130 Railway Birds and Flowers 



journey ; yet they find, even more than birds, a 

 favourite home on the fringes of the permanent 

 way. All the common English flowers, and many 

 of the rare ones, can be seen from the windows of 

 a train in the course of a year's travel in different 

 parts of the country ; and the profusion of these 

 blossoms of the railway is as remarkable as their 

 variety. Wild flowers and weeds form, after all, 

 but a single class of plants, and the slopes of the 

 railway line provide in most cultivated districts 

 one of the few strips of ground which are never 

 tilled or weeded, or in any way subjected to those 

 rigorous principles of cultivation which root out 

 the tares from the corn, and make even a green 

 hayfield a very different thing from a wild marsh 

 meadow. But the railway does not merely provide 

 the wild flowers with an asylum ; it specially 

 consults their needs. Over the whole extent of 

 British soil there is no situation in which a display 

 of mingled blossoms will flourish more gaily than 

 on a sloping bank or cliff-side that catches the 

 southern or south-western sun. Thousands of 

 miles of such sloping terraces are provided by the 

 cuttings and embankments of the railway lines 

 of our hilly isle ; and a large proportion of these 

 slopes have exactly the exposure which plants 

 best love. 



The traveller who leaves London by the North- 

 Western line has on his right hand, for the first 

 forty miles or so, a continual succession of green 

 banks that rise above his head and face in a south- 

 westerly direction. For nearly the whole of those 



