Bristol 36otan\> in 1914. 
By Jas. W. White, FX.S. 
HE progress of local field-botany during the past year can 
be described as in all respects satisfactory. Outstanding 
incidents of importance include an addition to the Bristol list of 
two species of flowering plants not previously known within 
our area. Other discoveries — almost if not quite as gladdening 
as the finding of new plants in the district — have confirmed old 
records for several rarities, records made long ago by our fore- 
runners who in describing their gatherings did not always leave 
the exact directions that would have guided other folk to the 
localities they noted. And so, for half a century sometimes, 
their botanical successors have been hunting for those spots, 
have drawn blank, and it may be have tried to cover their failure 
by proclaiming that the desired plants must " have died out," or 
(to use a frequent expression of one of my old friends when thus 
thwarted) "have been destroyed by quarrying " ; when, as it 
eventually proved, no quarryings were thereabout ! 
It will be seen that most of these successes are due to the 
assiduity of a rising generation of botanists whose good work it 
is the pleasant privilege of a veteran to welcome and to chronicle 
in this place. He ventures to believe that these young and active 
ones will go on working in sympathetic fellowship, and by their 
efforts keep Bristol botany on the high level it may claim to 
have attained. 
Ranunculus Lingua L. In 1865 Mr. T. H. Yabbicom gathered 
the Great Spearwort on "Walton Moor" and placed a speci- 
men in the herbarium of this Society. So far as is known to 
the writer the plant was not again noticed in that neighbourhood 
until 1914, when it was re-discovered by the Misses Cundall in 
a peaty ditch, well choked with vegetation, a short distance west 
of Clapton-in-Gordano Church. There was a fair quantity, 
extending about 100 yards, but when that ditch in turn is 
cleared and dug out another lengthy period of scarcity will 
probably follow. 
The small patches of R. Lingua that occur in the Bristol 
district are separated from each other by wide intervals. It is 
a species that never spreads or scatters itself over large areas 
even when the surrounding ground appears identical in every 
respect. Thus, on the great expanse of peat-moor between 
Highbridge and Glastonbury this plant grows only in one place 
where last year there seemed to be no more and no less of it than 
there was forty years ago. 
Helleborus viridis L. Miss I. M. Roper has shown me a nice 
clump in an old orchard near the Severn in Hallen Marsh. This 
is quite a new locality for the plant. 
