on Japanese beetle and other plagues
- Subject: on Japanese beetle and other plagues
- From: E*@aol.com
- Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 13:20:21 EDT
If you like books and can find an old copy, a new one would not feel as good
in your hands, read "My summer in the Garden" by Charles Dudley Warner.
He was an editor ( and we have a good editor here) of a newspaper and for
some reason left Harford and raised a garden one summer. He kept notes and
produced this small book around 100 years ago. There are nineteen weeks
recorded, the garden is not in Hartford, CT. It is entirely on his efforts
to make things grow.
But for the beetles here is a chemical-free solution from Mr. Warner.
He muses on petitioning the Ecumenical Council issue a "bull" of
excommunication against "pusley" whatever that might be. The word bull is
some irony, I think. He was contemporary of Mark Twain and that would be
Twain's thinking.
He goes on to document that the monks in St. Bernard's, Clairevoux - middle
ages excommunicated a vineyard that bore nothing.
In the year 1120, a bishop of Laon excommunicated caterpillars in his diocese
and the following year, St. Bernard excommincated the flies in the Monastery
of Foigny. In 1512 the court pronounced the sentence against the rats of
Autun, Macon and Lyons.
If anyone has the right connections, we could try it on the Japanese beetles.
Mr. Warner's small book is filled with such scholarship as he tries to wrest
some vegetables from this garden. I have an old edition printed in England
and it carries a wonderful inscription from the giver to the recipient, dated
in the year 1910.
Claire Peplowski
NYS z4
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