A GREAT NATURALIST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 261, 4 November 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

A GREAT NATURALIST.

RICHARD JEFFERIES. That very accomplished gardeneressayist, Dean Hole, said lie never found a gardener and a botanist under the same hat. Mr. Reginald Arkell, who writes the latest book about a famous English writer on countryside subjects, Richard JefTeries, says the same of a combination of farmer and naturalist. JefTeries was a Wiltshire farmer's eon, but he was not destined to be a farmer.

A clean farm with neat fences, well hedged and ditched, has no attractions- for the naturalist.- It is the tangle pf wild hops and' bryony that provides sanctuary for the lesser warblers. Where "would the pigeon place his crazy nest of crossed twigs if there were no hedges as high as a crabnpple tree? Those <leep banks on which you find the first coltsfoot in March, the first convolvulus in summer and the la**t hawkweed in autumn, bring no joy. to the farmer, however much they may please the poet's eye. .Broadly, speaking, all flowers are weeds to the farmer and, ull weeds are flowers to the Nature-lover. ... If Elehard Jeffcries had succeeded his father at Coate Farm he would have spent his days killing the things he loved, or they would have killed him.

Perhaps this biographer of Richard Jefferies pushes the contention too far. We have in New Zealand a GuthrieSmith to show that a man may be a successful farmer and a first-rate observer of Nature. But Mr. Arkell makes his point well, and uses his theme to give us highly interesting pictures of the Wiltshire countryside and the development of Jefferies to his true avocation. Mr. Arkell shows, among other things, what patience as well as innate powers of observation are required if one is to write a book like "Wild Life in a Southern County." Much time, for example, may have to be spent if one is to watch from start to finish the hunting of a rabbit by a weasel. The book is rather annoyingly discursive at times, but it gives a valuable picture of a strange elusive being who contributed gold to the litei-ature of the English countryside, and it contains passages that will delight everyone interested in out-of-door life. Rich and Cowan are the publishers.