FIR-WOODS AND HEATHER 291 



their colours are unlike the sere photography of the dog- 

 days, or the decadent splendours of autumn. They combine 

 spring tenderness with summer maturity, and they compen- 

 sate by this peculiar brilliance in July and early August for 

 their dullness in the earlier part of the year. 



In the whole of England and most parts of Scotland 

 the firs are a modern addition to the landscape, which is 

 therefore a mixed product of nature and art. The Scotch 

 pine or fir it is strictly a pine had long been extinct 

 in England when in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 

 turies it began to be planted on the heaths of Windsor 

 Forest and the sandy Surrey hills. Before that the 

 heather was usually unbroken by any tree, except where 

 a few birches, hollies, and -hawthorns were scattered on the 

 ridges, or alders and sallows formed brakes in the wetter 

 hollows. Oaks grew in the damp valleys that fringed the 

 heaths, where the soil became more clayey, and the heather 

 gave place to grass. Furze and broom dotted the heath in 

 brakes, and the broom-squires or half-gipsy squatters on the 

 heath made brooms and besoms first from the broom-plant 

 itself, but in later years chiefly from heather or birch-twigs. 

 The changes introduced by plantation, and the choice of the 

 fir and heather countries as residential districts, have altered 

 both the aspect of the landscape and the rough and isolated 

 old life. Except where they are commoners with recognised 

 rights the heath population has lost much of its living, and 

 more of its rough old ways. Carts laden high with new 

 birch-brooms still trail in from the Hampshire heaths to the 

 Berkshire river-towns, but their ware is the product of a 

 changed economic system, and they drag on their way 

 through an altered landscape of the columnar pines. 



The firs seed themselves so quickly that they are per- 

 petually colonising the heather slopes beyond the limits of 



