IN THE VICINITY OF BIRMINGHAM. 2^1 



hanij may not be without interest to many of its readers, and espe- 

 cially to those who, in common with the writer, are fond of the 

 study of indigenous Botany.* 



I need scarcely observe that the extensive changes which have 

 taken place in Birmingham and its environs during the last forty 

 years, or since Dr. Withering published the last edition of his 

 Systematic Arrangeme?it of British Plants, make it an object of some 

 interest to ascertain which of the localities of plants that gentle- 

 man's long residence near this town enabled him to point out still 

 exist, and w^hich modern improvements have destroyed. 



Birmingham Heath and Washwood Heath — where, in Dr. 

 Withering's time, the rambles of the botanist were rewarded by 

 Hypochceris glabra, Vaccinium oxycoccos, or Eriophorum vaginaium 

 — now exist as heaths only in name. Houses, canals, and the 

 murky steam engine, cover the place where " once the wild flower 

 smiled ;" the busy hum of men has long succeeded " the buzzing 

 wing of the drowsy Dorr," even in spots as yet unconscious of the 

 march of bricks and mortar. The labours of agriculture have 

 swept away almost all the gleanings of the botanist : the Common 

 Potato CSolaniim tuberosum) now occupies, far more profitably, 

 the place of its noxious congeners, Solanum dulcamara and S. ni- 

 grum (the two Nightshades) ; while the slender Sea Cabbage 

 ( Brassica oleraceaj has been doomed, " 'neath the gardener's 

 plastic art," to undergo more metamorphoses than ever Proteus 

 tried or Ovid sang. 



The crowding host of Savoy, Cauliflower, and " Cabbages of low 

 degree," up to that greatest among the Anakim of culinary vege- 

 tables, " the Cesarean Cow Cabbage,'^ oppress the groaning soil, — 



" In square battalion rang'd, line after line 

 Successive ;" 



* It may be as well to notice that the united committee of the Birming- 

 ham Botanical and Warwickshire Floral Societies, at a meeting held in the 

 early part of the present year, offered a prize medal for " the best hortus 

 siccus of native plants, correctly named, with their local habitation, collected 

 within ten miles of Birmingham, from the 1st of August, 1835, to the 1st of 

 August, 1836." Having myself previously formed the design of botanizing 

 the neighbourhood of Birmingham, this notice was an additional excitement 

 to exertion ; and I was enabled to collect, though the season was on the 

 whole an unfavourable one, about three hundred and twenty phsenogamous 

 plants and ferns, for which collection the botanical committee awarded me 

 the prize medal. 



