NATURE’S PLANTING.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 28 February 1925, Page 16

NATURE’S PLANTING.

AIDED BY BIRDS AND BEASTS. For every tree that man has planted there are piobably a thousand tliat owe their existence to- some chance incidentthat was just one little item in Nature’s never-ending, scheme, declares ""East Sussex,” in the Daily Mail. That giant oak at the corner of the lane; tnat solitary beech on the hilltop; those two ashes,that jostle one another in the meadow—none of these, probably, was ever actually planted, but came there just- by chance. The chances are that the oak owes its beginning to some greedy rook which, trying to carry more acorns than its beak could hold, dropped one of them where the oak now stands. A wood-pigeon may have planted the beech in similar fashion; and the ashes may have sprung from seeds brought there from miles away in the mud-encrusted hoof of a bullock bought in the market some fifty years ago. Many trees and plants, of course, have a distributing agency of iheir own. The lime and the sycamore beatwinged seeds which the wind may carry great distances. On a. gusty uav we may see them being hurt let! through the* air, then-propellers revolving rapidly, until at last they fall to earth. But the birds, probably, are Nature’s greatest assistants in the perpetual work of reproduction. The misselthvusli wipes his beak upon the hough and the, mistletoe seed he leaves behind fixes its tiny horns in the hark and 1 grows; the blackbird 4 drops the pips of blackberries, in ilie hedgerow; the fieldfare does the same with the holly berries; and the thrash or the ring-ousel with the hips and haws. In this haphazard way many a natural hedge or clump of trees or hushes is brought into being, Someone puts i p a. fence or digs a ditch to mark his boundary. The birds come and sit upon that fence to eat .their breakfasts and .dinners and drops the seeds they do not- want. Rats and dormice and squirrels run along that ditch and leave behind, them, in their untidy fafhion, the remnants of the feast—acorns and beech nuts, hazel nuts, and berries of various ' kinds. Some of them will.grow.' That is how Nature does it and will continue to do it in many and various ways to. the end of time.