For June there are
Ragged Robins like filaments of rosy cloud, and Forget-me-not to drift
like wood-smoke over the chalk rubble. In July I have a pageant. Foxglove
and Eglantine make melodious my woods; Ladies' Slipper gives a golden cope
to the hillside, with purple campanula to wind about it like a scarf.
After this--August, September, October--our uplands faint out in
semitones: grey scabious, grey harebell, pale bed-straw, white
meadowsweet, like the lace of an old lady's cap. But even so, if I must
have a sunset glow of brown-pink, herb-willow gives it me. Pinch out the
leader of each slim spike, and you make a different plant of it." Thus the
poet embroidered the philosopher's text, and kept away from his memories,
and husbanded his pence.
These things, at any rate, he did, collecting with diligence the plants to
his hand, separating them from the grasses and bents in which they hid,
massing them and marshalling to his purposes. The thing was done with
extreme art and infinite patience; the result, a rainbow stream of colour
through the working year.
He added a few foreign growths: cyclamen for the woods, because he did not
see how one could do without them who had once seen them in Calabria; wild
gladiolus, because it loved the corn, and there was land in tillage within
a mile of him; a few primulas for his conduit's edges; wild crocus,
because She whom he had loved best had loved them; colchicums for the
bottoms in Autumn, because once She, straying with him in meadows, had
picked some for her bosom and at parting given him one.
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