plantations 211 



"The bark of the beech is itself a panel to study, 

 spotted with velvet moss brown green, made grey by 

 close-grown lichens, stained with its own hues of 

 growth and toned by time. To these add bright 

 sunlight and leaf shadow, the sudden lowering of 

 tint as a cloud passes, the different aspects of the day 

 and of the evening, and the change of rain and dry 

 weather. You may look at the bark of a beech 

 twenty times, and always find it different. There is 

 another spirit among beech trees; they look like deer 

 and memories of old English Life. " 



The sense of distant space outside of the estate is 

 always desirable. If these single trees and scattering 

 shrubs can seem to lose themselves over the crest of a 

 hill into the sky it increases the mystery and sense of 

 largeness, the feeling that one might own the Universe. 

 Richard Jefferies expresses this idea when he writes as 

 follows in Field and Hedgerow: 



"Still higher and as the firs cease, and shower and 

 sunshine, wind and dew can reach the ground un- 

 checked, comes the tufted heath branched heather of 

 the moorland top. A thousand acres of purple 

 heather sloping southward to the sun, deep valleys 

 of dark heather, further slopes beyond of purple, more 

 valleys of heather — the heath shows more in the sun- 

 light, and heather darkens the shadows of the hollows 

 — and so on and on, mile after mile, till the heath 

 bells seem to end in the sunset. Round and beyond 

 is the immense plain of the air — you feel how limit- 



