D ESCRIPTIONS and illustrations of New Forest scenery are certain of
a welcome, because it is always found to be even more beautiful than its admirers say. In the
two volumes just published by Mr. Horace G. Hutchinson (London : Methuen and Co., 21s. net) and by Mrs.
Willingham Rawnsley (London : A. and C. Black, 7s. 6d.
net) the coloured reproductions of paintings of the national Forest, and the descriptive matter, are more effective than usual. Mr. Hutchinson's comprehensive account of the district and its history is embellished by fifty excel- lent landscapes in colour by Mr. Walter Tyndale, and by four studies of ponies by Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch, which are admirable in their truth. Mrs. Rawnsley's descriptive impressions of the months are the counterpart in prose to a very pleasing and sympathetic series of twenty full-page reproductions of water-colour paintings of the Forest in its moods and aspects under every sign of the Zodiac. In many the artist has been singularly successful. Others serve to remind us how impossible it is to paint the prodigal detail of ornament contributed by the Forest flowers in summer and in spring. Mr. Hutchinson is an excellent Forest historian, especially when dealing with its sport, flora, and fauna. The last two attract most visitors to the district, and the modern pilgrim of the spring cannot do better than substitute Lyndhurst for Canterbury, and make a rather later journey down to the forest capital.
By the first week in May the Forest has received the greater part of its summer population of birds. It is a nice question in bird polity which land is to be called their home, if the birds are migrants. The refrain of the song, "When the swallows homeward fly," suggests that it lies in the land of their winter sojourn. But if the scene of domestic joys is the domicile, then the nesting-place is the "home." In this sense the Forest is the home of whole nations of birds, but mainly of those whose food is insects, and who consequently leave it in winter, when the absence of ploughed land and cultivation makes the wild tracts of wood and heath less suitable to many of the birds that stay than are the tamer arable lands elsewhere. There is a peculiar charm in spring bird's-nesting in the Forest, by which we mean the finding, not the taking, of the nests and eggs of these migrant birds. In a perfectly wild area the birds are "free selectors," and their choice of settlements is not made without due regard to natural advantages. One grove of ancient trees, with sur- rounding outliers of what seem to be most attractive bushes of furze or wild rose or thorn and eglantine entwined, has few birds around it. Another will be haunted, both within and without, by a dozen species, and by several pairs of the same kind. If the reason for the difference be sought, in most eases it will prove that the presence or absence of water near at hand accounts for the number of the birds. They gather in the thickets close to which there is a flowing or trickling spring. In such places every bush seems to bold a bird, and the banks are musical with song. By the nature of the self-planted forest, all kinds of growth are found to- gether, if the soil is varied; and few tracts of English ground have such varied soil as the New Forest. The crest of a bill may be suited for timber trees. Here is a grove, such as is scarcely to be found elsewhere, containing nearly every British timber tree, self-sown, self-grown ; and in it are the birds of the grove,—the woodpecker, the daw (in the hollow limbs), the ringdove, the turtledove (in the thick leafage of the thorns which surround the greater trees), the missel thrush, and the jay. The forest starlings also haunt these groves, and bring up their noisy broods miles from a human habitation. An hour spent there at midday, in the sun-warmed air of spring, recalls the atmosphere of the days of the old ballads, the writers of which conceived life "under the greenwood tree" as apart from all other surroundings than those of the wild woods, and remote from every care. And the best of it is that it is not fancy but fact. You are, perhaps, miles from a house or a field. Scarcely any one enters the grove, except when the hunters come there, and hunt- ing is over. No woodman ever plies his axe in it. There is not enough game in that part of the Forest to make it worth while to shoot. The trees, plants, flowers, birds, and insects have it all their own way ; and for the matter of that, they have been left to themselves almost as completely for eight centuries. As you sit under an ash-stem a cuckoo alights in the branches and shouts his measured call. The turtledoves, newly settled there, are making love, and the wood-pigeons following their example. At regular intervals a burst of applause comes from the starlings' hole in the beech opposite, as one or other parent appears in sight with a big fat grub in its bill. Outside the grove in the bushes by the rill that winds down from the bog above, where it has lain in soak among little waving flags of cotton-grass, the songs of all the "smale fowles" rise mingled. They are all singing, without the slightest regard to what the others have to say, and singing the same song over and over again. Before leaving the grove it is well to note the fine growth of the trees, which are extra tall, because in the centre there is a deep hollow, and so they grow high and upright, and also their great variety. Yews and ashes, oaks and beeches, birches, thorns, wild cherry, crab-tree, holly-tree, and horn- beam are all there in such perfection of shape as can be attained by trees in groves, and with the added beauty which the mingling of branches, bark, and leaves of the different species lends. Beyond the grove, on the flat hilltop, is the heath, on which three species are found in numbers, absolutely indifferent to the waterless nature of the tract in which they nest. These are the whinchat, the meadow pipit, and the yellow-hammer, all of whose nests are almost undiscoverable when later in the spring the eggs are laid. But below, in the thickets by the waterside, the whitethroats', blackcaps', 'Alf& chaffs', willow and wood wrens', and against the ivy-covered trunks the flycatchers', and in the furze-bushes the linnets' and greenfinches' and stonechats' nests abound. Such numbers of nesting birds are scarcely to be seen elsewhere as in some places in the Forest ; though the estate of Beaulieu surpasses it in one or two enclaves by the river. There, by this stream, which is within the Forest boundaries, though under separate ownership, the present writer once found birds' eggs literally " by the pint." They were not taken ; but if all that were seen had been collected there would have been enough to fill the glass jars displayed in an average country " sweet- shop" window, and of all sizes, from redshanks' and pheasants' to wrens'. Mr. Hutchinson notes that "man as a gardener and a farmer is their [the birds'] friend rather than their enemy; and as a consequence the birds of the Forest are probably far more in number to-day than they were even in the days when, Gilpin wrote his history, and extolled the song of the multitudes of birds that inhabited the wooded banks of the Beaulieu River Before the Wild Birds' Preservation Act it [the Forest] used to be a paradise for bird's-nesting boyhood. Now that that Act has introduced the snake, in the shape of the law's prohibition, and the policeman, its executor, into that paradise, there is no doubt at all that the bird's-nesting boy either goes not at all along the Forest ways, or goes with a more Agag-like delicacy."
Among the most attractive features of the Forest are those portions in which the natural and unimpeded collection and outflow of water has stamped its own mark upon the earth's surface, and by its power of carrying seeds has planted its own banks with flowers. Thus in the early spring rains some sinuous little stream courses round the roots and stems of the upspringing black alders, and lays in the back-eddies grey slopes of silt. By these masses of king,cups blossom, and on the still shallow flats the white stars of the water-crowfoot light up the darker bends of the little overhung streams. Blue speedwell grows in astonishing abundance by the side of some of these streams, while the colours of the mosses that fringe the bogs, mingled with the crisp green leaves of the water St. John's wort later in the year, are almost as brilliant as flowers,—golden green, golden brown, madder red, deep orange, the scale of colour is always varied, and always rich in tone.
Two ancestors of our garden fruits, the wild cherry and the
wild crab-apple, stud with blossom the whole of the more open parts of the ancient woods in early spring ; while the white wild anemones cover hundreds of acres beneath the Forest trees. Later, parts of the woodland are blue with wild hyacinth. Not even in the woods of Sussex is the perfume of these flowers more all-pervading, mixed with the odours of moss, and wood, and all the vegetable debris that has been distilling in the Forest earth for eight hundred years. Speaking of the coming month in the Forest, Mrs. Rawnsley writes :—
" It should be May always, all the year round, we think with all our heart, on such a perfect May morning as this. The sun shines from a pale-blue sky, clear of clouds, and over the massed groups of delicate green beeches on the rising ground opposite is spread a soft blue haze, making them appear more distant than they really are, and deepening into an intense lapis lazuli blue in their shadows. At the bottom of the slope an ordered line of oaks, still in their thin, later budded foliage, and of a yellower green than that of the beeches, marks the division between field and open forest. From these up to the lawn is spread a golden carpet of buttercups, reflecting the dazzle of the sunshine large daisies, pale cuckoo flowers, dark purple orchises, and white narcissus strayed from the garden, can be spied in places among the tall grasses ; but the buttercup certainly holds the field against all rivals. But what is it that loads the breeze with fragrance, and seems to *make an intenser sun-shine all round ? Close to where I am standing the garden ends in a rampart of golden gorse, each bush with hardly a speck of green visible amongst the varying shades of its massed flowers, from pale yellow to deep golden orange."
The furze-blossom, as well as its scent, doubtless does seem to enhance the sunshine ; but over the whole of this great region of trees there is in May another prevading scent, that given out by unnumbered millions of young leaves, from those of the sweet-briar to the unrolling curls of the beech, the very " essence " of spring regained. In this cycle of the earth's existence it is difficult to speak with any certainty of the duration of the "seasons," of their beginning or of their ending. But when the fashion of the seasons was first set it may perhaps be assumed that summer began with June. But that was under the "old style " ; and the New Forest " spring " will not be over, if the " younge sun" keeps his normal heat, until at least the end of the first week in June. But the natural signal that spring is ended and summer begun is when the nightingales leave off singing.
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