NATURE NEAR LONDON 



with wealth can get anything to equal it if they 

 ransack the earth. 



After these, fill every nook and corner with 

 hazel, and make filbert walks. Up and down 

 such walks men strolled with rapiers by their sides 

 while our admirals were hammering at the Span- 

 iards with culverin and demi-cannon, and looked 

 at the sundial and adjourned for a game at bowls, 

 wishing that they only had a chance to bowl shot 

 instead of peaceful wood. Fill in the corners 

 with nut trees, then, and make filbert walks. All 

 these are like old story books, and the old stories 

 are always best. 



Still, there are others for variety, as the wild 

 guelder rose, which produces heavy bunches of red 

 berries; dogwood, whose leaves when frost-touched 

 take deep colours ; barberry, yielding a pleasantly 

 acid fruit j the wayfaring tree ; not even forgetting 

 the elder, but putting it at the outside, because, 

 though flowering, the scent is heavy, and because 

 the elder was believed of old time to possess some 

 of the virtue now attributed to the blue gum, and 

 to neutralise malaria by its own odour. 



For colour add the wild broom and some furze. 

 Those who have seen broom in full flower, golden 

 to the tip of every slender bough, cannot need 

 any persuasion, surely, to introduce it. Furze is 

 specked with yellow when the skies are dark and 

 _ 23 8_ 



