FRUITFUL HEDGEROWS 119 



stones. The sound of this operation can be heard a con- 

 siderable distance through the woods on quiet days, and may 

 be mistaken for the heavier and more deliberate strokes of the 

 nuthatch. The pulp of sloes seems to be too sour and acrid 

 to appeal to any bird. But hawfinches feed on the kernels, 

 crushing the stone with their huge conical bills ; and when 

 the fruits have dried and fallen, the stones are attacked by 

 wood-mice, and probably by dormice also. Fruit and nut 

 and seed and berry are terms which we usually apply rather 

 vaguely. In botanical language a fruit is a seed and its 

 covering, of whatever form. A sloe, or a haw, or a white- 

 beam * berry ' is a nut enclosed in pulp ; and a fruit of this 

 kind is called a drupe. A nut is a dry shell containing a 

 seed ; and it is as much a nut when it is enclosed in pulp as 

 when it is bare, like a hazelnut. A walnut, in the natural 

 state, is a drupe, like a sloe ; but because the nut is the part 

 which interests us most, we do ordinarily call it a nut, and 

 not a fruit or a berry. A berry is strictly a collection of 

 seeds enclosed in a mass of pulp, like the holly or elder 

 berry. A blackberry or raspberry is thus a group of drupes ; 

 while a strawberry assumes the extraordinary aspect of a 

 group of nuts set on a mass of pulp. The variety of Nature 

 plunges a strictly logical terminology into almost as many 

 difficulties as ordinary careless speech. But it is well to 

 realise the relation of one kind of fruit to another, and not 

 be misled by the importance, for human purposes, of the 

 different parts. The peach is only a larger and softer 

 almond ; but because we eat the pulp of the peach and the 

 kernel of the almond, we call the former a fruit, the latter a 

 kind of nut, and forget that they have anything in common. 



Sloes are occasionally so abundant as to tinge a whole 

 hedgerow with purple when seen from a hundred yards away, 

 but in some seasons the crop almost entirely fails. In spite 



