name is from the Greek, Arktos, a bear, from its rough appearance.
Goosegrass or Cleavers (Galium aparine).
Although Goosegrass has nothing else in common with Burdock it resembles it in the fact that its fruit “sticketh closer than a brother.” It is a plant of the hedge, where it forms dense masses, the whole plant—stem, leaves and fruits—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.
Burdock.
Arctium lappa.
—Compositæ.— Goose-grass. Cleavers.
Galium aparine.
—Rubiaceæ.—
White Campion.
Lychnis vespertina.
—Caryophylleæ.—