294 SUMMER 



wetter patches of the moor it grows among the bleached 

 and tangled ribbons of the flying bent-grass, which covers 

 wide tracts of moors and mountains with its pale growth, and 

 forms what hillmen call the ' white ground.' If we cross 

 the moors on a windy day in winter, when the heath-blossom 

 is all dead and the foam creeps and mounts at the leeward 

 edge of the shallow and open pools, the flying bent breaks 

 beneath our feet and streams down wind at every step. 

 Then its name seems vivid and accurate, though there may 

 not appear much meaning in it on the spring and summer 

 days when the curlews nest in its hollows, and the tit-lark 

 hides among its tussocks. 



The rarer heaths occur mostly in the far west of England 

 and Ireland, where they are outposts, or it may be relics, of 

 a Spanish flora which follows northward after the warm 

 Atlantic winds and the Gulf Stream. The common furze is 

 another and more widely spread example of the same class 

 of plants. There are five or six species of these western 

 heaths, all very local, and particular in their choice of soil 

 as well as of climate. But visitors to the Lizard in Cornwall 

 will not have to look long for the common Cornish heath, 

 which is abundant on the flat, bleak moors that cover the 

 mass of serpentine rock forming the south of the peninsula. 

 It has a shrubbier growth than the common heaths, and its 

 vivid stems and leaves recall the stringy stems of the 

 common hairmoss. The blossoms are rose-red and rather 

 small, and the plant is on the whole less attractive than the 

 bell-heather ; it has not their fine economy of stem and 

 foliage in proportion to bloom. White heather is not a 

 separate species, but merely a variety which occurs fairly 

 frequently on moors where the three common species 

 abound. In the case of the ling the lack of pigment in the 

 blossoms often goes with a paler and yellower growth of 



