OCTOBER 263 



for a modest garden, or Californian Abies, which start 

 with the intention of soaring to eight score of feet. 

 Things like these take such vigorous hold and grow so 

 strongly that it requires a regular siege-train to dis- 

 lodge them ; meanwhile, the native flora, which consti- 

 tuted the chief attraction of the place, have been 

 expelled for ever or relegated to an ever-narrowing 

 hinterland. 



Reflecting upon the divine summer just gone by (1899), 

 what a variety of beautiful berries one may call to 

 mind ! Among the earliest of these is the cloudberry 

 (Rubus chamTnceorus) of the Highland hills, delicate in 

 form and flavour, the whole plant not six inches high, 

 balancing, on the windy moor, its large amber-hued 

 fruit among ample, lobed leaves. Not less dainty is its 

 relative, also affecting northern latitudes, the stone- 

 berry (R. saxatUis) with bright red fruit. Of duskier 

 crimson and less transparent is the wood raspberry 

 (R. idceus), the fruit of Mount Ida, to appreciate 

 which, you should spend a day on the hill, and descend- 

 ing in the evening faint and leg-weary, refresh your- 

 selves with the delicious subacid of the wild plant. 

 The rowan, which yields the proper jelly to eat with 

 venison, will not be forgotten, nor yet a host of little 

 mountain and wood fruits, the purple blaeberry or 

 whortleberry, the jetty crowberry a veritable little 

 mountain grape and the cranberry, cowberry, and 

 bearberry, all red. But the most brilliant and curious 

 fruit among our British wild plants is not a berry at all, 

 in botanical language, but a drupe, and a remarkably 



