The kindly nature of the hawthorn and the simple nature of its cultural requirements have caused everybody to be familiar with the beautiful red and pink, single and double, varieties which have been raised and widely distributed. There is a variety with scarlet berries which I have only seen in the park at Newton Don, near Kelso. Beautiful as are the common red haws upon which fieldfares, redwings, and other winter visitors mainly depend for provender, this scarlet fruited variety is a much more brilliant object at the dullest time of the year. The variety with yellow haws is no improvement on the type. Phillips in his _Sylva Florifera_ (1823) states that "a variety has been discovered in a hedge near Bampton, Oxfordshire, which produces white berries." This variety, if it ever existed, appears to have been lost. He also commits himself to the statement that "the fruit of this tree are called haws, from whence the name hawthorn"; which proves that a man may be an excellent botanist and a bad etymologist. In Middle English "hawe" meant a hedge, and also ground enclosed by a hedge. It was in the latter sense that Chaucer wrote in the _Canterbury Tales_: And eke there was a polkat [polecat] in his hawe. The tree got the name of hawthorn, _i.e._ hedgethorn, because it has no rival as a hedge plant. And this brings us to consider what is the economic value of the hawthorn. It has become indispensable for hedges, which are as inseparable from a foreigner's impressions of English landscape as poplars are from French country scenery, and as date palms are from that of Egypt. Green fields of England! wheresoe'er Across the watery waste we fare, Your image in our hearts we bear, Green fields of England, everywhere. But the fields would not be so green, they would not indeed stamp themselves on the memory as fields at all, were it not for the hedges that mark them off. In Scotland hedges are not so universal, the preference being given to stone dykes, where the necessary material lies to hand, or, alas, to barbed wire, which, effective though it be as a fence, prevails to vulgarise the fairest scenery. Dr. Walker states in his _Essays of Natural History_ (1812) that Cromwell's soldiers first planted, or taught the Scots to plant hedges in East Lothian and Perthshire. They learnt the planting all right, but not, it would appear, the subsequent management; for, except in the Lothians, it is the exception to see hedges rightly tended. The plants are allowed to straggle and to be browsed bare below by cattle, when the gaps are repaired by running a wire through them. Far more admirable is the craft of the English hedger, who knows how to make a beautiful and durable fence by plashing and binding.