SEA-SIDE PLANTS. 5 



some once beautiful country, says, " He turneth 

 the land into barrenness," literally, "into salt- 

 ness;" and the scanty herbage and the small 

 number of trees and flowers usually found on the 

 vast saline deserts of Africa, or the sandy regions 

 of the countries of the East, are proofs at once of 

 the injury done to vegetation by salt. On some 

 lands of Cheshire, even of late years, when a soil 

 has produced too abundantly the rushes and weeds 

 which trouble the agriculturist, he has laid rock 

 salt upon the earth to destroy them. 



But it is only lands very near the sea whose 

 produce is injuriously affected either by the 

 muriates of the atmosphere which have passed 

 over it, or by the saltness existing in the earth. 

 A portion of salt is favourable to the growth of 

 plants, and the supply of moisture derived from 

 so large a body of water renders the land at a 

 small distance more fertile than those parts of the 

 earth's surface which are further from the coast. 

 Every one at all acquainted with the southern 

 part, especially, of our island, can call to mind 

 some quiet nooks of sunshine in which the wild 

 flowers attain great size and beauty, and crowd 

 the hedgebank or meadow, only just screened by 

 a cliff from the rudest breezes of the sea. What 

 Keats said of the Isle of Wight, might equally 

 well apply to some parts of the coast of Devon- 

 shire : " I have found," said the invalid poet, 

 " several delightful wood alleys, and copses, and 

 quiet freshes ; as for primroses, the isle ought to 

 be called Primrose Island that is, if the nation 

 of cowslips agree thereto, of which there are divers 

 clans just beginning to lift up their heads," 



But, barren as the soil is close to the sea, yet it 



