6o THE ASSOCIATIOISIS OF FLOWERS 
some of the glowing tints of an autumnal sunset. 
As in the spring the trees gradually assume the sunny 
livery, so in the autumn they gradually lose it. The 
walnut-nut tree soon drops its foliage, and the park is 
early strewed with the large leaves of the horse chestnut. 
By the end of September the town walk has lost its shade 
of limes, and nothing but a few brown leaves remain to 
tell of the lately shaded grove ; but it is not till November 
has passed, amid stormy gusts and drenching rains, that 
the apple-tree of the orchard and the oak of the forest 
hang out their naked branches to the winter winds ; 
while the privet and ivy, the holly and the butcher’s- 
broom of the hedges, and the evergreens of the garden, 
still remain to cheer us, and the brown leaves of the 
young beech-tree wait for the spring breezes to scatter 
them from the spray. 
‘‘Tale rugged winter, bending o’er his tread,. 
His grizzled hair bedropt with icy-dew,” 
is Chatterton’s description of the concluding season. 
Vegetation is now almost covered with snow, and were 
it not so, plants would perish from the countries at the 
north of our globe, and from elevated districts. So 
effectual is the preserving power of the snowy covering 
to the young vegetable beneath it, that, plants, when re- 
moved to gardens whose aspects is much warmer than that 
of their native regions, are often killed by the frost, 
which, in their late situations, could not reach them for 
the snow. The progress of vegetable growth, upon the 
removal of the snow is, in cold countries, so quick, that 
in Sweden the earth, which was one white sheet for 
months during winter, is, in the course of a fortnight, gay 
with leaves and flowers. Mr. Laing says of its rapidity 
in this country, that it gives you the impression of a self- 
acting power, rather than a process following warmth 
and moisture. “ The coltsfoot and strawberry plant 
seem,” says this gentleman, “to have thawed a little 
circle of snow around themselves, and to be in full vege- 
table life before there is any perceptible cnange in the 
temperature of the air. The grass springs up so sud- 
denly that its growth must have been in progress under 
