Our Oldest Neighbour
If ever that map of the wild flowers should come to becdrawn, I should owe its most distinguished entry to the kindness of a stranger. Years ago I received a small parcel, the contents of which its sender described as the root of an interesting fern. I was hard-pressed at the time ; buried it among the grasses beside my river, and, I confess, forgot it. Some years later, mowing at the water's edge, I checked the blade of my scythe just short of a handsome and unusual fern which, I noticed, was spreading along the bank. I could not find it in my Bentham and Hooker ; but the authorities at Kew recognised it as Onoclea sensibilis, a native of North America and Eastern Asia and, as identical with Eocene forefathers of some 70,000,000 years ago, entitled to rank as the oldest fern in the world. It had established itself, I was told, in a few spots in the North of England, an island in Windermere among them. I thus enjoy the good fortune of having watched a long-lost wild plant establish itself, with no more help than the burying of a fragment of root, on the bank of .a southern English stream.
STEPHEN TALLENTS.
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