AVILI) PLANTS WORTHY OF CULTURE. 



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perhaps quite as important as any, the blackberry, tons of which are 

 tiathered every season by cottagers' and labourers' children in the country 

 districts and sold at a profit in all our manufacturing towns. Blackberries, 

 mushrooms, and in some districts wild bullaces and sloes, and watercress 

 form the wild harvest or "jungle produce" for bright eyes and lissom 

 fingers nearly all over the country, and but little, if any, harm is done in 

 the gathering. Minor products are elderberries, medlars, crabs, and wild 

 pears, springtops or autumnal trails of wild hops, coral-berried wreaths 

 of lamus or black briony, our only British yam. The silvery fruits of 

 clematis, or " Old Man's Bears," are also largely gathered and used for 

 decorative purposes ; so also the red-fruited water elder { Viburnum Opiihis), 

 mountain ash, and berberis berries for jellies, candying or pickling, as 

 garniture for venison and other dishes. The jelly made from the rowan 

 tree or mountain ash is indeed the thing for a haunch of venison, 

 especially in the North, where both deer and rowan tree thrive so well. 

 The little jet black cro wherries, formerly esteemed of gourmands, and 

 now beloved by the grouse on many a mountain side, are not much utilised 

 to-day, but the wild cranberry and the Irish " fraughans " (Vaccinium 

 Myrtillus) are gathered in quantities wherever they are plentiful and used 

 in tarts or puddings. Even hips and haws have been used in rustic cookery, 

 and old Gerard, in his celebrated Herbal (p. 1089), mentions preserved sweet- 

 briar fruits as being excellent, " making pleasant meates and banketting 

 dishes as tartes, and such like, the making whereof I commit to the 

 cunning cooke and the teeth to eat them in the rich man's mouth." 

 Of all our native or wild fruits the one worth earnest attention, culture, 

 and improvement is the common blackberry or bramble. In the United 

 States the culture of the blackberry as a market fruit is very extensive, 

 and the economic results most important ; but as a rule the best of the 

 American kinds thrive but badly or intermittently in our own gardens. 

 We may do much better by selecting, cultivating and improving from seed 

 our native kinds. 



Every stretch of blackberry country, every hedge, in fact, contains 

 varieties of widely varying merit, and we must select the best flavoured, 

 the largest fruited and most prolific kinds. It is a fruit that may be grown 

 on rocky slopes or stony and poor ground quite unfit for most other uses. 

 Selected wild varieties, and the cut-leaved variety {Bubns fruticosus var. 

 laciniatiis) are decidedly the best to start with, but by selection and cross- 

 breeding under cultivation even finer, larger and more fertile varieties 

 would, and could, be obtained. The wild bullace plums, so popular in 

 Norfolk and the Eastern Counties, might also be much improved even 

 under hedgerow culture. Some may ask me Why go to the trouble of 

 cultivating that which already grows abundantly wild ? Well, in the first 

 place, we are rarely or never satisfied, especially by things that cost us 

 little or nothing, and then there is that deep laid desire in every British 

 heart to go " one better," in a word, to improve and ennoble whatever is 

 taken in hand. Besides, there is in the British Isles to-day a gigantic 

 army of gardeners, amateur and professional, and if every one of these is 

 to have a hobby horse to ride, as every good and true gardener should 

 have, well, then there is some chance for the selection, culture, and 

 improvement of all the best of our native plants. No one cultivator can 



