INTRODUCTORY 163 



amongst our woodland trees, such as the maple, are to be 

 found abundantly as constituents in the farmer's walls of 

 living green. The captious critic, if there be such a person, 

 might even declare that the regal oak itself, the monarch 

 of the forest, need not be sought for in the forest at all, 

 being in many parts of the country one of the commonest 

 of roadside trees, so that as we ramble along the skirting 

 hedgerow we can at will as easily gather either the 

 blackberries or the acorns that it yields. There is no 

 gainsaying the fact, and one can only plead in extenuation 

 that such difficulty of classification seems inevitable ; and 

 rejoice, moreover, that dear mother Nature does not pen 

 up her treasures in sharp divisions, but gives us everywhere 

 a wealth of variety, beauty, and interest, so that black- 

 berries and acorns are both possible to us at once, even 

 if in botanical books they are many pages apart. 



In the present chapter we propose to deal with divers 

 other plants that scarcely belong to either of the preceding 

 groups ; plants of the stream, the meadow, the moorland, 

 and so forth. Yet here again we feel that we shall have 

 need to plead for the greatest elasticity of treatment for 

 ourselves, and an all-embracing charity from our readers, 

 or we shall be having the brain-bound pedant, if there 

 be such a person, declaring that the buttercup or the 

 campion that we class as flowers of the meadow may be 

 found freely enough amongst the rank vegetation at the 

 foot of the hedgerow, and should, therefore, have found 

 a resting-place in our first chapter, and been read about 

 and forgotten long ere this. 



