Flowers of Late Spring 



the grand Eryngium Alpinum coming up by the 

 side of the parent plant ; nor have I ever before 

 been troubled with seedlings of the globe thistle ; 

 this year I have had to hoe down a large patch 

 of them ; and I have not till last year known the 

 Japanese Kohlreuteria even ripen its seeds, but it 

 did so last autumn, and dropped them on the 

 ground, on which they lay exposed all the winter, 

 and there are now scores of young plants showing 

 themselves. And so these different points of 

 interest in this spring, the abundance of flowers, 

 the extreme strength and vigour of almost all 

 vegetable growth, and the full ripening and ready 

 germination of seeds show that the beauty of any 

 season does not depend on the weather of the 

 moment ; the beauty has been laid up and been 

 matured for us by the weather of many previous 

 months — it may be of many previous years. 



I cannot close without a short record of the 

 wild flowers of this spring ; they were really 

 wonderful. I have mentioned the blackthorn, 

 which in some parts divided the fields with lines 

 of silver, but in the fields there was such a glory of 

 dandelions, buttercups, and celandine, that one 

 felt ashamed to call them weeds. Primroses and 

 cowslips were unusually abundant and fine, and 

 so were the wood anemones and bluebells, and I 

 never remember such an abundance of the flowers 

 of the wild oxalis, which I think one of the most . 

 graceful of our wild plants ; but the flowers are 

 very often much hidden by the leaves. If it were 



B 17 



