But the
same water creatures were feeding on the same plants perhaps when the
Thames first flowed as a river.
[Illustration: BURR REED AND FLOWERING RUSH. _From photographs by E.
Seeley._]
The sedge fringe in the shallows, the "haunt of coot and tern" elsewhere,
and of hosts of moorhens and dabchicks on the now protected river, is
mainly composed of the giant rush, smooth and round, which the water-rats
cut down and peel to eat the pith. These great rushes, sometimes ten feet
high, _die_ every year like the sickliest flowers, and break and are
washed away. Few people have ever tried to reckon the number of kinds of
sedges and reeds by the river, and it would be difficult to do so. There
are forty-six kinds of sedge (_carex_), or if the _Scirpus_ tribe be
added, sixty-one, found in our islands. They are not all water plants, for
the sand-sedge with its creeping roots grows on the sandhills, and some of
the rarest are found on mountain-tops. But the river sedges and grasses,
with long creeping roots of the same kind, have played a great part in the
making of flat meadows and in the reclamation of marshes, stopping the
water-borne mud as the sand-sedge stops the blowing sand.
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