The Natural History of Selborne

The hoar-frost was so great that Thomas could hardly mow.  Bats out for the first time, I think, this spring: they hunt, & take the phalanae along by the sides of the hedges.  There had been this spring a pretty good flight of woodcocks about Liss.  If we have any of those birds of late years, it has been in the spring, in their return from the West, I suppose, to the Eastern coast.

Grass-hopper lark whispers.

Sowed a crop of onions, & several sorts of cabbage: pronged the asparagus beds.  Radishes grow.

Planted ten rows of potatoes against the Wid: Dewye’s garden.  Planted one in the best garden. John Carpenter buys now & then of Mr Powlett of Rotherfield a chest-nut tree or two of the edible kind: they are large, & tall, & contain 60 or 70 feet of timber each.  The wood & bark of these trees resemble the oak; but the wood is softer & the grain more open.  The use that the buyer turns them to is cooperage; because he says the wood is light for buckets, jets &c. & will not shrink.  The grand objection to these trees is their disposition to be shaky; & what is much worse, cup-shaky: viz: the substance of these trees parts like the scales of an onion, & comes out in round plugs from the heart.  This, I know, was also the case with those fine chest-nut-trees that were lately cut at Bramshot-place against Portsmouth road.  Now as the soil at Rotherfield is chalk, & at Bramshot, sand; it seems as if this disposition to be shaky was not owing to soil alone, but the nature of that tree.  There are two groves of chest-nuts in Rotherfield-park, which are tall, & old, & have rather over-stood their prime.  J: Carpenter gives only 8d a foot for this timber, on account of the defect above-mentioned.

Timothy the tortoise comes forth from his winter-retreat.

The spring backward to an unusual degree! Some swallows are come, but I see no insects except bees, & some phalanae in the evenings.  Daffodils begin to blow.

No garden-crops sowed yet with me; the ground is too wet.  Artichokes seem to be almost killed.

Timothy the tortoise begins to stir: he heaves-up the mould that lies over his back.  Redstart is heard at the verge of the highwood against the common.

The buds of the vines are not swelled yet at all.  In fine springs they have shot by this time two or three inches.

Nightingale heard in Maiden-dance.  Ring-dove builds in my fields.  Black-cap sings.