THE WILD CLEMATIS. Ill 



uncommonly dry summers of 1825 and 1826, it 

 seemed to flourish with more than usual vigour, 

 throwing out its long tendrils, of a fine healthy 

 green colour, adorned with a profusion of blossoms, 

 itself and the bramble being in some places the 

 only thriving vegetation in a fence. It is marvel- 

 lous how fibrous-rooted vegetables, the roots of 

 which penetrate no depth into the soil, are enabled 

 in some seasons to preserve any appearance of 

 verdure, the earth they are fixed in seeming di- 

 vested of all moisture by the power of the sun, and 

 being heated like a sand-bath. The warmth of the 

 earth in 1825 I omitted to record ; but in the fol- 

 lowing year, which was more dry, and nearly as 

 hot, the thermometer, buried in the earth to the 

 depth of three inches, in a flower border where 

 many plants were growing in that sort of languid 

 state which they present in such exhausting seasons, 

 indicated the heat of 110. 



Having said thus much of the clematis, the 

 " withy- wind" of our peasantry, it must not be 

 supposed that I advocate the advantages of this 

 plant as a fence, but only tolerate it where we cannot 

 induce much else to thrive, it making something of 

 a boundary line ; and perhaps that is all, for very 

 frequently its numerous tendrils, and the downy 

 clusters of its caudated seeds, are so interwoven, that 

 the snow accumulates upon the bush, and presses 

 the whole to the earth, so that in the spring we 

 commonly find a gap to be repaired where the cle- 

 matis has thriven. About February, or towards 



