A common experience, which continues to surprise a good many
people, was peculiarly emphasized:` The gardens in the valley, especially the drier valleys, suffered very much more severely than those on. the hill. I made a sort of census of two of them. One lying on the north slope of a shallow dry depression was completely devastated. The herbaceous border was in rags. The French• beans and potatoes in the potager were no more. . The gooseberries just about big enough to pick were flaccid sticks. Such bushes as spiraeas were handled hardly less severely. The dahlias and some lilies were shrivelled off. Even the weeds of the orchard suffered hardly less severely than the blossom. The nettles, for example, were hardly less black, less miserably wilted than the beans. In the garden on the hill the losses were few. Strawberries suffered most severely and it was alto- gether surprising to see the young shoots of the blackberries on the east side of a hedgerow bent and browned. That useful and incredibly rapid climber, the Polygonium Baldschuanicum, lost its leading shoots, tender from excessive speed of growth. But for the rest little harm was done except to strawberries. The gooseberries, rose bushes, spiraeas and the rest did not so much as wince, though a thermometer (high up in a warm, well-piotected balcony) registered a frost of six degrees. The moral seems to be : live on a hill. In gmeral some few birds could not endUre
the cold and deserted their nests. It is a wiser act than to sit interminably (as grouse will sit) upon a defertilized clutch.
* * * *
Previous page
