Maytime Threats
From Chaucer to our latest Poet Laureate May has been more generally praised for its spring and summer charms than any month ; but the chief attribute of its opening fortnight in the view of most gardeners is frost. The May frost is the mast destructive act of the weather all across Europe from Austria to Wales ; and we have the authority of so great a European botanist as Kerner for believing that it is one of the very few Buchan or other spells that may be expected at particular. dates. Someone has said that we enjoy a bumper crop of plums about every fifth year, and a bumper crop of apples about every twentieth. If that estimate is in any sort accurate, it would seem to imply that the May frost is a greater scourge than the April frost, for the plum is about a month earlier than the apple on the average. In places that are especially liable to frost, it is well worth the attention of the planter of fruit-trees to select those apples that flower late, and such sorts are well known to all the sellers of fruit trees as well as to the R.H.S. (to which we should all belong). Knowledge of frost and the ways of defeating itthas increased greatly of late, though perhaps the ideal form of cheap smudge or protective smoke has yet to be discovered, or at any rate put on the market.
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