Lees : Two U-Neecoeded Lincolnshiee Plants. 



5 



of the Neocomian greensand strata that in North Lincoln lie imme- 

 diately to the west of the chalk wolds. It is the same Pyrola minor, 

 L., that grows at the Copley end of the North Dean Wood, near 

 Halifax, and that has been so often confused with, and wrongly 

 published in plant-lists as P. media, Swartz. The short straight style 

 is the best character by which to differentiate them. It is only just as 

 long as the stamens, and even when the bloom has reached perfection 

 is included and hidden by (instead of projecting beyond as in media) 

 the incurving waxy petals that close over it. The flowers are scent- 

 less, and would appear to be self-fertilised for the most part, since I 

 have been unable to detect them to be visited by insects in the day- 

 time ; and although each individual bloom is somewhat proterandrous 

 (that is, the anther pollen floury and ripe before the stigmatic surface 

 is ready for the reception of the pollen), yet the closed petals serve to 

 prevent the escape of the pollen, or the access of pollen from con- 

 tiguous blooms. 



The Garduus pratensis, Huds. (Girsium Anglicum, Lamk) — the 

 marsh plume-thistle, is a rare, but handsome single-headed species, 

 and, unlike all the other British members of the genus save its 

 compeer of the mountains the melancholy thistle (C. heterophyllus) , it 

 is unarmed and not prickly. It would seem to be local in Lincoln- 

 shire as in other counties ; for, so far, I have come across it only in 

 one place — bordering a deep, wet, grassy ditch dividing the high road 

 from the fir wood upon the right-hand side of the Walesby road, half 

 a mile out of Market Rasen. It is to be found at intervals for some 

 few hundred yards, and in this shady situation grows much taller (three 

 to five feet high) and slenderer than I ever saw it in Yorkshire. In the 

 West Riding, G. prafensis, Huds., is a rare plant, known as certainly 

 occurring only in the marshy meadows around Askham bog, near 

 York, by the Aire, below Castleford, about opposite Fairburn, and 

 about Potteric Carrs, Doncaster. An old record of the Rev. W, 

 Wood's, in the Botanists'' Guide, of Turner and Dillwyn, gives it as 

 growing " between Goole and Thorne, with Peucedanum palustre and 

 Myrica gale^ I have sought it there in vain, though I have found 

 both the others thereabouts ; and I am not aware that for this locality 

 the plant has found recent confirmation at other hands. In the first 

 edition of " Huddersfield : its History and Natural History," it was 

 erroneously given as a plant of the district. The trivial name 

 *' pratense " is a bad one : young botanists frequently think of and 

 call the common creeping field-thistle, or the equally common marsh 

 thistle, by the same name • and both these — arz/e^sis and palmiris — « 



