Now, in the third week of November, the most pressing work is the collecting of leaves for mulching and leaf-mould. The oaks have been late in shedding their leaves, and we have been waiting till they are down. Oak-leaves are the best, then hazel, elm, and Spanish chestnut. Birch and beech are not so good; beech-leaves especially take much too long to decay. This is, no doubt, the reason why nothing grows willingly under beeches. Horse and cart and three hands go out into the lanes for two or three days, and the loads that come home go three feet deep into the bottom of a range of pits. The leaves are trodden down close and covered with a layer of mould, in which winter salad stuff is immediately planted. The mass of leaves will soon begin to heat, and will give a pleasant bottom-heat throughout the winter. Other loads of leaves go into an open pen about ten feet square and five feet deep. Two such pens, made of stout oak post and rail and upright slabs, stand side by side in the garden yard. The one newly filled has just been emptied of its two-year-old leaf-mould, which has gone as a nourishing and protecting mulch over beds of Daffodils and choice bulbs and Alströmerias, some being put aside in reserve for potting and various uses. The other pen remains full of the leaves of last year, slowly rotting into wholesome plant-food.
With works of wood-cutting and stump-grubbing near at hand, we look over the tools and see that all are in readiness for winter work. Axes and hand-bills are ground, fag-hooks sharpened, picks and mattocks sent to the smithy to be drawn out, the big cross-cut saw fresh sharpened and set, and the hand-saws and frame-saws got ready. The rings of the bittle are tightened and wedged up, so that its heavy head may not split when the mighty blows, flung into the tool with a man's full strength, fall on the heads of the great iron wedges.
Pens for Storing Dead Leaves.
Careful Wild-Gardening—White Foxgloves at the Edge of the Fir Wood. (See page [270].)
Some thinning of birch-trees has to be done in the lowest part of the copse, not far from the house. They are rather evenly distributed on the ground, and I wish to get them into groups by cutting away superfluous trees. On the neighbouring moorland and heathy uplands they are apt to grow naturally in groups, the individual trees generally bending outward towards the free, open space, the whole group taking a form that is graceful and highly pictorial. I hope to be able to cut out trees so as to leave the remainder standing in some such way. But as a tree once cut cannot be put up again, the condemned ones are marked with bands of white paper right round the trunks, so that they can be observed from all sides, thus to give a chance of reprieve to any tree that from any point of view may have pictorial value.
Frequent in some woody districts in the south of England, though local, is the Butcher's Broom (Ruscus aculeatus). Its stiff green branches that rise straight from the root bear small, hard leaves, armed with a sharp spine at the end. The flower, which comes in early summer, is seated without stalk in the middle of the leaf, and is followed by a large red berry. In country places where it abounds, butchers use the twigs tied in bunches to brush the little chips of meat off their great chopping-blocks, that are made of solid sections of elm trees, standing three and a half feet high and about two and a half feet across. Its beautiful garden relative, the Alexandrian or Victory Laurel (Ruscus racemosus), is also now just at its best. Nothing makes a more beautiful wreath than two of its branches, suitably arched and simply bound together near the butts and free ends. It is not a laurel, but a Ruscus, the name laurel having probably grown on to it by old association with any evergreen suitable for a victor's wreath. It is a slow-growing plant, but in time makes handsome tufts of its graceful branches. Few plants are more exquisitely modelled, to use a term familiar to the world of fine art, or give an effect of more delicate and perfect finish. It is a valuable plant in a shady place in good, cool soil. Early in summer, when the young growths appear, the old, then turning rusty, should be cut away.