Hey presto! I have but to shut my eyes and think back, and the scene is changed. I see before me—
A Hedgerow in July.
Where am I? Away up north on a Yorkshire wold. The horses are out and grazing on the clovery sward by the roadside.
How silent it is!
As I lie here on my rugs on the coupé, I can hear a mole rustling through the grass at the hedge-foot. But the hedgerow itself, and all about it, how refreshing to look upon!
Surely no billhook or axe of woodsman has ever come near it since first it began to grow. Its very irregularity gives it additional charm. The hedge itself is really of blackthorn, but its white or pink-ticked blossoms have faded and given place to haws. Here and there, as far as you can see, up through it grow wild dwarf oak bushes, their foliage crimson or carmine tipped, dwarf plane-trees, with broad sienna leaves, that glitter in the sunshine as if they had been varnished; and elder-trees with big white stars of blossom, and rougher leaves of darkest green. Young elms, too, are yonder, and infant ash trees with stems as black as ink and strangely tinted leaves.
(Plane-trees, so-called, but in reality the Sycamore: the Acer pseudo-platanus of naturalists.)
“The sycamore, capricious in attire,
Now green, now tawny, and ere autumn yet
Has changed the woods, in scarlet honours bright.”
Here and there wild roses, pale pink or deepest crimson, blush out; here and there are patches of honeysuckle, and here and there waves of the white flowery bryony roll foaming over the green.
In some places the light and tender-leaved woody nightshade, whose berries in bunches of crimson and green are so pretty in autumn, impart a spring-like appearance to this hedgerow.