NATURE NOTES 
1 86 
Perhaps just here the most striking tints are those of the 
maple and dogwood — the former a bright yellow, the latter a 
deep wine-red. There is an abundance of each in our hedgerow, 
but the maple, beautiful as it is in its autumn dress, lacks one 
prominent feature which distinguishes it earlier in the year ; in 
the early summer its “ keys ” bear off the palm for beauty, but 
they have fallen before this, and the leaves alone remain! The 
dogwood, too, has another style of beauty in the early summer 
when its white flowers are out, but does not suffer in comparison 
now ; none of the leaves in the hedgerow are such a deep red as 
these. 
There are other inhabitants of the hedgerow still, which will 
be as familiar, even to the city-dweller, as his own plane trees 
in the streets, the brambles, the wild roses, and the thorns. 
Truly the blackberry is the poor man’s fruit : here he can have 
it for the fetching : every hedge is full : great sprays of black, 
luscious fruit are hanging everywhere : no poor shrivelled- 
looking specimens, such as show themselves in the immediate 
neighbourhood of the bricks and mortar, but real juicy fruit, and 
bushels upon bushels of it, only waiting for the picking, and pick 
as much as you will, there will be more to-morrow, until the 
frost comes and spoils it all. A few traces here and there show 
that the ubiquitous boy has been at work and had his fill, for 
there are signs of his head amongst the bushes, but he cannot 
take all : there is an unbounded field. The bramble leaves are 
worthy of notice also, even though their glorj' pales before the 
glory of the fruit : their tints in autumn are lovely and varied, 
sometimes a yellow, sometimes a red, approaching even to the 
richness of the dogwood. And oftentimes another point to 
notice is the way in which the leaves are ruined by some tiny 
leaf-mining caterpillar, who has left these visible tokens of his 
former presence behind him. 
The roses and the thorns are bright with their hips and haw's, 
a promise of good store for the birds when the ground is hard ; 
but they have begun to attack this store of provender already. 
It is the berries alone that make the thorns beautiful in autumn, 
but the roses have sometimes, in addition to their berries, some 
bright-coloured galls, w'hich give an added beauty. These how- 
ever, are not the plants’ own : they are an extraneous growth, 
due to the presence of the grub of some gall-fly, round whose 
soft, fat body this growth collects. Other instances are the 
familiar oak-apples, large and small. A knife cutting open the 
gall will reveal the grub within ; or if the gall be dry and hard, 
a little hole will mark the place whence the fly emerged. It is 
easy to discover what sort of a fly a gall-fly is by taking some of 
the common, hard, round oak-galls and putting them in a box, 
until the fly comes out and reveals himself. 
Even yet w'e have not exhausted the tale of the trees and 
bushes that make up our hedgerow. There are still the hazels, 
looking rather shabby now, for their leaves cannot vie with some 
