ON OTTERY EAST HILL. 135 



strips just below, hanging over the whitewashed farm beneath. 

 The trees lean towards each other at all angles, and lovingly 

 commingle their boughs ; while every here and there one or 

 two gnarled trunks totter away from their fellows, as if over 

 come by their own cider. It is to the monks that we are in- 

 debted for apple-trees as well as for the introduction of so 

 many of our culinary plants. The first orchard in Devon is 

 recorded to have been planted by the Cistercians at Buckfast- 

 leigh. No mistletoe, strangely enough, will be found in any 

 Devon orchard. For some unknown reason it does not grow 

 in the county, though legends say that its absence arose from 

 the Druids cursing Devon and forbidding their sacred plant to 

 grow in it. A curious story is told of an orchard on the con- 

 fines of Devon and Somerset, half being in each county, and 

 only separated the one from the other by a deep ditch. Its 

 owner has tried in vain to propagate mistletoe in the county, 

 under Druidic ban, while it grows in almost troublesome pro- 

 fusion in the opposite part of the orchard.* In its absence the 

 Devonshire apple-trees are hung with beards of white and 

 grey usnea, and show many a splash of yellow lichen on their 

 boles. Their spreading tops occasionally may be noticed 

 compact and matted together with lichen, till the mind won- 

 ders how sun can ever pierce the entanglement. Yet in 

 another three weeks these orchards will be gorgeously clad in 

 pink and white clouds of beauty, the whole county being girt, 

 as it were, with the cestus of Pomona, till a stranger doubts no 

 longer what is the time of the year in which to see Devon to 

 perfection. Yet autumn broods over this land with a touching 

 and tender melancholy which enhances its red-soil tints and 

 lends a dreamy attraction to the fruitage weighing down these 

 old apple-trees ; and as we grow older ourselves, the beauty of 

 Nature, just passing her prime, appeals even more powerfully 

 to the heart than did its budding spring. 



* See Notes and Queries, IV., vol. x., p. 495. 



