168 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



That is no reflection on the country. The part of 

 Hampshire where my village lies is graced with a rich 

 fertility, a plumpness comfortable without distinction. 

 It shows its second best in the flowers and its third in 

 the hangars or ranges of hills whose slopes are thickly 

 plumed with woods (mostly beech) and extend for miles, 

 dropping gently down at intervals into the broad valleys 

 lavishly spread with crops, pastures, plantations and 

 barbed wire. But even these hangars are a trifle 

 monotonous unless one can look down on a clear day from 

 a height upon the autumnal foliage, quilted with patches 

 of red, gold, russet, sage green of a clump of conifers, 

 yellow, purple at a distance, and brown, like a dome of 

 many-coloured glass staining the wide, uniform heavens. 



My acquaintance with flowers is unhappily not apace 

 with my friendship for them, for it is my wild ambition 

 to know every species of British plant and animal from 

 diatom and infusorian upwards — the desire of the moth 

 for the star. But even I can tell that the soils of 

 Hampshire have a particular kindness for plants, and 

 the luxuriance of the summer and autumn hedges is 

 quite tropical, especially that of the plume-flowered 

 Traveller's Joy (named by old Gerarde), whose powerful 

 runners surge over their tops, mingled among the 

 delicate patterns and designs of the purple tufted vetch, 

 with woodbine, honeysuckle, the greenish blossoms of 

 white briony and the scarlet grapes of the black, 

 dessert for autumn birds — which, luckily for them, we 

 cannot eat — some of whose leaves are green and others 

 a rich copper. Hemp agrimony also telescopes the 

 seasons in this way with its clusters of crimson buds 

 and misty flowers together, and for a mingling of colours 

 in the shadows and borders of the hedges there are 

 hemp-nettle with its whorls of pink flowers, the orange 

 berries of wake robin, the greenish-yellow spikes of 

 wood sage, red and white campion, forget-me-not, woody 

 nightshade, purple wood betony, slender agrimony (a 

 great favourite of mine), the thin candelabra of the 

 once sacred lilac vervain, smooth, rosy centaury (which 

 shuts at noon and points its fingers to the sky), yellow 

 bedstraw, mallow as delicate as the wild rose, the 



