WILD FRUITS 231 



lished garden, and though the plant is but an 

 annual, our utmost vigilance fails to exterminate 

 it. Somewhere an overlooked plant will escape 

 and swiftly set and sow its fruit before we can, 

 in gardening parlance, ' turn round.' The berry- 

 is more enticing to children than the oblong red 

 tomatoes of the woody nightshade or bitter sweet, 

 probably because none of our edible berries have 

 the latter shape. 



Another annual that has a mysterious hold on 

 the garden is the prickly pear or thorn-apple, 

 whose generic name, Datura, will be found in the 

 dictionary side by side with daturine, a very active 

 poison extracted from its seeds. There is usually 

 one in some corner of the garden, opening its 

 convolvulus-like flower and setting its fruit like 

 a prickly horse chestnut, from which it throws 

 when ripe plenty of little black seeds. Sometimes 

 a year goes by without its thorn-apple, but the 

 next year it appears again. The seed, no doubt, 

 can on occasion remian dormant over one season 

 into the next. 



I think the thorn-apple must have survived in 

 the garden from the time when some eighteenth- 

 century worthy cultivated it for its (rather complex) 

 virtue as a * simple.' Its reputation as a curer 

 of asthma rests on a much firmer foundation 

 than that of even such a well-lauded simple as 

 betony, and daturine is to-day one of our best- 

 used herbal remedies. 



I do not find the thorn-apple wild anywhere 



