The Fuchsia Hedge Atlantic winds are unfavourable to trees. What
starveling groves of stunted trees sloping (like Orion) from the west one sees on the coast of Wales ; but these winds are for the most part soft and warm and peculiarly favourable to some exotic plants. The hedge of the country in North-West Ireland is not quick or briar or blackberry or hornbeam or nut ; but of all unexpected plants fuchsia, imported, it is locally alleged, from South America. It flowers gloriously, even when cut and trimmed as severely as a suburban privet or Lonicera Nitida. In our more inland gardens a fuchsia of much the same variety is usually herbaceous, it dis- appears in winter, to reappear, we hope, when the weather is warmer ; and you cannot countenance a herbaceous hedge. These Irish hedges of fuchsia are as surprising and as lovely as the hedges of geranium and of passion flower that startle the English visitor to Australia. What a country for the naturalist, whatever his peculiar interest. The small birds are as few as the big birds (especially gulls, waders and hawks) are many ; and those who are lucky see the though and the golden eagle, though Scotland, not Ireland, is the eagle's favourite home. It is remarkable, at least in my rather limited knowledge of the west, that birds grow tamer and tamer the farther west you travel. As for insects the driver of a car has some ado to avoid hawk-moth and other cater- pillars, so big and_ splendid, that they are observable on the plain surface from a surprising distance.
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