Such are a few of the delights of the Surrey undercliff; but alas! they are vanishing delights, for the proximity to London has rendered all this district peculiarly liable to change. How could it be otherwise, when from the top of the ridge the dome of "smoky Paul's" is visible on a clear day, and a view of the Crystal Palace, "that dreadful C.P." as one has heard it called, can seldom be avoided. What havoc has been wrought in the Surrey hills by the advance of "civilization," may be learnt by anyone who studies the district with a sixty-year-old Flora of Surrey for guide. Between Merstham and Godstone, for instance, the hillsides, which were then free, open ground, have become in the saddest sense "residential," and the wildflowers have suffered in proportion. One may still find there the narrow-leaved everlasting pea, "hanging in festoons on thickets and copses," but other equally valued plants have disappeared or are disappearing. The marsh helleborine was once plentiful, it seems, in a swampy situation near Merstham; but when, by dint of careful trespassing and circumnavigation of barbed wire, I reached a place which corresponded exactly with that indicated in the Flora, not a single flower was to be seen. Probably some conscientious gardener had "transplanted" them.
It is impossible to doubt that this process will be continued, and that every year more wild land will be broken up in the building of villas and in the making of gardens, with the inevitable shrubberies, gravel walks, flower-borders, and lawn-tennis courts. The trim parterre with its "detested calceolarias," as a great nature-lover has described them, will more and more be substituted for the rough banks that are the favourite haunts of marjoram and rock-rose. How can the owners of such a fairyland have the heart to sell it for such a purpose? In Omar's words:
I often wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell.
X
A SANDY COMMON
The common, overgrown with fern, . . .
Yields no unpleasing ramble; there the turf
Smells fresh, and rich in odoriferous herbs
And fungus fruits of earth, regales the sense
With luxury of unexpected sweets.
Cowper.
Stretched between the North Downs and the weald, through the west part of Kent and the length of Surrey, runs the parallel range of greensand, which in a few places, as at Toys Hill and Leith Hill, equals or overtops its rival, but is elsewhere content to keep a lower level, as a region of high open commons and heaths. The light soil of this district shows a flora as different from that of the chalk hills on its north as of the wealden clays on its south; so that a botanist has here the choice of three kingdoms to explore.
In natural beauty, these hills can hardly compare with the Downs. "For my part," wrote Gilbert White, "I think there is something peculiarly sweet and amusing in the shapely figured aspect of chalk hills, in preference to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and shapeless."[12] The same opinion was held by William Morris, who once declined to visit a friend of his (from whom I had the story) because he was living on just such a sandy common in west Surrey, where the formless and lumpish outline of the land was a pain to the artistic eye. For hygienic reasons, however, a sandy soil is reputed best to dwell upon; and I have heard a tale—told as a warning to those who are over-fastidious in their choice of a site—of a pious old gentleman who, being determined to settle only where he could be assured of two conditions, "a sandy soil and the pure gospel," finally died without either in a Bloomsbury hotel.
The gorse and broom in spring, and in autumn the heather, are the marked features of the sandy Common: the foxglove, too, which has a strong distaste for lime, here often thrives in vast abundance, and makes a great splash of purple at the edge of the woods. But even apart from these more conspicuous plants, the "barren heath," as it is sometimes called, is well able to hold its own in a flower-lover's affection; though the absence of the finer orchids, and of some other flowers that pertain to the chalk, makes it perhaps less exciting as a field of adventure. In Crabbe's words: