The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1884-04-19 00:00:00

THE GARDENERS' ENEMIES.

The Morning Post, in a leader, says: About this
period of the year, if the weather be fine and
the sunshine tempting, the horticulturally-minded
citizen arms himself with a hoe and descends into his
garden. Then he finds that Nature has stolen a
march upon him; has taken the field—or rather the
flower beds—in force; has deployed a ragged regiment
of weeds to cut off supplies from the kitchen garden,
with scouting parties of dandelion and groundsel upon
the gravel paths. She has further reinforced them
with flying squadrons of insects, that buzz and
skip and crawl wherever vegetable action is
in progress. The lawn has been taken advantage
of by sappers and miners in the shape of earth-
worms, who throw up the earthworks admired
by Darwin in every direction. Woodlice have en-
trenched themselves strongly among the inverted
rhubarb pots, centipedes have garrisoned the water-
ing-can, and, when it is being filled for the first time
with water, sally out for the apparent purpose of
creating a diversion by running up the proprietor's
sleeve. It is no matter for diversion for him when
they succeed. Indeed, as he looks round upon
Nature's handiwork in early spring, the owner of a
garden which has been left, as most amateur gardens
are left, uncared for throughout the whiter, sees very
little indeed to laugh at. The little weeds, confiding
children of Nature, that give so glad an aspect to the
dark mould beneath a dreary hedgerow, when the
year is young, with their tender stars and points of
sprouting greenery—are far less poetical in senti-
ment when they are discovered thrusting them-
selves up in rampant confusion all over what
should have been a bed of springing lettuces. Certain
it is that the lettuce seed was sown at the proper
period; but equally certain, alas, that now, when the
undue warmth of April is suggesting grateful thoughts
of summer salad, the lettuces are conspicuously absent.
Not quite absent, though; for a minute inspection
reveals the fact that among the luxuriant groundsel
jungles of " Buxbaum's veronica "—a very estimable
plant, named after a very estimable man, in its
way, but very much in other people's way in a
lettuce bed—here and there may be detected a
juicy green stalk shorn off level with the surface of
the mould. These, then, are the lettuces; and it
dawns upon their dejected owner's mind that moist,
warm weather in early spring "brings forth troops
of shell snails," as Gilbert White observes, and that
after several months of sleepy fasting the poor things
are, not unnaturally, hungry. The delicate tracery
over some of the lettuce stumps of slime tracks,
whose iridescent beauties the worthy citizen is too in-
dignant to observe, confirm him in the opinion that
the slow-moving snails have been too quick for him
this year; and as he surveys the rampant weeds
he wonders why the shell-backed thieves have left
these intact. His wonder is of short duration; for,
turning round to console himself with contemplating
the sturdy growth of his spring cabbages, he observes
a curious fact unknown to him before, that the leaves
of young cabbages are adorned with large irregular
holes. On the underside of the leaves, too, are situated
spherical protuberances, about the size of a walnut, of
a mottled grey colour, common on our garden snails!
The apoplectic activity of the operations which ensue
is past describing. Suffice to say that in a few minutes
the panting proprietor has his watering-can one-third
full of the cabbagivorous pests, and pauses to consider
the least unpleasant method of immolation. There
are a great many of them, and they would make a
very considerable mess, poor things, if stamped upon.
Milder counsels prevail; so with a charitable impulse,
like that of Uncle Toby's when he set free the blue-
bottle that had annoyed him out of tho window to go
and do likewise to some one else, he throws them all
over the wall, whence his next door neighbour will in
due time toss them back.

A disobedient little girl being told by her mother
that it was necessary that she should be whipped,
said, "Well, ?ma, then I suppose I must; but won't
you give me chloroform first ? '
"The milk-maid is not the same everywhere," says
a moral philosopher; to which an item man responds,
„" That's so. The milk made in the city is quite differ-
ent from the milk made in the country." -