BLOSSOMING OF PLANTS

BLOSSOMING OF PLANTS, the act of blowing, or putting forth flowers or blossoms, called also flowering. The blossoming of the spina acuta, or Glastenbury thorn, piously on Christmases-day-morning, is a vulgar error,

error; owing to this, that the plant, besides its usual blossoming in the spring, sometimes puts forth a few white transient blossoms in the middle of winter. For the blossoming of the rose of Jericho on the same day, as it is commonly held in England, or in the time of midnight mass, as it is held in France, is somewhat more than an error, being really a fraud on one side, and a superstition on the other. This rose, whose leaves are only closed and shrivelled up in winter, will, at any time, upon setting its pedicle in water, expand and blossom a-new; because the pedicle being spongy imbibes the fluid space, and thus fills and swells out the shrivelled leaves: which property some monks have turned to good account.