FLORAL DISPLAY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 9, Issue 62, 12 April 1946, Page 2

FLORAL DISPLAY

SCIENTIST’S AND NATURALIST’S STRANGE DISCOVERY

A London garden from which the owner was exiled for some time during the war has yielded, in addition to weeds, some exciting results. From seed not sown by hands have sprung up two towering manybranched foxgloves, a magnificent great anchusa, a gorgeous Oriental poppy with seeds enough to furnish half the neighbourhood, several delphiniums, a cluster of Shirley poppies, and a veritable plague of loganberry plants. Some of the seeds from which these growths sprang may have been wind-blown, others must have been carried by birds.

It is always difficult to know what seeds will perish in the digestive tract of a bird and what will survive. A scientist, experimenting, found that from 250 plants the seeds of from 75 to 85 per cent, germinated after having been eaten by thrushes, blackbirds, and robins. One of the strangest revelations of the kind attended the discovery by a naturalist some years ago of the remains of a wood-pigeon in a disused chalk-pit. The bird’s last meal had been of broad beans, and from the crop of the bird a little harvest of beans was growing strongly.