I02 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



BUCKHURST PARK. 



An old beech tree had been broken off about five feet 

 from the ground, and becoming hollow within, was 

 filled with the decay of its own substance. In this 

 wood-sorrel had taken root, and flower and leaf covered 

 the space within, white flower and green leaf flourishing 

 on old age. The wood-sorrel leaf, the triune leaf, is 

 perhaps more lovely even than the flower, like a more 

 delicately shaped clover of a tenderer green, and it lasts 

 far on into the autumn. When the violet leaves are no 

 more looked for, when the cowslips have gone, and the 

 bluebells have left nothing behind them but their 

 nodding seed-cases, still the wood-sorrel leaf stays on 

 the mound, in shape and colour the same, and as plea- 

 santly acid to the taste now under the ripening nuts 

 as in May. At its coming it is folded almost like a 

 green flower ; at Midsummer, when you are gathering 

 ferns, you find its trefoil deep under the boughs ; it 

 grows, too, in the crevices of the rock over the spring. 

 The whortleberry leaves, that were green as the myrtle 

 when the wood-sorrel was in bloom, have faded some- 

 what now that their berries are ripening. Another 

 beech has gone over, and lies at full length, a shattered 

 tube, as it were, of timber ; for it is so rotten within, and 

 so hollow and bored, it is little else than bark. Others 



