XXIX Seeds and Sowers 



WHILE nature is still busy ripening her seeds, she 

 sets about sowing them. In the artificial life of a 

 garden most plants and flower-heads are removed 

 or destroyed before they seed, so that the show 

 of blossom is often greater at the end of a fine Sep- 

 tember than at any previous moment of the year. 

 It is the same, to a lesser extent, in the meadows 

 and fields. But in all waste and uncultivated 

 ground, where the processes of nature have been 

 little hastened or modified by man, there is no 

 such wealth of blossom and verdure as lingers in 

 autumn gardens and pastures, and no such clearing 

 of the soil as quickly follows the corn harvest. The 

 vegetation of all the year lies heaped and withered 

 in its place. Primrose leaves, grown rank and 

 ragged, still sprawl in the hollow ditch-sides ; and 

 the tall grasses of midsummer stand in whitish 

 tussocks, among which the large autumn spiders 

 sling their cables from stem to stem. 



All down the long green lane, rich with bloom 

 from the time of the first primroses in March to 

 the opening of the last convolvulus in the Sep- 

 tember shadows, seeds now shine or rustle in every 

 thicket or tangle. Seeds enclosed in bright berries, 

 like those of the mountain-ash and wild rose and 

 woody nightshade, are gay and conspicuous to the 



260 



