4 FEBRUARY 1944, Page 18

COUNTRY LIFE

A NATURE Reserves Investigation Committee was appointed in 1942 to advise the official planners of rural reconstruction after the war. An immense sum of local information has been now. accumulated. There will be no ignorance of what our county naturalists desire. All this good work has been greatly helped by the British Ecological Society, which has most generously pooled a good part of its accumulated knowledge, and this is great. The Sdciety has now produced a report (Cambridge University Press,. Is. 6d.) that is compact of both ideas and information of i,nterest to British botanists, ornithologists and the rest. The central plan is that the few remaining tracts of wild or semi-wild country should be marked down and preserved. A point that a little surprised me is that of the old native deciduous forest there still remain woods consisting of just these five trees—oak, ash, beech, alder and birch, and, in Scotland, Scotch pine. The selection of these species indicates how very few are the species of our native trees. Even the elm (but not the vvvch elm) is now said to be an immigrant. I wonder.

Immigrant Animals

It is rightly urged that the introduction of exotic species of animal should be forbidden, except under licence ; and the following examples of unregulated introductions are given. "At various times different landowners have introduced to their estates, for the sake of amenity or sport, a great variety of exotic animals, including Siberian roedeer, Japanese deer, Chinese waterdeer, wallaby, fat dormouse, and grey squirrel ; among Birds, little owl, Canada goose, bobwhite quail; among Amphibia and Reptiles, edible frogs and Mediterranean green lizards ; among fish, rainbow trout, sunfish and black bass. Fur farmers have introduced silver and arctic fox, muskrat, nutria, and mink." The muskrat, once a real danger, has been quite exterminated, I believe. The nutria never was a real danger. The grey squirrel is still extending its range north, south and west.

'Precious Herbs The turning up of some old paragraphs on the quitch or couch. grass has prompted an amateur herbalist in Scotland to the following confession of faith. "Personally I scrape the brownish husk off and simmer the -cleansed root, which provides a fine medicine (instead of pills, &c.). I do feel that Mother Nature provides us with so much help which is ignored through ignorance. I dry quantities of nettles for use in soups. Also I have dried my blackcurrant leaves. Dried grass, well rotted with soap suds, provides manure for the garden.... I am inclined to the view that artificial manures produce disease in the long run, as do artificial foods, unless very well balanced with uncooked native foods." This belief grows in strength rapidly.

Urban Hawks

The constant appearance of hawks, chiefly kestrel, in London seems to have caused some surprise ; but hawks have almost as great a preference for churches as the jackdaws that "keep a cawing from a steeple." Every morning from my bedroom window in Cologne (just after the armistice of 1918) I watched a number of hawks circling about the cathedral spire. Once on my way to see President Wilson at the White House in Washington I looked up to see several buzzards spiralling on almost motionless wings over the city. Bombing seems to have increased the attraction of the town for hawks. Some have built in the ruins of houses. The shy merlin appeared in one or two South Coast towns some little while after they were punished from the air. Of all the hawks the kestrel is the tr.-ast welcome: it will occasionally kill a small bird, but its favourite food is the mouse and the beetle. London is a great sanctuary.

In the Garden

A new use of the cloche has been put forth by the inventors of the English "continuous cloches" which has virtually supplanted the bell-jar of the French Gardener or maraichers, though the two have rather different uses. It is now claimed that if cloches are put over the coming seed bed, the ground is perceptibly warmed and a dry tilth provided for what seed may be sown earlier in the year— in January, for example for peas, prickly spinach, radish, lettuce and even onions and leeks. In the flower garden what lovely little bouquets of snowdrop, and even crocus, primrose, primula, lungwort and aconite, and above all iris this January has supplied!

W. BEACH THOMAS