Garden Friends 



warm, damp weather. This is a long white worm 

 looking like a piece of cotton thread endowed with 

 rather sluggish life. It is a worm that lives in the 

 intestines of insects, and is absolutely harmless to 

 human beings. 



Reference has already been made to beneficial 

 birds, and among other creatures, not insects, the 

 lizards, frogs, and toads which frequent our gardens 

 must be mentioned. The gardener has no better 

 friends. Spiders, too, are wholly beneficial, so are 

 centipedes,^ although they often fall victims to the 

 gardener's zeal for destroying pests. Worms, except 

 on lawns and in flower-pots, must be reckoned the 

 friends of the garden, and they have enemies, too, in 

 the garden besides the birds, slow-worms, moles, 

 and so oa, in the curious worm-eating sheH-bearing 

 slugs {Testacdla), and in greenhouses the exotic 

 worm Bipalium kewense, frequently found among 

 the crocks of flower-pots. 



This seems the proper place to mention the beetle- 

 mites (Oribatidae), which live in crevices of bark 

 of fruit trees, sometimes in great numbers. Because 

 their hard reddish bodies are frequent in canker 

 wounds, they are looked upon as a cause of canker, 

 whereas they feed upon fungus spores and lichens, 

 and are therefore friendly. The same may be said 

 of the tiny orange grubs of minute two-winged flies 



1 Centipedes have only one pair of legs to every joint, the harmful 

 millepedes have two pairs to each joint. 



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