YEW-TREES 



ON THE CHALK DOWNS 



THERE seems a refining influence in the clean and porous 

 chalk soil which gives a peculiar distinction and charm to its 

 characteristic vegetation. Even in winter chalk downs have 

 distinctive charms, with their smoothly moulded curves, 

 their dry turf and pure air, and their dark dwarf junipers. 

 In spring they foster one or two special flowers among the 

 bleached tufts of grass, such as the rich purple pasque-flower, 

 or ' Dane's blood,' which is an anemone, like the lighter 

 blossom of the woods. But the full flower-time of the chalk 

 downs comes in June, with the rising of the wild hay-crop, 

 among which many of our scarcer orchids and other curious 

 plants are born. At the same time another and very distinct 

 group of midsummer plants is blossoming on the broken 

 ground and chalky warrens, with which the smooth turf cloak 

 of the downs is here and there scarred. The ladies' fingers, 

 with its stem four or five inches long, is a large plant on the 

 open sward ; but in the warrens the mulleins and viper's 

 bugloss are measured by feet, not inches, and the henbane 

 and deadly nightshade form shrubby bushes of poisonous 

 foliage. 



A great swell of the Berkshire or Wiltshire downs at 



