You will find them on the shady sides of the hedges, their spikes of bells pushing up through hawthorn and sloe, through the tangle of bramble and bryony, cleavers and dog rose that scramble over the pollarded nut-bushes, beeches, elm-stumps, and ash-boles, amid all the dear delights that go to make that poem of loveliness—an English hedgerow.
You will also find them in little hollows and dells, in small ravines and in craggy places—in any spot where they can get a little moisture for the roots and occasional sunshine for the flowers, with a certain amount of immunity from the devastating hand of the human marauder. Give them but a ghost of a chance to seed themselves (though this is what the greedy flower-gatherer invariably denies them), and they will spread with great rapidity, and paint the face of nature with a rich glowing carmine that almost makes you hold your breath when first you see the broad sweeps of colour on certain hillsides in mid-June.
When you have found them, in any of their haunts, lift one of the bells and look right into it, delighting in the splashes and markings, the fine filaments and the silken texture, the pink and purple and crimson, the dark brown and white, the poise of the stalk, the droop of the bells, the balance that the leaf-arrangement gives to the whole plant, and the many other characteristics that go to make up one of the most exquisite of nature’s products.
The trouble is that in sparse soil, or in wind-swept places, the plant does not grow so tall as in a protected and secluded spot. Hence when we meet it in the open, its bells hang downwards below the eye-line, and we do not often remember to stoop and lift one, to see what message the bee left for us. Perhaps that is one reason why it seems to me that, while sunflowers and hollyhocks spend their days in gazing after grown-ups, foxgloves are for ever nodding smilingly and encouragingly to little children.
To those who are accustomed to agricultural scenery, where the landscape shows far expanses of pasture-land and cornfields, with wide spreading low-roofed farms clustered around with barns and ricks, our hills come as a surprise with their uneven surfaces, and the scarcity of soil in comparison with the superabundance of rock.