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Note on Melilolus officinalis. By W. A. Bromfield, M.D., F.L.S. 



Sir William Hooker gives this as an annual in his ' British Flora,' 

 by most authors it is more correctly marked as biennial or perennial. 

 That it is not annual I have a convincing proof, in its appearance this 

 year in prodigious quantity all over a copse called Bloodstone Copse,* 

 near Ashey in this island, where, previous to the brushwood having 

 been cleared last spring, little or none of the plant was to be seen. At 

 this moment the entire cleared space is filled with tall bushy plants 

 of Melilotus, so closely crowded as completely to hide the ground, yet, 

 of the many thousands, I might almost say millions, of specimens, I 

 could find but a single individual producing a small flowering branch, 

 and which was doubtless one amongst the few scattered unnoticed 

 about the copse, that had passed the first year of its growth. 



W. A. Bromfield. 



Ryde, Isle of Wight, September, 1845. 



Note on Atriplex hortensis. By W. A. Bromfield, M.D., F.L.S. 



Rambling about a month since upon the shore between Ryde and 

 Binstead, I was much struck by finding an Atriplex scattered along 

 the beach, in company with other species of the genus, which appeared 

 wholly new to me. On showing specimens of it in seed to Mr. Ba- 

 bington when down here lately, that gentleman pronounced them to 

 be A. hortensis, a plant formerly cultivated in British gardens in lieu 

 of spinach, but at the present day, I believe, wholly disused and for- 

 gotten. The locality in which I found it was quite a wild one, 

 namely, on the sea-beach just above high- water-mark, and close 

 under the wooded banks of slipped clay which skirt that part of the 

 coast, growing, as I have said, with other species of Orache (Atriplex 

 rosea, patula, &c.), either on the bare soil or amidst masses of sea- 

 weed. The plant was not abundant, neither was it very sparingly 

 dispersed the whole distance along the line of coast, single plants oc- 

 curring at moderate intervals for the space of, perhaps, one third of a 

 mile or more. The difiiculty is, to account for the appearance of a 



* This copse derives its name from the pebbles in a spring which rises here being 

 stained with marks exactly resembling blood, in miraculous commemoration of a san- 

 guinary conflict, which tradition records to have taken place on the spot between the 

 islanders and their Danish invaders. The legend is still current amongst, and de- 

 voutly credited by, the rustics of Ashley and its neighbourhood. 



