59 
The Ecology of Calluna vulgaris. 
Japan in 1684 probably from China, where until to-day no true M. 
japonica has been collected, but an allied plant occurs, M. Bealei, 
which has been taken for the other one in this country. The 
beautiful garden Chrysanthemum, which is the national flower of 
Japan, was certainly introduced from China, yet the wild form, the 
original of the garden variety, grows in the south-western parts of 
Japan. Nowadays a great number of European and American 
plants are introduced into Japanese gardens, while quantities of 
Japanese plants are exported to foreign countries and especially to 
England, where it always gives me the intensest joy to see the 
plants of my native land. 
THE ECOLOGY OF CALLUNA VULGARIS. 
By M. Cheveley Rayner, B.Sc., 
(Lecturer in Botany , University College , Reading). 
[Plate III and Two Text-Figures]. 
T HE Ling ( Calluna vulgaris) is usually recorded as forming definite 
heath communities, in competition with other plants, only on 
poor and often acid soils, such as those which occur on Bagshot 
sands, or less typically on the washed-out soils sometimes found 
overlying limestone and chalk. 
A somewhat anomalous distribution of Calluna on parts of the 
chalk downs of Berkshire and Wiltshire has been described in a 
previous communication. 1 
In that paper it was recorded that sporadic communities of 
this plant occur on the higher parts of the downs, forming patches 
of typical heath vegetation quite different in character from the 
so-called “chalk heath ” of the South Downs and elsewhere. 
The distribution of these communities is roughly determined 
by the overlying deposits of clay-with-flints, which give rise in this 
neighbourhood to fertile loamy soils, with a low percentage of 
calcium carbonate. The soil in question has the appearance of a 
' Rayner, M. C., and Jones, W. N. “Preliminary Observations on the 
Ecology of Calluna vulgaris on the Wiltshire and Berkshire Downs.” New 
Phytologist, Vol. X, 1911, p. 227. 
