Word: cactuses
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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North and South American prickly pears, members of the cactus family, were taken to Australia in the 19th Century, planted for hedges and as a source of fodder. By 1925 they threatened to crowd out native vegetation on 30,000,000 acres of land, and on 30,000,000 more acres the pears had completely won, standing in a dense, solid growth two to five feet thick. The cost of fighting them with chemicals, by digging or plowing, stacking and burning, would have been more than the land was worth. So, year after year, more land was abandoned, more homesteads...
Meanwhile the Australian Government sent agents to the Americas to see what the prickly pear's natural enemies were. The agents investigated about 150 insects that feed on cactus and nothing else, set a few of the most promising to work in Australia. By far the most potent destroyer proved to be a little moth borer, Cactoblastis cactorum. The larvae of this insect eat the inside of the pear plant, even the roots, and their depredations promote rotting due to bacteria and fungi. Armed with strings of moth borer eggs glued to strips of paper, fieldworkers swarmed through prickly...
...Golconda, Ill., Mrs. Jake Eichorn's cactus, which usually blooms on Thanksgiving Day, bloomed a week early. Mrs. Eichorn is a registered Democrat...
After the motorcade had passed, the sad-faced peons stood in little clumps for hours, looking like bunches of dry cactus blossom in their earthy blues, reds, yellows, talking of the parade of the Señor Henry Wallace. They said that he was of much sympathy, a plougher of ground like themselves, a gringo with the proper sort of gentle eyes. They put too much emphasis on his first name, for he spoke a kind of Spanish and they supposed that like Hispano-Mexicans he used both parents' names, Henry for his father, Wallace after his mother...
Birthday. Vice President John Nance Garner; his 72nd. celebrated at Uvalde, Tex. Cracked Cactus Jack: "I'm going to live...