Abstract
IN my garden the sparrows do not touch the crocuses. In that of a friend, some miles off, they attack the yellow ones exclusively. I address you chiefly to report a fact related to me by the vicar of a neighbouring parish, whose garden is infested with mice. He tells me that for some time he thought he could not grow crocuses at all, as the mice destroyed the corms, discovering and digging down to them, even when there was no trace of the plants on the surface. At last he found that they did not attack the purple crocus, and on his planting the edge of a long border, with alternate clumps of yellow and purple crocuses, the mice almost entirely destroyed all the clumps of yellow, but left the purple untouched. Possibly the purple plant possesses some acrid or bitter taste, rendering it nauseous to animals—the corms to mice, the flowers to sparrows and other birds.
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COMBER, T. Yellow Crocuses. Nature 16, 24 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/016024a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/016024a0
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