COUNTRY LIFE
Three-Cornered Preservation • In the Lake District, which I visited last week, there is great satisfaction at the salvation—so it is called—of a solid area of 300 square miles in the loveliest, most remote and most romantic region. Famous names are included in the salvation : Derwentwater, Ullswater, Grasmere, the Vale of Keswick, Buttermere, Troutbeck and others. The district is " saved " not from the builder, but frOm the afforester, by his own collusion. What is most pleasing and promising in the scheMe is the -technique of its accomplishment. The C.P.R.E., the National Trust and the Forestry COmmission appointed a joint committee, with the object of reconciling the ideals of use and beauty ; and the conunittee (who have worked very-hard) finally arrived at an excellent- arrangement. Iii its beneficent history the -C.P.R.E. has never done a better deed. It has perSuaded conflicting aims to consent to a mutual relation:- • The 'Forestry Commission is often roundly abused. Naturalists abuse it, as in Breckland, for spoiling good bird country and elseWhere, for condemning black game. Labourers abuse it for planting what was once agricultural land. Land- owners abuse it for filling surrounding acres with refugee vermin. Landscape' aesthetes abuse it for its affection for gloomy coniferS and for rectilineal prejudices and in general for interference with the native landscape beauties. All these forget that the nation needs and Will need trees, especially coniferS, and that the work of afforesting may give economic employment in depressed areaa• :This new arrangement, and concession, in and about Eskdale should do much to restore the general reputation of the Commission, at the same time that it enlarges gratitude to the C.P.R.E. and to the National Trust. It may be worth iterating a comment I heard again and again in Westmorland : " It would not be so bad if the Commission Would plant broadcast and not with the drill. The straight lines are what we hate."
Seasonal Contrasts On September 4th in Sussex hay was being carted on one side of the road and wheat on the other. Both were very fair crops and very eloquent of the strangest summer in memory. Almost everything has been contrary.- to rule. It is a rule that in wet seasons the leaves hang on the trees and keep their greenness till late in the year. Today there is a downpour of brown desiccated leaves in both town and country. One urban roadman, very busy with- his broom, volunteered the information that he had begun to sweep up leaves three weeks sooner than his wont. The enemy has been some form or other of mildew. Was ever a year when roses, though they have flowered and still flower magnificently, have so suffered both from white mildew and black spot ? The wild field and dog roses are already shedding quantities of yellow leaves. On the other hand some shrubs grow greener and greener. Raspberries in my garden still bear a good deal of fruit and the canes have grown four foot at least above the roof of their cage. Fruit was seldom in such abundance. Plums were and are as numerous as blackberries begin to be ; and apples are •a good crop in most of our gardens. Even the shy Cox is loaded ; and the robustious Bromley's Seedling demands drastic thinning.
A Hard Wittier?
Wild• berries, which' already begin to colour, as if we had enjoyed an excess of sunshine, are multitudinous in the wild-as-in the tame. I saw one weeping holly, a peculiarly lovely- tree, so weighed down with berries that the boughs touched the ground like •a long skirt all the way round the tree. In the same garden some specimens of the rather.rare rowan, with berries of an .enhanded- scarlet, beaedned from afar with flaming discs of colour. That surpassed all the records even of that surpassing garden. The country people, who can never shake off their teleological faiths, already prognosticate a hard winter, in which the lives of the birds will be saved by this prudent provision of food. It is sur- prising that already the berry-eating migrant birds, from the North have arrived. In the Midlands a fair number of fieldfare—the greatest berry eater in the list—appeared last week. Often they are not seen on southern shores till November or even later. What may this portend ? Winter Songs We do not hear the fieldfare or any Other winter visitor sing as they hear him in the far North, but he is one of the most talkative of birds in the winter months. The chuckle is like no other bird's (except perhaps the American robin's). That excellent paper, the organ of the British Empire Naturalists' Association, has been asking for transliterations of birds' songs on the model of "a little bit of bread and no cheese " (Galliec -“ pork "). Well, the chuckle of a flock of fleldfare reminds- Inc of the sound of water running out of a bath. Has anyone, I wonder, noted that the cirl-bunting has 'a song very much like the yellowhammer's but he omits the "-no cheese," or pork.- All the buntings of course are remarkable for their selection of autumn as spring. They nest- late and never seem to sing so much as in August or even September.• How the fat corn-bunting croaks from the telegraph wires over - holiday travellers ! Ripe corn is his inspiration.
A Greater Tortoise-shell News, of no little interest to entomologists, reaches rue from a correspondent in the neighbourhood of Bodmin. He writes : " I do not remember to have seen the Comma butterfly here till last year, when I saw two or three. This year I have seen half a dozen and actually caught one with my hands. Now my son has startled me by catchinga large tortoise-shell (on August 21st)." . . . Now the virtual dis- appearance of the larger tortoise-shell, while the lesser con- tinues to be one of the commonest of all butterflies, has greatly puzzled entomologists. It had become extinct in most districts and seemed to be going the way of the Grx at Copper. The Comma is a surprise in the opposite direction. It used to be confined to three or four counties of the West ; but has appeared in most of the Southern and Midland counties in the last few years ; and its multiplication—which also remains unexplained—and its extension of range seen' to be. continuing. Is this tortoise-shell a single spy and an immigrant, or the sign of a return of this most beautiful species ?
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An Asiatic Gentian
" The world's riches which dispersed lie " continue to " contract into a span "—into the span of England. I saw this week in full blossom some of the plants which have issued from seed brought back by Mr. Kingdon Ward, that king of plant discoverers, from beyond the Himalayas. They. included two gentians that have not, I think, yet been christened. One is a very bright blue of the type that we associate with the European gentian, the other a blue so light as to be almost white-; and its hue is unlike any other that I can remember. Both were blooming freely in an open frame, and seemed perfectly hardy. They are not such salient novelties of course as were his gorgeous blue meconopsis, which is incomparable, or even that lusty and most useful primula, Florinde, but they are real enough additions to the flora of our English gardens. In the same garden were growing some shades of red, as rare as the blue shades of these new gentians. A good many private gardeners, though fewer than one might expect, grow the tall lobelia that is a brighter scarlet than any flower in the list ; but there is also a variety, equally easy to grow, of a sort of salmon red, that has no near parallel so far as I know.
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The Dwarf Aster Our own hybridisers are always busy and produce novelties hardly less remarkable than those fetched -from the ends of the earth or what Mr. Kingdon Ward calls " the roof of world." One triumph of recent years, now being rapidly multiplied and therefore cheapened, is a form of dwarf aster or Michaelmas daisy. It grows only a few inches high, say twelve at the most, makes a comely bushy plant, and bears plentiful flowers of pink as well as purple shades. As an edging plant it would make a pleasant green border throughout the summer. and give welcome flowers in September. It is a favourite with Mr. Wallace of Tunbridge Wells, to whom horticulture and landscape gardening have long owed much.
W. BEACU TUOMAS.
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