“Yes; I like, if I can, to paint the flowers in their natural places, besides taking a single flower and painting it the size of life.  Look at that wild rose-bush mixed with bramble in that piece of hedge; underneath it I have painted a small spray of roses and buds.”

“What is that pretty little flower?” asked Annie; “I don’t remember ever having seen one like it.”

“It is the wood-sorrel; a very lovely little thing it is too.  It is common in woods and shady places; but the flowers are almost over now.”

“We have some roots of it in the shrubbery, and I saw one flower in bloom there this morning,” said Katey.

“Well, you may all go and look at it, if you like.”  So the children scampered away to look at the small pale, drooping flower.

“What pretty leaves it has!” said Mary.  “I have brought one with me; it looks like a cluster of leaves in one.”

“Yes; the bright, transparent leaves and stems are very delicate.  These leaves will frequently fold up, if knocked, like the leaves of a sensitive plant.  You can look for a plant in the woods and try it.  The leaves, too, have a very acid taste.”

“I see a violet root.  I like violets because of their sweet smell,” said Annie.

“I like what are called dog-violets too,” said her aunt.  “They have no smell at all, but they grow all the summer through, in hedges and in grass, in such large quantities that the turf often looks like an embroidered carpet.

“The flower is very similar to the scented violet, only it is of a pale grayish blue.  I have painted two roots side by side, one of the scented, one of the dog-violet; also a specimen of the white violet, which is not so common as that of the dark kind, but its smell is quite as delicious.”

The children were delighted to recognize, among others, sketches of daisies, cowslips, buttercups, wood-anemones, wild hyacinths, forget-me-nots, eyebright, red and white clover, and many kinds of flowering grasses and graceful fern leaves.

“What is that?” they said, as they saw something that looked curious but not pretty.

“That is one of the sketches I took in Cornwall two or three miles from the Land’s End.  It is a poor, unhappy furze-bush, covered with dodder.  The dodder is what is called a parasitical plant; that is, a plant that lives entirely on another.  There are several kinds of dodders:  some live entirely on flax, some on nettles, but those that stick to clover and furze-bushes are the most common in this country.

“When the seed of a dodder dropped into the ground begins to grow, it feels about for the kind of plant it wants to live upon:  if it cannot find it, it dies.

“This furze dodder, you see, has found what it wanted, and, having done so, began at once to coil its pink thread-like stem on that of the furze.  Now it had gained its footing, and threw out a great many more fine stems in all directions, after the fashion of strawberry runners, rooting as it grew.  There are thousands of little dodder plants sucking the life out of the furze.  I have seen many of the bushes quite smothered, and even killed, by this unpleasant and greedy plant.