104 ELEMENTARY BOTANY 
CHAPTER XV 
FIELD WORK 
It may be helpful to indicate a few observations which even 
beginners in botany can make for themselves, and which will 
add very much to the interest of the subject, for it is 
impossible to have any first-hand knowledge of plant life 
- merely from books. It is true that the parts of a plant can 
be examined in class, or at home, but little can be known of 
the lite of the plant, of its mode of growth, apart from its 
surroundings. 
The locality in which a plant is found should 
be carefully noted, whether it grows in hedges, 
in meadows, on rocks, on exposed hills, in bogs, by running 
streams, in stagnant water, by the sea, etc. Books, however 
good, cannot give an adequate idea of this. For instance, 
the habitat of the plant Butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris) is 
thus described in Bentham’s “Botany,” “Among mountain rills 
and on wet rocks,” and this is absolutely correct ; but what a 
very different idea one gets of the situations in which the — 
plant will grow, and its abundance, by walking over the high 
hills of the Lake District, or of the Scotch Highlands. There 
the plant is found literally by hundreds, on the very mountain 
paths between the stones, clinging to the sides of the rocks, 
and in boggy patches, though not so abundantly in this latter 
situation as on the rocky paths. | 
The month, and even the day of the month, 
in which a plant puts forth its leaves and 
flowers, and whether the flowers come out before the leaves, 
- should be recorded. In this way some idea of the effect of 
climate—of a severe winter, a late spring, east winds, etc.—is 
obtained. Again, the same plant will flower much earlier in 
some parts of England than in others. In the New Forest 
The Habitat. 
The Season. 
