THE PRESERVATION OF OUR INDIGENOUS 
FLORA; ITS NECESSITY, AND THE MEANS 
OF ACCOMPLISHING IT. 
[Reprinted, hy permission, from the “ South-Eastern Naturalist,” 1902. J 
ARIOUS causes contribute to endanger the continued 
existence of many of the most beautiful and interest- 
ing species of wild plants in this country. Some of 
these are inevitable, and, however much their effects 
may be deplored, can only be endured : others both can and 
should be checked. In the former class I will mention, in 
the order of what I believe to be their scale of importance — 
drainage, improved farming and the increased area covered by 
buildings ; in the latter, the needless deruralising of rural dis- 
tricts, smoke, trade-collectors, and the excesses of tourists and 
of botanists. 
Within the last two centuries a very large area of land in 
this country, especially but not exclusively in what is known as 
the Fens, has by drainage been converted into cultivable land. 
Though still traversed by ditches, the habitat of an interesting 
aquatic flora, this land has largely lost its bog-plants, whicli 
include many species as valued by the botanist as are the insects 
which fed upon them by the entomologist. 
One of the most instructive branches of botanical study is 
that of the migrations of “ weeds of cultivation,” which formed 
the main topic of the paper communicated to our last Congress 
by Mr. Dunn. Most of these cornfield weeds are annual herbs 
introduced with foreign seeds, often because their seeds being 
smaller than those of our cultivated crops escape in a badly 
conducted process of cleaning. Their name of “ weeds ” im- 
plies, alas, that they are “ plants in the wrong place ” ; and the 
necessary care of the modern agriculturist to secure his very 
dubious profits means that the beautiful Lychnis Githago, Ccn- 
taurea Cyanus, and others are not as common now as they were 
thirty years ago, and even poppies are, perhaps, more confined 
to railway embankments and other uncultivated margins of 
cultivated ground. 
We can hardly expect to-day to find the rare Cyperus 
that grew on Walham Green a generation back, to say nothing 
of such plants as Butomus nmbellatus, Lathyrus Nissolia, or 
Sagittaria, which grew in Battersea Fields in 1840, or of 
several interesting species recorded in the eighteenth century 
from Tothill Fields, Westminster, near the site of the new 
Catholic cathedral ; whilst it was presumably the needs of 
surrounding buildings that caused the Metropolitan Board of 
Works to desiccate with a main drain the locality where thirty 
years ago I used to study Drosera on Hampstead Heath. 
Unintentionally also, no doubt, an eminent Royal Academician 
pitched upon the sole locality over a wide district for Herminium 
