BOTANY
IN preparing a short account of the botany of the county I may say that my acquaintance with it is of long standing, for I was born on its borders, and my early years were spent near Stoney Stratford, while in my holidays I yearly visited the beautiful district of Brickhill, which was especially attractive to me then, as I was a keen lepidopterist and that heathy country afforded a widely different series of insects and their plant food from that which our more prosaic country afforded. The flora of this county came also under my observation during the time I was preparing the Flora of Northamptonshire[1] from 1874, the Flora of Oxfordshire[2] from 1879 to 1885, and from then to 1897 when I was working at the Flora of Berkshire.[3] Since that time I have been systematically exploring the county with the view of publishing a complete Flora, which with the two last mentioned works will form a Flora of the Upper Thames.
In the few pages at my disposal it is my wish to give a sketch of the salient features of the botany of the county, and to compare it with those of some of the bordering counties.
The acreage of the county, about 467,000, is rather smaller than Oxfordshire (470,000) and larger than Berkshire, which has only about 462,000 acres. Like those counties Buckinghamshire has in the long range of the Chilterns an interesting feature which not only is the domin- ating one from a scenic point of view, but one which materially affects plant distribution. The heathy portion about the Brickhills and the extensive commons of the uplands, as well as those on the lower country in the neighbourhood of Farnham and Burnham. are also most interesting from a botanical point of view.
The following tables corrected to the present date, show the number of species which have been reported on good authority to have been seen growing in a wild state in the bordering counties, as well as those which I have compiled for Buckinghamshire.
- ↑ 'The Flora of Northamptonshire,' by G. Claridge Druce, Journal of the Northamptonshire Natural History Society, 1880, et seq.
- ↑ The Flora of Oxfordshire, by the same author (James Parker, Oxford, 1886), pp. 446.
- ↑ The Flora of Berkshire, by the same author (the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1897), pp. 846 ; The Flora of Hertfordshire, by R. A. Pryor, edited by B. D. Jackson (Gurney & Jackson, London, 1887) ; The Flora of Middlesex, lumen *n& Dyer (R. Hardwicke, London, 1869); The Student's Flora, by Sir J. D. Hooker, ed. 3 (Macmillan & Co., London, 1884).
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