COUNTRY LIFE

Southport Flowers

The last of the great flower-shows of the year was held at Southport last week, and excelled in scope and perhaps in splendour any of its predecessors. Flowers have proved a municipal venture much more fruitful than most municipal ventures, even in direct dividends. Thousands of people go to Southport for the sake of flowers, whatever other attrac- tions they may find in the town or on the links ; and it is pleasant to see municipal activity take this flowery path. It is perhaps due to the influence of the great show that the municipality—not without help from the Friends—has made its own scheme for providing its unemployed with free land, with tools, with seeds and with manure and fertilisers. It is the best possible way of providing out-of-work men with work and poor families with wholesome food. Other muni- cipalities, please copy.

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Floral Tips

Do most of us go to a great flower-show to admire its splendours and wonder at its perfections, or to seek hints for our own plots ? The first object is much more easily achieved. It is often not easy to translate this gorgeousness into terms of a modest plot. " The beautiful is difficult " ; and blooms that we desire may only he grown by aids not at our disposal. I know a villager who spent the outrageous sum of 10s. for a gladiolus bulb, so enviable was the blossom ; and thereafter left the bulb in the ground to face the rigours of winter. It had, of course, vanished before the expected blossoming date in the next autumn. Perhaps to prevent such disappointment, some exhibitors put up cards advertising the particular qualities of their goods. Many people who have spent money more or less vainly on giant purple-flowered delphiniums should be grateful to the gardener who put up on his stall a succession of notices announcing the superior virtues of the Belladonna type in hardiness and length of flowering. Some of the newer varieties flower from the very base of the stalk to the tip. " Is it a good doer ? " is the most essential of all questions preceding the purchase of .a splendid thing ; and most sellers of flowers are extremely honest in their answers.

* * a * Creating Colour

Each flower-show exhibits the advance, the hurried evolu- tion of particular flowers. Personally, I have especially watched at flower-shows for years the improvement in the Iceland poppy, and heard last week some details of the work. Mr. Gibson, its arch-priest, toiled for fifteen years before he fixed the orange tint of the most popular variety. Till then the light yellow and white which are the natural colours insisted on recurring. ' It took him another ten, after this desired colour was fixed, to achieve the quality he sought. He has now produced some light pinks and expects to achieve in their regard the fixity of colour and quality of type that he seeks. The making of the Shirley poppy (in a Rectory garden) took much the same time ; and the variety of shade is now incalculable. The Zinnia is a good example of the growth of colour by means of the art of selection. The Zinnia is quite the commonest of the wild flowers you come upon in the hills of Cordoba in the Argentine. They are all of one hue and small in blossom. They have not only increased, in size from one inch to five or thereabouts, but have exhausted one range of mauve and pink shades ; and if you sow a packet of, say, Carters' " Giant Mixed " you will probably get one or two blossoms of that rarest of flower tints, a light green. It was amusing to see on one stand the large, heavy card proclaiming a gold medal award, firmly balanced on the base of a single Zinnia head. In the achievement of brilliance of colour, no example is more striking than " Morning Glory," a single red and orange dahlia, shown in great perfection on many stalls.

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Money in Glass

This flowery township is connected with Preston by a service of trains that have an incomparable gift for sauntering. They pause at every Halt and do not exceed the speed, limit over the short spaces between. An observer may almost rejoice in the delay, at any rate in August, now. He may see not only field crops excellent in spite of our untoward weather, but most fruitful devices for defying the weather. Not one, but scores of farmers, including men whose whole farm does not exceed three acres or less, have built glass houses of the latest. patterns ; and they pay handsome dividends. There are places which almost rival the famous Valley of Glass in Guernsey or the lower reaches of the Leo Valley in Hertfordshire. Tomatoes are the standard crop ; but a good many flowers are grown. Whatever happens, however deep economic depression, flowers remain a good market. One of our greatest growers told me during the week that an inquest had been made into the popularity of flowers, for purchase, and the result surprised the very elect. The list was headed by chrysanthemums, with carnations second and roses third. The pink and red varieties of the pyrethrum are both at times best sellers ; and I have known a smallholder to make a small fortune out- of the Caucasian scabious, a flower that has been greatly improved of late.

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A Ravaged Moor . .

Grouse in the north country have flourished rather less freely than was hoped and expected. Their enemy was not disease nor the weather, but the quite unex-plicable prevalence of that comparatively new menace the heather beetle. There is one grouse-moor in Westmorland which is being burnt— not in strips, but over all its surface, and will not be shot over for at least four years. This wholesale arson has been made necessary by the multiplicity of the beetles, which have been so numerous that they have killed a deal of the heather outright. The double attack by the grubs of the beetle on both root and stem is more than this most hardy plant can withstand. It is difficult to parallel the rapidity of the spread of this insect ; and so far, I believe, very little expert work has been done on its life-history. The chief harm is wrought not by the beetle, the perfect insect, but by the caterpillar—as indeed is usual. How few insects, in the perfect shape for which their other forms are preparatory, do any harm at all ! The daddy-long-legs, for example, though a present nuisance, is as harmless as his grub is harmful. The one race of insects almost harmless in all stages is the butterfly. Perhaps the only enemy of them all is the caterpillar of the common white, which certainly does enjoy the cabbage. On a Westmorland farm the first cutting of hay was made in the third week of August. The farmer said that in his records of the neighbourhood the very latest day was August 23rd. He had beaten that handsomely by finishing his cutting on August 27th, and a very good crop it was. For some not very obvious reason the growth had been late, though of course the prime reason for delay was the continuance of rain. The haysel and the harvest are simultaneous in this district ; and both very fair. It is more astonishing that the number of partridges in the district is exceptionally large, and this surprising fact, after a summer of thunderstorms, is apparently due to the fact that no nests were destroyed in the process of haymaking, which indeed in these days can be very deadly. The paucity of partridges has perhaps been as much exaggerated as the badness of the harvest in broadcast estimates. The gloom of the B.B.C. especially was quite unjustifiably abysmal.

A Trusting Dishwasher

The following account of a trusting bird and friendly workers is vouched for by the managing director of a brick works in my neighbourhood. Recently a pair of pied wagtails, often called " Dishwashers," built a nest on the boards on which bricks are set down to dry. The nest with its eggs had to be frequently moved, as soft bricks were set dovoin, and when dry taken away to the kiln and a fresh lot of soft bricks put' down. In all the nest was handled some eight or ten times. The hen bird would leave the nest and perch on a neighbouring shed, an interested spectator of the moves, and quickly returned to the nest when the worker moved away. It was a proud day for the workers when five young birds were hatched from the five eggs. The brood was jealously guarded till the fledgelings left the nest without the loss of a singular member.

W. •BEACH THOMAS. '