Abstract
ALTHOUGH only an infinitesimal proportion of the alien plants which reach Great Britain in some form or other and take root ever succeed in establishing themselves, much less colonizing the country, a small number of additions to the flora that have established themselves in recent years from garden escapes or alien casuals of industry may have some important bearing upon the flora of the future. In 1928, F. W. Holder and R. Wagstaffe, of the Southport Scientific Society, found an alien composite with small yellow flowers at Freshfield, West Lancashire (vice county 59, botanically “South” Lancashire), which Druce afterwards identified as Siegesbeckia orientalis, fairly widely distributed in the southern hemisphere, but not previously recorded in Britain. In the twelve years since then, the species has firmly established a colony of plants at the Freshfield station and J. D. Massey, in a communication to the Liverpool Botanical Society, has pointed out that it differs from Ridley's description of the species in the “Dispersal of Plants Throughout the World” in growing much taller (5-6 ft.), in always possessing five long narrow bracts instead of four, and has glands on the leaves and stem as well.
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Additions to the British Flora. Nature 146, 486 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/146486b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/146486b0