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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. RED CAMPION AND WHITE. The bank along the footpath that leads from the village to Culverhole Cliffs is just at present all aglow with a varied wealth of flowers and insect life. The yellow cabbage- butterflies are flitting over the blue masses of wild hyacinths; the ladybirds are busy among the wee green aphides on the budding sprays of honeysuckle; and the bronzed- mailed beetles are hunting for smaller insects beside the matted stems and roots of the big white stitchworts. The gorse has burst into its wonted blaze of blossom, so bright that one can hardly wonder at Linnaeus, who fell upon his knees and thanked God withfervour when first he looked upon its golden glory. Up to this morning I have counted seventy-eight kinds of wild flowers in blossom, not including catkins or grasses. And now to-day, for the first time this season, I see the pretty pink clusters of the red campion adding their warmer tint to the blues and yellows and greens of the tangled bank beside me. Already the butterflies have found out that its big swollen buds have opened and made clear the way to the nectaries; and I can notice a great bustling hairy bumble bee blundering about the mouth of one flower on the stalk, while half a dozen little flies are gathered around the sticky calyx of another. Evidently the red campion is very successful in its efforts to attract the eyes of insects. I saw it distinctly a hundred yards away, and the butterflies seem to see it quite as well, and a great deal more effectually. The campions, indeed, are flowers in which specialisation and adaptation have inmany respects been carried to an extremely high pitch. True, they cannot compare in complexity with the orchids or the dead- nettles, nor even with the little daisies and dandelions around them. Yet in the...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217142755 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217142753 |
| Weight | 0.46 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.31 In |
| List Price | $19.99 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 134 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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