NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 283 



The summers of 1781 and 1783 were unusually hot and dry; to 

 them therefore I shall turn back in my journals, without recurring 

 to any more distant period. In the former of these years my 

 peach and nectarine-trees suffered so much from the heat that the 

 rind on the bodies was scalded and came off; since which the 

 trees have been in a decaying state. This may prove a hint to 

 assiduous gardeners to fence and shelter their wall-trees with mats 

 or boards, as they may easily do, because such annoyance is 

 seldom of long continuance. During that summer also, I observed 

 that my apples were coddled, as it were, on the trees; so that they 

 had no quickness of flavour, and would not keep in the winter. 

 This circumstance put me in mind of what I have heard travellers 

 assert, that they never ate a good apple or apricot in the south ot 

 Europe, where the heats were so great as to render the juices 

 vapid and insipid. 



The great pests of a garden are wasps, which destroy all the 

 finer fruits just as they are coming into perfection. In 1781 we 

 had none ; in 1 7 83 there were myriads ; which would have 

 devoured all the produce of my garden, had not we set the boys 

 to take the nests, and caught thousands with hazel-twigs tipped 

 with bird-lime : we have since employed the boys to take and 

 destroy the large breeding wasps in the spring. Such expedients 

 have a great effect on these marauders, and will keep them under. 

 Though wasps do not abound but in hot summers, yet they do 

 not prevail in every hot summer, as I have instanced in the two 

 years above-mentioned. 



In the sultry season of 1783, honey-dews were so frequent as to 

 deface and destroy the beauties of my garden. My honeysuckles, 

 which were one week the most sweet and lovely objects that the 

 eye could behold, became the next the most loathsome ; being 

 enveloped in a viscous substance, and loaded with black aphides, 

 or smother-flies. The occasion of this clammy appearance seems 

 to be this, that in hot weather the effluvia of flowers in fields and 

 meadows and gardens are drawn up in the day by a brisk evapora- 

 tion, and then in the night fall down again with the dews, in which 

 they are entangled ; that the air is strongly scented, and therefore 

 impregnated with the particles of flowers in summer weather, our 



