COUNTRY LIFE

Our Second Spring Storm and rain have not arrested the strange outbreak of spring-like phenomena. There is still apple-blossom. In one garden three young holly trees—two male and one female— have just opened their flowers, which are in fair quantity. Viola gracilis, which at one time had apparently perished by drought, is now in full leaf and flower. Honeysuckle is flowering in a hedge near by. The crop of seedlings from annuals sown in the spring, some very late in the spring, have made one bed as green as the grass round it. Bees, especially the carder bees, are very active. It is literally true of England that ver semper viret. There is no month in the year when you cannot find what the old keepers of nature calendars called "indications of spring." The survivals from the previous spring meet the anticipators of next spring. The thrush and the honey-suckle are the best of the " all-rounders."

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A Change of Address

The string of sanctuaries, and protected ground between Scolt Head and the Cley marshes, have benefited, it is sur- mised, from the disastrous experience at Hickling Broad, which was invaded by the sea. Among other birds that lost for a season or two their nesting haunts were a pair of bittern, and they migrated to the north coast of Norfolk. Birds run a certain risk from their friends or admirers as well as from those who seek to rob their nests or acquire their skins ; and this danger is so acutely realised by the guardians of the sanctuaries that they abstained from peering too closely into the bitterns' sanctum. It may, however, be assumed from general observation that the pair nested in this new haunt. The rarer birds are often among the shyer birds ; and this shyness may well be fatal to their multiplication in a particular district. For example, in one year, out of a number of kites' nests within the country exactly one young bird was reared ; and among the adverse influences must be numbered the eye of the camera.

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A Rara Avis By good fortune (or perhaps good judgement) the Norfolk Naturalists' Trust has once again chosen for illustration a biril that has been in particular evidence. When the snow bunting was chosen, the birds appeared in unusual numbers at an unusually early date. This year a young naturalist of my acquaintance almost ran into a spoonbill and an avocet on a flying visit to the Salthouse marshes. It is the avocet that has been chosen for this year's Christmas card. It is feeding on Salthouse Broad on the north coast of Norfolk, one of its last breeding places in the British Isles, which it still visits each year, and where every effort is made to induce it to nest. All who buy the card will help towards this end, as all profits from its sale are put to the funds of the Trust. The card is reproduced in colour from a painting by J. C. Harrison. Orders, accompanied by remittances, should be sent to Sydney H. Long, M.D., 3! Surrey Street, Norwich. Price, 4l d. each or 4s. 6d. a dozen, inclusive of suitable envelopes and postage.

A National Calendar

Of the calendars for next year that have appeared even at this early date a special virtue belongs to the group of twelve photographs that have gone forth as apostles of the National Trust. They are gloriously English ; and that means that they depict with splendour the humanised landscape. Even the forefront, which gives a wide purview of the wildness of Derwentwater, has " touches of things human." We all in these days delight in the wildness that our ancestors not so long ago regarded with a sort of abhorrence ; but the essential beauty of Britain is made by architecture and husbandry not less than by strata. It is the great English achievement that the three have agreed to an aesthetic co-operation or co-relation that has never been equalled. This calendar— as indeed the beneficent work of the National Trust—shows most persuasively how the village street, the country house, the ruined arch, and the taming of the forest have helped to create the landscape that is essentially English. The calendar, of which the purchase benefits this most beneficent organisation, is published by Burrow and Company, Limited, London, W.C. 2. It is to be hoped, and it is expected, that the Trust will have national support for its new Bill, about to be introduced, for the preservation of country houses of historic or scenic interest. They provide the most English scenes in England.

Below London

If anyone wishes to advertise London as a health resort he should broadcast the experience of the trench-diggers in Hyde Park. The sand and gravel disclosed are just the sort of subsoil that the doctors desire. London has its share of the virtues discovered, and certainly not anticipated, by those who, on the spur of the moment and as an act of faith, bought the ground for the Welwyn Garden City. The survey, which was undertaken almost at once, revealed singularly clean gravel, pits of good sand, and in one corner firm brick clay. The discoveries so delighted the first makers of the survey that they prophesied, with pardonable exaggeration, that one day the city would be rate-free, thanks chiefly to the richness of its own subsoil. The association of gravel and clay has some queer and most unexpected results—one small gravel- pit holds water permanently ; and in and about grows a lusty crop of the reed-mace that is popularly and wrongly known as the bulrush. How it got there is a wonder ; but the way of a seed in the air is as wonderful as any of Solomon's four ways. The best example that ever I saw of the colonisa- tion of land by water plants was on the farms just outside Ypres. They were an archipelago of reedy, rushy ponds, frequented by incredible numbers of both frogs and wild duck. The marsh plants established themselves in these shell-hole pools within two years !

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Ravaged Sanctuaries

I gave some account the other day of the wholesale destruction of coarse fish in the Broads that was caused by the inroad of the sea in the early spring. Further inquest on the water of some of the best known of the Broads has made manifest the wholesale nature of the malign effect of salt water on fresh- water life and of flood water on underground life. One reason why such bird sanctuaries as Hiclding Broad are supreme is that plentiful food of all sorts is supplied to different species and families : water birds, wading birds, and reed birds all find ideal conditions. There are dry tufted intervals of grass which harbour much insect food and supply such waders as the Redshank with the nesting site that it desires. All these desirable conditions have been taken away simultaneously. There is little food in the water and little cover on the land, and a good part of the birds that had found a perfect home as well as perfect protection have been forced to abandon their paradise altogether. They will return anon ; but even teeming nature must take some time before she can people the devastated areas with fishes, crustacca, insects of all sorts, and even worms. The birds will return almost automatically when feeding and nesting conditions are restored. Their intelligence department is always beyond praise and often beyond explanation.

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In the Garden

The south-west of England is rightly proud of itself as a Riviera. Things would grow in the gardens of Vcitch that would grow nowhere else ; and the firm, now alas extinct, was the last to send travellers for plants round the wide world. Snug corners of the south are almost sub-tropical. Nevertheless, no part of the island has more glorious gardens than Scotland ; and two letters that have reached me this week bear witness to their wealth of blossom.up to the edge of winter. A quotation from one may convey a hint or two :

" Even in this time of stress and though I am in the midst of burning garden rubbish I must tell you of the planting of our sino- ornata gentians. . . . On reading a paragraph of yours we surrounded our rose border with these gentians. Today, as I look down on their vivid blue, a broad band all round, mingling with the late blosson:s of the rose (Shot Silk), the same colour carried on by a near bed of antirrhinums, and against trees already in autumn tints, was wonderful and beautiful to behold."

This from Argyll. It is only. in Scotland so far as I know that Kingdon Ward's Blue Meconopsis seeds itself into masses that rival the bluebell for quantity. W. BEACH THOMAS.