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Nature Notes: 
7’//E SELHORNE SOCIEl'rS MAGAZINE. 
No. 227. NOVEMBER, 1908. Vol. XIX. 
NATURE NOTES IN TOURAINE. 
T is an old, if trivial, saying, that Tonraine is the garden 
of France. Though this boast savours of the adver- 
tisement, it is none the less true. Not all the savage 
splendour of the Dauphiny, nor the wild passes of the 
Pyrenees, with their wealth of vegetation, can equal the fertility 
of this district formed by the confluence of the Loir and the 
Cher. It is essentially a garden, no vast fertile desert, the home 
of a straggling savage flora covering glens and hills untrodden 
by the foot of man. The greater part of the country is well 
cultivated, but the feudal system, which lingered in France for 
centuries after it had been almost forgotten in England, has left 
large wild tracts in which the seigneurs preserved their game. 
These forests are still the haunt of plants and animals long since, 
or at least rapidly becoming, extinct in England. W^e are apt 
to associate wild boars and wolves with dark German forests 
hidden among the mountains which enqlose Bohemia, or with 
the boundless “ steppes ” of central Russia ; yet these animals 
exist, in ever diminishing quantities, it is true, in the forests 
round Tours. 
These forests have a subtle charm all their own. The long 
straight national roads of France have the appearance of enormous 
“ rides.” It is in the forests that the first signs of spring appear. 
The common flowers are much the same as those we have been 
familiar with from our earliest years. One day the forest seems 
dead, almost without colour except for the pines and the lichen- 
covered oaks : then the sun shines and the little yellow Ranun- 
culus Ficaria lifts up its golden head, the wood-anemone fills the 
coppices with its delicate flowers, and everywhere the ground 
is carpeted with the dark green leaves and the blue flowers of 
the larger periwinkle. In every open space the strong unpleasant 
plants of Hellehovus vividis spring up, the lighter green of their 
flowers making them a very prominent object. Among the 
