THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BRITISH PLANTS 417 
A recent measure for decentralising our local government seems 
to have created the necessity for some means of expending rates. 
The lighting of our country lanes by gas may be desirable; but I 
fail to see the necessity for replacing the turf edging of our foot- 
paths by stone orate kerbs, the destruction of many a roadside 
strip of grass and flowe s where the width of the roadway - aoe 
than the traffic je. rogue, and the wholesale plastering over of o 
hedge-banks e mud laboriously excavated oacsd our now 
formalised sta ditches. Such trimming of the turf along 
Watling Street by a county council destroyed the only locality in 
Northamptonshire for the beautiful Exyngiwm campestre, the ‘* Char- 
don Roland” of French flamboyant architecture.* No doubt 
employment is provided by this policy, and the rates are increased ; 
but the beauty of our country roads is being siepuetnanscly de- 
I feel constrained at this point to record the damage done by 
golf, since this same species, Eryngium campestre, has been destroyed 
by the players near New Romney in Kent, whilst from across the 
tlantic I learn that a rare Clematis is in danger of the same fate 
on ge eae 
1882 the late Professor a, published a long sag interest- 
ing “ist of the flowering p then found by him on Barnes 
Common.{ Barnes Common is til an open space, protested by a 
body of conservators from all depredators except golfers; but I 
very much doubt if Teesdalia nudicaulis, and some others pe meee the 
species found by Paley in 1882, can be found there he 
nm is surrounded by houses rs railways, eae ssevesed by 
commo 
well-drained roads, and it is exposed to an ever-increasing volume 
of smoke from Putney, cesdedeniehs, and the oe of London. 
e smoke nuisance is ans merely a sentimental one 
that, as it has already all but demolished the lichen-fiora of Epping 
Forest, § on the one side, and of Kew Gardens on the other, London 
smoke was killing the janipatn on the more distant Surrey hills. 
But not only are increasing areas round our manufacturing centres 
being rendered barren and. ugly, while the health of the community 
is ae from the contamination of the a fre as Pa Drue om 
has ee me in “ age ron this subject call t 
siention f Parliam o the fact that the very life of the build. 
ings in whieh they hold ‘her ee is being shortened by 
this same agency. It i oreover. aces could at leant be 
checked if even existing ledleliiGion pa callsnis 
We must all rejoice in the vastly increased pear of the 
beauties of the plant-world, especially by those ‘in populous city 
pent,”’ and in the well- meant, but often misdirected, — of the 
* G. C. Druce in the Cotteswold Report, as above 
Mrs. E. G. Britton, How the Wild Wrenmael are Protected. 
82. 
v. J. M. Crombie ‘‘ On the Lichen-Flora of Epping Forest, the 
Causes affecting its Recent Diminution,’’ Trans. Essex Field Club, iv. *(1884), 
pp. 54~' 
