io SUMMER 



the best. Energy and colour are the marks of the month. Spring 

 is not over, and summer is not stale. The garden certainly flames, 

 principally and most notably with roses, of which the carmine pillar 

 is a real pillar of flame. The trees are alight. How many people 

 in June have thought of the upstanding pink and white flowers of 

 the horse chestnut as a candelabra? Tennyson, though he was 

 scolded for it, wrote of the laburnum's ( slow-dropping wells of fire,' 

 another type of flaming June. The may-trees are bright with 

 flower, and the lilac and the acacias. The syringa weights the air 

 with scent. The hedgerow gleams on June nights with discs of 

 light, with heavy-scented alder-flowers, and guelder and dog-rose 

 and wayfaring tree, and with a galaxy of kexes at the foot. 



The naturalist can pursue every sort of his quarry. The guille- 

 mots' eggs on the Bempton cliff are still lawful prey ; corn-buntings' 

 eggs may be found ; and the latest migrants, the reed-warbler, the 

 flycatcher, turtledove and swifts begin to lay. The leaves of the 

 hedgerow are alive with young birds ; and the hayfields, which are 

 reaped this month, are a wishing-well of discoveries. You have 

 flower, you have fruit, and yet, plain on the ash and oak, you have 

 the breaking of the leaf-bud and the change from red to green. In 

 no month do birds so baffle one with a range of notes. Before the 

 nightingale grows silent towards the end of the month, and the 

 cuckoo changes his tune, young birds and hen birds, as well as the 

 fussy cock birds, indulge in a number of calls and cries and whispers 

 that have quite evaded the attempts at classification. But before 

 the month is over the hunt for caterpillars and insect food for the 

 young has brought the song of the parents to an end, and it has 

 become little more than a cluck such as the robin's when calling the 

 young, or the blue tit's just before entering the nest. 



Some moths now first emerge, the fox moth and the hawk 

 moth ; but the time is rather remarkable for the host of beetles 

 and weevils and chafers that appear: the bright green nettle 

 weevils, the long thin-bodied red ' soldier ' and blue ' sailor ' beetles, 

 the cockchafer, noisy on June evenings, and the rose chafer. It is 

 the month too to see the glow-worm, the little beetle of the hedgerow. 

 The month has several nature festivals. 



Shearing day, now an occasion less thought of, was once one 

 of the most hilarious and characteristic, especially celebrated by the 

 picking of posies. 



