Buttercups
What a wonderful year for buttercups, say the sight-seers. And what a poverty-stricken one for nutritious grasses in consequence 1 No domestic animal will touch a buttercup, except the goose which will eliminate Ranunculus repens, as it did from my orchard. You haite only to bend down over the ground-talons of the buttercup to see how it annihilates the grasses. Nor must the wet winter be pilloried as primarily responsible for the expansion of this plague of the good pasture. Its tents of cloth of gold have occupied our fields in such invincible battalions because of our over-specialised milk-policy. Those churns on their stands by the wayside are the secret collaborators. For they carry within them the calcium and phosphorus that in the days before the modern Enlighten- ment were returned to the soil by way of the skim-milk and whey, by- products of cheese- and butter-making, and fed to the pigs. But the milk-cheque is welcome only to the farmer and the buttercups.
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