126 SPRING 



boughs take up much room, and its pithy wood is useless ; 

 but it often clusters thickly in the hedges bordering the 

 copse, and blossoms abundantly in early June. Honey- 

 suckle is another beautiful weed of the copses ; its winding 

 stems grip the stems of oak and beech saplings so tightly 

 that they often constrict them into the pattern of a twisted 

 balustrade. Sometimes the climber bites so deeply into the 

 stem that it is hidden, but lives on encased in the wood, and 

 throws out a flowering head in the sunshine above. A 

 beautiful shrub confined to the woods and copses of the 

 north and west is the bird-cherry ; this is quite distinct from 

 the common varieties of wild cherry, which have given us 

 our cultivated fruit. Bird-cherry forms a small rounded 

 tree with leaves of vivid green and pyramidal clusters of 

 white blossom, which often droop like the pink flowers of the 

 garden ribes or flowering currant. The bruised foliage gives 

 out a strong odour of prussic acid, like the laurel ; and the 

 blossoms have an aromatic smell, unlike the sweet scent of 

 the more familiar cherry blossom. 



Next to the nightingale, the most characteristic song-bird 

 of luxuriant copses on loamy soil is the garden-warbler. 

 Blackcaps are also common in such spots, but they are fonder 

 of tall timber than either the nightingale or the garden- 

 warbler, and prefer on the whole the mixed trees of an open 

 wood to the copse with its undergrowth and standard oaks. 

 Blackcaps and garden-warblers are very closely related species 

 in every detail ; both build among the thick thorn-beds and 

 verdant undergrowth, and their nests and eggs are somewhat 

 difficult to distinguish without a clear view of the parent bird. 

 Then there can be no doubt, for the cock blackcap has a 

 sharply defined black cap, and the hen a russet-brown one, 

 while the crowns of both garden-warblers are of the same 

 brownish grey as their backs. Garden-warblers build a 



