Underneath the tall flowers there is a wonderful carpet of lesser-growing things—masses of trefoil, the yellow blossoms often touched with fiery orange; patches of heath bed-straw, with its myriads of tiny gleaming white flowers, cling to any spot where the grasses leave it room to breathe, its first cousin, the woodruff, preferring a shadier part of the bank at the side—the bank where the wild strawberries grow to a luscious size, and whortleberry bushes add a touch of wildness to the spot.
The smaller clovers, both yellow and white, seem to thrive under the bigger flowers, where most else would suffocate. Pink-tipped daisies bloom wherever they can find room to hold up a little face. Rosy-pink vetches wander about at pleasure, and pretend they are going to do great things when they start to climb the stems of the moon-daisies.
Where the big fir trees throw a shadow, and the sun only touches the grass when it is getting round to the west, foxgloves send up shafts of colour and the pale-blue spiked veronica carpets the ground.
Still further back, where the sunshine never penetrates, even here something strives to give beauty to barrenness and soften austerity, for the small-leaved ivy starts to climb the hard tree trunks, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful of the many living things that are neighbour to the old wood-house.
And always in the grass there lie the snapped-off twigs and branches of the larches, with their brown picots up stems that are studded with exquisite cones. We strive hard to better Nature, to make new designs, to evolve fresh beauty; but with all our skill and experiments we have yet to improve on the cone as a design, with its rhythmic re-iteration of the one small motif and the perfection of its proportions. In my mind it ranks with the smoked-silver seed ball of the dandelion, both of them examples of absolute beauty derived from the simplest of outlines.
The walls of the wood-house have their share of green; on the north side an ivy, with a gnarled main stem the size of a fair sized tree trunk, sends evergreen branches over roof as well as walls. Outside the door, which opens to the south, stone-crop has planted itself in masses among the stones, a perfect carpet of it, that in June is a bright yellow. In the “good old times,” before my day, the stone-crop served as a convenient spot on which to dump the coal sacks!