226 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



may enable it to succeed and grow into a perfect 

 plant, each green thing is flung forthwith on its own 

 resources. Stark competition is the hard world into 

 which it must enter; and if by chance it has been 

 sown in overcrowded or unkind soil, or if its neigh- 

 bours have the start of it in germination, it must 

 perish, unless above the average in strength. So, 

 after exquisite provision comes merciless competition. 

 This is the sequence; or, taking the two opposites 

 together, this makes up the scheme of green things 

 that is being worked out in sappy May days. 



I have turned from our Hampshire Highlands 

 and visited the noble woods and the lawns of Lady 

 Cross a little after this primal rush of summer. 

 The oaks there are at the full, and yet at the fresh 

 of their leaf about midsummer. There nothing of 

 the flush of red and spurge yellow, of the tones and 

 undertones of spring, is left even on the latest trees. 

 But the whole wood is even then not at quite the 

 full green, its floor of fern scarcely matches yet its 

 roof of oak, for the bracken phase is incomplete. 

 Bracken is a great feature of an English wood. After 

 oaks and beeches, it is the chief contributor of green 

 to the forest, certainly to the New Forest. I put 

 it, for this, before pine and spruce. 



The vast abundance of the bracken fern is brought 

 home to one better in the first half of June than at 

 any other season. True, till midsummer is come 



