PLANTS THAT HATE EACH OTHER.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXIII, Issue 9038, 30 December 1907, Page 2

PLANTS THAT HATE EACH OTHER.

ASSASSINS IN THE PLANT WORLD. Trees, says a well-known naturalist, are very like human beings. They have their sympathies and aversions. Most of them like company, and grow better in clumps, but many are very particular about the company they keep. When they have had what they like they flourish. When they have uncongenial neighbours they are stunted, and often die. If you keep your eyes open when walking on the country, you will see for yourself that these remarks are perfectly true. Observe a solitary tree standing alone in an open nieadow. It is rarely so fine in size or shape as one which grows in a wood. At first sight this seems curious, for one would naturally imagine that a tree which had an unlimited supply of soil and air and light would have a better chance of prospering than another which had to share these necessaries with its neighbours. The real truth of the matter is that a young tree must be protected from the wind. If it is not it gets a set-back from which it never recovers. But it does not pay to plant d young tree near to one which is already in full growth, and especially is this the case if the older tree be a pine or a Scotch fir. The pine will simply push its roots out and absolutely strangle its younger companion. Almost all evergreens exercise an evil effect upon the so-called deciduous trees—the ones that lose their leaves in winter. The worst of the whole lot is the yew. No other plant or shrub can keep up the struggle for existence beneath the black shadow of a yew tree. Even grass and weeds will not grow in such a place. There is a semitropical plant commonly known in our gardens and most useful in medicine which is at least equally deadly as the yew. This is the castor bean. Everything, animal and vegetable, seems to have this handsome plant with its large shiny leaves. Nothing will grow beneath it, and even a goat will starve before eating it. Locusts refuse to touch it, and it is said that the surest way to keep a lawn free from moles is to plant a few castor beans here and there in the grass. Incredible as it may appear, there are plants which are so mutually hostile that they cannot exist in one another’s neighbourhood. This is true of the thistle and the rape. If a field is infested with thistles, which seed themselves and come thicker year by year, the best plan is to plough it "and sow rape. The thistle will be absolutely annihilated. Other antagonistic plants are the rose x and the mignonette. Between these antipathy goes so far that if you fill a vase with specimens of the two flowers mixed together, the result will be that both will lose their scent, and very shortly their freshness also. There are some plants which can only be called assassins. One of these is the humea elegans, sometimes seen in our greenhouses, which gives forth an odor strongly resembling that of Russian leather. The humea literally poisons all other plants, its neigh bpours. A correspondent wrote to a gardening journal, describing how one planted in a pot in his greenhouse caused the leaves of a peach tree, in another pot a foot or more away, to wither and fall off. This is the more strange in that the roots of the two being in different pots could not possibly come into contact. What is perhaps the most deadly to its fellows, of all known plants, is the “ jatropha nrens,” a specimen of which was grown some years ago in Kew Gardens. The jatropha is said to contain a poison so virulent that an infinitesimal dose stops the heart’s action and kills instantaneously. It is an odd fact that the Kew specimen mysteriously disappeared. It was suggested that it was too dangerous to be allowed to exist. Of all the mean, shabby plant criminals known, none can quite match the dodder. There are several specimens of this noxious vegetable in England. Starting as quite an ordinary plant, with roots of its own, the dodder lies in wait for a neighbour which may suit its requirements, and seizing upon it drives suckers deep into its stem, and lives upon the juices of its unwilling host. The miserable dodder then discards its own roots, degenerates into a mass of pink filaments which twine all over its adopted parent, and, in short, be,comes a parasite of the meanest description. Feeding entirely upon the juices of the host, it usually ends by killing the latter; but as the dodder itself can grow and spread from an inch of uninjured stalk it simply seeks a new victim for destruction. One sort of dodder preys upon wheat, and does fearful damage; another lives upon the gorse, and in some parts of the country has destroyed large areas of the prickly golden bloomed furze. — Pearson’s.