BLUE COLUMBINE AND CHEQUERED DAFFODIL 111 



few miles from the Dorsetshire bor- thinness of the single stem and the 



der. It was a lonely-looking country, fewness of its leaves gave it a starved 



where, out of sight of the fertile vales appearance ; but the flower was large, 



and hollows in which people live and like that of the garden plant, its colour 



cultivate the ground, one can look a deep, beautiful blue. A few more 



over long leagues of the billowy down- flowers were found in that part of the 



land and see no human habitation and brake, but going further another day 



no trees except a few widely separated I came to a place where it grew abun- 



hill-top groves or clumps of pine. In dantly over an area of about twenty 



May I visited one of these groves in acres of furze, on the higher ground, 



cold, windy weather, and was delighted An old man, a keeper who had charge 



to find on the further side a vast of this part of the ground, told me he 



brake of old furze interspersed with had known the flower from his boyhood, 



holly, thorn, and bramble, filling the and that he could fill a barrow with 



deep depression between the two oppos- " collar binds," as he called them, any 



ing downs and spreading partly over day. All these flowers were of the 



the lower slopes. Here I was glad to same true blue, and we are told by 



escape from the wind's violence, and some botanists that this colour in the 



wished for no better place. How far flower, found in chalky districts in 



the growth extended I did not see, southern England, shows the plant 



and had no wish to ; sufficient for the to be indigenous ; but that purple and 



day was the pleasure thereof ; for now reddish is a proof that the plant is a 



the furze was arrayed in its shining garden escape. 



yellow masses of bloom and the warmer It was a rare pleasure to see the 



air in that sheltered hollow was laden columbine in its own home the big, 



with the delicious spicy fragrance. blue, quaint flower blooming in the 



My next visit was in June, when the shade of rough furze bushes and for 



yellow furze-flame had burnt itself the first time in my life I admired it, 



out, and then, close to the spot where since in the garden, where as a rule its 



I had rested, I discovered my first lustre is dimmed by gaudy exotics, 



columbine, and wondered if it could be it has an inharmonious setting. It is 



an outcast in that lonely place. The not strange that it should be called by 



plant was nearly three feet high, grow- bird names, but it strikes one as curi- 



ing in a furze bush, and the excessive O us that the names should be of birds 



