CATKINS.

THE year from spring to spring is long enough to shorten the memories of most of us, and it may be that we persuade ourselves a little too often that in this or that respect the season is abnormal. But it happens sometimes that facts become so plain that they insist upon notice, as, for instance, in the drought of last summer. The heat and the lack of rain during July, August, and September last year were more remarkable than in any year in living memory, and they were followed by a prodigious rainfall in December. The question now is whether we are not witnessing some rather remarkable consequences of the drought followed by the rain, The prolonged sunshine of last summer produced as one of its effects an enormous harvest

of wild fruit. Acorns, nuts, blackberries, set themselves in the woods and hedgerows in an extraordinary profusion. Another effect, unexpected by some of the most confident weather prophets, was the strangely deferred fall of the leaf. Nothing was commoner last summer, when the oaks were bronzed and withered by the first week in August, than to hear it predicted that the leaves would fall early. 'The sun will have burnt them off the trees by October; there will be no question about the country being blind in November this year "—so we were assured. But as a fact the leaves remained on the trees late into November. With the lack of moisture the trees could not form the new buds to push the old leaves from their places, and it was not until the autumn rains had at last soaked their way into the baked soil that the sap drove up again into the boughs and twigs.

And now, apparently as a sequel to the prolonged storing up of last year's sunshine, we are watching the progress, or rather the beginning, of what looks like another abnormal season. The countryside is "three weeks in front of the time," as a gardener put it to the writer the other day. The end of February has seen not merely the buds and flowers of an ordinary year, "the groundflame of the crocus," and "the snowdrop cold That trembles not to kisses of the bee,"

but it has brought out the bees themselves—honey bees among the crocuses and the furry brown and yellow humble bees crawling over the dusty stamens and blundering down into the lawn grass again, numbed by the touch of a west wind blowing clouds over the sun. The larch boughs on the western borders of the wood, where the larch breaks always earliest, are already thrusting their light green bundles of leaves ; the almond trees in the garden have dotted their boughs with the pink that belongs in other years to March; the elders have already set green hedgerows alongside the drills of springing corn. But more than all these, the hazels and the elms have changed the whole landscape with colours and forms that belong neither to winter nor to every spring, but to a gracious space which seems to set itself now and then in our calendar, in a week or two fuller of warmth and life and flower than we remember easily or recognize without wonder when we see it again. The writer happens to live in a hazelwood country, and those who have known the woods longest say that they "never remember" a year in which there were more catkins, or more of the "nut bloom," which is the country name for the tiny starfish buds of crimson set along the branches—the female cell waiting for the dusty vigour of the pollen from the catkins to swell it to the ripeness of the nut. So small are these crimson blossoms, and set about the boughs so sparingly in comparison with the prodigal clusters of the male flowers that you must hold a hazel branch pretty close to count them but even with their smaller numbers, and with the clouds of Pollen mingled round them in the wind, perhaps only half of them: mature to fruit. The male catkin, seen as close as the female, has its own minute beauties. There may be two hundred or so of bracts springing from the axis of the catkin, each protecting its flower, and each tinged with faint purple- brown above and transparent green below. But the real beauty of hazel catkins loses itself when examined too closely. A hazel tree needs to be seen as a whole, with the pale green of its catkins fused to yellow against the blue and white of a cloudy sky; or with a strong wind blowing the hundreds of yellow blossoms straight from the branches like the washing hung in the cottage garden by the roadside ; or set with a hundred other 'laze' trees in a hedgerow, a green mist lit by sunlight among

oaks and springing grass. Looked at close at hand or as near as you may walk along a field path under a hedge, the hazel truly shakes out "cats' tails" or "lambs' tails" for country children to pull—like Wordsworth's daffodils, a " jocund com- pany." But there is another and a wilder setting of the hazel catkins, and that is in the distance, streaked as the newest light of the year among the naked woods.

The hazel lights the lower growths and the hedges ; the higher spaces of the woods and the hills glow with the flower of the elms. And the elms this spring are as full of blossom as the hazels ; March in an ordinary year does not load the branches as has this year's February. Perhaps in some years the elm blossom goes unnoticed, even by fairly observant people who live in the country. But this year no one could look out over a stretch of country where elms grow in any quantity without catching sight of the bunched rosy tops of the trees, nor could help wondering, if he bad never noticed the new colour in the trees before, what might be the shape and size of the separate flowers. Elms cluster their flowers on their higher branches, not often within easy reach of the ground, and for that reason, possibly, a bowl of elm blossom is not a common sight in a drawing-room. But the perplexed arranger of flowers, looking round at this time of year for the foliage which she finds lacking for her vases of daffodils,

might well be advised to substitute for the "something green" of her usual habit the browns and crimsons of a branch of elm. Elm twigs in bloom, like boughs of hazel

or of sallow, group with daffodils as naturally as brown garden beds suit the yellows and purples of crocuses. The flowers belong to the same leafless months of the year, the same scheme of tracery against cloudy skies, the same afternoons of lengthening sunlight. But not all catkins suit the early daffodils in the same way. Alder catkins are best gathered unopened, before the tree has shaken itself from russet into ochre. Aspen catkins are a little too heavy for the slender texture of daffodils; the oats for which such rotund fluffiness might be suited would be large Persians. But best of all flowering branches which can be chosen to go with daffodils are without doubt the sallow's, either in their earliest

stage of olive-brown, silver-pointed buds, or later when the silky white tip thrusts itself from its cover like a snail from its shell, or later still when the branch is studded with the fully opened blossoms—yellow bearskin hats for Moth and Peaseblossom. There may be twenty or forty different sorts of sallows and willows—nobody, indeed, has counted them all yet—but the pale graces of daffodils go

with them all.

Catkins surround themselves with affections of their own. You may have likes and favourites among flowers, from prim- roses to peonies, but you must have a natural affection for catkins. Catkins belong to all the early times and things and places, to nursery rhymes, and nursery window-sills, and nursery walks. They are out in the wind when all the other young and growing things are out in the wind, when the whole air of the road and the field and the wood is fall of confident beginnings and promises which you must believe ; when young rabbits wait half unafraid at their burrows, and farmyard ducks go loudly through the puddles, and the great tit see-saws from the oak, and the woodpigeon curves up and down over the wood all the morning.

One of our modern English poets, Ella Fuller Maitland,

has known that sense of early affection for catkins. In her poem in the Spectator, "To Willows," she has written of them

as she and as all children have seen and thought of them in February:—

"To all the Willows in the land Now greetings do I send, Bidding them know that I do stand Ever their faithful friend,

And honoured hold the time of year When catkins on slim boughs appear. Withy is weak,' the proverb tells, 'But many woods he binds ' ; And in the truth that therein dwells My heart some comfort finds,

1-loping that weakness also can Not only things ignoble span."

Yet another poet sings them in our columns to-day. In truth there is a touch of Freemasonry which unites those who love catkins.