Concerning Dr F V Paxton, Coralroot and some elusive Herb Paris

Source: Sturt, Nick. “Concerning Dr F V Paxton, Coralroot and some elusive Herb Paris.” Sussex Botanical Recording Society Newsletter, no. 55 (January 2003). http://sussexflora.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Newsletter_Jan_2003.pdf.

 

A pleasant way of passing a winter evening in the 1980s was to translate the lists of additional records patiently processed on his computer by Peter Donovan into tetrad dots on the maps in the Sussex Plant Atlas. On one such occasion I was intrigued to find myself adding two adjacent pencil marks in squares south of Chichester for Cardamine bulbifera (Coralroot). A glance at the OS map suggested that the plants had almost certainly been found in Hunston Copse, a small, almost rhomboidal patch of woodland on the coastal plain.

In a sense, Elisabeth and I knew this wood well. Hunston Copse has the appearance of a relict from larger swathes of woodland which once covered the plain and which were cleared for farming, many in early times. The geological map indicates a drift of Brickearth over London Clay, and the ground is quite damp. Among a fair selection of species associated with ancient woodland, Daphne laureola (Spurge Laurel) is relatively plentiful here and its presence in hedges elsewhere on the Manhood Peninsula is perhaps also suggestive of a once more general tree cover over the area. In another sense, however, Elisabeth and I knew this wood not well enough, for we had made numerous visits to it in search of the Paris quadrifolia (Herb Paris) which was reputed to grow there, all with a lack of success which some might justly describe as spectacular. As I reflected on the two additional Coralroot records I realised that this too had eluded us….

But what of the status of Coralroot in Hunston Copse? That same map in the Atlas clearly showed that it was a plant of the central Weald, with one outlier (of dubious status) in the far west near Rogate: its presence about one mile south of Chichester looked odd. The explanation was several years in coming. Two copies of Arnold’s Flora of Sussex which had been extensively annotated by Henry Guermonprez were presented to Howard by the illustrious E M Venables. Howard lent them to me and so it was while browsing through one of them that I noticed against the entry for C. bulbifera: ‘Hunston Copse, introduced by Dr Paxton from Tunbridge Wells.’ Confirmation, therefore, that the Coralroot found in the copse had been originally brought in by human agency…. But who was Dr Paxton?

Not a great deal of rummaging in the Chichester Record Office produced some information about the introducer. The 1871 Census pinpoints Francis Valentine Paxton, as a 35 year-old bachelor practising as a physician in West Street Chichester.

Their Proceedings reveal him to have been a stalwart member of the not inconsiderably named Chichester and West Sussex Natural History and Microscopical Society throughout the 1880s, serving on the committee in various capacities alongside Arnold. The initials FVP in the Flora of Sussex testify to his help with the original project, and he also appears in the list of subscribers to the second edition. I suspect that his relationship with the Arnold family was somewhat closer, since a certain Master G H Arnold, probably a nephew of our botanist, was lodging in his house during the 1880s.

Dr Paxton apparently had quite a penchant for introducing plants and we shall probably never know the true extent of these activities in the Chichester area. We do have it on record, however, that he added Nymphoides peltata (Fringed Water-lily) to the already obsolete canal in Chichester and he likewise brought Oxford Ragwort to the city. This last came as something of a surprise to me. I had tended to embrace the simple notion that in the 1790s Senecio squalidus scaled the walls of the Oxford Botanic Garden and waited (several decades) for a train. But in fact it first arrived in Chichester direct from Oxford without the aid of the railway: Arnold specifies that it was an introduction and then a Guermonprez annotation gives the credit or the blame (depending on your point of view) to Dr Paxton and corrects the published date of 1898 to 1888.

In the history of Sussex botanists Paxton is a link between the two important figures of Arnold and Guermonprez: it is already clear that he co-operated closely with Frederick Arnold, and the circumstantial evidence from the annotated Flora implies at least an acquaintance with Guermonprez. The chronological facts are that Guermonprez took over Selborne Notes in the West Sussex Gazette on the death of Arnold in 1906 and continued to write the weekly column until he himself died in 1924, while Paxton was living in South Pallant (Chichester) until at least 1924 when, presumably in his eighties, he disappears from the local directory.

Returning to the Herb Paris in Hunston Copse, there is no reason for it to come under suspicion as another of example of Paxton’s creativity, even if it too is something of an outlier in relation to its main concentration in the South Harting area. It is reported in Arnold’s Sussex Flora as having been found in ‘Hunston Wood’ in 1881 by Mr G Jeffrey (another leading light of the local society) who declared it ‘abundant’: even if Paxton had introduced the plant as early as 1870 it is hardly likely to have become ‘abundant’ in so short a time.

To my knowledge Herb Paris was last seen there in about 1997 by a member of the now abbreviated Chichester Natural History Society. Optimism not quite extinguished, Elisabeth and I shall probably venture forth again to Hunston Copse in the coming season…. on this occasion hoping to find, in addition to the infuriatingly elusive Paris, some descendants of Dr Francis Paxton’s Coralroot.