The graceful Wood Hyacinth is one of our prettiest flowers. You will
find the woods and hedge-banks covered with its masses of pale blue
flowers in late spring and early summer.
The leaves appear first,--long, narrow green straps, with a point at the
end, and each green strap looks as if it had been folded in the middle
and not quite flattened out again.
These leaves spring from a bulb which lies deeply buried in the ground.
Underneath this bulb are a few white thread-like roots.
The Hyacinth flowers grow, all on one side, towards the end of a tall
and juicy flower-stalk. This flower-stalk droops when the flowers are in
bud, and again when the flowers are faded. But it stands proudly erect
when its bells are in full bloom.
Each bell is made up of six long, narrow petals. These petals are really
separate, but about half way down, they touch each other and so form a
bell. The tips of each petal fold back at the mouth.
There is a yellow-headed stamen clinging to the side of every petal, and
in the centre of the bell sits a green pear-shaped seed-vessel, with a
short pillar on the top. In the Wood Hyacinth there is no calyx.
Every blue bell hangs from a short stalk of its own, and wherever a
flower-stalk joins the main stem there are two narrow pointed leaves.