Ivy (Hedera helix).
How common is Ivy, whether wild or cultivated! Yet how few are acquainted with its flowers!
There is no occasion to say that the Ivy is an evergreen perennial climbing shrub, nor to describe the form of the beautiful leathery leaf. If there is one leaf that may be said to be thoroughly well known to every British man, woman, and child, it must be the Ivy, for it thrives in dark corners of towns as well as on the hedge-banks of the country, and its foliage has been so well used in all classes of ornamental work. And yet there are few leaves that are subject to such great variation of form, though, with all its changes, one dominant character runs through them all, except its upper leaves, which are totally unlike. The Holly has prickly leaves for its lower branches, but those that are above the heads of browsing cattle have “entire” margins. So with the Ivy; its five-lobed leaves are for its trailing and climbing branches, but when it has reached the top of the wall or the tree it puts on simple lance-shaped leaves, and in September or October crowns these shoots with its umbels of yellow-green flowers.
The flower consists of a calyx with five triangular teeth, petals and stamens five each, style one, with five obscure stigmas. The flowers are succeeded by blackish berries, sometimes yellow. There is a common woodland variety, with smaller, narrower leaves, that never flowers; neither do those forms that persistently trail along the hedge bottom instead of climbing. Ivy has been at various times condemned as causing dampness in the walls it covers; the exact converse is the truth. It is the only British species; the genus contains but two for the whole world.
Arrowhead (Sagittaria sagittifolia).
One of the most striking among the many forms of leaves that go to make up the vegetation of the sluggish stream or the canal is the aptly-named plant here figured.
It is a perennial, the leaves are radical, and from the base of the plant runners are thrown out, each ultimately terminating in a globose tuber. The leaves are typical of what botanists describe as a “sagittate” leaf, and their long stalks are three-edged. The stem is leafless, but bears a number of flowers in series of threes. These flowers are of two kinds, staminate and pistillate, and because, like those of Poterium, they are borne upon the same plant, botanists describe Sagittaria as monœcious, just as they describe the Hop as diœcious, because its two sexes are on different plants. There are three sepals, and three large white petals with purplish spots at their base. The lower flowers contain carpels only, which are many in number, and which develop into a compact head of nut-like fruits. The stalks of these pistillate flowers are shorter than those of the staminate flowers above them, which contain purple anthers. It flowers from July to September, and is frequent in England as far north as Cumberland, as an indigenous plant; in Scotland it has become naturalized, and in Ireland it is of local occurrence. It is the only British species.
The name is from the Latin sagitta, an arrow.
