A Ricefield in China
The proprietor and two of his coolies are in front of the paddy field. The young rice plants can be seen growing in the water.
Theophrastus speaks of those in the Persian gulf, and that exceedingly shrewd botanist has some valuable notes about them worth reading even to-day.[75]
In temperate countries, such as our own, the districts where great rivers enter the sea are for the most part aguish and rheumatic, but, of course, there is nothing so startling and extraordinary as the mangrove swamps.
Yet, even in temperate countries, the work of winning or gaining new land plods steadily onwards, and it is performed by humble, inconspicuous little plants.
Where the Rhone enters the Mediterranean, there are some 40,000 acres of sandy and clayey land called the Camargue. The bare sand near the sea is often flooded and swept by violent storms in winter; anything which tries to grow there is usually carried[75-b] off and destroyed.
[note 75-b: Drude, l.c.; Schimper, l.c.; Warming, l.c.; Colonial Reports, No. 3, Miscellaneous. Schimper, Indo-Malayische Strandflora.]
But, after a time, one finds here and there a solitary plant of a kind of Saltwort (Salicornia macrostachya) which has withstood the strain: its branches gather a little sand and hold it together, and its roots gradually explore and tie down the soil around it. Next winter it can stand the sweep and scour of the stormy water; next summer other plants begin to grow on this tiny sand-heap, and the "touradon," as it is called, is now fairly well established. It goes on growing until it may be, after a few years, six feet in diameter.
Eventually the salt gets washed out of the soil and these little heaps become united by a continuous covering of green plants in which shrubs and then trees begin to grow.[76] By this time of course the sand has accumulated farther out to sea and the same process is going on there.
In Britain we have the "sea meadows" of Sea-grass, which covers the submerged sand and mudbanks near the mouths of great rivers.