Pawson : English Hedgeroivs. 



261 



and all insects, I truly think that by no fertility of imagination 

 or ing-enuity of design and by no happy inspiration could any- 

 thing have been discovered to equal the hedges with which our 

 land is covered as with the finest network. 



Think of the artless ingenuity of it all ! You needed only to 

 fence in your cattle or to shelter your crop from the wind, but 

 you have planted four hedges, each facing to some different 

 point of the compass and its reverse, north, south, east, west, 

 or to anything between these cardinals : so that within a square 

 mile, so many are the rows, you shall not find a single exposure 

 in the whole area which is unrepresented. These hedges too 

 are placed on mounds which favour dryness, yet on one side 

 is a ditch, and in a short space you find every degree of moisture 

 from cool dampness to running water. Thus you have every 

 possible exposure and every conceivable condition of soil. No 

 wonder that those children of the hedges, the roses and the 

 brambles, are so fickle and uncertain and changing in their 

 moods when they have so much choice of habitat. They find so 

 many pleasant ways of growing that they cannot make up their 

 minds which they like best. Long may they flourish to deck the 

 maiden's hair and to stain the children's lips, and to pain and 

 delight the laborious botanist ! 



All the natural flora of the country driven by agriculture 

 from the fields has taken refuge in their hedgerows. There 

 is hardly a plant native to the level which you will not find 

 on some of the banks or in some of the ditches, and the foster- 

 nurse of them all is the hawthorn. 'The hawthorn,' says 

 JefFeries, ' is a part of English life — country life. It stands side- 

 by-side with the Englishman as the palm tree is pictured side- 

 by-side with the Arab. You cannot pick up an old play or 

 book when English life was in the prime without finding some 

 reference to the hawthorn ' ; and again ' Nightingales love haw- 

 thorn and so does every bird. Plant hawthorn and every bird 

 will come to it from the wood-pigeon to the wren.' Let it suffice 

 for its praise that the common name of the hawthorn-bloom is 

 May. It is called after the month which is the prime and pride 

 of the year — from mid-May to mid-June as we now reckon it — 

 the old English May of the poets, the month which in Catholic 

 countries was sacred to the Blessed Virgin. 



Alongside the hawthorn whatever is choicest among our 

 native shrubs is most at home in a sunny hedgerow. Where 

 else do the wild roses grow, or the honeysuckle or the crab- 

 apple? How otherwise should we have nuts and blackberries? 



■1904 Sepiember i. 



