THE ESSEX MARSHES 137 



And if those vast stretches of lonely marsh-land, 

 where the peregrine and the raven may still occa- 

 sionally be seen, have a strong fascination for the 

 ornithologist, they are no less dear to the botanist. 

 The flora has but little changed since the days of the 

 early herbalists, and most of the plants noticed by 

 Gerarde and Merrett and John Ray and Adam Buddie 

 may be found in their ancient habitats. Now, as then, 

 the wild celery is plentiful in the marshes ; the rarer 

 form of sea-lavender continues to flourish at Walton, 

 and the beautiful marsh-mallow, with its stem and 

 leaves thickly clothed with starry down, puts forth 

 its pale, rose-coloured flowers every autumn, as when 

 in the sixteenth century old Gerarde found it " very 

 abundantly" in the salterns " by Tilbury blockhouse." 

 There is the same hoary growth of orache and worm- 

 wood, the wild beetroot grows as rankly as ever on the 

 sea-banks, and the twin-spiked cord-grass {Sparlina 

 stricta) remains the characteristic plant of the muddy 

 salterns as in the year 1667 when Merrett first recorded 

 it as growing at "Crixcy Ferry in Essex." A speci- 

 men of this plant, gathered "in August 1703 in the 

 marshes about the river Wallfleet, near Fambridge 

 Ferry in Dengey-hundred in Essex," may be seen in 

 the Buddie herbarium, now preserved in the British 

 Museum at South Kensington, which is one of the 

 earliest collections of British plants in existence. 



The stretch of country between the beautiful estuary 

 of the Blackwater and the mouth of the river Colne is 

 one of special interest to the naturalist. In this district 

 at least fourteen decoys formerly existed, and one, 

 occasionally used in hard winters, remains. In Ray's 

 famous Synopsis of British Plants there are many 

 references to these marshes, only some twelve miles 



