256 



NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



amends for the prolix account of the degrees of cold, and the in- 

 conveniences that we suffered from some late rigorous winters. 



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

 to them therefore I shall turn back in my journals, without re- 

 curring 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 annoy- 

 ance 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 of 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 1783 there were myriads ; which would have de- 

 voured 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 honey- 

 suckles, 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 appear- 

 ance 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 evaporation, 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 senses will inform us ; and that this 

 clammy sweet substance is of the vegetable kind we may learn 



