Please wait. Contacting image service... loading

Article text

FREAK PLANTS.
Toadstool with Roots in the
Air.
Specimens of precocious flowering plants
and fruits, made abnormal by the mild
winter in England, nere exhibited in Lon
don last month.
"I have had yellow jasmines blooming
more than a month ago," said Dr. A. B.
Eondle, Keeper of Botany at the Katnral
History Museum, "but the plants I re
ceive are more abnormal than precocious,"
He has acquired a fig root, forming a
flat trelliswork 4 ft- by 6 ft., which was
believed to have grown in a rock crevice
in Italy. It belonged formerly to Baro
ness Burdebt-Coutts.
Dr. iRendle's collection includes a pine
apple which tried to split itself into scores
of pineapples at once, with disastrous re
sults; and thare is a toadstool which
might have come from a fairy story land.
It "grew np all right, and then grew an
other one on top of itself, head on, with
the root of the second sticking up in the
. air.
A firm of timber merchants sent Dr.
I Rendle part of a tree trunk they had been
| sawing through, when the saw struck
: something hard. The tree came from Re
: gent's Park, and was about 130 years old.
; Examination showed the truck to enclose
i a thick Iron chain.
$