COUNTRY LIFE
The Wild Nt. ;:reun
Daphne Mezereum, reputed to love chalk but always seen at its best, to my mind, on the clay of the Midlands, has long been listed as a wild plant. Its sturdy pink-starred currant-bushes, as much an indispensable part of Victorian cottage-gardens as Madonna lilies and the musk on the window-sill, have been described by countless botanists as " found in woods and thickets." Thus the plant is something of a contradiction : supposedly happy in chalk but magni- ficently healthy on clay ; a sturdy town-plant in cultivation, a shy woodlander when wild. The point on which it would be interesting to get information is not, however, where it grows best, but if it still grows wild at all. There are reports of it from the North Downs above Wye, where the green- flowered Daphne Laureola, apparently liking similar condi- tions, is as common as i weed, but these reports are neither first-hand nor reliable. Last year and the year before readers of this page provided about a hundred answers to a similar query about wild gladioli and wild tulips. Neither of these are common garden-plants ; but Daphne Mezereum is so widely cultivated that it will be specially interesting to see if it survives in the wild state, and I shall naturally be grateful to anyone who can send reports of it. I need haidly say that the usual pledges of secrecy about its exact whereabouts will be given and kept.
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