206 Fruits and Fruit- Trees. 



a most singular power of adapting itself to circumstances. 

 All climates seem to agree equally well with it hot or 

 cold, rainy or dry, maritime or inland, plain or mountain. 

 I have never been to a spot in Europe where I have not 

 found it, from Sutherlandshire to Mentone. I must, 

 however, confess to a certain degree of surprise when I 

 saw this favourite of our English shady lanes growing at 

 Mentone with wild and determined luxuriance, filling up 

 the beds of dry torrents, climbing up trees to a height of 

 twenty or thirty feet, and choking passages between 

 lemon-trees on the mountain-side; and that in regions 

 where it often does not rain in summer for six months 

 together, and under the glare of the fierce Mediterranean 

 sun. Certainly it must have a mission to fulfil. Its sight 

 is always welcome, as is all that reminds the sojourner 

 in foreign lands of his native country, and of the haunts 

 and pleasures of his early days." * The Blackberry is 

 reported even from northern Africa. 



The abundance of this plant in English hedges seems 

 to have come very much of the pains taken in the six- 

 teenth century to multiply it for the express purpose of 

 use in fences. Old Tusser emphatically urges the farmer 

 to mingle brambles with hawthorn when laying down 

 " quicksets " hedges, that is, of living as distinguished 

 from dead material. Once introduced brambles generally 

 hold their own, perhaps somewhat to the detriment of 

 the hawthorns, which are liable to be overwhelmed, but 

 the advantage of their presence quite compensates the 



* "Mentone and the Riviera as a Winter Climate," 1861, p. 23. 



