COUNTRY LIFE
Forest Heyday England is at its loveliest point when some of the trees— ash, oak and elm—are still so small in leaf that the pattern of their boughs tells of winter, and the beech and chestnut have expanded their very green leaves. Some of the little copses of Charnwood Forest, for example, are an almost startling mixture of summer and winter. You must peer into the crumpled litter of the brown bracken to see the green shoot unfolding. Oaks, ruddy rather than green, show up in startling contrast the intense vividness of the beech leaves. Perhaps no district in the island is quite so eloquent of the story of English landscape. The forest was once so dense that old writers counted the number of miles you could travel without seeing the sun however brightly it shone. The forest, like most other British forests, is no longer a place of serried trees. What woods there are have shrunk to spinneys or single trees ; and all life or almost all has enjoyed the change. There are more birds, more flowers, more butterflies and bees. The old forest was the great, even the dreaded enemy ; today the place where the forest was—at Epping, in the New Forest, in Chamwood or the Forest of Dean—is the favourite resort of holiday makers of all sorts and conditions. Whitsuntide is its heyday.
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The Supremacy of Kew After a recent visit I am inclined to maintain that Kew Gardens, though primarily a home of science, is one of the loveliest places in all England, and though all the world contri- butes to its plants it is singularly English ; and it is rural in atmosphere. On leaving it last week I asked a gardener for the shortest cut to the nearest gate. He told me and I moved towards the gravel path, at which he demurred, " I should go across the grass," he said. I remembered trying a short cut across some very rough unkempt grass in the great garden in Dresden. The action' raised a howl, not from an official but from a visitor : " That no man dare do." With wise tolerance you are allowed to wander along the open glades and enjoy the green shade to your heart's content. There are one, or two things you must not do. You are specifically forbidden to birdsnest, for example ; and what a tribute this is to the birds' appreciation of the sanctuary of London ! The garden will be almost at its best this week and next, especially in the wilder part where the bluebells are massed as they are massed in any wood in the countryside. The greatest unit of splendour is perhaps the grove of flowering prunus and cherry.
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A Cuckoo's Selection We all know about the cuckoo's lazy and selfish habit of laying eggs in other birds' nests and so avoiding the troubles incident to parenthood. I should perhaps write " laying or placing," for the controversy between the layers and the placers is as flagrant as that between the boosters and knockers in the pages of Sam Slick. It is dangerous to hint a preference- for either view or to suggest that there may be something in both. Let that be. A particular cuckoo has (somehow) inserted its egg into a hedge-sparrow's nest built in much the same spot for the last three years. The cuckoo or a cuckoo was seen last week busy quartering the same little bit of hedge. The hedge-sparrow's nest was there, but the cuckoo took no advantage of it ; and this week four hedge-sparrows were born ; and we must infer that the cuckoo realised that she had arrived too late for her favourite host. When I looked at the young, a new reason occurred to me for the strong preference shown by cuckoos for hedge-sparrows, although the host's egg has seldom any resemblance whatever to the cuckoo's. The young cuckoo has a bright orange cavern of a mouth. When their little clutch, which was still blind, held up their slender and naked necks and opened their gape the colour at once suggested the cuckoo's. In this regard at any rate the young cuckoo would arouse no suspicions in the nursing mother.
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Bracken
That very lovely plant, the bracken, now springing up in crozier shape, beautifies many open woods and hillsides ; but is almost the worst of known enemies of husbandry of all sorts. It has recently eaten up acre after acre in many parts of the
country—in the Quantocks, for example, and in the Merioneth hills and the Welsh islands. Its advance is detested in that sanctuary of sanctuaries, Skokholm island, which was indeed once offered as a field for experiment in bracken eradication. It is detested in Merioneth, both because it destroys good grass needed for sheep and because it harbours the insect that is the worst of all the enemies of the sheep. The scourge has been so wholesale in the north—both in Yorkshire and Scot- land, that a Bracken Eradication Committee for Scotland has come into being ; and the Scottish Department of Agriculture is taking a hand. A number of experiments or demonstrations are to be made this month and later on the lines of those that were organised last year on Westerdale Moar. Grants in aid of bracken eradication can be secured ; and for this purpose the Holt Bracken Breaker, invented last year by Captain Holt, has been approved. It has earned golden opinions, and has the advantage over most of the new devices urged upon farmers that it is very cheap and very simple. We can less well spare the thousands of acres that the advancing bracken has absorbed than the Australians can spare the millions of acres rendered unapproachable by the cacti. It is beautiful but bad, a combination of qualities not unknown about the world.
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A Bad Builder There are four robins' nests, if no more, in a particular garden in Warwickshire. One is in an old paint-container that was thrown into a mass of ivy on the ground. One is in a biscuit tin fixed between the rival trunks of a yew tree. One is in an old coconut similarly fixed. It is always worth while for a gardener to fix such unlovely relics in places of decent obscurity ; they will please many birds ; but the robin above others. Its natural sense of domesticity is extended to the crock whether in metal, wood or ware, an old kettle, rhubarb pot or box, or even a niche between books—it is all the same to the robin : art is preferred before nature. A robin in another garden whose fortunes I have been following for more than six weeks has achieved a final success. More than four weeks were spent in vain attempts to balance nesting material, first on a pipe, then on a board kindly placed to broaden the founda- tions. All was in vain till human hands composed a nest out of the barrow-load of waste material on the floor. Less than a week later the rough cup was lined, and the full clutch was duly laid, and the hen bird has sat so close that she could be fed by hand on the nest.
* * Birds and Aeroplanes A plea reached me the other day for the preservation of the coastal area of Pembrokeshire as a sort of national park or sanctuary area. A week or two later came the news that a large aerodrome was to be set up in the very heart of this district. It would almost seem that aeroplanes dislike birds as much as birds dislike aeroplanes, for a number of spots that have been particular haunts of rarer birds have been especially selected for dromes. The marvellous, the unique natural sanctuaries of this western promontory are threatened as Abbotsbury (where the swans come from) has been threatened. In old days St. David's Head was famous, among those who pursued the sport of hawking, as the breeding ground of the best pere- grines, and still today the cliffs thereabout are so well known for peregrines' nests that a special watch has to be kept against egg-collectors. The islands off the coast have no parallel. Simmer and Ramsey are not less precious as bird sanctuaries than the more widely bruited Skokholm and Grassholme. How far an aerodrome will interfere with the birds I do not know, but this splendid headland is worth preserving and more easily preserved than other places. It has great marshes, beloved of curlew, duck and snipe, and great rocks. The population is scattered in a few small homesteads that shelter under the rocks, many of them approached by narrow and difficult lanes, singularly rich in flowers. It would be a tragedy if the shack and its cousins were given licence, if colonies of such dwellings grew as they have grown, say, at Saunton Sands in North Devon—a place famous for the variety of its flowers—or for that matter at Newgall between Haverfordwest and St. David's. The district cries out for a wide and wise regional plan, even if a more national scheme were at first deemed impracticable.
W. BEACH THOMAS.
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