JANUARY 21 



and climate suit it. In the Scilly Isles, strange to 

 say, where bulbous plants are cultivated to produce 

 hundreds of tons of early blossom, the snowdrop will 

 scarcely live ; while four hundred miles to the north, 

 on the misty Atlantic seaboard, it spreads from garden 

 to lawn, from lawn to woodland, and sheets the banks 

 with mimic snow. 



VII 



' When the gorse is out of bloom, kissing will go out 

 of fashion,' is the conceit of amorous English Gorse ^^ 

 rustics. In Scotland, where, as everybody Gromwe11 

 knows, kissing was not practised until the Union, the 

 perpetual flowering of the gorse has given rise to the 

 distich 



' When the whin gangs out o' bloom, 

 Will be the end o' Em'brugh toun.' 



Now this welcome property of the gorse has been 

 attained by a floral subterfuge harmless indeed, but 

 distinctly insincere. It is not known to everybody 

 that there are two kinds of gorse equally distributed 

 over Britain, very like each other, so much so that they 

 are regarded by some botanists merely as varieties of 

 the same species. But the difference is invariable be- 

 tween Ulex europceus, the gorse dear to foxhunters, 

 and Ulex nanus, a dwarfer shrub, with spines of deeper 

 green and flowers of ruddier gold. Both kinds, especi- 

 ally the last-named, have a perpetual flowering tendency ; 

 but if Ulex nanus were not present to take up the 



