Seven Lectures on the United Kingdom for use in India / Reissued for use in the United Kingdom

by Halford John Mackinder

47.
Roses.

Fruit is grown in large quantity for the markets of the great town populations. Here in this slide is one of the finest of the northern fruits, the strawberry, which you probably know. See how it is coloured, like so many other things northern. And here is yet another crop of England. The vast cities with their millions of people—many of them well-to-do—demand in their houses the flowers of the country. Therefore there are parts of England where not merely corn and cattle, and not merely fruit, but also flowers are grown for the supply of the towns. This is the best known of the flowers of England, the rose, which grows also in other parts of the world, but is pre-eminently the national emblem of England, and praised as such in English poetry.

48.
Hay-stack.

Let us turn for a moment finally to a side of English life which is different from all that we know here in the tropics. There are seasons in Britain, not rainy seasons and dry seasons, but seasons of heat and of cold. In the winter the vegetation stops growing, and there is little food in the fields for the animals. Then all the life of the land, animal and human, must be maintained by foresight, by the storage of the fruits of summer, or by the import of supplies from other countries. The cattle are kept alive by means of hay, that is to say, of grass cut in the summer, dried in the sun, heaped into hay-stacks, and there preserved until required in the winter. This is a hay-stack laid by for the winter supply of the animals.

49.
Beech—Autumn Tints.

When the hay and the corn have been harvested and the apples have been gathered and turned to cider, and the roses have bloomed, and the strawberries have been eaten or boiled to jam, then the summer wanes, and a change sets in. Day by day, as September and October pass, the green leaves of the trees gradually turn to all manner of brilliant hues of red and brown, and presently, as the rains and the winds increase, they fall and litter all the ground as we see them here. At last, in November, the trees become naked, and show the tracery of their branches against the sky.

50.
Park—Autumn Tints.

51.
River Scene with Autumnal Beeches.

There are few more splendid natural scenes than those of the fall of the northern year. Let us look at one or two more of them photographed in colour. This is an English park in the autumn, and this a wood by a river bank.