SHORT NOTES 209 



SHORT NOTES. 



The Aeundance of Blossom this Year. It may be well to 

 put briefly on record tliat the late spring and early summer of 1922 

 were remarkable for the extraordinarily profuse blossoming of nearly 

 all plants. Not only have practically all flowering trees and shrubs 

 shown an excessiv^e amount of blossom in the districts frequented by 

 me and by some of my friends, but the wealth of flowers on herbaceous 

 plants of ordinary stature and on rock-plants has also been noticeable. 

 A friend in Cornwall writes "I don't think I have ever seen the 

 common dwarf flowers of the rough downs of the cliffs in such 

 abundance, making sheets of colour— very lovely." 



Certain trees in Clifton which rarely flower, or do so to a very 

 limited extent, e. g., Paidoivnia imperialis (one of the few trees of 

 the family Scrophulariaceae) has been a beautiful sight. Yesterday 

 in the gardens of Mr. Hiatt C. Baker at Almondsbury, Glos., it was 

 noticeable that on account of the drought last year and the hot 

 weather of May and June 1922 a number of Mediterranean species 

 with foliage more or less felted with gre}^ tomentum have remained 

 their natural colour, Avhereas usually in this country, and particularly 

 in Ireland, the whitish-grey foliage becomes greener. Such plants as 

 Lavatera Olhia and the beautiful Convolvulus althceoides may be 

 cited as examples. The latter is less green than often in Provence, 



Nor have I ever observed so much Hawthorn turning so marked 

 a pink just before the petals dro]) — as pink as the last-named Convol- 

 vukis or even a deeper rose. It would appear that this coloration is 

 more frequent in the lowlands, at least in the Bristol district. Last 

 autumn I observed that the second flowering of the Dog Hose was 

 also chiefly in hedges of the low-lying pastures not far from the 

 coast. — H. Stuart Thompson. 



[The astonishing display of Hawthorn blossoms seems to have 

 attracted general attention, but can nowhere have been more remark- 

 able than in the counties of Dublin, Wicklow, and Westmeath, which 

 I visited at the end of May and beginning of June ; in the last, in 

 the MuUingar district, the branches were sometimes so laden with 

 blossom that no leaves were perceptible, and the effect in some places 

 was that of a fall of snow. — Ed. Journ. Bot.] 



YiciA BiTHTNiCA. — In drjdng a series of this Yetch for distri- 

 bution, I noticed the day after they were put in the press that many 

 tendrils had elongated and attached themselves to other specimens on 

 the same sheet. Even making allowance for possible slightly closer 

 proximity through pressvn-e, it is an interesting physiological fact. 



Last year, owing to the drought, I could not find a sign of any 

 portion of this annual Yetch in one of its well-known localities in 

 N. Somerset, where in June 1920 the grassy bank was partly clothed 

 with hundreds of fine plants in flower and fruit. This June the Yetch 

 is in fair quantity there, though rather shorter than usual. The 

 seeds of 1920 had failed to germinate last 3^ear. White, in his Flora 

 of Bristol, points out that this rare species is "remarkably uncertain 

 in quantity from year to year " ; and that on the high bushy bank 

 Journal of Botany. — Yol, GO. [July, 1922.] p 



