PROUD PIED APRIL 



crows, and her nest, with its dome and its thorny pali- 

 sade, is considered a comparatively new and an advanced 

 type of crow architecture becoming to the craftiest 

 and most mischievous of her tribe. 



BEECH-TREES are unkind to other plants, and because of 

 their sunproof leaves the beech-wood 

 Beech-wood floor is commonly brown and bare in 

 Flowers summer, save for a few wild orchids. But 

 before the leaves unfold, the early wild 

 flowers have a chance to blow for a brief season, and 

 to-day the floors of Buckinghamshire woods are covered 

 by a rich tapestry of violets, anemones, and the ethereal 

 blooms of wood-sorrel. And in Sussex beech- woods, 

 in the St. Leonards Forest district, the wild daffodils 

 will be succeeded in a few days by azure seas of blue- 

 bells : already the children have carried home in triumph 

 small bunches of the earliest bells. 



ONE of the prettiest floral pictures of the April hedge- 

 row is made by stitchwort, whose grass-like 

 Starwort leaves are veritable grappling-hooks to drag 

 the brittle stems through the herbage until 

 the flowers can shine out like stars. The plant was 

 anciently called " All-bone," a name which puzzled 

 Gerard, as he could see no reason for it, unless " it 

 were so called of contraries." Our name may refer to 

 an old faith that a decoction of the plant cured stitches 

 in the side; but it is also traced to the Greek word for 

 sting, as the plant was among the many cures for a 

 serpent's bite. But starwort is the name that best be- 

 comes the gleaming flowers. 



47 



