In a Cheshire Garden

The Flower Garden.

In a Cheshire Garden

Natural History Notes

BY
GEOFFREY EGERTON-WARBURTON,
Rector of Warburton.

LONDON
SHERRATT AND HUGHES
Manchester: 34 Cross Street
1912

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

PREFACE.

These Notes appeared from April to June this year in The Warrington Guardian and afterwards came out in a de-localised form in The Staffordshire Weekly Sentinel.

I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. P. Ramsdale, of Heatley, for the photographs of The Old Church, The Yew-tree, and The Flower Garden (as it was some years ago).

My thanks are due also to Mr. Garrett for kindly allowing me to use his very interesting photograph of The Two Nests referred to on page 94.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

I.

Introductory.

Although much of the neighbourhood has become semi-urban and any idea of rural seclusion is destroyed, at least in summer, by the crowds that find their way to it from Manchester and other large towns, yet the Cheshire village of Warburton in which this garden is situated is a real country place still. How long it will remain so is another thing. One salt works has been set up at Heatley about a mile away and we are now (1912) promised another, while there is every prospect of land being let for works in Warburton itself. Who knows, in a few years perhaps the whole place may be reduced to the desolation of another Widnes. Then, when it has become a rare thing to find even a blade of grass on the dreary black waste or to see any bird but a grimy sparrow, a record of what was once here may be strange reading.

The garden itself about which I write is quite on the northern boundary of Cheshire, in old days divided from Lancashire by the Mersey only. The soil is light and sandy, not far from the rock in places and in places with water at a very little depth below the surface. It is well suited to hollies and rhododendrons, both of which grow abundantly and