Eyes and No Eyes

CLIMBING PLANTS If you look along the hedges you will find many climbing plants, which manage to use the thick bushes as a sort of bank on which to spread out their leaves and flowers. There is the Clematis, or Traveller’s Joy. It has not turned its leaves into tendrils, nor twined its stem. It twists the stalk of the leaves tightly round the twigs, so that the leaves stand out at the end.

Its pretty greenish flowers are spread in this way all over the top of the hedge, and by-and-by the feathery seed-boxes will hang like an old man’s beard, just where the wind can catch them to blow them away.

I think you must know the Goose-grass or Cleavers, which grows over everything in the lanes Its narrow green leaves are arranged round the stem like a star, and it has very tiny white flowers. The stem, leaves and seed-boxes are all crowded with tiny hooks so that it clings to your hand when you gather it. It is really a very weak plant, but it clings to other plants which are stronger, and so raises itself up.

The blackberry and other brambles climb in the same way, and the wild rose climbs by its thorns. Further along the hedgerow the wild Hop may be growing. Its stems die down every year and grow up again in the spring. Yet it manages to spread a long way, for its stem twines round twigs and small trees, and everything it can find, spreading out its broad leaves shaped like a heart. You will find the flowers of the hop rather puzzling, for its dust-bags and seed-boxes grow on different plants.

The Honeysuckle, too, twines its stem, as you must have seen on the porch or the paling. Some- times when it twines round a young branch, it winds itself so tightly that the branch cannot grow in the places where the honeysuckle binds it. So it is marked all the way up, as if it had a ribbon round it.

Then there are the pretty plants called Tares or vetches, which have flowers like small pea-flowers. They climb everywhere by their tendrils. I think you will be able to 117