Page:VCH Bedfordshire 1.djvu/77

 BOTANY IT must be confessed that although a considerable proportion of the species of plants which actually occur have been put on record, yet their distribution through the various parishes of the county is at present inadequately known, and the knowledge of such critical genera as the brambles, roses and eyebrights, the segregation of which has during the last years of the nineteenth century been made the object of special study, is most imperfect. The publication of this sketch of the flora of the county, incomplete as it avowedly is, will, it is to be trusted, stimulate local workers to fill up the lacunae, and to prepare a complete flora such as exists for so many other counties. It is true a very excellent work on the subject, the Flora Bedfordiensis by the Rev. Charles Abbot, D.D., of Oakley Raynes, was published in 1798, but necessarily a work issued at that date is insufficient in detail, and has an archaic nomenclature. Moreover shortly after its publication the Enclosure Act led to a considerable change in the vegetation of the county from the introduction of hedges as separating boundaries to the fields, and from the enclosure of commons, some of which had at one time a heathy growth, but which soon under the influence of cultivation lost much of their original flora, and either as pasture or arable land became like their neighbours in possessing few plants of interest ; indeed so rare has the true heath [Erica cinerea) become that it now exists, it is said, in only one locality in the county. The higher cultivation of arable land and the more complete system of drainage have likewise been factors in gradually eliminating some of the original species from their homes and replacing them by less interesting and more widely dis- tributed plants. Nor is the process arrested ; each decade threatens some local species, and witnesses the encroachment of common plants. Need we wonder then that several plants mentioned by Abbot have either become extinct, or are now so scarce as to have evaded the observation of recent botanists. The area of the county is small, indeed only Hunts, Middlesex and Rutland are smaller in England. Compared with other counties its flora is small also ; there are several reasons, apart from the mere extent of surface, why this should be so, the chief of these perhaps being the excellent condition of tillage and cultivation of the surface soil, which necessarily means that the aboriginal features of the flora have long ago disappeared ; while, although so much of the surface is below two hun- dred feet in altitude, yet the drainage is so complete that few marshes, 37