2 PAWSON : THE POSITION OF ANNUALS. 
According to the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, the doom 
of annual plants would seem to be near. Biennial plants evidently 
do not occupy a much better position, for although they hold their 
ground for two years they produce seed but once. The other 
so-called monocarpic plants of tropical countries, not annual or 
biennial, as the Banana and the American Aloe, seem to me to be 
misnamed, for although they apparently perish after flowering, they 
usually give out suckers from the root and so enter upon a new 
existence on the same spot. 
If we turn to the species themselves and examine the ordinary 
conditions of life of the annuals of our own flora, we find that they 
O not as a matter of fact occupy the same ground as the perennials. 
They are the outcasts, the plants of waste ground, of dry and barren 
places, of rocks and sandy shores, of water-margins, of any spot 
where the rivalry of the true possessors of the soil is less keen. 
Seeding abundantly and growing rapidly, they are always the first to 
seize any newly-exposed soil, but they do not long retain their 
conquest. A heap of road-scrapings by the wayside is occupied at 
first by a gay crop of poppies and charlock and scentless mayweed, 
with groundsel, goosefoot, and fumitory, but the docks have got 
foothold before autumn, and the creeping-thistle, and in two years 
more they and the grasses share it between them. If a turf is taken 
from the sward, chickweed and annual speedwells and lady’s mantle 
may revel on the bare spot for a season, but the grass soon recovers 
its inheritance. Crumbling banks, where a fresh surface is often 
exposed, are a great resort of foxgloves; they maintain themselves 
with difficulty at a hedge bottom. Some annuals get their living as 
a snatch-crop on wall tops and dry rocks in the spring before the 
heat of summer begins, as Saxifraga tridactylites, Draba verna, and 
some short-lived grasses. The seedlings are up and in flower 
before the snow is well off the ground, and by the time the stones 
have become too parched to support any but the lowest forms of 
vegetation, they have sown their seeds and withered away. 
A large number of our annuals seem to be as dependent on 
man as the common mouse or the house-sparrow. He is always 
disturbing the ground and making room for them, and they follow 
him assiduously. How else could they live? Sir J. D. Hooker 
observes in the preface to his /Zora, ‘Few who have not gone into 
the subject have an idea how many plants would disappear from our 
Flora were the soil left undisturbed by man and the lower animals 
which he rears.’ What would the charlock do without the corn- 
fields, or the groundsel outside a garden, or the shepherd’s purse 
missing the waysides? The aliens and colonists would be forced to 
Naturalist, 
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