Oak Leaves. 225 
the garden. A wild gooseberry may sometimes be 
seen growing out of the decayed ‘touchwood ’ on the 
top of a hollow withy-pollard. Wild apple trees, 
too, are not uncommon in the hedges. 
The beautiful rich colour of the horse-chestnut, 
when quite ripe and fresh from its prickly green 
shell, can hardly be surpassed ; underneath the tree 
the grass is strewn with the shells, where they have 
fallen and burst. Close to the trunk the grass is 
worn away by the restless trampling of horses, who 
love the shade its foliage gives in summer. The 
oak-apples which appear on the oaks in spring— 
generally near the trunk—fall off in the summer, and 
lie shrivelled on the ground not unlike rotten cork, or 
black as if burned. But the oak-galls show thick on 
some of the trees, light green, and round as a ball; 
they will remain on the branches after the leaves have 
allen, turning brown and hard, and hanging there till 
the spring comes again. 
One of the cottagers in the adjacent hamlet 
collects these brown balls and strings them upon 
wire, making flower-stands and ornamental baskets 
for sale. They seem to appear in numbers upon 
those oak bushes rather than trees which spring up 
when an oak has been cut down but the stump has 
not been grubbed up. These shoots at first often 
bear leaves of great size, many times larger than the 
ordinary oak leaf; some are really immense, mea- 
suring occasionally fourteen or fifteen inches in 
Q 
