COUNTRY LIFE
Green England The returning traveller from any extra-European zone must rejoice in the exceeding greenness of England. There. is no evergreen that can compare with grass. What immense areas in other lands 'are surfaced with sand, rubble, rock and scrub. What grass there is often enough resembles the starved stuff described by Robert Browning in " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Caine." It may be daintily starred with dwarf flowers, hie a quaint golf course by the old Dutch settlement of Swellen- dam in Cape Colony : but the greens which demand real grass have to be made of grit. How pleasantly the grass in most English fields north of Southainpton, as elsewhere, snuggles up to the hedgerows. We are forced as agricultural theorists to condemn grass as the thinnest, the least intensive form of cultivation, yet what natural wealth is in it ! It is a widhw's cruse, it stores wealth ; and while the capital increases, the dividends, if small, are never intermittent. It is a free gift. What pleasant treading as well as feeding for stock ; and Bottom, a true Englishman, though temporarily an ass, was right enough in his panegyric : "Good hay, sweet hay hath no fellow " ; and in the newest form of haymaking the trussed hay remains as green as the growing crop. Yet the greatest of all gifts given by the grass field and common is to the eyes. While grass grows the inhabitants of this island will live in a green, and therefore pleasant, land.
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The Apostles of Grass Nor are there any patriots who deserve better of their country than Professor Stapleton and his like, who spend their scientific gifts in discovering (after a variant of the Swift dictum) how to make good grass grow tomorrow where indifferent grass grew yesterday. One must visit other countries to feel how natural and blessed a crop is English grass. In South Africa (as at Gibraltar) the golf greens are mostly made of grit ; and immense areas that would be pleasant and valuable paddocks and fields in England are wholly waste, often denuded merely by the wind, only for lack of this precious green carpet of -sheep's fescue or foxtail or cocksfoot.
* * * * Where is the Wheat?
At the same time it must be confessed that England is very much less green this spring than it was in the winter. The wheats have suffered cruelly from both excess of wet and from cold winters. Field after field has steadily lost its greenness. The wheat that was flourishing in plant in January is now 'scarcely visible. You can in most fields just make out the line of the dtill, but that is all ; and farmers cannot make up their minds whether to plough the crop up or to hold on in the hope that the plants will recover. It will' soonbe too late for spring sowing and the alternative must be faced within the next fortnight. The farmer's troubles are increased, as every gardener will realise, by the difficulty of manufacturing the soggy or gluey ground into a seed bed.
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Xerophitic Flowers
More arid lands, which nature does not clothe with grass, excel us greatly in variety of flower ; and none perhaps equals South Africa. The Cape is a sort of Mecca for the botanist ; and one might well in Britain take example from the specialists. Nothing was more pleasing in that land of scenic beauty than the insistence on the preservation of local flowers. Flower sanctuaries abound, and are made glorious by the variety and splendour of the species. I was in South Africa when the flower season was over ; its heyday is the junction of our summer and autumn ; yet one felt that it would be difficult to exceed the delight of gorgeous patches of Crassulas and Watsonias among bushless heaths as different from one another as chalk from cheese. There is one sanctuary extending for five miles and more within an enclosure round a great water reservoir ; and standing among these flowers I could not but contrast the same with the slopes round some of the English reservoirs, where the plantations of conifers have killed off every native flower. On the whole, of course, such afforestation is an excellent form of what Theodore Roosevelt
used to call not preservation but conservation. Nevertheless the conifer can be overdone, as in Breckland—a unique district for flowers and, indeed birds—and some parts of Westmor- land. In one district of the Cape I saw the results of a pro- longed and vigorous battle between local lovers of flowers and Government afforesters. A glorious valley and slope in the midst of the afforestation had been won by the local flower lovers, led by the President of the Chamber of Com- merce. A flower sanctuary had been secured in perpetuity. It lies at the foot of a range of mountains of rare beauty and grandeur. Never did a mountain walk have a more hospitable avenue of approach than this flower sanctuary by Swellendam. It is strictly preserved, yet kept free, and a certain amount of flower-picking is allowed, one may say desired and en- couraged. Just a few treasures, like a unique Protea, are ringed with wire. Table Mountain itself, beloved by that ardent walker and scientific botanist, General Smuts, is a flower sanctuary ; and I shall always be grateful to him for a sight of those loveliest plants, the blue and the tufted Disas.
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Mass Production
In case some Scottish Chauvinist should be a little jealous of extravagant praise of the South African heaths, it may be well to say that the variety itself diminishes the scenic splendour. The purple hillside has no rival, and indeed the glory of flowers in Scotland, in Wales and in England lies chiefly in the massing of a single species. The heather hillsides, such massed gorses as made Linnaeus fall to his knees, and" the shout of primrose banks," say by Lee in North Devon, and the blue mist of bluebells both in woods and beside the open treeless heath on a South Welsh island, even the buttercups in water meadows and the daisies on the solid foundation of an else forgotten Roman road, have few parallels the world over.
* * * A Fox's Beanfeast
A queer little mystery, finally solved by some careful sleuth- work, puzzled an Oxford gardener. His broad beans, just making a brave appearance in spite of the severity of spring, were suffering severely from the depredations of foxes. Now foxes are not vegetarians. The bean feast is no feast to them. Why had they paid this unwonted attention to the bean bed ? A closer watch on their movements 'revealed the motive. It is the custom of some Oxford colleges to sort out and sell their kitchen refuse. One selection is sold to pig keepers. The pig keepers sold the pig manure mixed with the rejected morsels in the troughs to local gardeners. The foxes came to the beans to unearth where need be and carry off the bones that were a part of the kitchen refuse. The Oxford bones may be compared with London glass ! Travelling on a sunny day down any of several lines more or less near London you may notice the tilths sparkling with bright points. The sight often astonished me, and one day I discovered the cause. All these bediamonded fields had been treated with manure collected in London. This, of course, was in the vanished horse era.
A Siberian Visitor An ornithological speciality of the past season in the North of Britain has been the appearance of a number of waxwings. This rare and very beautiful bird has an affinity for the North. It is common, but appears to vary greatly in numbers, in both Alaska and Siberia, and ranges over the North of Scandinavia and over Finland. Its visits to Britain are fitful and eccentric both in date and numbers. As a rule it crosses the North Sea (it has been noted in large numbers on Heligoland), when the weather becomes excessively severe in the North, and is more frequently seen in Scotland than in England. This year the immigration has been exceptional. The chief records are from Ross-shire in March. Spring appearances are not unknown and there is, I believe, a May record ; but the bird has never been known to nest in Britain and must be classed as a rare winter visitor. The strange thing is that it should be seen in March when presumably it was returning home,
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