6 SEA-SIDE PLANTS. 



has its own peculiar plants ; plants winch will 

 grow nowhere else saline plants, which, if carried 

 away to grace some inland garden, droop and 

 pine for their native shore. Others grow not 

 only by the sea-side, .but on pasture lands to 

 which saline waters have access ; and some which 

 grow in our inland fields, yet are so much more 

 luxuriant near the shore, that we must consider 

 that as at least an especial place of their growth. 

 So small, however, is the number of wild plants 

 of the sea-side, that limited as is this little volume, 

 they can be enumerated in the chapter appro- 

 priated to them. 



There are few subjects more interesting to the 

 botanist than the adaptation of plants to their 

 peculiar places of growth. The most lofty Alpine 

 hills have their blossoms, and the deep blue 

 gentian thrives amid the snows, 



" The living flower that skirts the eternal frost ; " 



the sand has its sand- worts, which refuse to grow 

 on richer soils. The magnificent cedar is wild 

 on its native Lebanon only; Lapland boasts her 

 flower called Charles's Sceptre, which is never 

 seen beyond the limits of her own land. Even 

 the dreary Siberia has her own beautiful Cypri- 

 pedium, or, as we in English term it, the ladies' 

 slipper. Our streams have their water-lilies, our 

 meadows their field flowers, our woods their 

 anemones and hyacinths. At the extreme limits 

 of vegetation we find the wood sorrel, ferns, 

 lichens, and mosses cover the grey rocks ; one 

 lichen growing even on the forbidding surface of 

 the stalactite. There are plants which are indi- 

 genous to sulphureous springs, and a little flower 



