374 ^^^^' Fl^^'<^^ Sanctuary of a Meanwoodside Garden. 



These ' Meanwoodside ' grounds are now, in parts, a jungle 

 of wild and thoroughly acclimatised American vegetation, 

 traversed by tracks — almost limberlostean ways, contracted or 

 half erasedby soil slip and overgrowth, forming, roughly es- 

 timated, a sinuous slype of mead and coppice for upwards of 

 a quarter of a mile, along the slack wherein flows the Adel 

 Beck (rising at its ultimate springs about Bramhope and 

 Alwoodley ]31ack-moor) walled-in, from Low Harry-gate where 

 Mean — or Middlewood and Weet-wood begin ; — the gap or 

 gate having got its name, on the line of an ancient pack-horse," 

 if not really a ' Roman ' way, as the site of long-forgotten 

 harries of Scots' Reivers in Norman to Stuartian days ; and 

 so easterly to the church schoolhouse of Meanwood's " Green 

 road " ; all of them ancient names. The beck in this bi- or 

 tri- furlong of its scarcely fouled reach, with two or three 

 made pools at the western end, make happy hunting grounds 

 for many wildfowl. Mallard, Waterhen, and the Kingfisher — 

 oft to be sighted on its arrowy flight, feathered in facsimile 

 of sapphire and garnet ; while the Greater Spotted Woodpecker 

 has nested here, of recent years ; and the whole preserves in 

 large measure, a picture of what the fauna and flora of Cookridge 

 Bramhope, Adeland its Black-hill, and Allwood its Black-moor 

 was a century ' or more ago. Besides preserving the royal- 

 fern (in great stools by the wooded rock-pools at the western 

 extremitv), the 'long purples' of Shakespear, and the blake 

 Loosestrife {Lysimackia vulgaris) which used to ' grin ' so 

 janntily (!) through the iron rails of the ' Spring-field-Place ' 

 gardens in Leeds — how these old-time names tell, knell their 

 history ! — the long-tasselled Sedge [Carex pcnditin) hangs ils 

 whips and rods of inflorescence over many a mossed bank of 

 stream-side earth. Natives of old, all these here, albeit long 

 syne extirpated from the black-earth links three miles higher 

 up the stream, whence, they were brought in, forethoughtfully, 

 probably on the advice of A. Denny, their original recorder 

 for the Leeds District as the old Botanists' ' Guides ' shew, ta 

 keep under eye something of the Near as foil to those others of 

 the Far West and the great Lone Land, which the late Traveller 

 Gates brought from the Sierras and slopes of the Rockies. 

 Some of these have ' made good ' and thrive as well as in their 

 homeland ; others are in extremis through compulsion of 

 existence in tenebra un-natural to them ; hard wood trees have 

 grown up and a few other sciaphiles — shade lovers--are 

 tending to take their place ; so every rood of surface long left 

 to itself, helps along that inevitable chain of Change with 

 compensating vegetal links which Time is everywhere and 

 ever forging. 



Several noteworthy brambles and western fruit-bearing 

 shrubs, quite ' maquis ' as opposed to the more sterile or 



Naturalist , 



