WILD-FLOWER SANCTUARIES.
[TO TRY EDITOR Or TER "SPECTATOR.") SIR,—Your article in last week's Spectator has a melancholy interest for one who has watched the painful extinction of many scarce plants in this peninsula of Wirral. The last great bed of Osmunda regalia was uprooted for sale by an ignorant cottager thirty-five years ago, and I tremble year by year to see a far rarer fern swept from its one hiding-place. Surely in such matters we should all be protectionists. The point I would raise is this :—Is it legitimate to replant a rare or local plant in a habitat from which it has been eradicated ? Would it be wrong to restore the marsh fern or the rarer Lastrea cristata to some of our Cheshire bogs, which they adorned until recent years P—I am, Sir, &c.,
H. BALLA.NTINE.
Heath Bank Road, Birkenhead.
[Most assuredly it is a pious duty to make such restoration wherever possible. Just as many families have lost their old homes and then reacquired them, so the return of the native is to be helped in the case of flowers and ferns, birds and beasts.—En. Spectator.]
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