The Flora of Suffolk

Abstract

SUFFOLK is a characteristic lowland maritime English county, the flora of which, at the present day, contains absolutely no infusion of the boreal element. Its area is about 1500 square miles. The whole surface is flat, without any prominent rocks. It is underlain by chalk, which, in the north and west, lies immediately below the subsoil, but, in the south and east, is covered by Tertiary and Glacial deposits, which at Harwich have been found to reach a thickness of 1000 feet before the chalk is reached. In White's history of the county, its soils are classified into three groups: heavy lands, in which clay predominates; mixed land, common mixed soil, rich deep moulds, fen-lands, and rich marshes; and light lands, consisting of sand over chalk. To the first set belong the soils of the western two-thirds of the county, except in the extreme north and near the coast. The mixed lands are found—one portion east of the heavy lands between the Orwell and the Stour; a second in the north, between Halesworth and Yarmouth; and a third west of the heavy lands between Holston and New-market. The sandy, or light, soils are in the extreme north-west, in what is called the “Breck district,” between Thetford and Mildenhall, where are found the rarest plants of the county, such as Veronica hybrida, V. triphyllos, V. venna, and Apera interrupta. The coast is remarkable for the extent of its tidal estuaries and bays, creeks and havens. There are no cliffs of any considerable height, but a great extent of sand and shingle. The beach at Orford, where grows the great mass of Lathyrus maritimus, the seeds of which saved the life of many poor people in a famine in the middle of the sixteenth century, is said to have the greatest breadth of sand anywhere on the English coast. The rivers are shallow streams with slow currents. In the north-east there are several lakes of brackish water, not so well known as the Norfolk Broads, of which Braydon Water covers 1200, and Thorpe Mere 1000, acres. The fresh-water lakes of the county are few and small. There is a considerable area of fen- and marsh-land, both in the north-west and east, so that we get in the county all the conditions that produce a rich low-country flora, and, superadded to the common lowland plants, rarities characteristic of chalk country, the seashore, and fen-land ditches and marshes.

The Flora of Suffolk.

By W. M. Hind, Rector of Honington, assisted by the late Churchill Babington, D.D., F.L.S. With a Chapter on the Geology, Climate, and Meteorology of Suffolk, by Wheelton Hind, M.D., F.R.C.S. Pp. 508, with a Map. (London: Gilbert and Jackson, 1889.)