Plenty To See In Show Displays

Press, Volume C, Issue 29666, 9 November 1961, Page 22

Plenty To See In Show Displays

Visitors to the Canterbury Agricultural and Pastoral Association's show will learn many interesting things from the special displays, but there is one in particular which may send them scurrying right home to root out of their gardens some innocentlooking plants. “Do you know that these com—ion garden plants are poisonous?” asks a sign over a collection of about 30 plants in a display promoting weedkillers. The plants all have familiar names, and all are poisonous, either in whole or in part. They include rhododendrons, privet, rhubarb, potatoes (the green tubers), foxgloves, macrocarpa and ngaio. People will have fun, too, at the Department of Agriculture teqj, where they can press buttons over samples of imperfect wool and make lights flash beside reasons for the imperfections. At the same tent they can learn how to control footrot, grass-grub, gorse, nodding thistle, and soil deflcic-icies. Helpful hints are available there on the erection of electric fences, the cultivation of indoor plants, and pig husbandry. The department has a special display of indoor plants and a glass-sided bee hive where visitors can bunt for the queen bee marked with a silver dot. The Poet Office display puts special emphasis on telephone

services, and especially the new coloured telephones. Wael Display The special wool display is remarkable for the fact that the 40ft by 15ft woolly background to the display’s title is made from only one bale of scoured fine crossbred wool. Above it is a display of vrool fashions, and beside It lies this year’s “Fleece of the Year,” a Merino fleece from Miss L, B. N. Wills’s “Snowdon” station at Rakaia Gorge. The title was awarded by the Massey College Wool Associatioo. Prize-winning fleeces from this year’s show make tip the main part of the display. The Army *aws the attention of prospective recruits to the new 106 mm. anti-tank gun issued to the Ist Canterbury Regiment, and to the cut-away models of . the human body and jangling skeletons used to train the Army Medical Corps. In the Canterbury Agricultural College tent visitors can peer at five mites a microscope and at dead flies through the mesh of a wire trap. Ancient Typewriter Careful inspection of some of the other displays discloses the first typewriter used by the frozen meat industry in New Zealand in 1881, and a mound of azaleas and hydrangeas imprisoned in a block of ice. The ice-bound flowers are renewed every day, and have been a feature of one firm’s display for the last 30 years. People who are not distressed by the protest of tortured metal can watch salesmen promoting an oil additive by running oiled metal parts against each other with and without the additive. And there are plenty of things to interest those who like to stand and watch moving devices—windmills, cutaway models of farm machinery, indefatigable water pumps, and a swaying tower built of giant Meccano-like construction pieces.