WEEDS OF OUR FIELDS, WAYSIDES AND TOWNS. 7 



survey of British Botany in the days before the Britons or 

 their Xeolithic predecessors come to disturb the conditions 

 that preceded them. 



The arrival of man in any region is about the biggest 

 catastrophe that can well occur. He interferes with 

 everything, but not always very successfully. He usually 

 begins by hacking at the forests or burning the grass. 

 The tops of the mountains do not much attract him at 

 early stages of his career, but the river plains do, and he 

 usually clears them and breaks up the surface for his 

 crops. The precise stages of the change may not be very 

 easy to distinguish, but in actual fact we have in Britain 

 several rather well defined regions or botanical stations 

 where the plants I ventured to call pagans, or villagers, 

 exist in quantity and proportion increasing from zero to 

 totality. Let me suppose a simple country scene, a wood 

 with an adjacent meadow, and beyond a cornfield with a 

 cart track and hedges. It will be found possible to make 

 three separate lists of plants for the wood the meadow and 

 the cornfield, respectively, and they will hardly overlap by 

 a single species. 



It is true that the primroses, blue-bells, and anemones 

 may extend a few yards from the actual edge of the wood, 

 and the tall wood thistle, Cnicus sylvestris, may find it 

 possible to exist in a swampy spot in the meadow, but the 

 thick matted turf of perennial grasses and other plants, 

 none of which can grow in the shade, will form the flora 

 of the meadow. Man has here interfered a little, but 

 not much. He has left the roots alone, and though his 

 cattle have cropped the surface for centuries, nature has 

 asserted herself and a balance has been arrived at. The 

 turf plants hold their own just as in the days of the earliest 

 gwents or forest clearings. Nevertheless, grasses and 

 clovers are not utter savages, and a selective work has been 



