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THE CANADIAN HORTICULTURIST. 



all the grapes. I have ten oi- twelve 

 varieties. My peach trees are fresh to 

 the topmost bud, but there will not be 

 much fruit on them. They were 

 loaded with fruit last year. 

 Yours truly, 



"William Brown. 



SPARROWS AND PARASITIC PLANTS. 

 Editor (/ANadian HoRTicnLTURisT : 



Sir, — I was pleased to see in the 

 April number of the Horticulturist an 

 article in favor of my old acquaintance, 

 the English sparrow. It appears that 

 that enlightened body, the Fruit Grow- 

 ers' (fruit eaters') Association of On- 

 tario, have decided that the sparrow 

 must go ; but supi)ose if, like the Hon. 

 Mr. Mowat, he will not go, what then 1 

 Do they intend to resort to bribery by 

 oftei-ing that ubiquitous individual, the 

 small boy, a cent a head for all the 

 sparrows he can catch and two cents 

 apiece for every sparrow's e.gg, and so 

 get rid of him I If so I hope they will 

 adopt the necessaiy measures to get rid 

 of the tent caterpillars at the same 

 time. Thei'e are but few sparrows here- 

 about, altliougli there are a good many 

 in the town of Owen Sound, a place 

 which one of the Salvation Army cor- 

 respondent's in the War Cry calls " the 

 Devil's headquarters in Ontario," and 

 perhaps he is not so very far wrong 

 either, and the Salvation Army boast 

 that they have captured one of the 

 worst men in the place, so they hope 

 to succeed in driving him out alto- 

 gether — the devil, I mean, not the 

 sparrows. My })rincipal object in 

 writirig is to call your attention to the 

 following extract from Colin Clones 

 Calendar, by Grant Allan : — 



But there are other and still more 

 abandoned parasites like yellow-bird's 

 nest, which have no leaves at all, and can- 

 not provide themselves witli food in any 

 way. Yellow-bird's nest is a very rare 

 plant in England — a degraded relation of 



the heaths, which has taken entirely to 

 living on the roots of trees, sucking up 

 their juices by its network of succulent 

 rootlets. Its leaves have consequently 

 shrimk by disuse into mere pale yellow- 

 ish scales, not unlike those which one 

 sees on the young shoots of blanched 

 asparagus. Now, yeUow-rattle and its 

 kind deserve notice as showing the first 

 step of this downward course ; the ini- 

 tial stage through which the ancestors of 

 the mistletoe must once have passed, and 

 the ancestors of the yellow-bird's nest 

 must ages ago have left behind them. 

 The plants are not in any way related to 

 one another ; on the contrary they are 

 extremely unlike as far as pedigree goes, 

 but they have all three independently 

 acquired the same parasitic habits, and 

 they all exhibit different stages in the 

 same periods of degenerescence." 



Now, it has occurred to me to ask 

 you if this English yellow-bird's nest 

 may not be identical with the disease 

 called yellows in peaches, and if so, 

 would the knowledge of this fact be of 

 any use in leading to the discovery of 

 a remedy without resorting to the ex- 

 treme measure of grubbing up and 

 burning the infected peach trees, root 

 and branch. The yellow-rattle is an- 

 other })arasite very destructive to the 

 grasses. If once it gets into a meadow 

 nothing seems to be of any use to get 

 rid of it. As a rule one ought not to 

 speak evil of plants behind their backs, 

 but, for a hungry, persistent, deliberate, 

 designing, importunate parasite, your 

 yellow-rattle really has no fellow. 

 There is not a single redeeming point 

 about it ; it is ugly, useless and unin- 

 teresting, and it makes a wretched 

 living by fastening on the roots of 

 grasses and draining them dry with its 

 lion-id clinging suckers. See here, if 

 you pull up a tuft of meadow foxtail 

 carefully, you find the rattle actually 

 engaged in sucking its life blood at this 

 very moment. Kinse the two stocks 

 together in the basin where the brook 

 runs clear from the culvert for a foot or 



