52 Soil-Binders 



have been consolidated into a low range of permanent 

 hills by a curious grass with tall, cutting, sword-edged 

 blades, which grows so closely and with such rapidity 

 that any paths made by travellers are quite covered up 

 and destroyed by it in a few days. In itself it is of no 

 use — that is, it cannot be used as fodder for flocks or 

 herds, though no doubt it affords shelter, and possibly 

 food, to wild animals ; and where it grows, there other 

 more useful plants have no chance, being simply over- 

 powered and choked by it. 



But then useful grasses and other fodder-plants would 

 be quite unable to spring up while the sand was shift- 

 ing about ; they could not grow fast enough to stop it 

 from smothering them. Their turn may come by-and- 

 by, when generations of this coarse grass have improved 

 the soil. 



The plants which are most useful for this work of 

 binding the soil and giving it its first firmness are those 

 which, besides growing quickly, also send out especially 

 long roots, runners, or underground stems, often mis- 

 called roots, which are pegged down at frequent in- 

 tervals by real roots, much in the same way as the 

 thatcher binds down the straw on the rick-top. The 

 couch-grass and others have long underground stems 

 of this sort, as the gardener knows to his sorrow ; and 

 then there are the bindweeds, most appropriately so 

 named, for they send out long, trailing runners above- 

 ground, having roots at each joint, which make them 

 extremely difficult to get rid of when once they have 

 established themselves in a garden. Their tropical 

 relatives, the ipomseas — plants of much larger growth, 

 but bearing similar convolvulus-blossoms of more bril- 

 liant colour — are among the plants which render most 



