4 Plant-life of the Oxford District 



little to attract the visitor from other more favoured districts. Yet it is this 

 very commonplace character which constitutes its greatest asset. With 

 attention no longer distracted by special factors or extreme conditions of 

 soil and water-supply, one may settle down to the examination of just what 

 constitutes the ordinary flora of the river-valleys of the central plain of 

 England, its limitations and its expression in common types which represent 

 the response to a fairly average condition of environmental factors. 

 Recognizing, again, the important fact that however commonplace such 

 a flora may be in the present locality and conditions, it is not so very 

 widely spread. The floras of other more emphasized biological districts are 

 equally commonplace to the natives of those regions, and the plants of an 

 English countryside may have a special scientific interest alike for the 

 inhabitants of Greenland's icy mountains or those of India's coral strand, as 

 conversely the English botanist is expected to be familiar with the ecology 

 of these distant lands. 1 To a floating population of students, the analysis 

 of the local flora may serve as a guide to the methods of attacking the 

 general problems of plant-life quite as well as that of any other. Though it 

 may be characterized as ' homely ' in its general features, 2 it is nevertheless 

 essentially British and English in its more fundamental factors. In spite 

 of modern tendencies for admiring any country but one's own, it must be 

 remembered that for all those who in this country are still privileged to 

 trace an Anglo-Saxon origin, plant-life of this description has been intimately 

 associated with the life of the essentially English race for a period of some 50 

 generations (1,500 years). To our mediaeval ancestors the ecological factors 

 of the plant-life of such a countryside, with its woodland, pasture, arable 

 land and streams, were the primary factors of their own lives also ; as their 

 continued existence and material comforts depended solely on the special 

 plant-products of the land, whether in the form of timber, 3 food-grains, 

 fodder, vegetables, fruit, and even medicines, 4 to an extent that is difficult 

 to realize by a present town -bred population fed mainly from overseas ; 

 while 50 per cent, of the nation live in towns of 50,000 inhabitants or more, 

 and even in the smaller towns comparatively few are brought into direct 

 contact with the primary life of the district around them. While, again, in 

 the past, the common plant-lore of the countryside has been naturally 

 incorporated in older English literature, as typified by the Shakespearian 

 drama, books are written for a modern urban generation to explain the 

 ' plant-allusions ' of Shakespeare, 5 just as Bible-students require to be 

 primed with references to an equally unfamiliar flora of Palestine and the 

 ecological relations of the Syro-Arabian desert. 



The present discussion is restricted to an account of the region more 

 immediately surrounding Oxford, within reasonable distance for investiga- 



1 Troup (1921), Silviculture of Indian Trees. 



Schimper (1903), Plant Geography, Eng. Trans., p. 688]; Holttum (1922), Journal of Ecology, 

 x, I, The Vegetation of West Greenland. 



2 P. B. Shelley, Univ. Coll. 1810, 'The Country near Oxford has no pretensions to peculiar 

 beauty, but it is quiet and pleasant and rural, and purely agricultural after the good old fashion.' 



* In early times the success of English armies was based on the equipment of archers with 

 a remarkable type of self-bow determined by the special properties of the wood of 7'axus ; as in 

 later times the navy depended on the quality of English-grown Quercus, Oak-timber also gave 

 efficiency to building construction. 



* British Botany begins officially with the essentially medical works of Turner, 1551. 



6 Grindon (1883), The Shakespeare Flora : Ellacombe (1878), The Plant-lore and Garden- 

 craft of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare-country, as more particularly the district around Stratford- 

 on-Avon in Warwickshire, is but 37 miles NW. of Oxford. The character of the flora is identical ; 

 the same masses of woodland, alluvial pastures, and slow-moving streams are characteristic features ; 

 and the Avon at Stratford is closely similar to the Isis above Oxford. It is also interesting to note 

 that neither of these exponents of Shakespeare's botany, on general principles, appears to have been 

 very familiar with the ecology of the Stratford countryside. 



