RAMBLES IN SARK. 



195 



generally concealed by overgrowing vegetation. Compare 

 these smooth round leaves with the feathery foliage of Yarrow, 

 the elegantly divided leaves of Fumitory, or the fern-like ones 

 of Hedge Parsley. Little boys and girls will find a delightful 

 amusement during the holidays in collecting specimens of all 

 the different kinds of leaves they meet with, pressing them 

 between old newspapers under a heavy weight until they are 

 thoroughly dry, and then gumming them down in the blank 

 pages of a common exercise book. Very soon an interesting 

 collection of beautiful leaf -forms will have accumulated, 

 recalling many a pleasant walk and recollections of days gone 

 by. And perhaps, who knows ? some day this unpretentious 

 bundle of dried leaves may gradually develop into a thoroughly 

 scientific and really valuable herbarium of British plants. 



Now it is time to specify two or three of the noteworthy 

 rarities of Sark, and if the incipient botanist in a burst of 

 enthusiasm starts off at once to search for them, and returns 

 unsuccessful, let him not be discouraged, for the plants will 

 not run away but will remain growing where they are, to be 

 discovered another day. First then, the Yellow Pimpernel, 

 an elegant creeping plant with trailing stems, bright leaves 

 and flowers like golden stars. The interesting point about 

 this species is that it grows nowhere in the Channel Islands 

 but in Sark. Then there is the Deptford Pink, with its 

 delicate rosy blossoms, found in a few localities in the interior 

 of the island, but absent in Guernsey and Jersey. To a 

 botanist, however, the greatest prize and treasure of all is the 

 French Cudweed, a continental plant which does not occur 

 anywhere else either in the Channel Islands or in the United 

 Kingdom. It is rather a neat-looking, unobtrusive species, 

 with grey-green foliage and brownish flowers, of the unmis- 

 takable Cudweed type. It grows plentifully enough in one or 

 two fields in a certain part of the island which it is better not 

 to specify too minutely lest the plant should be thinned out by 

 thoughtless collectors. 



So much harm has been done to local floras in this way 

 by persons who gather plants greedily, that one hesitates to 

 publish the exact habitat of any special rarity. Even in Sark 

 much mischief has been done. The grandest of all the British 

 ferns — the Osmunda, or Royal Fern — has been practically 

 eradicated by the persistent digging up of roots, so that at the 

 present day it grows only in one spot on the cliffs, where 

 fortunately it is quite inaccessible. In the same way another 

 beautiful fern, the Sea Spleenwort, has entirely disappeared 

 from most of its former stations, and is now very seldom to be 



