THE BUDS AND BLOSSOM OF TREES 153 



dry, have a false foliage of splendid crimson catkins, 

 which lie tumbled, like crimson and yellow caterpillars, 

 upon the ground below. But the buds of the willows 

 are the main feature in the phase of beauty in the 

 woodlands in March which precedes the bursting of the 

 leaf. The tall osier rods are of all colours, grey and 

 green, yellow and scarlet, maroon and black, and these, 

 from root to top, are studded with white satin buds. 

 The most beautiful of all have a deep purple bark 

 which shines with a polish like Chinese lac, against 

 which the velvet-white of the buds stands out in 

 perfect contrast of texture as well as of colour. 



It is these beautiful and exactly placed ornaments 

 that make the silver haze in the woods before Palm 

 Sunday ; and it is perhaps of their silver fleeces that 

 Shelley thought when he wrote of the spring 



"Driving sweet buds \\keflocks to feed in air." 



In the sunny March mornings, when the sun is 

 up at seven, and a choice band of native songbirds, 

 the thrush, the blackbird, the robin and the hedge- 

 sparrow, are singing their pertest and loudest, un- 

 challenged by a single note of song from the earliest of 

 the warblers from beyond the seas, every tree shows 

 some slight, half-hinted shadow of spring change. It 

 is like the change of breathing as sleep is ending, or 

 the swelling of wetted grain. At every joint, and 

 at the end of every twig, there is ever so slight a 

 swelling of the bud ; and though the change of shape 

 and colour in each is hardly discernible till held in 



