COUNTRY LIFE
leadership in this regard has been given by the example of Americans who have set up branch factories in this country, as Mr. Ford has industries themselves feel some desire to be decentralised. Some given a lead in intensive agriculture. of a garden city has been the slowest to be realised, the decentralisa- tion of industries, the juxtaposition of country homes for workers the organisers of industry: The new idea of dispersal into satellite will be very much easier to fulfil the central idea of a garden city towns with a rural atmosphere had not captured their imagination ; but there are many signs of a change of heart. The planners (who reason that for the first time since the industrial revolution the or walling off the flower-beds. The faith of old Ebenezer Howard, water, agriculture and a retail monopoly. There is no sign of that most desirable ideal (for all country communities) of a fresh local food supply, in respect of grain as well as other foods. It proved impossible to prevent the city becoming in some degree a dormitory for workers in Cobbett's Wen. Perhaps the cardinal, essential idea and the place of their labours. The lag has been due chiefly to are many and rather too abstract) may take it as certain that it after this war than it was before or after the last, solely for the has since spread not unsuccessfully over a familiar stretch of country. Nightingales still sing there and corn grows. The growing popula- tion has not evicted the natural denizens, and the town presents a garden air, thanks' in some degree to the fashion of not hedging WHAT is a garden city? Mr. Osborn, one of the chief propagandist no definition. Now I was at the birth of one of the best, whi,s, justified. Yet the more optimistic vision, glibly foretold by one of the organisers, has not been realised. He promised a rateless as he once explained it to me on the spot, has been, in general, town, enriched by its own resources in the way of clay, gravel, said the other day that the phrase was misused. But he offerd Cuckoo Problems When Mr. Chance published his illuminating book, The Cuckoo's Secret, he did not solve, as he well knew, all the cuckoo mysteries. The cuckoo (whose iteration has more than usually deserved its constant epithet) continually puts up new problems. In a neigh- bour's garden a cuckoo laid her egg in a hedge-sparrow's nest con- taining only two eggs. A day or two after the young cuckoo was hatched those two eggs had vanished. The young cuckoo was too small to have turned them out, and they were not under the nest. Had the mother cuckoo removed them, and does she, as some, observers begin to believe, take some after-interest in the career of her progeny? The egg, of course, bore no likeness whatever to the blue eggs of the foster mother.
Rival Summers Those gloomy persons who hold that the singularly perfect weather of April and May will have to be paid for in later months would perhaps be interested in the record of an Oxford diary of 1893, the one remembered spring that can rival 1943. It records the pleasing warmth of early July with as much corroborative detail as the more unexpected warmth of April and May. It looks possible that in harvest earliness 1943 may surpass its rival. Even spring-sown barley was in ear in May. Autumn-sown oats and wheat are, of course, much more forward, and farmers are offering odds that some will be ripe by the last days of June. Harvest will in that case be yet earlier than haysel, which began last week, is did the equally premature cherry harvest, which seems to have been less popular with the birds than usual, perhaps because insect food is rarely plentiful.
In the Garden •
A chorus in favour of black cotton has been heard. Cherries have been saved by throwing reels to and fro over the trees as well as peas and gooseberries by more careful methods. Most birds are terrified by the contact of their wings with this unnoticed obstruction. The one exception is the jay, that goutmet of the edible pea. Those who take the precaution of picking off the top of their broad beans, as a defence against the fly, may be reminded that this top spray is edible. Winter-sown beans are already fit for table. Field beans also are good to eat if, like Dr. Johnson's Scotsman, they are taken Postage on this issue : Inland and Overseas, id.
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