Geo. Cattle, too, are sometimes fed with cabbage, I believe.
Tut. Yes, and large fields of them are cultivated for that purpose. They succeed best in stiff clayey soils, where they sometimes grow to an enormous bigness. They are given to milch kine as well as to fattening cattle.
Geo. Do not they give a bad taste to the milk?
Tut. They are apt to do so unless great care is taken to pick off all the decayed leaves.
Coleworts, which are a smaller sort of cabbage, are sometimes grown for feeding sheep and cattle. I think I have now mentioned most of the useful plants of this family, which you see are numerous and important. They both yield beef and mutton, and the sauce to them. But many of the species are troublesome weeds. You see how yonder corn is overrun with yellow flowers.
Geo. Yes: they are as thick as if they had been sown.
Tut. They are of this family, and called charlock, or wild mustard, or corn kale, which, indeed, are not all exactly the same things, though nearly resembling. These produce such plenty of seeds, that it is very difficult to clear a field of them, if once they are suffered to grow till the seeds ripen. An extremely common weed in gardens and by roadsides is shepherd’s-purse, which is a very good specimen of the pouch-bearing plants of this tribe, its seed-vessels being exactly the figure of a heart. Lady-smock is often so abundant a weed in wet meadows as to make them all over white with their flowers. Some call this plant cuckoo-flower, because its flowering is about the same time with the first appearance of that bird in spring.
Geo. I remember some pretty lines in a song about spring, in which lady-smock is mentioned:—
“When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver white,