There is a clear contrast, among the Cardamino-Montion springs and flushes of acid to circumneutral habitats, between the upland communities described above, where Montia fontana, Saxifraga stellaris and Philonotis fontana are conspicuous and the vegetation of lowland and often shaded situations, in which Chrysosplenium oppositifolium occurs with such bryophytes as Hookeria lucens, Rhizomnium punctatum, Trichocolea tomentella, Pellia epiphyIla and Conocephalum conicum. Such assemblages were used by Westhoff & den Held (1969) to diagnose distinct sub-alliances within the Cardamino-Montion, the sub-montane and montane Montion and the lowland Cardaminion. The latter kind of vegetatation has not been separately sampled in this survey but it figures in the field and ground layers of various wet woodlands, notably the Alnus-Carex, Alnus-Urtica and Alnus-Fraxinus-Lysimachia types, where it is distinctive of seepage lines and damp stream banks, quite often with Cardamine flexuosa, C. amara and Chrysosplenium alternifolium (see also Oberdörfer 1977). Similar mixtures of plants can also be found widely through lowland Britain, especially in the wetter west and around the upland fringes, along stream sides and wet banks which were probably once wooded but where shade is now provided by tall herbs or by virtue of the aspect of the sites. These need further sampling to see if the kinds of communities identified on the Continent occur here.