The Red Campion (Lychnis diurna), with stem covered with soft hairs, which are sticky near the upper part of the plant. The flower has a singularly neat appearance, altogether lacking the ragged character of flos-cuculi. The petals, instead of being deeply cut, as in that species, are merely divided into two lobes. The calyx is reddish, with triangular teeth. The anthers and stigmas are produced in separate flowers; occasionally flowers may be found with both organs, but one or the other will be undeveloped.
The Red Campion is a plant of the hedge-bank and the copse, where it may be found in flower from June to September. In Cornwall it keeps fully in flower till the end of the year. This page was written there a few days before Christmas, when the fern-clad rocky hedgerows were lit up with great numbers of the flowers of Red Campion and Herb-Robert.
The name Lychnis is from the Greek, Luchnos, a lamp or torch, the application of which is obscure.
Bluebottle or Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus).
The Centaureas are closely allied to the thistles, and share with them that hard-headedness which makes the thistle so good a type of the canny Scot. The Bluebottle must not be sought in the company of the thistles on wastes and in neglected corners of pasture, but, as one of its folk-names indicates, in the cornfield. Beginning to flower in June, it keeps up the display of bright blue until the reapers cut it down.
Bluebottle is a composite flower, and it should afford interest to the reader, when he finds the blossoms, to institute a comparison between it and that of the Daisy or other of the Composites we have already described.
The thin stem is but slightly branched, and the long lower leaves are much cut up and very attenuated. Nearer the summit of the stems the leaves are simpler, and reduced to a very slight width. The stems and the under sides of the leaves are covered with loose cottony fibres. The flower-heads have for involucre a number of greenish scales, with toothed brown margins. The ray-florets are bright blue, their free ends divided into five teeth; the inner or disc-florets are much darker. The stamens are irritable, and if touched withdraw into the tube.
