Woodland and Copse.
Far away in bonnie Scotland, where the woods are mostly composed of dark, waving, brown-stemmed pine-trees, feathery larches—crimson-tasselled in early spring—or gloomy spruces, there is often an absence of any undergrowth, unless it be heather. But English copses are often one wild tanglement of trailing flowering shrubs, with banks of bracken or ferns.
I have often stopped to admire the marvellous beauty of these copse-lands; their wealth of silent loveliness has more than once brought the tears to my eyes.
So now I refrain from describing them, because any attempt to do so would end in failure. But, reader, have you seen an English woodland carpeted with deep-blue hyacinths, with snowy anemones, or with the sweet wee white pink-streaked sorrel, with its bashful leaves of bending green? Have you seen the golden-tasselled broom waving in the soft spring wind? Or, later on in the season, the tall and stately foxgloves blooming red amidst the greenery of a fern bank? If not, a treat, both rich and rare, may still be yours.
Is it not said that the wild anemone or wind-flower grew from the tears shed by Venus over the grave of Adonis?
“But gentle flowers are born, and bloom around,
From every drop that falls upon the ground:
Where streams his blood, there blushing springs the rose,
And where a tear has dropped a wind-flower blows.”
I think it must be the wood-anemone that is referred to as the snowdrop in that bonnie old Scottish song, My Nannie’s awa’:—
“The snowdrop and primrose our woodlands adorn,
And violets blaw in the dews o’ the morn,
They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blaw,
They mind me on Nannie—and Nannie’s awa’.”
Fields and Moorland.
Turning to these, what oceans of beauty I saw everywhere around me during all the months of my travel!