NOTES ON CERTAIN PLANTS IN WANSTEAD PARK. 220
botany manuals are distinctly brief in their descriptions of it,
I give a fuller description taken in part from Spotton's Canadian
Flora and from Flora von Deutschland by Schmeil and Fitscher,
verified and added to by my own personal observation.
Stem repeatedly forked, erect, about 6 dm. in height, and at base
4-5 mm. in cross section ; often reddish on one side and clothed throughout
with stiff patent yellowish hairs. Leaves ternate ; leaflets oblong, nar-
rowed at both ends, coarsely toothed ; ribs and edges of leaflets with
stiff spreading hairs. Terminal leaflet the longest, often 5 cm. In-
florescence densely cymose, erect. Sepals 5 ovate pointed, at broadest
part 5 mm., and in length 1 cm. Closed in fruit. Leaves of the epicalyx
5, about 4 mm. in breadth and 1 cm, in length, patent in fruit. Calyx
and epicalyx fringed with hairs. Petals 5 obovate smaller than the sepals
and pale yellow. Stamens 15-18. Carpels glabrous and wrinkled length-
wise.
Later in the year, however, another equally curious "find"
suggested to me a more probable origin for this plant. This
was a number of specimens of the Aster tripolium. This
is a well-known plant of the salt marshes, and is, of
course, quite common in our Essex salt marshes and by the
sides of tidal creeks, but it is not found inland (save for a note in
a German Flora—"Selten an salzhaltigen stellen des Binnenlandes"
—"Rarely on salt retaining spots of the mainland"). The
origin of these plants in this unusual spot undoubtedly must
be the web feet of water fowl, probably the herons of Wanstead
Park, which may often be observed in the quiet of the evening
moving across the sky on their return from feeding on the marsh
lands. I also found Rumex maritimus, the "Golden Dock,"
another salt-loving plant.
Possibly, then (and one might, perhaps, say probably),
the seeds of the Potentilla norvegica reached their situs in Wan-
stead Park by the same means, and as once Darwin argued from
the shape of a certain orchid that there must be an insect with a
long proboscis capable of entering the flowers' honey gland
(which later was verified), so one may be inclined to argue that
somewhere on the little frequented parts of our Essex marshes
there grow some specimens of the Potentilla norvegica. This
is at least a fascinating theory, and if ever verified would read
like a fairy tale.
For the rest there were a large number of the usual water
plants—large, at least, when one considers the small area covered