132 BRITISH AND FOREIGN 



In other cases, the circumstances under ■which a par- 

 ticular plant appears in England are often very suspicious. 

 Take the instance of the belladonna, or deadly nightshade, 

 an extremely rare British species, found only in the 

 immediate neighbourhood of old castles and monastic 

 buildings. Belladonna, of course, is a deadly poison, and 

 was much used in the half-magical, half-criminal sorceries 

 of the Middle Ages. Did you wish to remove a trouble- 

 some rival or an elder brother, you treated him to a dose 

 of deadly nightshade. Yet why should it, in company with 

 many other poisonous exotics, be found so frequently 

 around the ruins of monasteries ? Did the holy fathers — 

 but no, the thought is too irreverent. Let us keep our 

 illusions, and forget the friar and the apothecary in * Romeo 

 and Juliet.' 



Belladonna has never fairly taken root in English soil. 

 It remains, like the Roman snail and the Portuguese slug, 

 a mere casual straggler about its ancient haunts. But 

 there are other plants which have fairly established their 

 claim to be considered as native-born Britons, though they 

 came to us at first as aliens and colonists from foreign 

 parts. Such, to take a single case, is the history of the 

 common alexanders, now a familiar weed around villages 

 and farmyards, but only introduced into England as a pot- 

 herb about the eighth or ninth century. It was long grown 

 in cottage gardens for table purposes, but has for ages been 

 superseded in that way by celery. Nevertheless, it con- 

 tinues to grow all about our lanes and hedges, side by side 

 with another quaintly-named plant, bishop-weed or gout- 

 weed, whose very titles in themselves bear curious witness 

 to its original uses in this isle of Britain. I don't know 

 why, but it is an historical fact that the early prelates of 

 tlie English Church, saintly or otherwise, were peculiarly 

 liable to that very episcopal disease, the gout. Whether 



