58 THE EFFECT OF FROST ON VEGETATION 



falling trees, or blown from their roosts and dashed 

 against the swaying boughs. For days after that 

 memorable night, the woods were full of piteous 

 cripples, broken- winged, which, except those that were 

 mercifully put to death, eked out a miserable existence, 

 till the great frost came to put an end to their 

 suffering. Others, again, were blown into the water 

 and drowned. In Lord Stair's beautiful grounds at 

 Castle Kennedy in Wigtownshire, there is a large 

 rookery on an island in one of the lakes. The day 

 after the storm, the gardeners collected the corpses 

 of upwards of five hundred rooks, washed up on the 

 lee shore. 



XXVI 



Gardeners may be heard bewailing now (1895) the 

 havoc wrought among shrubs and herbs by the extra- 

 ordinary cold ; but it serves a more useful 

 of Frost on purpose to note those plants of doubtful 

 vegetation ^,.^00^ w hi c h have resisted it. In the 

 gardens in and near London, perhaps the most notable 

 and unexpected instance is afforded by an evergreen 

 of comparatively recent introduction to this country, 

 a native, too, of New Zealand, which is a region 

 producing a flora of which the greater part has proved 

 impatient of our climate. Olearia Haastii, as botanists 

 have somewhat clumsily named it, is a shrub of the 

 order Composites, typified by our own daisies and 

 thistles, with leathery, evergreen leaves, beautifully 



