322 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
myriads of seeds which would produce another 
undesirable but exceedingly beautiful crop the 
following summer. The lazy  stay-in-bed-for- 
seventeen-hours goat’s-beard was actually ahead of 
the other flowers in ripening its seed! 
That shining yellow field, which continues to 
shine in memory, just now serves to remind me of 
other plants and flowers that, commonly seen, have 
no special attraction, but which occasionally find 
their day of fullest perfection and triumph on some 
abandoned and waste ground—a field perhaps once, 
long years ago, under cultivation. 
I have described some cases of this kind in 
Nature. in Downland, where the turf was ruined for 
ever by the plough on the high South Downs a 
century ago, then left for Nature to work her will on 
the desolated spot. But we are most familiar with 
the sight of her beautifying processes in the remains 
of mediaeval buildings scattered about the land, in 
old castles and abbeys and towers, draped with ivy, 
the rough stone walls flushed with green and grey 
and yellow colours of moss and lichen and rainbow- 
tinted algae, decorated too with yellow wallflower, 
ivy -leafed toad-flax, and red valerian. Thus 
Nature glorifies our “builders of ruins.” 
And going back to remoter ages, I have in my 
rambles come upon two wonderfully beautiful 
flower effects, one in a Roman road, unused probably 
since Roman times; the other more ancient still 
on a British earthwork. I found the first one 
