Wild Harvests The two, almost the only two, surviving wild
harvests are in full swing ; and blackberry and mushroom-piekers go forth from every village in numbers. The mushroom keeps its value ; and the wild agaricus cavnpestris (which in our narrow insular way we regard as the only edible mush.- room) has no rival in flavour, except among such comparative rarities as the quaint morel. The wild blackberry has suffered a little in value from the quite new vogue of the cultivated blackberry. Some of the newer sorts beat very freely ; and the fruit is big and uniform. They have proved so popular that in some commercial gardens they are being substituted for that admirable fruit the loganberry, which indeed lost value owing to sudden large and abundantly cheap imports from Oregon. In one of the best of the intensive fruit farms of Worcestershire, newly planted logans are actually being grubbed up owing to the inability of the canners to pay the old prices. These cultivated blackberries suffer much less than the wild sorts from drought. This year the wild harvest is small. The fruits have shrivelled away in the drier hedgerows to nothing. Besides this there are many hedgerow sorts which are always valueless. The plant fills an interesting corner of botany ; and within recent years the varieties have been multiplied into scores. It behoves those who plant wild brambles in their garden to be careful about the variety, but in every event the new cultivated sorts are much better than any wild plant. This does not apply to the mushroom. The cultivated product very rarely has the full savour of the wild.
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