The Natural History of Selborne

The ants, male, female, & workers, come forth from under my stairs by thousands.

Timothy comes-out but a little, while the weather is so hot: he skulks among the carrots, & cabbages.  Red-breasts eat the berries of the honey-suckle.

Gleaners bring home bundles of corn.  The black-birds, & thrushes come from the woods in troops to plunder my garden.  We shot 30 blackbirds, & thrushes.  The white-throats are bold thieves; nor are the red-breasts at all honest with respect to currans.  Birds are guided by colour, & do not touch any white fruits ’til they have cleared all the red; they eat the red grapes, rasps, currans, & goose-berries first.

The blackbirds & thrushes, that have devoured all the wild cherries in the meadow, now begin to plunder the garden.

The crop on my largest Apricot-tree is still prodigious, tho’ in May I pulled off 30, or 40 dozen.

Of those China hollyhocks that stood the winter the tall ones are plain & single: the stunted ones are double & variegated.

All the first meadow-hay about us was spoiled: all the latter was ricked in delicate order. Late in the evening the swifts course round with their young high in the air. They are some times so numerous that one might suspect they are joined by parties from other villages. The fly-catchers have quite forsaken my house & garden: they never breed twice.

The planet Mars figures every evening & makes a golden & spendid shew. This planet being in opposition to the sun, is now near us, & consequently bright.

House-martins abound at Lipock.

Bramshot-place

Lapwings haunt the uplands still.  Farmers complain that their wheat is blited.  At Bramshot-place, the house of Mr Richardson, in the wilderness near the stream, grows wild, & in plenty, Sorbus aucuparia, the quicken-tree, or mountain-ash, Rhamnus frangula, berry-bearing alder; & Teucrium scorodonia, wood-sage, & whortle-berries.  The soil is sandy.  In the garden at Dowland’s, the seat, lately, of Mr Kent, stands a large Liriodendrum tulipifera, or tulip-tree, which was in flower. The soil is poor sand; but produces beautiful pendulous Larches.  Mr R’s garden, tho’ a sand, abounds in fruit, & in all manner of good & forward kitchen-crops.  Many China-asters this spring seeded themselves there, and were forward; some cucumber-plants also grew-up of themselves from the seeds of a rejected cucumber thrown aside last autumn.  The well at Downland’s is 130 feet deep; at Bramshot place..  Mr R’s garden is at an average a fortnight before mine.