In My Vicarage Garden 



not exactly a railway cutting, but it was a road 

 cutting made to divert a road for a railway, and 

 so may find a place here. Orchids seem especially 

 to look for a quiet and undisturbed place ; they 

 dislike removal, and require great care in growing 

 after being removed from their old quarters, and 

 such quiet places they seem to find in railway 

 embankments and cuttings. I have seen good 

 plants of O. pyraniidalis in a cutting on the Great 

 Western between Bath and Bristol, and this orchis 

 is very scarce in the immediate neighbourhood, 

 though it is abundant in some parts of the Cots- 

 wolds, perhaps twenty miles distant. In the same 

 neighbourhood I have seen the handsome large 

 butterfly orchis growing close to the rails. This 

 grows in woods near at hand, but not abundantly ; 

 and I never saw one outside these woods till this 

 one found a quiet resting-place that suited its 

 wants as well as the quiet of the woods. 



In another way it may happen that in years to 

 come the railway will be a record, and, perhaps, 

 the only record, of the nature of the country as it 

 originally was before the railway came to it. I 

 know of one piece of railway that passes through 

 an old common. Little by little the common is 

 getting covered with cottages, and the flora is 

 getting entirely destroyed by donkeys and other 

 animals, and by constant traffic. But between 

 the two hedges of the railway the old flora of the 

 common has well established itself, and is spread- 

 ing in such a way that there is little fear of its 

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