BOTANY 



NORFOLK considered from a physical and also from a botanical 

 point of view is an irregular oval tract of land of 1,291,170 

 acres in extent, about 65 miles in its greatest length from east 

 to west from Yarmouth to Wisbeach, by about 40 in its 

 greatest breadth from north to south from Blakeney to Bressingham. 

 The two apices of this oval consist of flat alluvial marshy land, the 

 eastern one containing the ' Broads ' and the western the ' Fens,' the 

 eastern skirts of the great fens of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely ; 

 between these marshes rises a broad wedge of gently undulating country, 

 which nowhere attains a height of 350 feet. Its two highest points are 

 a range of hills between Cromer and Holt on the east and near Massing- 

 ham on the west. Under nearly the whole, with the exception of its 

 north-west corner, of this central portion of the county lies chalk which 

 sometimes rises so near the surface as to give a calcareous character to the 

 soil, which is otherwise mostly light, sandy, or gravelly, with marshy, 

 peaty accumulations in the beds of the rivers and streams. The rainfall 

 is light, averaging for the last hundred years about 24I inches per 

 annum. There is rather more than a hundred miles of sea coast, varying 

 from chalk, gravel, or clay cliff, or sandy, stony beach, to salt marsh, 

 much of which is more or less overflowed by the tide. 



The enclosure of a large portion of the common and waste land of 

 the county does not date back more than a hundred years, and fortunately 

 much of what is now drained and cultivated was botanized over by keen 

 and skilful observers before its character was changed, as may be seen by 

 reference to the works of the older writers on the British flora, and it is 

 very remarkable how few of the plants of which they left records have 

 become extinct. It is difficult to name more than two species which 

 seem to be hardly worth looking for at the present day, and only one of 

 these, Malaxis paludosa, owes its absence to the extinction of the smaller 

 bogs by drainage ; the other, Holosteum umbellatum, is in all probability 

 lost, but if it be so it is from a different cause, the destruction of old 

 walls in the towns. The progress of improvement and development of 

 the sea coast particularly is sadly interfering with some of our rarer plants, 

 as for example with Medicago syhestris, which has this year (1900) been 

 very hardly dealt with at Cromer in the construction of works for the 

 defence of the town from the sea. Still many more species have been 

 added to the county list during the last fifty years than can possibly have 

 disappeared, and the close of the nineteenth century witnesses no diminu- 

 tion in the number of species which are certainly to be found if looked 

 for perseveringly. It is true that although rare plants have not been lost 



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