Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A genus of plants, of the order Labiatæ, type of the tribe Stachydeæ.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun large genus of usually woolly or hairy herbs or subshrubs or shrubs; temperate eastern hemisphere; tropical Australasia

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The flowers are large and relatively solitary among the felty foliage, and they are wonderful over a foil of silver stachys or acaena.

    Stunning salvias Dan Pearson 2010

  • Other adaptations to look out for include hairy leaves, such as those of stachys (woolly lamb's ears), because they slow down the wind blowing across the leaf surface; and silver-leaved plants – many of them native to the Mediterranean – that reflect the heat of the sun: olives are a perfect example and are quite happy in a pot.

    Gardens: Roof gardens 2010

  • Wish there were more of the stachys, wonder if it seeds?

    Wordless June Blooms « Fairegarden 2009

  • In early spring the fields and hillsides were clothed in crocus and viola, white stachys, and yellow sternbergia, and pale lilac colchicum nodded on exiguous stalks amid the already sere grass of the meadows.

    Captain Corelli's Mandolin De Bernieres, Louis 2003

  • There were patches of purple thyme, of blue stachys, and yellow gallium; there were countless spikes of yellow agrimony and heads of wild carrot, and white ox-eyes looked out from amidst the long grasses like snowflakes of summer.

    Two Summers in Guyenne Edward Harrison Barker 1885

  • Near the water's edge, mingling with sedges, flags, marsh-mallows, bur-reed, and alisma, were the golden flowers of the shrubby lysimachia in dense multitudes, while from the canal itself rose many a spike of water-stachys, with here and there blossoming butomus, near the fringe of the banks.

    Two Summers in Guyenne Edward Harrison Barker 1885

  • Elsewhere it is the blue of the stachys and the spiked veronica that rules.

    Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine Edward Harrison Barker 1885

  • The grass mounts high, but not higher than the oxeye daisies, the blue racemes of stachys, the mauve-coloured heads of scabious, the bladder-campions, the yellow buttercups and goat's-beard.

    Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine Edward Harrison Barker 1885

  • A humming-bird moth, that seems to have been just created, for the eye cannot follow its movement in the dusky air, appears suddenly upon the topmost flower of a stachys, and in another moment it has vanished.

    Two Summers in Guyenne Edward Harrison Barker 1885

  • Good deal on the stachys already growing, don’t the bees just find it irresistable?

    Lambs Ear Love « Fairegarden 2008

Comments

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  • Greek Ear of grain, or seed spike.

    July 11, 2008