"THOSE WRETCHED THISTLES!"

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1289, 12 November 1896, Page 4

"THOSE WRETCHED THISTLES!"

Writing in the London Field, Mr G. Clarke Nuttall, B.Sc, gives an interesting account of how the thistle is kept down in Canada. He says : In Canada the common creeping thistle (Caucus arvensis), introduced probably by accident—there is no foundation for the stoiy that a loyal Scot took it with him to plant in his front garden ! —spread in a couple of years to such an amazing extent that it became an overwhelming nuisance. Individual effort to remove it seemed hopeless ; it was useless for one man to clear his ground and weed out his thistles while the thistledown from his neighbour's fields floated with every breath of wind over his land, and each little feathery seed seized with avidity on the vacant space which appeared specially cleared to receive it. The farmers groaned under the yoke of the thistle, and their groans reached the Legislative Assembly, and stirred them to action, and in 1895, following the example of the Australian province, a Thistle Act became law, wherein " Her Majesty, by and with advice and consent of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia," enacted various stringent decrees against the offender. Any owner or lessee of land upon whose land, or upon the adjacent roads, the Canadian thistle appeared, was to be compelled, under punishment of a fine, to destroy them all within fourteen days of notice being served up on him. Moreover, if he still neglected the thistles, then certain officers, appointed for the purpose, were to have the land cleared, and the owner would be compelled to bear all the expense thereof. And, further, the Act gave the right to these officers to enter a man's land at any time and examine it for traces of the pernicious weed. By these strong measures the Canadian farmers are doing their beat to cope with one of the greatest problems they have to

face, for probably the subject of noxious weeds is of more importance today to the Canadian and Manitoba farmers than any other agricultural question. The presence of weeds injures the farmer in three distinct ways—more useful plants are crowded out; the soil is robbed of the plant food, and so impoverished that crops cannot flourish on it ; much valuable time is wasted in the eradication, and the proper rotation of crops has often to be altered.

Only the constant cultivation of the soil and an unwearying and unending fight will keep these pests at bay, the thistle in particular. For the ground may be cleared, the thistle may apparently have completely vanished, and yet even while the farmer is congratulating himself on his success it will

be again before him, for the keynote of the thistle's character is undoubtedly its irrepressibility. Though the hand of every man is against it, yet still in every country it flourishes, and, without the slightest encouragement, it follows man to the remotest coiner of civilisation. All over the world it is classed as a pest and a nuisance, but its presence was p-irt of the curse which fell on our first parents, and so, like the Wandering Jew, it cannot die. In the millennium alone may we hope to find a world without thistles. Its irrepressibility is chiefly due to its magnificent constitution ; it is the hardiest of the hardy, it has no luxurious habits, it asks for no indulgence in food, the plainest and scantiest suffices it, and its dependence on the character of its environment is reduced to the lowest possible figure. The discipline of ages has taught it to accommodate itself to its surroundings, and like a child brought up on a rough moor with simple food and over-fiowing with rude health, it can meet adversity bravely and triumph over difficulties which would kill one of more delicate nurture. One cannot but admire its dogged persistence, its resolve to hold its own, and the thrifty way in which it has turned to the very best advantage every endowment that nature has given to it. It has produced stalks so hard and stringy and leaves so prickly that browsing animals, as a rule, leave it severely alone; only the iron palate of a donkey can relish it. Its scented, honey-bearing flowers, tiny and insignificant in themselves, have been

gathered into heads that they may be the more conspicuous in the attraction to butterflies, bees and moths, for these are visitors of greatest service to the plant. Flitting from head to head, and diving deep into each to extract the honey, they carry the fertilising pollen from flower to flower, and thus promote cross-fertilisation. And the thistle, having discovered through the long ages of its development that the cross-fertilisation of its seeds gave the healthiest and hardiest offspring, set itself in its usual thorough way to make sure that cross fertilisation should always take place, and self-fertilisation never. This it did effectually by the separating of the sexes on different heads; thus in the large globular purple blooms each little purple tube contains a ring of pollenbearing stamens, their heads all joined together, while in the more slender and pointed ones the purple petal-tube protects the case of unripe seeds, and it is these female heads alone which turn into feathery masses; the male ones simply shrivel up and die down when their fertilising function is performed. By this wise provision each generation of thistles arises sturdy and full of vitality, without any of the weakliness and poverty of stamina which is so often a corollary of in andin breeding.

Then, again, the arrangements a thistle raak<=s for the propagation of its kind are another admirable example of its irrepressibility. Each tiny light seed is furnished with a feathery parachute, which can carry it into every hole and corner; nothing is sacred to thistle-down—the wool of sheep, the seeds for crops, a faggot of sticks, may all be the innocent means of introducing it into a farm or a country. Let it once settle and the mischief is done. A single plant will bear a dozen heads of flowers, male and female; each head is an aggregation of about a hundred flowers; supposing half the heads are females, we have then 6000 flowers, from every one of which a tiny seed—a potential plant—will in time float away from the parent stem. The attack of an army 6000 strong issuing from a solitary weed is indeed enough to baffle the resources of a farmer. If only a small percentage of these find a suitable resting place, still the figures which work out in a second generation are positively appalling.

But the common Canadian thistle, in its determined fight for pre-eminence, does not trust altogether to its feathery seeds; it disdains to put all its eggs into one basket. It is furnished with a long, creeping, perennial root stock, which worms its way about in the ground, and drains the surrounding earth of nutriment. An old botanical writer—Curtis—tells how he planted a piece of the root of this thistle about the size of a goose quill, and 2in long. Six months later he had it dug up, and found that some of the shoots thrown off had a length of Bft, and, instead of a piece like a slip of goose quill, he had a mass of roots and shoots weighing 4lb.

But even that was not the sum total of the thistle's six months' work, for he further relates 'that in the next spring " this thistle again made its appearance, on and about the place where the small thistle was originally planted. There were between fifty and sixty young heads which must have sprung from the roots which had eluded the gardener's search, though he was particularly careful in extracting them." So tenacious and irrepressible is the thistle.

The sow-thistle—a variety without prickly leaves—has also become of late years a terrible plague to the Canadian farmer. He has nick-named it Creve-les-yeux(Hard on the eyes; because he is obliged to veil his eyes when threshing his grain tJ protect them against the cloud of thistledownjwhich flies out. Another terrible plant whose very name has the same effect on the Manitoba and the Canadian farmers as the proverbial red rag to a bull is the celebrated and dreaded Russian thistle. Yefc the popular tradition which links it with the thistle is doing even that justly hated family an injustice, as it is a saltwort and not even a near connection, but in the war between thistle and man it is always classified as belonging to the ranks of the enemy, and it falls under the strictest enactments of the Thistle Act.

Like the thistle, its leaves are hard and prickly, but so much more venomous that, in fields infested by it, horses cannot be put even to work, for the pricking of its spiny leaves causes their legs to swell and fester painfully. It was in 1889 that the Russian thistle crossed from the Dakotas into Manitoba, and settled on a farm stiU

pointed out. In two years it 'had j spread far and wide, choking literally | whole crops. One man on a small field of five acres raked up and destroyed ninety cocks of Russian thistles, each heap as large as a good sizad haycock, and this was no uncommon instance. Its entry into different parts was made to a very great exten'; along the railway cuttings. There, on .the uncultivated fresh turned banks, it found convenient footholds by which it rapidly advanced into the very heart of the land. Its method of advance is curious ; its seeds are gifted with no parachutes or feathery plumes to bear them onwards, but when they are ripe the plant detachesitself frointhe ground, rolling and tumbling along before the wind, and they are scattered broadcast '"with everv movement.

The Government, however, quickly took steps to check the ravages of this most pernicious weed. Lecturers on agriculture were sent to the infested districts to direct the farmers how best t) cope with the pest, and pamphlets to the same effect were printed and distributed widely. Stringent laws were enforced for it s extermination, and whenever it appeared in a new place that patch of land was placed under direct observation. For instance, the Dominion botanist, travelling in Manitoba 'in 1894, was shown a carefully marked spot on a railway bank where a few seedlings had been noticed and destroyed ; but every week the place was examined afresh, and hoed over should any fresh opecirnens have appeared above ground. The roadmasters, too, of the great railways are keenly on the alert since the alarm was given, and the whole line is systematically overlooked and cleaned. Two year j ago a feeling of dismay wasfeltthroughout the whole Dominion of Canada because, in spite of all precaution, the Russian thistle had made its appearance in Ontario, but, alive to their danger, the colonists have prevented it spreading, and hope now to stamp it out easily. It is wonderful to see the intense interest shown when a Government lecturer on tour speaks on the subject of noxious weeds and their extermination. Farmers will come from any distance to ask questions and listen to the advice given ; indeed it is quite obvious that there the war against thistles and other injurious weeds is the burning question of the hour.