302 NOTES — ORIGINAL AND SELECTED. 



has maintained itself in the same spot for at least forty- 

 three years. — Fred. J. Chittenden, Technical Laboratories, 

 Chelmsford, April iHth, 1904, 



Surviving London Wild Flowers. — In the Times, of 



October 17th, 1903, Mr. C. J. Cornish has the following 



interesting letter : — 



" Though the author of the Flora Londinensis would no longer find the 

 rare plants which in his day grew in Lambeth Marsh, tlie number of wild 

 .flowers still found in the London area is much larger than would be readily 

 believed. That this is so is clear from a remarkable collection of the wild flowers 

 remaining in Fulham, a London borough of some 250,000 inhabitants, made by 

 ]Mr. W. Clarkson Birch, and presented by him to the Field Club of St. Paul's 

 School. The collection, which is only of leaves and flowers, not of the roots of 

 the plants, was made in a twelvemonth, and contains no less than 130 varieties of 

 ilowering plants, though the market gardens, for which Fulham was famous, 

 have almost disappeared, and bricks and mortar are rapidly taking their places. 

 It would puzzle most people to guess where these flowers could have found 

 room to grow. Fortunately there is nothing which many flowers like so much 

 as a rubbish heap or a bit of waste ground. As the market gardens or sites of 

 ■old houses are taken up for building and enclosed, but before operations 

 actually begin, the flowers and plants rise uj:) to take what fancy might describe 

 as their last farewell to London. The sides of reservoirs are also homes for 

 London flowers. But among their best retreats are the banks of the London 

 river, where many of the water plants still survive, and the bank flowers are 

 recruited by seeds washed down from the upper Thames. From the river bank 

 came the poisonous hemlock, dropwort, two kinds of pepperwort, several kinds of 

 ■cresses, and gipsywort, with nettle-shaped leaves and white flowers. On a 

 reservoir embankment, lately made, were quantities of greater skull-cap, with blue 

 tubular flowers, and a specimen of the great willow herb and purple loosestrife. 

 I have seen plants of the former grooving abundantly in the foreyard of an old 

 house, which was set aside to be pulled down near the Hammersmith Road. A 

 balsam called " touch-me-not," because the pods when ripe open with a 

 spring when touched, and eject the seeds, is also found there. It is said to have 

 become naturalised on the banks of the Wey. If so, possibly its seeds have 

 passed from the Wey to the Thames, and from the Thames to Fulham. But the 

 wanderings of plants are illustrated in a remarkable fashion by \.\\o species in 

 this collection — one called Galinisoa parvijiora, and the other, a very relnark- 

 able plant, Tet/agoiiia crystallina, a native of Chile. Its lea\es are coated 

 with what look like spangles of ice crystal, from which its name is derived. 

 Both plants were found by Mr. Birch growing on a rubbish heap near the 

 Crab Tree, famed in accounts of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. A 

 specimen of the Aster tripolium, or sea starwort, was found growing by the 

 river, a plant usually found on salt marshes, and plentiful at Canvey Island, at 

 the river's mouth. How did it get to Fulham } The purple-flowered lucerne 

 grows on the reservoir banks in abundance. Even the harebell was found, and 

 cuckoo flower, bristly ox-tongue, self-heal, scarlet pimpernel, crane's bill, 

 mallow, and the London rocket are among other flowers in the hst." 



