Page:VCH Sussex 1.djvu/87

 BOTANY SUSSEX owing to its varied geological formations, its downs differing in elevation, its extensive weald, its forests, its cliffs, and its long seaboard, indented to the westward by estuaries, is one of the most interesting of our southern counties with respect to its flora. It has been fortunate too in having attracted the attention of some of the more eminent of English naturalists in early times. As preliminary, therefore, a short history of the botany of the county is here sketched.^ In Gerarde's Herball or General Historie of Plants, 1633, we have the earliest account with which I am acquainted of plants with their localities in the county. Of the beech, the chief ornament of the Sussex hangers, he says : ' It groweth very plentifully in many forests and desart places of Sussex. The Sea Holly I found growing at Rye and Winchel- sea, and the Rock Sampier.' He also gives a figure, without locality, of the spiked rampion now met with in Sussex only, well describing it as ' bearing at the top of the stalke a great thicke bushy eare, full of little long floures closely thrust together like a Fox-taile.' This plant, which occurs at Mayfield and its vicinity, is not known in any other district in Great Britain. Another woodcut of Gerarde may be mentioned here. It is an excellent one of the pease earth-nut, with its peculiar tubers, which ' by the Dutch are called tailled mise, of the similitude or likenesse of domestical! mise, which the blacke round and long nuts with a piece of string hanging out behind do represent ' — and to a dead, shrivelled mouse they have certainly a quaint resemblance. Recorded only in Essex, Devon and Sussex, it was found at Eastbourne in 1888 by Mr. R. D. Postans. In 1640 Parkinson mentions the bulbiferous coralwort not pre- viously met with in England. It is still a very rare species in Sussex. In 1690 John Ray, the 'father of English Botany' published his Syjwpsis MethoJica Stirpium Britannicarum. He visited this county several times, and in a letter to Mr. Courthorpe, of Danny, April 28, 1692, ^ I wish to express my thanks to the following friends and correspondents who have informed me of the discovery of additional species and stations : Miss R. L. Arnold, Miss Gould, Mrs. S. Butcher, Mrs. A. E. Lomax, Mr. B. Oakeshott, Messrs. J. Anderson, A. Bennett, F.L.S., P. Coombes, W. H. B. Fletcher, J. & H. Groves, F.L.S., J. H. A. Jenner, H. C. Miller, Dr. F. V. Paxton, F. Townsend, F.L.S., W. C. Unwin, the Revs. E. N. Bloomfield, E. R. Ellman, A. A. Evans, A. Fuller and W. Moyle Rogers, F.L.S., who have aided me both as to the phanerogams and cryptogams. I 41 6