102 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
BUCKHURST PARK. 
AN old beech tree had been broken off about five feet 
from the ground, and becoming hollow within, was 
filled with the decay of its own substance. In this 
wood-sorrel had taken root, and flower and leaf covered 
the space within, white flower and green leaf flourishing. , 
on old age. The wood-sorrel leaf, the triune leaf, is 
perhaps more lovely even than the flower, like a more 
delicately shaped clover of a tenderer green, and it lasts 
far on into the autumn. When the violet leaves are no 
more looked for, when the cowslips have gone, and the 
bluebells have left nothing behind them but their 
nodding seed-cases, still the wood-sorrel leaf stays on 
the mound, in shape and colour the same, and as plea- 
santly acid to the taste now under the ripening nuts 
as in May. At its coming it is folded almost like a 
green flower; at Midsummer, when you are gathering 
ferns, you find its trefoil deep under the boughs; it 
grows, too, in the crevices of the rock over the spring. 
The whortleberry leaves, that were green as the myrtle 
when the wood-sorrel was in bloom, have faded some- 
what now that their berries are ripening. Another 
beech has gone over, and lies at full length, a shattered 
tube, as it were, of timber ; for it is so rotten within, and 
so hollow and bored, it is little else than bark. Others 
