January in temperate latitudes is popularly believed to possess no wild flowers in our lanes, fields or hedgebanks; and the reason for the common belief is that no one expects or looks for them, and there is no conspicuous color to attract attention to them at that ordinarily cold and apparently “dead” season of the year. Yet there are not less than twenty-five of our wild flowers that may be found in bloom _somewhere_ in January. A January has probably never yet been known during which it was impossible to find out of doors a daisy (_Bellis perennis_) in flower: not in the open meadow, or on the cold slope of the hillside, but at least in some sheltered nook where a streamlet may flow, unhindered by frost. Says Montgomery: “On waste and woodland, rock and plain, Its humble buds unheeded rise; The rose has but a summer reign, The daisy never dies.” And this last line explains the true meaning of the specific botanical name of the day’s “eye”—_perennis_—which does not mean, as it is usually understood in botanical language, “perennial,” simply to indicate that the daisy _plant_ lives beyond a period of two years. It means “lasting throughout the year,” that is to say, lasting in _blossom_ throughout the year, for our daisy is _always_ in bloom somewhere. Another January flower, and one whose blossoms, though it is an annual plant, may be found throughout the year, is the purple dead nettle (_Lamium purpureum_). Though much like its relative, the later-blooming white or common dead nettle, this pretty plant may be known from _Lamium album_, not only by the purple color of its curious flowers, a color with which its leaves and its leaf-hairs are sometimes suffused, but by its smaller size and by the curious crowding of its alternately-paired heart-shaped leaves on the upper part of the stem, a feature which is not common to its white-flowering congener. The unobservant pedestrian who may linger by the wayside to pluck something which strikes his fancy in the low hedgebank, must often have dreaded the touch of the harmless dead nettles, under the belief that these plants were the widely different, though similarly leaved, “stinging” nettles. If disabused of this impression and induced to handle a flowering stem of the purple dead nettle, with square stem and whorl of stalkless axillary blossoms, he will marvel at the singular-looking corolla, separated from its calyx of five sepals. The generic name _Lamium_ comes from a Greek word which means throat, and that, as referring to the blossom, it is aptly applied, will be seen at once. From the depths of this throat, or the corolla tube, in other words, rise the stamens on their long filaments, covered by the upper and concave lip of the corolla, which hangs hood-like over them, whilst the lower lip (for this species belongs to the large natural order called _Labiatæ_, labiate or lip-flowered plants) is prettily marked with spots of darker purple than the normal