sensitiveness to foul weather. The frosts of this spring have
punished the West of England very much more severely than the East. In Herefordshire, which is said to have suffered the most severely—and the frosts there fell twelve degrees below zero—whole hedgerows have perished or been at least decimated. Such lusty bushes as privet are killed. Euonymous and holly hedges are brown as autumn, and yew hedges look as if they had been singed. So are cedar trees, holly trees and arbutus. Bushes of the larger berberis are killed stone dead. For the first time in the experience of many years we have seen an ilex or holm oak as bare as any deciduous English oak. In the gardens, climbing roses are either dead or cut to the ground, and every bush cistus with many rock roses has vanished. From such punishment as this the birds, and indeed some of the mammals, have not been exempt.
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