THE NATURALIST 



FOR 1900. 



WEST LANCASHIRE FLORA NOTES. 



J. A. WHELDON, 



Liverpool. 



For many years Mr. Albert Wilson has been engaged in the 

 collection of material for a Flora of this Watsonian vice-county, 

 and for the past two years I have been collaborating with him 

 in the work. It is with the greatest pleasure that we observe 

 a botanist of such attainments as Mr. F. Arnold Lees devoting 

 some attention to the botany of the county in ' The Naturalist ' 

 for October, p. 299. Workers in this field are unfortunately 

 not numerous, and as published records are few, there is some 

 reason for Mr. Lees' statement that West Lancashire has been 

 'sadly neglected.' Nevertheless, perhaps quite unknown to 

 him, steady progress has been made in cataloguing the plants 

 of the county and tracing their distribution through its various 

 sub-divisions. Mr. Albert Wilson recorded a large number of 

 West Lancashire species through the medium of Mr. Lees 

 and the Botanical Record Club, and since the demise of that 

 organisation he has continued to devote a good deal of his 

 spare time to the elucidation of the local Flora with most 

 val uable results. Several of the new county records mentioned 

 by Mr. Lees have been long known to Mr. Wilson or me as 

 integers in the florula of V.C. 60, some of them from numerous 

 stations. With a view to enlisting further aid we are about to 

 publish a list of species not recorded in 'Topographical Botany 5 

 or the Botanical Record Club Reports. 



Rubus radula, mentioned incidentally under R. rusticctnus in 

 Mr.' Lees' paper, appears to be a new county record, although 

 attention ;s not called to the fact. This species does not appear 

 in 'Topographical Botany,' nor in Mr. Rogers' more recent 

 census list of these plants published in the ' Journal of Botany.' 

 It must be exceedingly local in West Lancashire, where the more 

 glandulose Rubi are represented chiefly bv Rubus dasyphyllu& 

 Rogers, and forms of A\ hystrix and A', dumetorum. 



