Parting the grasses and looking more closely you may trace the branching of their shining stems, and note the marvelous beauty of their mist of flowers, the glumes and pales exquisitely penciled, the yellow dangling stamens, and feathery pistils.

A mantilla of very rich transparent black lace was thrown over her head, and fastened on one side with a cluster of red fuchsias, the golden stamens of which were tipped with small diamonds.

A group of the innumerable stamens have grown together on one side of the flower into a hood, which bends over the stigma and the other stamens.

Perhaps a difference in the time of their maturity obtains in all these flowers, which have numerous stamens.

The flowers are produced on the naked shoots in April, and are rendered conspicuous by reason of the pendent yellow stamens.

This is a rare American shrub, with leaves reminding one of those of the Nine Bark, Neillia opulifolia, and the flowers, which are freely produced along the full length of the shoots, are white or yellowish-green, with prominent stamens of a tufted brush-like character.

Six petals with a dewdrop in their heart, Six pure brave years, an ivory cup of tears; Six pearly-pillared stamens golden-crowned Growing from out the dewdrop, and a seventh Soaring alone trilobed and mystic green; Six pearl-bright years aflower with gold of joy, Sprung from the heart of those brave tear-fed years: But what that seventh single stamen is My little wit must leave for thee to tell.

Now turn homewards, past the Rosa del monte {85b} bush (bushes, you must recollect, are twenty feet high here), covered with crimson roses, full of long silky crimson stamens: and then tryas we do daily in vainto recollect and arrange one-tenth of the things which you have seen.

But for the flowers, too, it is well worthy of culture, the crimson-tipped stamens of the male flowers being singularly beautiful and uncommon.

One cape was a garden of flame-coloured carnations, another was a bed of roses and other fantastic flowers with twisted stamens and metallic petals.

After they have shed their dust, they turn themselves away outwards; and the pistil, or female, continuing to grow a little taller, is applied to the upper stamens.

The broad ring of incumbent yellow stamens, with blood-red filaments, is a conspicuous ornament of the expanded flower.

Just as the sepals open at the tips, and you think they are about to expand, they shrivel and fall away, leaving a tuft of greenish yellow stamens in the center.

You see a tree blazing with dark gold, passing into orange, and that to red; and on nearing it find it tiled all over with the flowers of a creeper, {118b} arranged in flat rows of spreading brushes, some foot or two long, and holding each hundreds of flowers, growing on one side only of the twig, and turning their multitudinous golden and orange stamens upright to the sun.