THE CHEQUERED DAFFODIL 329 



escape dating back to the Roman occupation, which 

 gives it a better title by some eighteen centuries to 

 be described as British than dozens of our wild 

 flowers. The charming sanfoin, common as the 

 gipsy rose in our fields, the wild musk that flourishes 

 by a thousand streams from Land's End to the 

 Western Islands, the winter heliotrope that spreads 

 its green mantle over so much of England, are by 

 comparison aliens that emigrated but yesterday 

 to our shores. 



It was in Wiltshire again that I found my first 

 columbines, in a vast thicket of furze, may, and 

 blackthorn covering about twenty acres of ground. 

 The plants were tall, the thin wiry stems being two 

 or three feet long, and produced few leaves, but 

 flowers as large as those of the garden plant. An 

 old keeper who had charge of the ground told me 

 he had known the flower from his boyhood, and 

 that formerly he could fill a barrow with " collar- 

 binds," as he called them, any day. It was a rare 

 pleasure to see that columbine in its own home 

 the big blue quaint flower that looked at you from 

 its shelter of rough furze and thorn bushes; and 

 for the first time in my life I admired it, since in 

 the garden, where as a rule its peculiar beauty is 

 dimmed by other garden blooms, it has an inhar- 

 monious setting. But I must .say of the colour 

 that albeit a true floral blue it is a blue of the 

 earth, the material world we inhabit, not the divine 

 (or human) blue of the blue geranium nor the more 

 ethereal blue of the vernal squill on the sea-cliffs, 



