From Hensleigh Wedgwood   5 February 1831

Dear Henslow

I do not want to bore you with answering this letter as I am aware that the Botanical Professor would require a secretary. I inclose you a very bad specimen of Lepidium ruderale with all it’s [sic] petals & stamens perfect, I send it you because I see Hooker says he has never seen it with any petals & Withering that it has sometimes 4 stamens. It was almost the first plant I saw when I began my botanical studies last summer & puzzled me not a little from their giving as a specific character for it its only having two stamens. I derived so much pleasure from botany last summer that you don’t know how much I regret not having taken to it when I was at Cambridge & had so many opportunities for it, whereas now I am confined to London till the end of August for the remainder of my life. One great difficulty I found was between making out the difference between potentilla & tormentilla reptans [doodle of ‘P’ and ‘T’ leaves]. In the part of Monmouthshire in which I was in the month of August there was a good deal of what I believe was the potentilla in flower but it nearly all had only 4 petals with a stray flower here & there with 5 & the leaves irregular in size & I almost began to doubt whether there really were the two species or not. However in a specimen I saw afterwards of Darwin’s from Shrewsbury of the Tormentilla the leaves were all the same size & the leaflets pretty regularly obovate instead of being wedge shaped like the Potentilla. I wonder whether that is a distintction to be trusted to. I was a good deal puzzled by the brambles & there is one of them that I cannot help thinking Hooker has mistaken in his capital book, it is the one Smith calls R. nitidus as well as I can make it out. Hooker calls it a variety of the suberectus & if it is the one I mean nothing can be more distinct tho’ I must confess the leaflets are very like each other. But the stem of the suberectus is round (those I have seen\quite so/) & upright of the nitidus sharply angular and trailing the prickles of the suberectus are small & straight, of the nitidus large few & more hooked than those of any other bramble I have seen it is an excessively neat looking plant with very shiny leaves & without any hairiness when it grows in exposed places with large perfectly white flowers on long slender footstalks all pointing forwards so as to make a very distinct looking panicle from any other bramble I have seen. The calyx of all I saw was perfectly unarmed. Hooker is wrong too in saying that the suberectus has not dark red fruit. I saw it I believe quite right last autumn of that colour & it has a most singular flavour which reminds one of raspberries. These two brambles grow near us close together in considerable quantities & perfectly distinct, nearly all the leaves of the suberectus have 7 leaflets. I wanted to send you a specimen of Gnaphalium sylvaticum that I gathered in Monmouthshire it seemed so different from the erectum to which I see it is now joined & agreed so exactly with the drawings & descriptions. I wonder whether you will have patience to read thro these botanical criticisms of such a tyro as I am. I was quite delighted with Dr Hookers book it solved so many difficulties that had been puzzling me & it seems to me to contain quite as much as Smith’s 4 volumes. I wonder at his never having seen so very common a plant as the Hieracium sabaudum. It was one of those however that puzzled me most.

I am, dear Henslow | yours very truly | H Wedgwood