The Natural History of Selborne

The kidney-beans are cut down.  Potted several balsoms, a fine sort saved last year.

Planted some red cabbages from S. Lambeth.  Planted some green cucumber-plants to fill the void spaces in the early-frames.

My wall-nut trees seem much injured by the fros.  The laurels shoot at the bottom of the boughs.  Sycomores are injured.  Chafers swarm about Oakhanger, & on the chalky soils, but not with us on the clays.

My fields have more grass than my brother’s at S. Lambeth, which burn.  My St foin looks well, & is grown.  Ponds in bottoms are dry.  Our down burn brown.

The country strangely burnt-up.

Dragon-flies come out of their aurelia-state.  Great bloom of apples round S. Lambeth.

Severe drying exhausting drought.  Cloudless days.  The country all dust.  Timothy the tortoise weighs 6 ae 11 13/4 oz.  He spoils the lettuce under the fruit-wall: but will not touch the Dutch, while he can get at any coss.

The grass in my Brother’s fields burns, & does not look so well as it did when I came.

There is a great want of rain in France as well as in England.  A cuckow haunts my brother’s fields; so that probably there will be a young cuckow hatched in the quickset-hedge.  Millions of empedes, or tipulae, come forth at the close of day, & swarm to such a degree as to fill the air.  At this juncture they sport & copulate: as it grows more dark they retire.  All day they hide in hedges.  As they rise in a cloud they appear like smoke: I do not remember to have seen such swarms except in the fens of the Island of Ely.  They appear most over grass-mounds.

Pastures yellow with dandelions.  Meadow-foxtail grass, alopercurus pratensis, in bloom.