Regression of Cultivated Land 93 



As examples of minor changes, affecting easily accessible stations 

 within the current year, may be instanced : 



The Fencing of ' Open ' Brasenose : The extension of the Golf Course 

 over Lye Hill, replacing pasture and arable fields: The cultivation of 

 Bullingdon Bog Valley, and the drainage of its lower portion : The 

 Reconstruction of Iffley Mill Weir : The clear-felling of a quarter of old 

 Wood (Milestone Piece), Bagley Wood : The extension of allotments at 

 Manor Road (flood-pasture) : The Council Houses in Iffley Road, Cowley 

 Road, Abingdon Road, replacing pasture fields: The New Loop and 

 extension of building at Iffley Turn, in pasture fields : The reconstruction 

 of the Railway Bridge over the Thames, with denudation and remaking 

 of embankments : The first appearance of a notice against Trespassers on 

 ' Private Land ' of a meadow in the Iffley alluvial area, as also on the 

 scrub-covered rubbish-heaps of Headington Quarry. 



The conventional notice, which has no special legal significance, may 

 be merely a crude threat to unwelcome strangers, or a method of evading 

 responsibility for their welfare ; but often merely expresses a dog-in-the- 

 manger type of mentality, and the addition of barbed wire is a deliberately 

 unfriendly act. 



VII. ALIENS AND ADVENTIVES 



By an alien is conventionally understood a plant which is known to 

 have been introduced by human agency, or preferably a plant which is 

 associated with human occupation of land. The term is wholly metaphori- 

 cal, and like other metaphorical expressions is likely to be misleading. 

 To previous generations the general idea sufficiently distinguished between 

 plants which were assumed to be 'native' or * indigenous' to the country, 

 and others which came in from foreign sources ; this general impression 

 following from the conception that native plants were created, or at any rate 

 ' evolved ' in the land where found. The fact remains that all plants in this 

 country are immigrant at some time or another ; the expression alien is 

 purely relative, as applied by the race in possession to the race that is 

 coming. The Englishman who assumes that he is a native of this country 

 was as alien to the older Celtic races, as any representatives of the interesting 

 civilizations of Central Europe may be to us at the present day. So long as 

 the period of human occupation of the land was considered from the stand- 

 point of the historical epoch of 2,000 years, the term alien merely expressed 

 a plant of which there was some evidence of introduction during that period. 

 With the extension of the time during which man is known to have lived in 

 this country to something like 50,000-100,000 years, the subject takes on 

 a much wider aspect. 



Older attempts at analysis of this problem have attempted to grade 

 plants as native, denizen, colonist, alien, 1 according to degrees of establish- 

 ment ; and the term alien is generally retained to cover all the cases of forms 

 which have come in with the aid of man, to become more or less naturalized. 

 The term ' adventive ' conveniently meets the case of those whose importa- 

 tion is so casual and so recent that they have so far not had time to show 



diameter. One comes immediately to barbed wire, the cultivated arable fields of Pickett's Heath 

 and houses. The track continues on for half a mile to meet the main road at Hill Crest (500 ft.), 

 and a pilgrimage of disillusion ends appropriately at the Boar's Hill Shop ' (Howard and Nicholson, 

 Licensed to sell Tobacco and Methylated Spirit). There is no other ' signal elm that looks on 

 Ilsley Downs ', and the spirit of the generation that prompted these lines is now something less than 

 the shadow of a dream. 



i Watson (1847), Cybele Britannica, p. 63. 



