240 OCTOBER 



Half cultivation, bad cultivation, is more than ugly and 

 unpleasant : it lets loose all manner of ills on the land, 

 especially thistles. It is good for neither man nor beast, 

 like the east winds of January. But these weeds and 

 some others are the tares of cultivation, always dogging 

 the cultivator s footsteps ; they are often at a loss when 

 the cultivator clean vanishes, like parasites that cannot 

 live without their peculiar host. 



Some of these happy autumn fields are as nearly as 

 may be weedless. The grass has won ; and, indeed, it is 

 a definite discovery of the year that you may destroy 

 every thistle in a field, however thickly beset, if you take 

 successive crops of hay. The big thistles are like that 

 singularly handsome dwarf thistle which flourishes on 

 the commons : if its low leaves cannot get their full 

 share of light and air they wither and the plant succumbs. 

 So the bigger thistle in deep hay. The grass behaves like 

 a thick grove of evergreen trees : nothing grows beneath 

 its shade. How strangely the landscape changes where 

 fields are afforested, not only over wide spaces of affores 

 tation, as at Thetford, but on this field and that, where 

 little plantations have come into being. At first we see 

 an uncomfortable jumble of weeds. Then the more 

 powerful grasses, especially cocksfoot, which is the 

 master grass of England, begins to conquer, and the 

 plantation may be almost as good to look at as a field of 

 corn. Then over the grass begin to thrust upwards the 

 spires of pine and fir and larch, which steadily conquer 

 both the grass and any relic weed. They will make 

 pleasant or forbidding woods, as it may be. A wood 

 should be lovely, and its rides are as the cloisters of a 

 sanctuary ; but it is not always so. The gloomiest patch 

 of England that I know is a Shropshire wood of Sitka 

 spruce now some eighteen years old. It is shunned like a 



