The observant hop grower notices constant changes in the appearance of his plants from day to day under varying weather influences and other conditions:  a retarded and unhappy expression in a cold, wet and rough time; an eager and hopeful expansiveness under genial conditions; a dark, plethoric and rampant growth where too much nitrogen is available, and a brilliant and healthily-restrained normality when properly balanced nourishment is provided.

There should be sympathy between the grower and his plants, such as is described by Blackmore in his Christowell; though in the following passage with consummate art he puts the words into the mouth of the sympathetic daughter of the amateur vine-grower, and gives the plant the credit of the first advance: 

“‘For people to talk about “sensitive plants,"’ she says, ’does seem such sad nonsense, when every plant that lives is sensitive.  Just look at this holly-leafed baby vine, with every point cut like a prickle, yet much too tender and good to prick me.  It follows every motion of my hand; it crisps its little veinings up whenever I come near it; and it feels in every fibre that I am looking at it.’”

Blackmore was much more than a writer of fiction; I think he had a deeper insight into the spirit of Nature and country character than perhaps any writer of modern times; he combined the accuracy of the scholar with the practical knowledge of the farmer and gardener; the logic of the philosopher with the fancy and expression of the poet.  I regard the appreciation of his Lorna Doone—­a book in which one can smell the violets—­as the test of a real country lover; I mean a country lover who, besides the gift of acute observation, has the deeper gift of imaginative perception.  If only the book could have been illustrated by the pencil of Randolph Caldecott, such a union of sympathy between author and artist would have produced a work unparalleled in rural literature.

Like all insects the aphis has its special insect enemies, among which the lady-bird ("lady-cow” in Worcestershire) is the most important.  It lays its eggs in clusters on the hop-leaf, and in a few days the larvae (called “niggers”) are hatched, aggressive-looking creatures with insatiable appetites.  It is amusing to watch them hunting over the lower side of the leaf like a sporting dog in a turnip field, and devouring the lice in quantities.  I knew an old hop grower in Hampshire who had a standing offer of a guinea a quart for lady-birds, but it is scarcely necessary to add that the reward was never claimed.

The hop is dioecious (producing male and female blossoms on separate plants), but very rarely both can be found on the same stem—­the plant thus becoming monoecious.  In 1893, a very hot dry year, several specimens were found, including one in Kent, one in Surrey, one in Herefordshire, and one in my own hopyards at Aldington.  It is curious that the same unusual season should have produced the same abnormality in places so far apart, practically representing all the hop districts of the country.