The other plant of this order is the very common Spotted Palmate Orchis (_Orchis maculata_), abundant on the moist heaths and commons of most parts of Britain, flowering from June to August. Its root has two or three flattened tubers with long, finger-like lobes; and the stem is solid, erect, from six inches to more than a foot high. The leaves are ovate below, narrow above, and usually marked with many dark spots. The spike of flowers is dense, oblong or pyramidal in form, and two or three inches long. At the base of each flower is a bract usually shorter than the ovary. The flowers are pale purple, lilac, or (occasionally) white, and are generally conspicuously marked with irregular lines and spots of a deeper tint. The sepals are spreading, about a quarter of an inch long; and the petals are arched over the column. The lip is broad, deeply three-lobed, more or less toothed, either flat or with the lateral lobes slightly turned back. The spur is slender and a little shorter than the ovary. This Orchis is represented on Fig. 6 of Plate VI. [Illustration: THE COMMON QUAKING GRASS.] Our single example of the _Liliaceæ_ is the Butcher's Broom (_Ruscus aculeatus_), the only British monocotyledonous shrub. It is of a very dark green colour, varies from one to four feet in height, and is occasionally met with on the wooded heaths of the southern counties. Its rigid, evergreen, leaflike appendages, which are ovate in form, terminating in a sharp spine, are not really leaves, but leaflike branches or _cladodes_; for, it will be observed, they bear the flowers and fruits, which are attached to their centres. The only leaves possessed by the plant are the minute, deciduous scales, from the axils of which the cladodes grow. The flowers are white, very small, with a deeply six-cleft, persistent perianth, each one attached to the centre of a cladode by a very minute stalk. They are always on the upper side of the cladode, though it generally happens that they are turned downwards by a twisting of the base of the leaflike branch. The flowers are always imperfect, the male and female blossoms growing on separate shrubs, and both have a small bract at the base. The ovary of the latter develops into a rather large, scarlet, berry-like fruit containing one or two seeds. The flowers appear during March and April. [Illustration: THE COMMON MAT GRASS.]