Ecology of Moorland Plants

Abstract

OTTO STOCKER, of Bremerhaven, has a very interesting review of the recent work by Montfort and himself upon this problem in Die Naturwissenschaften for August 8. The problem is an old one. Plants of the heath and of moorland, such as Calluna and Erica, have a form and structure that suggested to some of the earlier workers, and notably to Schimper, that they must be adapted to reduce water-loss arising from transpiration. Schimper advocated this view in his classical book upon (Plant Geography” and, faced with the problem that moors are by no means dry places, influenced probably also by his earlier studies of the mangrove swamps bordering salt water lagoons, he escaped from the difficulty by the assumption that these moorland soils must be “physiologically dry.” This view of the xerophytic character of moor vegetation has been handed on from text-book to text-book, although it is based almost entirely upon the appearance of the vegetation and is unsupported by experimental evidence, apart from certain American experiments which showed that extracts of bog soils were toxic to certain non-ericoid mesophytes under certain experimental conditions.