24 FIELD AND HEDGERON’. 
Though we have been so many thousand years upon 
the earth we do not seem to have done any more as yet 
than walk along beaten footpaths, and sometimes really 
it would seem as if there were something in the minds of 
many men quite artificial, quite distinct from the sun 
and trees and hills—altogether house people, whose 
gods must be set in four-cornered buildings. There is 
nothing in books that touches my dandelion. 
It grows, ah yes, it grows! How does it grow? 
Builds itself up somehow of sugar and starch, and turns 
mud into bright colour and dead earth into food for 
bees, and some day perhaps for you, and knows when to 
shut its petals, and how to construct the brown seeds to 
float with the wind, and how to please the children, and 
how to puzzle me. Ingenious dandelion! If you find 
out that its correct botanical name is Leontodon tarax- 
acum, or Leontodon dens-leonis, that will bring it into 
botany ; and there is a place called Dandelion Castle in 
Kent, and a bell with the inscription— 
John de Dandelion with his great dog 
Brought over this bell on a mill cog— ’ 
which is about as relevant as the mere words Leontodon 
tararacum. Botany is the knowledge of plants according 
to the accepted definition ; naturally, therefore, when I 
began to think I would like to know a little more of 
flowers than could be learned by seeing them in the 
fields, I went to botany. Nothing could be more 
simple. You buy a book which first of all tells you how 
to recognise them, how to classify them ; next instructs 
you in their uses, medical or economical ; next tells you 
about the folk-lore and curious associations ; next enters 
into a lucid explanation of the physiology of the plant 
and its relation to other creatures; and finally, and 
