XXIII. 



SUNDEW AND BUTTEBWOBT. 



SHOWERY August weather, with gleams of sunshine 

 interspersed, is just what the little blue butterwort best 

 loves : and coming out into the patch of bog above the 

 Home Fields to look for it this morning, I find its 

 strange spurred flowers out by dozens, among the mossy 

 bits where the undrained pools lie thick with red rusty 

 sediment between the tufted grassy islets, and the peat 

 yields like a saturated sponge beneath one's hesitating 

 feet. There is nothing wilder and more natural left in 

 England than these frequent oases of marshy ground, 

 dotted about through the great sheet of artificially 

 drained and cultivated farm-land that coders the plain or 

 the hillside ; and here alone one might compile a special 

 calendar from spring to autumn a chronicle which 

 should note from day to day the budding of the rushes 

 and the sedges, the flowering of the flags and feather- 

 foils, the fruiting of bog-asphodels and great osmunda 

 ferns. Everywhere else, save on a few lonely moors or 

 heaths and barren mountain-tops, our true native flora 

 has been mostly killed off before the spread of tillage and 

 the steady march of those cultivated weeds which came 

 to us first from Western Asia, and which are now mak- 

 ing the tour of the world with English seed-wheat and 

 English clover. We can hardly say, indeed, what the 

 real English flowers of the plains were originally like ; 

 for some of them must now be quite extinct, and others 

 must have grown weedier and coarser to suit the new 



