JULY. 



277 



braided as it were with the exquisitely delicate blos- 

 soms of the Maiden Pink (DiantJms deltoides). 



I have found an OrobancJie or Broom-Rape with pur- 

 ple stem and light brown flowers, on many of the walls 

 of the castles of "Wales and Monmouthshire, which 

 seems a curious habitat for it, since it is supposed to 

 grow parasitically only on the roots of other plants, as 

 the clover, &c. ; and as its seeds are not winged, it 

 seems difficult to account for its location there.* But 

 the subject of the migration of plants demands more 

 attention than it has received. No sooner now is a 

 mansion or tower abandoned, than all the plants of 

 the neighbourhood hasten to possess it, and those that 

 can fly (as the seeds of the syngenesian tribe) have of 

 course the best chance but birds carry many seeds 

 and berries, and thus in a few years a ruined castle 

 assumes the semblance of one of the rocks around 

 peopled with most of their plants but none different. 

 So numerous do these sometimes become, that Profes- 

 fessor SEBASTIANI has published a " Flora Colisea," 

 containing a list of more than two hundred plants 

 growing on the Coliseum at Rome. If we may sup- 

 pose our own rocks to have been clothed in a similar 

 manner from other pre-existing ones, it would be 

 curious to trace, if possible, some central point from 

 which all originated, unless, as contended by some 

 botanists, there were many centres of creation, and 



* I gathered this plant on the top of Martin's Tower, Chepstowe Castle, 

 in 1839, and I have seen it also growing among ivy on St. Catharine's Isle, 

 Tenby, as well as on the rocks of the Great Orme's Head, Caernarvon- 

 shire. In fact it occurs on many ivied ruins in Wales and Monmouthshire, 

 perhaps parasitical on the roots of ivy. It must therefore be the O. Hederte, 

 Duby, though but little different in aspect from O. minor. According to 

 HOOKER and AKNOTT, it is chiefly distinguished "by its yellow stigma cleft 

 only two-thirds down instead of to the base." 



