COUNTRY LIFE
The Harvest Month We have entered the harvest month and are constrained to ask whether there will be any harvest. Several appearances are almost new to my experience. Where there is any con- siderable shade the ears even of winter oats are as green as the neighbouring grass. The line of greenness is precisely outlined against a crop that has ripened surprisingly early in so late a season. Another juxtaposition, as abrupt in contrast, is in the angle of the crop. The field is charted like a raised map into tablelands and valleys. Very wide patches are laid almost horizontal. Should August prove a month of revival and the summer make good by a deathbed repent- ance, the grain of the best crops can hardly help being uneven in sample, so capricious has been the ripening. Everything is " patchy," including the population of young partridges. Within the same small parishes are fields devastated by thunder-rain, that fell with the weight of shrapnel, and fields where oats are upright and even the hay was successfully carried. Some oats were cut in good condition last week.
Sunshine Contrasts Britain, of course, is a patchy island, hence its charm and interest. Like Becky Sharp, in Lord Steyne's estimate, it never bores one. The contrasts of wetness and dryness, nevertheless, are quite as abrupt in the middle of continents. One that particularly astonished me was between the Okanagan Valley and some of the neighbouring slopes. This glorious fruit paradise in British Columbia receives a mere sprinkle of rain ; and the dryness is one reason why the apple trees fruit every year, not every other year as is apt to happen in England. Irrigation is necessary, though quite near by the rainfall is heavy. The parallel in England is between the hills of Cumberland and Westmorland and the plains of Essex. Many places, especially holiday resorts on the South Coast, compete for the honour of enjoying the most hours of sunshine ; but it is widely reported by statisticians that the driest bit of country within the island is in and about Coggeshall and Kelvedon, where roses and sweet peas are bred and kale and corn give the firmest seed.
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A Bracken Eradicator
The abnormal spread of bracken, seen on Yorkshire moors, on Welsh hills and in Devon combes, has set the inventors at work on devising remedies. The Ministry of Agriculture and the Forestry Commissioners !lave been inspecting one of these on Yorkshire moors. Several instruments have been made ; but none perhaps is so simple and cheap as the revolving bar (drawn if need be by a single horse) invented by Captain Holt and exhibited this summer on Westerdale Moor. It is reckoned that a man with one horse can destroy the bracken of 18 acres within a day. The instrument (like a spring plough used in Australia) can jump rocks, boulders and other obstacles without damage. Bracken (like most green perennial weeds, including nettles) can be scotched by three consecutive close cuttings, begun about midsummer, and can be killed if the process is repeated in the following year. The trouble has been the expense and difficulty of manipulating very rough ground. The new invention goes a long way to meet these difficulties.
The Shepherd's Enemy
The Yorkshire demonstrations were undertaken primarily on behalf of the sheep-farmers. Bracken is so dense both below ground and above that it allows few neighbours. Bluebells .are among the few plants that can flourish amongst it. Grass, which is one of the light-lovers, is killed at once by the darkness under the canopy of fronds. I was struck by this quality in a garden in the Isle of Wight. A rough patch was occupied by bracken, lovely and magnificent in its place. The stems were five feet high and the great fans of leaves four feet and more in area. Nothing whatever grew underneath, not even the garlic that flourished there- abouts. Such monopolising qualities in the fern are men- tioned with emphasis by Captain Holt and his assessors ; but (as it seems to me) they weaken their case for a wholesale campaign by omitting one of the worst results of bracken infestation : it half kills the sheep as well as half starving them.
The Sheep's Enemy Not long since I went over a very attractive sheep farm in Merioneth. The bracken had crept like a tide—a tide that does not recede—over good grazing ground and had encircled nearly all the upper grazing ground. Walking up from the valley I met the shepherd and his dogs con- ducting a flock to the lower levels. He spoke with a sort of horror and passion of the gory wounds that scored the backs of the sheep ; and some were a pitiable sight. In his view, and there is little doubt of its truth, the fly that does the damage is as surely encouraged by the neighbourhood of bracken as the gnat by pools of undisturbed water. It is not true, as the inventors argue, that bracken is quite useless : it is harvested in a good many places—North Devon for one—and is used for bedding. The Japanese assert that it makes a good vegetable. However that may be, it is virtually useless in most districts and has put many thousands of acres out of cultivation all over the West and North of England. It has made quite barren much of the famous bird island of Skokholm, where it has the added disadvantage of encouraging the rabbit, which becomes as severe a plague as the bracken itself. It is hoped that the Ministry of Agriculture will take a hand, if only by advice, in the cam- paign for eradication. The demonstration on the Westerdale moors in North Yorkshire may prove a turning point. Our sheep- farmers have been retiring in face of the enemy far too long.
Increasing Species
The ups and downs of plants and animals, whether beneficent or evil, are of great interest to the biologists. They are now wondering why the comma butterfly has multiplied and spread ; why the greater tortoiseshell has almost vanished. They have decided that the willow herb (rosebay) has extended, perhaps beyond the record of any other flower, chiefly because of the efficacy of the wings attached to its seed, but also because the seed has found congenial beds in lands taken from husbandry for building. Locally I have watched in the last two years a scarcely credible increase in the biennial (not the creeping) thistle. One piece of ground of several acres is quite impassable, and a smaller patch even better defended by teazel, and another field of some twelve acres rendered virtually grassless by a combination of the biennial thistle and ragwort. The Noxious Weeds Act is a completely dead letter—to the shame of the agricultural inspectors. You may ruin your own land and your neighbours with impunity. It is as safe to grow thistles, docks and ragwort (the only illegal weeds) as any other crop. A steadily increasing plant—on the whole harmless—is the wild clematis or old man's beard. This again has a flying seed, and though by nature a climber is quite content to creep over the ground. The disused chalk pit is its favourite haunt. Among birds I should say that the turtle dove (now one of the few singers left) is several times as numerous as it was, say, twenty years ago. The most remarkable re-emergence of an almost vanished animal, is the polecat.
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Climbers as Shrubs In a Hampshire garden, where many things grow delight- fully, where cork trees and eucalyptus and lemon verbenas and fuchsias need no protection, the loveliest bush at this date is perhaps a rhus cotirms that has spread very wide and glows like a bonfire with the feathery flower. Close by it at an earlier date the loveliest things were two bush wistaria. The world is so well used to the plant as a climber that its beauty in another form is apt to be forgotten. The same sort of thing happens with a good many shrubs. The much abused laurel, used almost everywhere solely as a screen or hedge, may be a really gorgeous thing when it has grown to a good size by itself and can reflect the sunlight from a thousand leaves. Most yew hedges are spoilt because it is forgotten that the yew is a forest tree. In the sequel the best hedges are those in which the trees are furthest apart. In the best, and least stuffy that I know (it is in Norfolk) each yew is nearly three yards from its neighbours. Even lonicera nithia, much the most popular hedge plant of the moment, is worth growing as a separate bush. A good many roses are better unprene i and treated as shrubs, not least the old thornless rose Zephyrine
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