MY WORK AND MY WORKSHOP 5 



nor a single clump of the dwarf oak. As thyme and lavender 

 might be useful to me as a hunting-ground for Bees and Wasps, 

 I was obliged to plant them again. 



There were plenty of weeds : couch-grass, and prickly 

 centauries, and the fierce Spanish oyster-plant, with its spread- 

 ing orange flowers and its spikes strong as nails. Above it 

 towered the Illyrian cotton-thistle, whose straight and solitary 

 stalk grows sometimes to the height of six feet and ends in 

 large pink tufts. There were smaller thistles too, so well 

 armed that the plant-collector can hardly tell where to grasp 

 them, and spiky knap- weeds, and in among them, in long lines 

 provided with hooks, the shoots of the blue dewberry creeping 

 along the ground. If you had visited this prickly thicket 

 without wearing high boots, you would have paid dearly for 

 your rashness ! 



Such was the Eden that I won by forty years of desperate 

 struggle. 



This curious, barren Paradise of mine is the happy hunting- 

 ground of countless Bees and Wasps. Never have I seen so 

 large a population of insects at a single spot. All the trades 

 have made it their centre. Here come hunters of every kind 

 of game, builders in clay, cotton-weavers, leaf-cutters, archi- 

 tects in pasteboard, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters 

 boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers 

 in gold-beaters' skin, and many more. 



See here is a Tailor-bee. She scrapes the cobwebby stalk 

 of the yellow-flowered centaury, and gathers a ball of wadding 

 which she carries off proudly with her mandibles, or jaws. She 

 will turn it, underground, into cotton satchels to hold the 

 store of honey and the eggs. And here are the Leaf-cutting 

 Bees, carrying their black, white, or blood-red reaping brushes 

 under their bodies. They will visit the neighbouring shrubs, 

 and there cut from the leaves oval pieces in which to wrap 

 their harvest. Here too are the black, velvet-clad Mason-bees, 

 who work with cement and gravel. We could easily find 

 specimens of their masonry on the stones in the harmas. Next 



