IN SHADIEST COVERT 



IN SHADIEST COVERT 



THE beech has an ill-deserved reputation for so keeping 

 out sunshine that no flowers will grow in 

 Under its shade, but many a beech-wood to-day 

 Greenwood has its floor covered by drifts of the curious 

 Trees plant, wood sanicle. Its leaves are very 



decorative in their glossiness, and the ele- 

 gant way they are cut into lobes, and the minute white 

 flowers manage to make a goodly show by rearing them- 

 selves two feet high. The plant is interesting for its re- 

 putation as a healer of all inward hurts and outward 

 wounds, whence its name, from sano. 



THE great beech-woods of the Chilterns offer a succes- 

 sion of floral pageants ; carpets of violets in 

 The Fox's April, seas of bluebells in May; and now 

 Flower the massed ranks of the foxgloves are 

 making one of the most magnificent wild- 

 flower shows of the year. So in Cornwall to-day the 

 foxgloves of the stone hedges blaze the trail of the moor- 

 land roads for miles. Individual plants are six feet high, 

 and may have some three hundred buds and blossoms. It 

 is often disputed whether the word " foxglove " has any- 

 thing to do with foxes ; but it is the fox's flower in that 

 it so often grows about his den in a sandy bank. 



SWEET wild strawberries now ripen for the fairies' 



dessert in beech- woods. And if housewives 



Fairies' take the advice of worthy old Tusser, in his 



Straw- sixteenth-century work, " Five Hundred 



berries Points of Good Husbandry," they will 



transplant the wildings to gardens, for 



9* 



