Sweet Chestnut Bloom
After the high colour of May-time the woods take on a dark uniformity of green that remains unbroken until the early days of July. In hot summers the blossoming of the Spanish chestnuts reaches its splendour about that time. The tree needs only four months, as against the horse-chestnut's six, between flowering and full fruition. It flowers high up, to the extreme tips of the branches, with masses of long cat-o'-nine tail flowers that are in both colour and shape very like the beards of barley just before ripening. In the winds that are so common to early July a wood of these trees, seen from a distance and from a slight elevation, blows and waves indeed like a field of ripening corn. The whole uniform woodland landscape is suddenly brightened by this rippling olive flowing exactly as the fields themselves will soon be illuminated by white and yellow fires of harvest.
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