120 THE BOOK OF THE OPEN AIR 



from marshlands, although, under pres- remain, on steep, unploughed hill- 

 sure of wheels or trampling horses, slopes or in waste no-man's-lands and 

 they founder into bottomless sloughs, parish-ends, as one of the most striking 

 The oak-forests of the clay are of a and unspoilt relics of the elder England . 

 denser and more gloomy growth than The largest tree of all such " Thornaby 

 the open woodlands of the deer, of waastes " is generally the ash, which 

 bracken, and of butterflies ; beneath loves the sound loam and delicate air 

 their shrouding thickets, there is a of the open slopes, and often (as Tenny- 

 lesser growth of straggling hawthorns son again has said) nurses in such 

 and hollies, but no great variety of places the scented violets, white and 

 verdure and blossom. The clay nat- sometimes blue, in the angles of its 

 urally supports but a restricted and spreading roots. But the ash and the 

 rather monotonous arboreal growth ; in holly are only two trees of many, 

 parts of Essex and Hertfordshire the Here, commonest of all, are the great 

 prevalent tree is the scanty hornbeam, old lichen-bearded hawthorns, and all 

 with its spare, twisted trunk, and its the denser thickets of their seed-fallen 

 general aspect of meagre endeavour, growth. When the great banks of 

 A wood of pollarded hornbeams is the hawthorn foam to whiteness in the 

 most featureless and uninteresting time of nightingales, it is the triumphal 

 form of all our forest scenery. Wild hour of English flower and song. As 

 holly-bushes are generally found scat- the hawthorn-foam fades red and 

 tered even in the stunted hornbeam tainted, then the wild roses open their 

 woodlands ; indeed, the holly is one exquisite shell-pink petals on every 

 of the most persistent and characteristic slope of the thicket. A little later 

 of all British trees and shrubs, and again, the large, brittle elder-brakes 

 wherever there is an unmistakable hang out their heavy-scented creamy 

 bit of wild woodland England, there discs, that shine like swung censers 

 will the holly be found, brave and in the warm, tempestuous nights, 

 lustrous amid the barest winter decay, Earliest of all, the loose white stars of 

 and a home and fastness of all hardy the blackthorn opened and let fall 

 winter birds. It is one of the most their petals from the still leafless, 

 conspicuous species in those mixed, angular boughs ; no fastness of the 

 broken thickets, freely interspersed thicket is so iron-like and impene- 

 with spaces of open turf, which still trable with its spines as the dense, black 



