26 APRIL 1935, Page 16

Flowers and Birds Flowers and birds give me more pleasure

than all other wild things. Yet as I sit here in the spring sunshine, at a time when I ought to be enjoying the rewards of much autumn horticultural sweat, I am nursing for the first time a feeling of hatred against the birds. For the sparrows are ripping my polyanthus buds to yellow and crimson shreds. I am more angry because I not only imagined that my flowers, after being unattacked for four years, were immune, but because I imagined I knew why they were immune. I put down that immunity to the fact that I never feed birds except in bitter weather, reasoning first that a wild bird ought to find its food without the aid of man and secondly that a pampered bird, like a pampered child, is more likely to be treacherous than grateful. Acting on those suppositions, I have never lost a single polyanthus in four years. True, I lost during the same time a patch of crocus Susianus, the flowers of which arc yellow and chocolate, though I never lost a hybrid crocus, of whatever colour, nor a single blossom of crocus Sieberi, which grew in a patch of mauve three inches away from the Susianus. Whereas this year, with the earth soft and bird-food plentiful throughout all the winter months, I lose a thousand polyanthus buds, but no crocus. And of all the countless wild primroses that have bloomed in increasing numbers since Christmas day I have never seen a single one molested. This is an old question. What I want, however, is not an answer but a remedy. Pepper, says a friend. So I am trying pepper. All I can say as to its efficacy at the moment is that peppered primrose seems to be as delicious in the mouths of birds as oysters on the tongues of epicures.