Handbook of Birmingham / Prepared for the Members of the British Association, 1886

by British Association for the Advancement of Science

The vegetation of any district depends partly on the nature of the soil, as determined by its geological structure, partly on altitude and drainage areas, and partly on the character of the surface, whether water, bog, heath, arable, pasture or woodland. The geology has been treated of in a previous part of this volume. It will be sufficient to say here that the red rocks of the Trias occupy by far the largest portion of the area, and that calcareous soils are rare. An elevated line of country, commencing north of Wolverhampton, runs in a southerly direction, by Sedgley, Dudley, and the Rowley Hills, to Frankley Beeches and the Upper Lickey, where it attains an altitude of about 900 feet above the sea. This is the great water parting of central England which divides the drainage areas of the Trent and Severn. From the Lickey, a line of lower elevation runs in a westerly direction and divides the tributaries of the Trent from those of the Avon. The subordinate river basins and surface characteristics will be noticed in the special articles.

A brief outline of the history of the Botany of the Midland Counties may be useful to students, and is therefore included in these remarks. It commences with the honoured name of William Withering, one of the most eminent of British Botanists. Born at Wellington, in Shropshire, in 1741, he practised as a physician in Birmingham, where he died in 1799. The first edition of his well-known “Botanical arrangement of British Plants,” in two volumes, was published in 1776; the second, in three vols. in 1787; the third, in four vols. in 1796. It passed through five further editions, in four volumes, after his death. Numerous references to localities in the neighbourhood of Birmingham are contained in these volumes.

Scarcely less distinguished was Thomas Purton (1768-1833), surgeon, of Alcester, the author of “The Midland Flora.” The first two volumes of the work appeared in 1817, the third in 1821. They contain copious descriptions of local habitats in the counties of Warwick, Worcester, and Stafford.

Nash’s “History of Worcestershire,” 1781, contains (Introduction p. lxxxix.) a list of forty-three rare plants, two only of which, Vaccinium Oxycoccos and Comarum palustre, recorded as growing at the Lickey, belong to the Birmingham district. The Supplement (1799) has a further list of forty-seven plants, four of which belong to the district.

The late W. G. Perry, bookseller, of Warwick, published at Warwick, in 1820, the first Flora of that county, under the title of “Plantæ Varvicenses Selectæ.” He also contributed to the Magazine of Natural History, Vol. iv., p. 450, 1831, a list of some of the rarer plants of Worcestershire, chiefly from the neighbourhood of Kidderminster and Bewdley.

The “History of Stourbridge,” by William Scott, Stourbridge, 1832, contains a list of plants from the neighbourhood of that town, in the counties of Worcester and Stafford.

For a knowledge of the plants of the immediate vicinity of Birmingham, and particularly of the once celebrated “Moseley Wake Green,” Botanists are chiefly indebted to the late William Ick, Secretary of the old Philosophical Society of Birmingham. Mr. Ick published two lists; the first in “The Analyst,” for 1837, Vol. vi., p. 20; the second in the “Midland Counties Herald,” Aug. 1838.

The present Mrs. Avery, then Miss M. A. Beilby, was a frequent visitor to Moseley at about that date, and has obliged the writer with a list of the rarities gathered by her at Moseley Bog and Common in 1835 and 1836.

A list of some of the rarer plants of the neighbourhood of Birmingham, by Saml. Freeman, appeared in the first series of the Phytologist, Vol. i., p. 261.