349 



A NEW VARIETY OF SEDGE. 



p. FOX LEE, 

 Dewsbiny. 



Additionally to my discovery this year of the Hairy Sedge in 

 its remarkable prickle-glumed form, spinosa Mort., by the 

 canal side at Mirfield ; in the early part of July this year I hap- 

 pened to be in the sloping pastures on the eastern bank of the 

 beck of the pretty little valley, couched — a boat-shaped 

 depression — in the bleaker higher land to the south of Wood- 

 kirk Church. This is known as the Heybeck.* 



It is within three miles of Dewsbury, and yet it is a beauty 

 spot retaining some of its original ruralness ; and it was, indeed, 

 one of the happy hunting-grounds of a former generation of 

 working-men naturalists, who used to visit it for its gay tassels 

 of Dyer's Greenweed, the golden peasebloom sprays of which 

 give the prominent colour note — yellow, with rose-purple of 

 Betony, — to the dryer turf-clothed spoil heaps of pit ' trials ' 

 now long ago forgotten. 



These, however, make the pastures hereabouts vary vastly 

 in character. In one place a spring of chalybeate water oozing 

 through the soil on the brow will make a quag in which many 

 water-loving plants congregate ; though where the seeds come 

 from it is hard to say, and almost as miraculous is it to suppose 

 they have been there in the soil, awaiting a birth-moment for 

 thousands of years ; whilst in another, not a hundred yards 

 awa\% xerophiles such as the pill-headed Carex will occur in 

 plenty. As Dr. Lees says, ' the moral for the field-worker is 

 that all require searching, missing none, if the full tale, and the 

 secret of " Associations " is to be told.' 



Here, then, it was that comparing the constituents of field 

 after field, I came across, in one quite open moss-swampy strip 

 of sloping ground, grazed over, a few clumps of an unusual 

 graceful-looking hair-pedicelled Carex, with recurving bright 

 green leaves, and curving pensile spikelets, aggregated from 

 the upper sheath, which was quite new to me, although, of 

 course, its kinship to the wood-lover sylvatica was apparent. 

 Clearly on the track of ' a good thing,' for the unknown has ever 



* Hey — a corruption of Anglo-Sax //i'^f" — meaning" an enclosure, just as 

 beck means a little stream ; and no doubt the name was first given when 

 the glebe was enclosed at some period of the kirk's history. 



1909 Oct. I. 



