292 SUMMER 



the enclosed woods. There is a marked difference between 

 the young woods, where the pines are fighting their way, 

 and the old plantations. Among the self-sown saplings the 

 heather still grows thickly and almost undisturbed ; the young 

 pines toss among its billowy outlines like green buoys in an 

 impossibly purple sea. In the high woods the heather, over- 

 shadowed, is moribund ; it grows in limited tracts where the 

 light falls in, or creeps in a thin occasional growth. Often 

 the floor of the woods is bare, except for the pale carpet of 

 dry needles, out of which the ribbed trunks rise in their red 

 ranks. But sometimes the fir- woods are full of tall bracken- 

 tall because of the trees' shelter and its own straining towards 

 the light and these woods are the most haunting of all. 

 The bright green fern, the dark green whispering roof up- 

 borne on the high red trunks, with their silver stains this 

 makes a shadowy forest stranger and more like fairyland for 

 the absence of the usual birds. Birds are scarce in all the 

 heather country, and scarcer still among the pines, and in 

 July the pine-wood is a place where 'no birds sing/ Where 

 a wood is thin enough to let the sun enter fairly freely, but 

 the heather is not too dense, sometimes the rose-bay willow- 

 herb will fill it in July with a dense mass of purple blossom as 

 brilliant as the bloom of the bell-heather, though of a more 

 tender shade. Sometimes, too, there are foxgloves, and 

 they have another shade of purple, rosier than the bell- 

 heather, but more heather-like than the rose-bay. 



Three kinds of heather or heath are common on English 

 and Scottish moors, besides the Cornish heath which cloaks 

 the bleak moors of the Lizard. The most widely distributed 

 is the ling, which forms the bulk of the vegetation covering 

 many moors, and provides the chief food of the grouse. 

 Ling has a starry blossom of a lighter and more delicate 

 purple than the common bell-heather ; distant moors where it 



