Excerpt from The Story of Plant Life in the British Isles: Types of the Common Natural Orders

Uring the last decade much headway has been made with the study of plants in their natural surroundings or their habitat. And a new science, ecology, has arisen, which bids fair to revivify the old systematic botany, which had fallen into such dis repute, by allying itself with that branch of botany and raising the study of plants from the systematic standpoint to a higher level.

Considering the centuries that have been devoted to systematic botany or the study of the Characters of plants and their relationship to each other, it is indeed to us, in these enlightened days, marvellous that the life of the plant, which includes a study of its habitat, its manner of association and relation ship to the character of the surroundings, had not been considered at all in detail until quite recently.

But it is now recognised that the physical surround ings play a great part in the shaping of species, apart from their diversity and the fact that these diversi ties are correlated with plant distribution and plant variation.

If, indeed, we can determine the requisite surround ings of a plant we can more surely discover it. And as a great part of geographical botany is concerned with the discovery of the exact distribution of plants, it is highly valuable from this point of view alone.

But this is not all, for we learn from the Character of the surroundings its requirements as regards light, heat, moisture, altitude, soil, etc., and the manner in which the plant occurs, either in small communities, large ones or otherwise, helps us to obtain a much broader and more intelligent view of the vegetation of a district, or its physiognomy on a large scale, which in turn reveals to us the bases of scenery and land scape. So that here the painter or the poet may join in the study of botany from a really vital stand point.

In general plants are most largely affected by three factors, though there are others which are connected directly or indirectly with these three main factors.

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