Excerpt from The British Flora Medica, or History of the Medicinal Plants of Great Britain, Vol. 2: Illustrated by a Coloured Figure of Each Plant Description. - Common Holly is a small evergreen tree, vary ing in height from four to thirty feet, or more, much branched, with the young shoots very smooth, pliant, and of a fine green colour the bark is ash-coloured, very compact; the wood is hard, heavy, yellowish-white, darker towards the centre. The leaves are persistent, alternate, petiolate, coriaceous, of a deep shining green colour, ovate, undulated, and furnished at the margins with strong sharp spines.* The flowers are small, numerous, on short peduncles, somewhat umbellate, and spring from the axils of the leaves. The calyx is small, slightly hairy, and mostly four-toothed. The corolla is rotate, in four deep divisions, of a whitish colour. The stamens are four (sometimes five, and then the other parts of the flower have a corresponding development), Spreading, with subulate filaments, attached to the base of the corolla. The germen is sessile, four-celled, and terminated by four sessile obtuse stigmas. (the pistil in some flowers is altogether wanting.) The fruit is a shining scarlet berry, nearly spherical, and includes fodr, bony, channelled nuts, each containing a single seed. Plate 26, fig. 1, (a) an entire flower, of the natural size; (a) calyx and pistil; (c) the berry, with part of the fleshy substance removed, to show the four nuts (d) a nut, isolated. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.