THE MIDSUMMER MONTH.
JULY is the true "midsummer month" by natural order, if not by the calendar. Coming between the busy days of hay-time and the hush before harvest, it marks the acme of summer foliage and summer flowers, and often, even in this country, the most abiding period of summer heats. Its beauty depends wholly on the season. No greater contrast has been known for fifty years than the appearance of the country in the present week, and at the corresponding date of last summer. Then the long drought and heats had burnt every meadow brown, and the rich foliage of the hedgerows was gnawed and bruised by the hungry cattle. Even the streams and rivers were invaded, and not only the rushes and sedge upon the banks, but the water-lilies and arrowheads in the running rivers were browsed and cropped level with the water by horses and oxen. The sunbeams whioh then burnt the ground seem to have given it a double measure of fertility, which the summer rains of the last three weeks have vivified and turned to use with almost tropical swiftness. The result is a crop not only of leaf, but of flowers, of the richest and most luxuriant growth. In the gardens, the stems of the white lilies are six and seven feet high, the clustered roses almost break their branches, the honeysuckle tears itself from the walls by its weight of blossom, and the second crop of grass is smothered with field-flowers. It is the month of perfume, and for the moment the gardens eclipse the fields both in scent and colour, for the lime-blossom and roses struggle for the mastery in scents, and the lime is nearly always a garden-tree. In the fields, the sense is almost oppressed by the heavy odour of the drying hay-ricks. But in the gardens there is now a blending of delicate scents such as has not been known for years. There has grown up a fashion of preferring mere odours to per- fumes, perhaps because the assthetio perception, which has learnt to appreciate many things which it did not, is forget- ting the value of what needed no teaching. The taste for wild-flowers is almost losing its sense of proportion, when ox- eyed field-daisies are bought in the streets by preference to roses, and at an equal price. But whatever the canons of beauty, that of scent can hardly change. The rose has still the purest perfume in Nature. Let those who are forgetting it, go down to the country, and walk among the rose-gardens in the morning, as the sun is drying the dew on their petals in mid-July. The flower-fancies of the Midsummer Night's Dream were woven in the fresh hours of midsummer mornings, as well as of summer twilight, and it was then that the poet remembered to make his night-flying fairy queen a lid her elves- " Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds ; " while more true to fairy hours- " Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings."
It was the same hour which made Milton for once strike a note of gladness, unborrowed from the conventions of his classic store, and bid the Nymph of Gladness- " At his window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweet-briar, or the vine, Or the twisted eglantine."
And it was the rose-gardens of Damascus, in which, then as now, the Syrian lords sat among the damask flowers by the rushing streams from Lebanon, that Naaman had in mind, when be asked if Abana and Pharpar were not better than all the waters of Jordan ?
The " monotony" of the dark-green foliage of July is the theme of some complaint. If the green of floor and walls wearies, what of the flowers with which they are then adorned? The authors of that useful catalogue, The Country Month by Month,* are at pains to give statistics of the change in colouring of flowers as the year progresses. From April to July there is a steady increase of yellows and reds among the different varieties in blossom. In July, the number of blue, white, purple, yellow, and red varieties is almost exactly equal. But these statistics are useless as a guide to the general effect of flowers in a given month. It is the number of blossoms, not of species, that gives the tone to the fields, and an acre of red poppies is worth all the parti-coloured rarities that "blush unseen" in the hedgerows. The red poppies, in the corn and in the waste lands, and the wild-roses, which break the line of the tall hedgerows, are the natural contrast to the "monotony of green." The dark July tints have their proper place in the natural scale of colour for the English year, or rather for that part in which vegetable life is active. From March till autumn the colours gradually deepen, until in early September the tints of all the second blossoms of flowers, and of the grass and leaves, is darkest. Then colour dies as the leaves die, the tints growing lighter and brighter, till colour vanishes in decay. Every fruit is darker than the flower which bore it, except the snowberry, and the brighten- ing and lightening of tints, whether in the seeds of plants or in the stalks and ears of the ripening corn, is the sure pre- cursor of decay. It is by the banks of English rivers that the natural beauties of the midsummer month are seen in their greatest perfection. The contrast of cool waters and snn-lit levels of meadow, appeals equally to the sense of sight and the enjoyment of coolness, tranquillity, and repose. The Upper Thames, and its beautiful tributaries, the two Colnes, the Lod- don, the Cherwell, the Windrush, and the Evenlode, are the natural summer haunt of those who can choose their locality to suit the months. To appreciate the beauties of the water- garden you must be on the water itself, and row among the lilies, and in front of the flower-set banks. The growths in the two have this contrast. All the plants of the bank are tall and upright; all those of the stream, except the arrow- head, are level and fiat, Thus the purple and yellow loose- strife, the yellow iris, burr-reeds, the St. John's wort, the bull-rushes, and, above all, the pink flowering-rush, are set like sentinels to watch the stream, in which the lilies, water- plantain and villarsia float and blossom, supported by the density of the water itself, which takes the place of the up- right stalk, and leaves them free to spread themselves in ever- increasing areas of natural growth. The sea-coast is perhaps less affected by the seasons than any other English district. The scanty vegetable growths on the margin of shingle, sand, and seaweed left by the ebb, hardly change from year's end to year's end, and the ordinary sea-side visitor sometimes forgets that there are flowers almost peculiar to the sea-beech and the cliffs. Most of these are out in July, and the editors of the Country Month by Month have remembered to give a list of these little-noticed, but unusual and picturesque, plants, whose acquaintance may be made in a midsummer visit to the sea. They are pale grey-green plants, with a wholly different tone of colour from those further removed from the salt and sea. Perhaps the finest is the " sea-holly," a spiky- acanthus-like plant, though it is neither a " holly " nor a thistle, with all its stalks and the framework which intersects its leaves of a splendid ultramarine blue. The intersecting veins are lighter or darker according to their distance from the stalk, and the flower-heads are also blue. Sea-kale is a typical coast plant, too well known to need description, yet often unrecognised in its native cliffs. Horned poppy is also in flower, and grows just above high-water mark among the larger boulders and shingle. Its fragile flowers are a pale orange, and though poppy-like, instead of the upright vases in which the sleepy seeds of the poppy are stored, it carries them in long, hornlike pods, as decorative as its flowers. Samphire grows in less dangerous places than those in which it had to be sought in Shakespeare's days. It is like an ice- plant, with succulent leaves of a brighter green than those of most plants on the rim of the sea. In old French, says Pro- fessor Boulger, speaking of the name of samphire, it was called " perce-pierre," or "rook-piercer," the equivalent of "saxifrage," or " rock-splitter," because it was seen growing out of crevices. This suggested a connection not with rocks, * The Country Month by Month : July. By J. A. Owen and G. B. Boulger, LL.B. London: Bliss, Bands, and Foster. but with Saint Peter, whence we get not only the Latin " Petrus cresoentius," or "rock-cress," but the Italian " herba di San Pietro," and the French " Saint Pierre," afterwards written " Sampier," the origin of the present name.
Besides the true cliffs, a great part of the southern coast is fringed by earth-slopes called " cliffs " by courtesy, but more truly the sea banks. In parts of the Isle of Wight, and of the Solent shore, as well as of the Suffolk coast, the earth cliffs are among the most luxuriant of natural gardens at all seasons. In July, the beds of willow-herb, wild iris, and mares-tail, and the masses of clematis and everlasting-pea, which make them almost impossible for ascent or descent, form an unrivalled wilderness garden when seen from the crest of the slope. On the beautiful Solent shore, between the mouth of the Beaulieu river and Hurst Castle, and thence to Christchurch bay, the land flowers creep down to the very margin of this inland sea, and in July tiny wild roses blossom among the pebbles, their flowers looking like little pink shells on the shingle. By the middle of August most of these mid- summer beauties of the rivers and the coast will have faded. The bright flowers have turned to seed, though the leaves are not yet touched by the fire of autumn. If those who can choose their own time for their holidays were to anticipate their usual journey by some six weeks, and make trial of the country in the midsummer month, they would not regret the change.
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