Page:Extracts from the letters and journals of George Fletcher Moore.djvu/220

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PLANTS AND FLOWERS.

from the observation, that gum trees emit, when wounded, a stream of reddish fluid of a consistence not unlike thick blood.[1] I got a considerable quantity of it to-day from the veins of a tree which I rolled up in my hands like pitch;—I shall send it in the next box.

There are a hundred plants, flowers, shrubs, &c., that I have not the names of, nor do I know how to describe them. One very abundant plant is called wild carrot: we have the dock, penny-royal, trefoil, sorrel, rib grass, fern, flax (native), which is pretty abundant, burnet, yarrow, sowthistle, moss (the hygrocrocis), sedum, buttercup, eringo, wyay or native yarn, davisia, and several blue, white, red, and yellow climbers and creepers, anigozanthus, orobus solis, chrysanthemum, primroses, daisies, rockets, orchis, cardinal, sweet pea, and a beautiful purple flower, which looks as if it were trimmed with lace, and called here the lace flower, and many others.

I sometimes think of making a hortus siccus of all these flowers; but they are too transient, and I am so much occupied, that I have not hitherto been able to accomplish it. Many beautiful shrubs and flowers are now in bloom, of which I must mention the black wattle, which bears a yellow blossom resembling that of the laburnum at a


  1. Ater et alterius sequitur de cortice sanguis.