14 Country Rambles. 



While other portions of our district are scarcely giving 

 signs of vernal life, at Bowdon the spring flowers are 

 often open and abundant, and this quite as markedly in 

 the fields as in the gardens. The former is the more 

 valuable and interesting part of the testimony thus borne 

 to the mildness of Bowdon, since the life of cultivated 

 plants is always in some measure artificial, or under the 

 influence of human direction, whereas the occupants of 

 the hedgerows are pure children of nature. In the 

 pleasant little nook called Ashley meadows, lingering 

 with its very latest campanula and crimsoned bramble- 

 leaf, Autumn seems hardly gone before Spring prepares 

 to change all again and once more to green. Dunham 

 Park offers nothing important for several weeks after the 

 Ashley meadows have flowers to show. The total, 

 indeed, of the botanical productions of the former place 

 is not a fifth of what may be found within a mile of 

 Ashley Mill. It is well to note this, because many 

 people suppose that a scene delightful in its picturesque is 

 correspondingly rich in wild-flowers. Generally, no doubt, 

 it is so, since the picturesque in scenery is almost always 

 connected with great unevenness of surface, precipitous 

 descents, rocks, and tumbling waters, these usually 

 coming in turn, of geological conditions, such as are 

 highly conducive to variety in the Flora. But when the 

 charm of a scene depends, not on cliffs and cataracts, but 

 simply on the agreeable intermixture of differently-tinted 

 trees, a gently undulating surface, sweet vistas and 

 arcades of meeting branches, and the allurements held 



