30 GUERNSEY. 
From a botanist’s point of view, the most interesting portion of 
this island is unquestionably that part which lies north of a line 
drawn from Grand Havre to St. Sampson’s Harbour. This ima- 
ginary line, scarcely more than a mile in length, traverses a belt 
of low-lying, marshy ground which, from the earliest times down to 
the beginning of the century, was inundated by the sea at high 
spring tides, so that the entire northern extremity of Guernsey 
became converted into an island. About the year 1812 this 
periodically submerged tract was reclaimed, and although the 
300 acres so recovered were, in the words of a contemporary writer, 
“to all appearance little better than a bed of sand,’ they became in 
course of time very good pasture land. This must have been a fine 
hunting-ground for the botanist, because brackish pools and salt 
marshes were scattered about on all sides. Gradually, however, 
these marshes have been drained, and the ground brought into 
cultivation and built upon; hence the disappearance of many plants 
which flourished when Babington visited the island sixty years ago, 
and which continued to exist there for probably a quarter of a 
century afterwards. 
Further north, however, there is plenty to be found. One of the 
most conspicuous objects in the landscape is the Vale Windmill, 
which stands on an eminence. Within a radius of a mile or two 
from that spot a large proportion of the best flowering plants in the 
Sarnian flora are to be found. Indeed, the collector will have need 
of a capacious vasculum if he spends a summer’s day in rambling 
over this charming country, with its network of winding ‘lanes, its 
deeply indented coast, and the green, undulating sward and sand 
dunes of Lancresse Common. The following plants have their 
headquarters in this district :— 
Brassica Cheiranthus. Gnaphalium luteo-album. 
Silene conica. Cicendia pusilla. 
quinquevulnera. Herniaria glabra. 
Ononis reclinata. Cynosurus echinatus. 
Arthrolobium ebracteatum. Bromus maximus. 
Bupleurum aristatum. Isoetes Hystrix. 
The vicinity of Vazon Bay, about four miles westward of the 
town of St. Peter-Port, is another locality exceedingly rich in good 
flowering plants, perhaps hardly inferior to the one just described. 
Conchologists will be interested to see the rare Tenby snail (Hedx 
pisana) in immense numbers on the sand-hills by the sea wall; they 
are not indigenous, however, and the shells are less handsomely 
marked than the Welsh specimens. 
Half a mile inland from Vazon Bay lies the famous marsh known 
as Grande Mare, the sole remaining relic of what was once an 
extensive area of swampy, bogey ground. Quite a number of plants 
occur nowhere else in the island, so that, if the regrettable project 
