The Call of the Wildflower

great hill, a green concave, where I

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a gradual slope leading up to a bleak tableland; and only when one emerges suddenly on their southern front, with its wide views across the weald, do their glories begin to be realized. In this steep declivity, facing the sun at noon, there is a distinctive and unfailing charm, quite unlike that of the correspondin

by poets and nature-writers, the marjoram, itself a glorified thyme, has by comparison gone unsung. We are told in the books that it is a potherb, an aromatic stimulant, even a remedy for toothache. It may be all that; but it is something much better, a thing of beauty wh

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mmoner plants of a calcareous soil, there are a few which present a surprising array of the choicer kinds; and to light upon one of these treasure-troves is a joy indeed. I have in mind a large semicircular disused pit, lying high among the Downs, and bordered with abrupt grassy banks and coppices of beech, hazel, and fir, where during the past thirty yea

his, and the twayblade-these six are stationed there within a small compass. The marsh orchis grows below; the fly orchis is in the neighbouring thickets; in the beech-woods are the bird's-nest orchis, the broad-leaved helleborine, with its rare pur

nd all other British flowers, as it rears its bristly green spikes, studded profusely with the pink buds that are turning to an equally vivid blue, it seems instinct with the spirit of a fiery summer day. Like other members of the Borage group, it has the warm southern temperament; its name, too,

isfortune, so we are told, to smell of mice; were it not for this hindrance to its career, it might justly be held in high esteem. Among the larger plants prominent on ledges of the chalk, or in near neighbourhoo

will scarcely survive a journey in the vasculum, yet so hardy that it will flower to the very latest autumn days. The wild strawberry is creeping everywhere; and the crimson of the grass vetchling may occasiona

rect habit that is a property of the Gentian tribe. It is one of the many merits of these chalk hills that their flower-season is a prolonged one. Not the gentians only, with yellow-wort and centaury, are still vigorous in the autumn, but al

parks and private estates, which now block the ancient route to Canterbury; but where Nature has provided so many shrines and cathedrals of her o

n attendant at a lunatic asylum, and was in pursuit of an inmate who had escaped an hour or two before. We went a short distance together, he peering into the coombes and bushy hollows, as incongruous a pair as could be imagined; yet it occurred to me that his mission, too, might be considered a botanical one, since there is a plant name

along these Downs; so, too, is the strange yellow bugle, or "ground pine," which is much more like a diminutive pine than a bugle; also the still stranger fir-rape (monotropa), which lurks in the thickest shade of the beech-w

seems to suggest a toy man dangling from a string; a simile which I prefer to that of a dead man dangling from the gallows. In the woods that crown this pit there is a profusion

n the Surrey hills by the advance of "civilization," may be learnt by anyone who studies the district with a sixty-year-old Flora of Surrey for guide. Between Merstham and Godstone, for instance, the hillsides, which were then free, open ground, have become in the saddest sense "residential," and the wildflowers have suffered in proportion. One may still find there the narrow-leaved everlasting pea, "hanging in festoons on thic

le shrubberies, gravel walks, flower-borders, and lawn-tennis courts. The trim parterre with its "detested calceolarias," as a great nature-lover has described them, will more and more be s

er what the

ecious as the