COUNTRY LIFE
IN looking over the records of the famous Norfolk diarists (who found "indications of spring" in November) I could not but notice that a good many of their records were this winter, so- called, anticipated by a month or so. Here are some recordings furnished me by a schoolmaster (F.R.H.S.) from Cornwall: Fuchsias, large flowered ; the small flowered have shed flowers and leaves. Pink, white and common purple veronicas, hydrangeas in scores. Wallflowers, white lupins, snapdragons, pansies, forget-me-nots, violets, roses. Both primroses and polyanthus in quantity. Among wild flowers outside the commonest are red dead-nettle, fumitory, sow thistle, germander speedwell, winter cress, and—most satisfac- tory of all—winter heliotrope. It is pleasant to hear that this grows "in great profusion." Most of us in the eastern half of England regard it as rare. The school from which this information comes owns a collection, mounted and pressed, of 400 wild flowers, all collected locally. "The English Riviera" is no false title for the Cornish peninsula. Even the lambs, already plentiful, there seem to be in step with the general earliness, though doubtless they are anticipated by the Dorset Horns.
Dumps Into the thousand grandiose ideas for planning England after the war I would venture to intrude a small and negative suggestion. We must stop destroying before we can build. Now I walked this week over a space of some zoo acres, not 30 miles from London. Some of it was once good farm land. It is now a dump for North London rubbish. In one place a great hill of pots and pans, and ashes, and rejected scraps of all sorts both in stuffs and metal, has risen above an earlier hill of the same sort. The force of ugliness could no further go. The labour expended is immense. Train lines have to be made, some as sidings from the railway proper, some of small gauge for more local work. A large body of work- men are continuously employed (sometimes in breaking up sleepers for their home fires). They have other occupations outside their proper work, which is laborious and dirty. Within half an hour or so (as mentioned in a previous note), I picked up five copper wire snares, one of them holding a cock pheasant by the neck.
Farming Rubbish It is an exceedingly fortunate accident that the dump with which I am best acquainted is owned in part by a very public-spirited farmer, who has made manful and, indeed, successful efforts to cultivate and plant what parts of this great rubbish heap are flat enough and incommoded enough to admit of tillage; but, of course, a good proportion of this devastated acreage is quite beyond such beneficent treatment. One of the botanical reasons for this is that the waste land is instantly appropriated not by thorns and briars, though these are found, but by elder bushes, which grow at an astonishing rate in astonishing profusion, and, incidentally, could supply abundant fruit to those who are wise enough to preserve the most succulent and delicately flavoured berries. When the bushes are cut and left on the ground to be enveloped in nettles, which are the master crop, they make one of the most effective entanglements that I know. A Maginot line of these would be impregnable.
One of the popular additions to orchard science is the bush walnut. The tree does not fruit till it is fifteen years old, and then as a rule sparsely. The bush is very much quicker off the mark. This is a useful discovery, though at present such bushes are almost unprocurable. An interesting experiment is also being made with the object of growing cider apples on bushes ; since England is very far from self-supporting in this fruit (which, inci- dentally, is the best apple for mincemeat as well as necessary for wholesome cider).
In the Garden Two walled gardens, belonging to country houses—one in Hampshire, one in Lancashire—of which I have had accounts, have produced income enough to pay the wages bill, and to give the house all the vegetables and fruit it requires. Such examples are beginning to open the eyes of country-house owners to the high value of the walled garden. An expert believer in the value of the French system of intensive cultivation started a demonstration in an old country-house garden because he held that walls plus cloches could outrival the greenhouse. We have discovered in the war that it is good for the nation as well as the impoverished landowner that these gardens should be made to pay. W. BEAC.H THOMAS.
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