220 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



not so unripe but that, a few days from their birth, 

 they will be shown in perfect miniature, and in a few 

 days more be ordinary beech-tree leaf and blossom. 

 The brown bands that were swathed so tightly round 

 the bud now- drop off, till the ground under the beech- 

 tree is littered with them. They made the beech bud 

 a hard thorn, and now they are seen to be as soft and 

 limp as moistened paper. 



How is this change in the beech twig wrought in a 

 matter of days ? Sap can only ascend otherwise it 

 would be giving the lie to the law of gravity through 

 some such device as osmose. To gain matter, on 

 which to feed and fatten, a beech-tree bud must itself 

 give off matter in liquid form, for osmose must be 

 active at the entrance to the rolled leaf as well as at 

 the main doors of the plant, the doors at the root. 

 Thus must not the leaf in the bud or thorn, folded 

 and crinkled into almost nothing, begin to answer to 

 the call of the sap in May, give off liquid and take in 

 liquid, and begin to feed at a time when, if we 

 examine the beech bud, it seems to our sight and 

 touch to be still a hard, unyielding thorn ? 



From the day when its bud loses the spiked tip and 

 swells into leaf to the day when the leaf is all green 

 the foliage of the beech tree goes through four distinct 

 phases of beauty. A few yards of beech hedge in 

 mid-May will often illustrate each of these phases on 

 the same day, for little chances of soil and sun cause 

 the plants in the hedgerow, like the trees in the wood 



