People are very much struck by our beds of Myosotis, surmounted by the swaying chalices of the Darwins. The simple plan of the blue carpet for these slender May Queens seems to them very wonderful and new.
OAKS AND BLUE GLADES
“Oh, look! What’s happened? Is it real? It’s like fairyland!” cried a visitor yesterday to a sympathetic sister.—Such kind people to walk about the garden with! They have themselves a mysterious Oak wood, falling away beneath their lawns, that is now carpeted with Bluebells: a place to sit and dream in. Oaks are trees full of romance, we think. They tell long stories out of the past, and speak of Shakespeare and the glories of England, and their glades are for ever peopled with brave figures of history or fiction.
THE BEECH
XX
Beeches, on the other hand, have a kind of fairy glory about them that does not seem to belong to our land. We drove through a beech forest the other day; the road went up zigzagging to the top of a steep hill, and one looked down upon the Beech glades, all golden green in a fierce sunburst between two showers. And they were still dripping with the rain. It was wonderful, but not English, distinctively English, like that Oak wood. It was a Märchen-Wald. Siegfried might have strode through it, blowing his horn: youth incarnate, leaping out of Mime’s cave to conquer the world. On the inspiration of such a haunt was the Wald-Musick conceived.
MAY AND SEPTEMBER MOODS