COUNTRY LIFE
Harvest and Quality
One facet of this year's harvest well illustrates the addition to production due to increased knowledge. The barleys all along the East Coast are of quite exceptional quality ; and with this grain a slight betterment in quality makes a crucial difference in price. Barley of malting quality should bring good profit. If the brewers do not acknowledge that the necessary pitch is reached the crop may show a loss. Now the excellence of this year's harvest is due in considerable measure to the extended use of varieties of the grain that can be sown in autumn. Time was when most barley was sown iq spring, and spring-sowing is more of a gamble than autumn or winter-sowing. The drought of the early spring of this year utterly destroyed the recently sown crops, but only checked the winter-sown, and.they have recovered beyond all expectations. The men of science have made perhaps the greatest advance in the hybridisation of wheats, but the market takes so little notice of quality in wheat that farmers look to heavy-yielding varieties rather than " strong " varieties ; and it is in strength not in yield that the research workers have made their more notable advance. Argentine farmers complain similarly of " the market " in respect of their stock. In spite of promises little if any more money is given for such higher quality beef as is given by the Aberdeen Angus. Weight is almost the sole standard.
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Rural Revival In the annals of rural reconstruction in England an honoured place must be given to the small group of people who compose the Rural Reconstruction Association. Several of their ideas have been taken (and this is all to the good) without acknowledgement (and this is all to the bad) by Governments ; and their ideas have generally not been improved by subsequent qualifications. What may be called the philosophy of the Group is well and permanently epitomised by Mr. Montague Fordham in a page or two of pamphlet under the heading of "Christianity and the Countryside " (published from 4 The Sanctuary, Westminster, price 3d.). The struggle for what is now known as a " standard " price is the same as the League's original plea for a " just " price ; and the more spiritual word is perhaps the better. A just price means, among other things, that the middleman should share fairly with the pro- ducer. It has long seemed to me that Mr. Fordham's thoughtful and original book, Mother Earth—founded on practical experi- ence in several European countries—has never had the public recognition that it deserves. It has the sort of virtue that made famous through the world Prince Kropotkin's Farms, Factories and Workshops, though it has nothing that so much as suggests a revolutionary view. Its concern is conservative : construction or reconstruction. Indeed in one aspect it is founded on the guild. After all is not the present Danish system closely allied to the old guild system ? The Archbishop of Canterbury, who writes a short preface, asks a shrewd question about unemployment, and the need of land workers. It nuches really one of the difficulties of this year's harvest.
* * * * • Migratory Game Birds In spite of weather that has done much damage in most directions, the year has been exceptionally prolific in some quarters. Partridges, for example, and wild pheasants seldom hatched out such large families ; and the grouse did very nearly as well. The northern birds all suffered more than the Southern from later storms ; but it is a good year for game- birds almost everywhere. Neither ornithologists nor sportsmen have troubled themselves much about the movements of game birds (except over butts, hedges and trees) ; but it has become apparent of late years that the grouse is much more of a migrant, though not an oversea migrant, than was once thought. An enquiry well worth the attention of all con- cerned is being scientifically conducted, and information is desired from as many moors' as possiblein Wales as in Scotland and North 'England. It ddes not seem to have occurred to researchers that partridges have changed their habits a good • deal of recent years in response -tO changes in agriculture. The coveys hatch much earlier and these -packs fly quite inordinate distances in search of food and cover. Small packs appear even in September ; and late in the year I saw a pack of well over a hundred birds fly clean out of sight on Berkshire uplands at a height that suggested a migratory impulse. The driving of partridges even as early as
September 'the First may have influenced this habit. * * * *
A Compass Plant A peculiarity of the creeper that we are no longer allowed to call Ampelopsis Veitchii is more than usually well instanced in two plants on an easterly wall in my garden. • Both have been heading steadily northwards and upwards. Both the main and longest shoot so directs itself and all the side shoots stretch to the northern side ; I have never found any reference to this habit in a book ; but there is, I think, no doubt at all about the general tendency of this vine. On the house where I first noticed it, the only creeper that grew more or less straightly upwards was on a north-looking wall. Unfor- tunately there was none on the south wall, but the creepers played the compass on both the east and west walls. Probably the reason for *the direction is that the sensitive tip, often bent over into a pot-hook shape, shrinks from the light. It is coloured purple, which is 'of course the favourite light- resisting colour. What a lovely creeper it is, now as in autumn ; and its small suction plates are one of the standard marvels of adaptation. A house-fly's' feet are not more efficiently devised. I do not know whether this northerly drift of Vitis Inconstans is a tendency shared 'by that variety of Vitis Cinquefolia that also clings to supports by aid of
discs, not by tendrils. * * * *
A Squirrel's Taste
Within a Devonshire grove the brown squirrel, which had disappeared, now flourishes again, thanks to a successful importation. They come daily to a tray-ful 'of nuts put out for them but live chiefly on what they can find. The other day one of them was seen crossing the drive ; and it carried in its mouth a large white Object. This it conveyed to one of 'Its dining tables, the flat top of a severed trunk. I saw there after the squirrel left the remains of the feast, a half-devoured mushroom of a'-sort generally regarded as poisonous. Mush- rooms are not I think a favourite form of food with any animal larger than a grub, but there are a few exceptions. Pigs are of course epicures in a highly valued subterranean fungus ; and both dogs and cattle will nibble various mushrooms. Whether they do so for any liking of the food I doubt. It is seldom eaten in any quantity and perhaps the bites are chiefly prompted by idle curiosity. The squirrel had found less than half a small disc quite enough. The brown squirrel (which in Devonshire is undisturbed by the grey) has not quite so catholic a taste as its alien cousin ; but it will eat almost anything on occasion, from an unfledged rook in the treetops to the mushroom on the ground. It appears that its general habits are not harmful, though, some of the afforesters will hardly agree. What a beautiful creature it is to watch. * * * *
In the Garden One of the loveliest and most ingenious landscape gardens that ever I saw seemed to me after a recent tour of it, to be a supreme example of the wisdom of limiting a garden to " good do-ers," to plants naturally suited to the soil and clime. The garden is in North Devon. A good deal of the effect is produced by hydrangeas of all sorts, blue, pink, white, round headed and flat headed all of them growing to gargantuan proportions. The flanks of the tiny stream flowing between abrupt slopes were well clothed with spiraeas and Astilbes and primulas, among which Kingdon Ward's Florinde grew to great size. Agapanthus flourished without being coddled in winter and the lemon- scented verbena was a tree. The garden is big and the .total number of different plants and bushes must be large ; but its crowning effects were due to the prevalence of a few sorts of shrubs and plants rightly placed on slopes enclosed this and that Lapis vert. A bush that rivalled the hydrangeas was a bush mallow of a very beautiful blue-mauve hue. Both this and the pure pink bush mallow, which flourishes anywhere, are worth a wider popularity in gardens Small or great. They will flower in great profusion from July into September. Another partidular beauty of the garden is that the uprights of the pergolas are all made of local stone, and stone is in one respect better for this purpose than wood, W. BEACH THOMASs -
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