THE CHEQUERED DAFFODIL 329 
escape dating back to the Roman occupation, which 
gives it a better title by some eighteen centuries to 
be described as British than dozens of our wild 
flowers. The charming sanfoin, common as the 
gipsy rose in our fields, the wild musk that flourishes 
by a thousand streams from Land’s End to the 
Western Islands, the winter heliotrope that spreads 
its green mantle over so much of England, are by 
comparison aliens that emigrated but yesterday 
to our shores. 
It was in Wiltshire again that I found my first 
columbines, in a vast thicket of furze, may, and 
blackthorn covering about twenty acres of ground. 
The plants were tall, the thin wiry stems being two 
or three feet long, and produced few leaves, but 
flowers as large as those of the garden plant. An 
old keeper who had charge of the ground told me 
he had known the flower from his boyhood, and 
that formerly he could fill a barrow with “ collar- 
binds,” as he called them, any day. It was a rare 
pleasure to see that columbine in its own home— 
the big blue quaint flower that looked at you from 
its shelter of rough furze and thorn bushes; and 
for the first time in my life I admired it, since in 
the garden, where as a rule its peculiar beauty is 
dimmed by other garden blooms, it has an inhar- 
monious setting. But I must say of the colour 
that albeit a true floral blue it is a blue of the 
earth, the material world we inhabit, not the divine 
(or human) blue of the blue geranium nor the more 
ethereal blue of the vernal squill on the sea-cliffs, 
