BRACKENS, AND HOW TO EXTIRPATE THEM. 301 



And speaking of the bracken, let us observe that, while it is a 

 magnificent and beautiful plant, it is, like everything else of beauty, 

 most beautiful in its proper place. Meet it on mountain slope, in 

 copsewood covert, or greenwood glade, and you cannot admire it 

 sufficiently. In the end of autumn, particularly when its graceful 

 fronds have assumed a certain indescribable tinge of mingled brown 

 and ruby and gold, a bracken covert is beyond measure lovely. At 

 such a stage, and in the warm and mellow light of the setting 

 September sun, it is to ourselves all that an ocean of broom in 

 flower was to the great Linnaeus. If, however, you live in the 

 near neighbourhood of brackens, you will find that it is apt to 

 creep down from its proper wild and upland habitat, and to 

 encroach unduly upon your old grass lands, wherever it can get an 

 undisturbed footing. If you consult books on the subject,- they 

 will tell you that if you cut them down for a season or two running 

 before they ripen, they will die away and disappear. "With our 

 large, soft-stemmed herbaceous plants, this method of eradication is 

 sometimes effectual enough ; with the bracken, as we know to our 

 cost, it avails nothing. The roots are so curiously ramified and 

 intertwined that they will live on and put forth a new growth year 

 after year, no matter how constantly and closely you cut and crop 

 them. We gave up trying a plan so futile, and only hit upon the 

 right way of dealing with them by the merest accident. Walking 

 along the edge of one of our old grass parks about mid-June some 

 few years ago, we wished to get hold of a switch or something 

 similar, wherewith to drive a fractious pony on before us to the 

 park gate. There was no switch just then at hand, and, without 

 thinking of it, we bent down, and with both hands pulled steadily 

 and straight upwards at one of the largest of a luxuriant bracken 

 patph that skirted the path beside us. To our surprise the plant 

 came up easily and from the very root, or we should rather say 

 with the very root attached, long, dark-brown, and something cigar- 



