The Creeping Cinquefoil has a slender stem that creeps on the ground and forms new roots at the nodes. Its leaves are digitate and long-stalked, with five obovate, serrate, hairy leaflets. The flowers are yellow, solitary, nearly an inch in diameter, with five sepals and five petals.
On banks we frequently meet with the Agrimony (_Agrimonia Eupatoria_), a slender plant, from one to two feet high, covered with soft hairs, and bearing long, tapering, spikelike racemes of small, scattered, yellow flowers during June and July. This plant may be readily identified by means of our illustration.
One of the Willow Herbs--the Broad Smooth-leaved Willow Herb (_Epilobium montanum_)--is common on roadside banks, flowering during June and July. Its stems are slender, downy, and generally unbranched; and the leaves are opposite, stalked (the lower ones almost stalkless), ovate, acute, with serrate edges, and smooth except along the margins and the principal veins, which are more or less downy. The plant grows to a height of one or two feet, and bears small, pale-purple flowers which droop when in the bud. It belongs to the order _Onagraceæ_; and, like the others of its genus, has four sepals, four petals, eight stamens, and a long inferior ovary which splits into four valves, setting free a large number of little, tufted seeds.
The order _Crassulaceæ_ contains a number of low, succulent plants, with small, regular, star-like flowers. Some of them are well known as Stonecrops and House-leeks. Those of the Stonecrop group usually have cymes of flowers with perianth leaves in whorls of five, and stamens in two whorls.
One member of this group--the Orpine or Livelong (_Sedum Telephium_)--is not uncommonly found on shady wayside banks, especially near villages and on the outskirts of towns, where it is probably an escape from gardens. Its leaves are large, flat, oval or oblong, with serrate edges. The flowers have five sepals and five petals, are of a purple or crimson colour, and are clustered in close cymes.
We have now to consider several species of the order _Umbelliferæ_--a group of flowers which contains so many species, with often such close resemblances in general appearance, that it is always more or less puzzling to the beginner, especially as it is frequently necessary to note minute details of structure in order to determine a species.