In the Garden Almost a hundred and fifty years ago
Gilbert White com- plained that the " bull-finches make sad havoc among the buds of my cherry and apricot trees; they also destroy the buds of the gooseberries and honey-suckles." A year earlier he had complained that they did the same to his damsons. Today, almost on the same date, I see them devastating the prunes pissardii, and am forced to wonder which I should miss most : the absence of the birds or the loss of the wine-pink buds which seem to dye their feathers. A few days earlier White had " covered the asparagus beds, and the artichokes with muckle." A note in the new Nonesuch edition calls attention to the word muckle, describing it as a term still occasionally used for long cow-manure in remote country districts. This gives the word much less than its due. Muckle is still good common Midland English. I was brought up to think of any muck-heap as a muckle, and in turn of any man on his own muckle as a man not to be mucked about with. Meanwhile, I have made a load of muckle into a hot-bed, raising a temperature of 90° on the second day. The first iris reticulata are out, rich torches of purple, the first grape hyacinths, many crocuses, the first saxifrages, the later butter- cup-yellow variety of winter aconite, the first mauve cowslip- bells of the primula denticulata, a renewal of iris stylosa, the pink and blue soldiers and sailors, the first daffodils. I breal: up the dry' potatoes of dahlias and salvia patius, and a little squirrel-red vole is disturbed from among them and slither,
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