30 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



There was oak, elm, and ash, and a withy-bed on Coate 

 Farm, walnuts overhanging the farmyard itself, and much 

 fruit in the garden. And James Jefferies liked to plant. 

 He always had good apples of his own growing at Coate ; 

 and it was he who planted the copper-beech behind the 

 house, and the French cherry in front. ' It was he who 

 brought a water-finder with his witch-hazel to the farm, 

 and who made the long tunnel through the fields to bring 

 the water into the house. (By-the-by, this water is gone 

 from the old home now, and the cottagers used to say, 

 * Ould Mr. Jefferies, he stopped it, afore he went away !') 

 It was he who rooted up all the rough old cider apples, 

 and stocked the orchard with the sweet, delightful codlins 

 and russets it now possesses ; he planted the pear-trees 

 on the walls, the Siberian crab and the yew-tree on the 

 lawn, and the luscious and then little-known egg-plums ; 

 the box-hedges, in Richard's youth just at their prime, 

 taller than a man and a dense cover for birds. He scat- 

 tered the musk-seed, so that each year the delicate, scented 

 little plant would crop up between the paving-stones 

 under the " parlour " window. His garden produce was 

 always of the best ; no one else ever grew such red carrots, 

 yellow parsnips, juicy cucumbers ! He planted horse- 

 chestnuts and filberts. (I remember how he cut down 

 the whole hedge in a rage one day, because the men from 

 the New Town, as it was called, had rifled the nuts in the 

 early morning.)'* 



They say, too, that he planted the mulberry and the 

 weeping ash at Coate ; and he used to trim the pollard- 

 limes behind the front wall, so that they made a solid 

 bastion of leaves against the world. When he had no 

 trees of his own, in his old age at Bath, he became a gar- 

 dener, and he got to know all the trees in the gardens. 

 Of birds, too, he knew much, as a sportsman and some- 

 thing more ; it seems to have been he who shot the last 

 bittern at Coate. Sometimes he fished. He kept bees 



* ' Forbears of Richard Jefferies,' Ccuntry Life, March 14, 1908. 



