“There is cultivated in gardens a pretty little lily native to high mountains, bearing orange-colored blossoms, and known as the bulbiferous lily. Here is a piece of the stalk with its buds situated in the axils of the leaves. These buds must pass through the winter and develop the following spring. They are covered with succulent scales, very thick, tender, and fleshy, good for nourishment as well as for protection. This store of provisions makes the bud quite plump. Toward the end of summer some of these buds leave the mother plant; they fall at the slightest wind, scatter on the ground, and are henceforth given over to their own resources. If the season is a wet one, many of them, still in place at the axils of the leaves, send out one or two little roots that hang in the air as if trying to reach the ground. Before October arrives all the buds have fallen. Then the mother stalk dies. Soon the autumn winds and rains cover the scattered buds with dead leaves and mold. Under this shelter they swell all winter from the juices of their scales, plunge their roots into the ground little by little, and, behold, in the spring each one displays its first green leaf, continues henceforth its independent growth, and finally becomes a plant like the original lily. “The fleshy, scaly buds destined to develop independently of the mother stalk are called bulblets. No plant known to agriculture could furnish us so striking an example of bud-emigration as the bulbiferous lily; but in our kitchen gardens we have garlic, which acts in almost the same way. Take a whole head of garlic. On the outside are dry, white wrappings. Strip these off and underneath you will find large buds which can easily be detached one by one. Then come more white wrappings followed by new buds, so that the entire head is a package of alternate wrappings and buds. “These wrappings are the dried-up lower portions of the old leaves of the plant, leaves blanched where the soil covered them, and where they still remain, and formerly green where exposed to the air, though that part is now lacking. In the axils of these leaves buds have formed according to the general rule; only, as they are destined to develop by themselves, they have stored up supplies in their thickened scales, and that is what makes them unusually large. Split one of them lengthwise. Under a tough sheath you will find an enormous fleshy mass forming almost the whole of the bud. That is the storehouse. With such supplies of food the bud is well able to take care of itself. And, in fact, when a market-gardener wishes to raise a crop of garlic, he does not have recourse to the seed; that would take too long. He turns his attention to the buds; that is to say, he plants in the ground, one by one, the bulblets of which the heads of garlic are composed. Each of these bulblets, sustained at first by its own reserves of food, puts forth roots and leaves and becomes a complete garlic plant.