Few English flowers are better known than the harebell; yet I wonder what proportion of all those who love it well in its summer beauty would be able to account for its botanical name of Round-leaved Campanula. “Round-leaved!” most people would say; “why, its leaves are slender and narrow and grass-like.” And so they are, indeed, in the later state in which you pick in July the graceful pensile blossoms. But the flowering stage of every plant is, after all, but its momentary reproductive period; it represents, so to speak, the golden prime of the full-grown individual. Before that stage is attained, the plant itself has to grow and prepare for flowering; it has to pass through its adolescence and its formative epoch. Now, the harebell is a herb whose two ages of life are singularly different; if you saw it in its green youth, when it is devoting itself wholly to feeding and storage, you would never imagine it was the self-same plant as that whose tall and very slender stem supports in later life the scattered group of drooping blue bell-flowers with which you are familiar.

Here on the dry sandbank, beside the path that runs obliquely across the moor, I see half a dozen harebell-worts in the first, or caterpillar, stage of their existence. The metaphor is less violent by far than you would at first imagine, for in its earlier days the harebell, like the caterpillar, does nothing but eat and lay by for the future; while in its second or flowering stage it does nothing but put forth its tender blue blossoms, which answer to the butterfly both in their attractive beauty and in the fact that they serve to produce the seeds (which are the analogues of eggs) for the coming generation. In the purely preparatory, or hard-eating, stage, the harebell has no stem or branches to speak of; it consists of a rosette of large orb-like leaves, often heart-shaped towards the stalk, and pressed close to the ground in a spreading circle. Each such rosette springs in April from a buried rootstock, which, in loose loamy soil, like that of these Surrey moors, is often intricate; it burrows in and out with strange instinct among the dry sand and stones, in search of such rare moisture as it can manage to find for itself. But though water is scarce, access to light and air is easy; so the large round leaves, lying close on the bare ground, get sunshine in abundance, and feed to their hearts’ content upon their proper food—the carbon in the atmosphere—while vegetation around is still low and backward. In this stage they may be compared to the rosettes of London-pride, which are similarly clustered, but which do not die down as the flower-stem advances.

About June, however, the harebell plant has eaten and drunk enough to venture upon leaving it............