198 



RAMBLES IN SARR. 



beauty, than the marshy banks and swampy borders of the 

 little cliff-streams that meander among the fernclad hills. 



Wild flowers of many colours, shapes and sizes, we have 

 now gathered in the course of our wanderings, and many 

 remarkable forms of floral beauty which we had never noticed 

 before have attracted our attention ; but not one of them all 

 is so curious as the one which has been reserved for the last — 

 Duckweed. No one but an expert botanist would imagine 

 that the little plant known as Duckweed is just as truly a 

 flowering plant as a Daisy or a Violet — and yet it is so. In 

 pools and roadside ditches, in old wells and cattle-troughs, the 

 surface of the water is sometimes covered with little detached 

 particles that are crowded together and form a yellowish 

 green floating scum. Each of these little particles consists of 

 an oval or roundish frond or leaflet, which all its life floats 

 upon the water in company with myriads of others, and each 

 frond has a single hairlike rootlet hanging from the under 

 side. Now, the surprising thing is this : that each one of 

 these floating particles is a complete and full-grown plant, 

 although it possesses neither stem nor leaves. Its mode of 

 increase is by budding, and only on very rare occasions 

 it produces flowers ; and, as may be supposed, these are of the 

 most rudimentary description. 



Here our rambles in Sark in search of wild flowers come 

 to an end. The lover of nature, to whom the "flower in the 

 crannied wall " is a thing of beauty, no matter whether it be 

 rare or not, will continually find here at every turn, and during 

 all seasons of the year, something fresh to admire, linger over, 

 and study. And this need not be only among the flowers ; 

 there are gems of exquisite beauty in the delicate mosses that 

 lurk half concealed amid the larger vegetation, or spread their 

 velvet cushions upon the wayside boulders. And strange 

 examples of lowly plant life are met with in the scaly lichens 

 that clothe those stupendous rock masses with broad patches 

 of rich brown, silver grey and olive, or with that glorious 

 orange glow that tips the sea rocks, and, as Ruskin finally 

 says, " reflects the sunsets of a thousand years." 



