DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS AND PLANTS IN FELSTEAD, ESSEX. 201
a large bed of Horse-radish. For some years subsequently the
leaves were hoed off once in the spring and reaped in the autumn,
and in the winter the crowns occasionally fell a victim to the plough-
share. This adverse treatment was not excessive, yet the plants
only lived about twenty years.
The Common Elm (Ulmus campestris), (seedless in England)
on the other hand, makes its way well in North Essex. It is the
commonest tree in the hedges, and may be said to flourish in the
Blackwater valley above Braintree, and seems to delight in striking
its roots into the Westleton gravel and sands which there predominate.
There are some very fine trees at Saling Grove, and on the village
green there, there is a magnificent specimen which girths twenty-one
feet at five feet from the ground. It perhaps exceeds a hundred feet
in height, and at the top has produced a sport which may be called
a tree in miniature.
The nidus upon which a seed falls directly affects the distribu-
tion of plants, and in some cases ultimately gives a character to the
landscape. Thus we often speak of the prevalence of an arenaceous
or calcareous flora, which is equivalent to stating the final outcome
of distribution for that locality. In Essex these results are not so
marked; the variety of forms bearing some proportion to the variety
of soils. We are not quite without evidence as to the difficulties
plants have met with in colonizing our county. In my neighbour-
hood there are a few lanes in which the Chalky Boulder Clay is
exposed with scarcely any covering of surface soil, and at some
places none at all. The flora of those lanes is, as regards indi-
viduals, very meagre, and has been such for the last half century.
If therefore plants can make no headway with their present wealth
of numbers and immediate contiguity, what a sad disadvantage they
must have been at in earlier Post-Glacial times. It may even be
conjectured that the colonisation of East Anglia fell behind some
other counties.
I would here call attention to the general appearance of wild
vegetation in North Norfolk as compared with that of Essex and
South Sussex—say the neighbourhood of Hastings, or within twenty
miles of it. Hedgerows might be taken from Essex and transferred
to Sussex, and vice versa, without the possibility of detection; yet
this does not hold for North Norfolk. Many species are con-
spicuously different there, and the proportion of those remaining
are vastly altered ; yet the soil agrees with that of Essex, whilst that