For other flowers, other fenny tracts may be sought; Henfield Common, for instance, has the bog-bean, the marsh St. John's-wort, and still better, the marsh-cinquefoil. But of all Sussex water-meadows with which I am acquainted the richest are the Amberley Wild Brooks, which lie below Pulborough, adjacent to the tidal stream of the Arun, a piece of partially drained bog-land which in a wet winter season is apt to be flooded anew, and to revert to its primitive state of swamp. It is a glorious place to wander over, on a sunny August afternoon, with the great escarpment of the Downs, and the ever-prominent Chanctonbury Ring, close in view to the south; and in a long summer day the expedition can be combined with a visit to Arundel Park, only three miles distant, the best of parks, as being the least parklike and most natural, and having a goodly store of the wildflowers that are dwellers upon chalk hills.
The Amberley Wild Brooks possess this great merit, that in addition to most of the aquatics and dike-land plants above-mentioned, they present a fine display of the tall riverside flowers. Their wet hollows that teem with frog-bit, arrow-head, water-parsnip, water-plantain, yellow cress, glaucous stitchwort, and other choice things, are fringed here and there with purple loosestrife, and with marsh-woundwort almost equal to the loosestrife in size and colour; and mingling with these in like luxuriance are yellow loosestrife, tansy, toadflax, and water-ragwort—a brilliant combination of purple flowers and gold. Then, as if the better to set off this spectacle, there is in some places a background of staid and massive herbs like the great water-dock,
And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green
As soothe the dazzled eye with sober sheen.[3]
One would fear that this wealth of diverse hues might even become embarrassing, were it not that the heart of the flower-lover is insatiable.
IV
LIKENESSES THAT BAFFLE
Stay, stand apart; I know not which is which.
The Comedy of Errors.
One of the first difficulties by which those who would learn their native flora are beset is the likeness which in some cases exists between one plant and another—not the close resemblance of kindred species, such as that found, for instance, among the brambles or the hawkweeds, which is necessarily a matter for expert discrimination, but the superficial yet often puzzling similarity in what botanists call the "habit" of wildflowers. Thus the horse-shoe vetch may easily be mistaken, by a beginner, for the bird's-foot trefoil, or the field mouse-ear chickweed for the greater stitchwort; and the differences between the dove's-foot crane's-bill and the less common geranium pusillum are not at first sight very apparent. Distinguishing features instantly recognized by an expert, who has taken, so to speak, finger-tip impressions of the plants, do not readily present themselves to the layman, whose only guide is the general testimony of structure, colour, and height.
It is, moreover, unfortunate that some of the popular flower-books, owing to the slovenly way in which their descriptions are worded, are of little help; they not only fail to give the needed particulars where there is a real likeness, but often, where there is none, create confusion in the reader's mind by depicting quite dissimilar plants in almost identical terms. In Johns's Flowers of the Field (edition of 1908), for example, the description of hedge-woundwort hardly differs verbally from that of black horehound, and might certainly mislead a novice who was studying hedgerow flowers. The same writer had an exasperating habit of repeatedly stating that various plants are "well distinguished" by certain features, when in fact it is very difficult, from the accounts given by him, to distinguish them at all!