Outside the wood-house door there is a little clearing adjoining the grove of trees, where a perfect thicket of wild flowers smiles at you for the greater part of the year. First come the early violets clustering about the roots of the trees, and in the shelter of the grey rock fragments; while primroses dot the grass with their crinkly leaves, and then send up pink stems covered with silver sheen, and delicately scented flowers each as big as a penny. Oxlips grow on the bank that borders one side of the clearing.
Later, it is an expanse of moon-daisies—thousands of them swaying the whole day long to the motion of the wind like the ever-restless surface of the sea. And with the moon-daisies are buttercups, crimson clover, rosy-purple knapweed, spikes of pink orchis delicately pencilled with mauve—all trying to grow to the height of the big yellow-eyed daisies; while here and there ruddy spears of sorrel out-top them all.
Tall grasses of every kind are here, some like a fine translucent veil of purple, others grey, or a pinky-green; some shaking out yellow or heliotrope stamens; some ever trembling like the quaking-grass—but all mingling with the tall flowers, softening the surface of the mass of white blossoms that seem in the sunshine almost too dazzling to look upon, were it not for the mist of the grasses that envelops them.
Underneath the tall flowers there is a wonderful carpet of lesser-growing things—masses of trefoil, the yellow blossoms often touched with fiery orange; patches of heath bed-straw, with its myriads of tiny gleaming white flowers, cling to any spot where the grasses leave it room to breathe, its first cousin, the woodruff, preferring a shadier part of the bank at the side—the bank where the wild strawberries grow to a luscious size, and whortleberry bushes add a touch of wildness to the spot.
The smaller clovers, both yellow and white, seem to thrive under the bigger flowers, where most else would suffocate. Pink-tipped daisies bloom wherever they can find room to hold up a little face. Rosy-pink vetches wander about at pleasure, and pretend they are going to do great things when they start to climb the stems of the moon-daisies.
Where the big fir trees throw a shadow, and the sun only touches the grass when it is getting round to the west, foxgloves send up shafts of colour and the pale-blue spiked veronica carpets the ground.
Still further back, where the sunshine never penetrates, even here something strives to give beauty to barrenness and soften austerity, for the small-leaved ivy starts to climb the hard tree trunks, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful of the many living things that are neighbour to the old wood-house.
And always in the grass there lie the snapped-off twigs and branches of the larches, with their brown picots up stems that are studded with exquisite cones. We strive hard to better Nature, to make new designs, to evolve fresh beauty; but with all our skill and experiments we have yet to improve on the cone as a design, with its rhythmic re-iteration of the one small motif and the perfection of its proportions. In my mind it ranks with the smoked-silver seed ball of the dandelion, both of them examples of absolute beauty derived from the simplest of outlines.