• COUNTRY LIFE
WHITSUNTIDE coincided with absolutely the most lovely period of scenic beauty. Housman has given, in his ingenious but ardent verse, a certain supremacy to the wild cherry, but I think the thorn surpasses it. May is by far the most widely spread of all wild flowering shrubs, since the enclosers decided to use quick or whitethorn almost exclusively for many hedges. The bush reached its peak at Whitsun, to the nose as well as the eye. Tennyson was writing of an earlier date in his much- quoted lines:
" Now burgeons every maze of quick About the flowering squares."
But if he meant by squares the right-angled fields, it is the time of the may blossom, not of the opening of the leaf, that alone makes the phrase wholly apposite. Today England is compact of flowering squares, and isolated trees or bushes grow self-sown on commons and even rubbish dumps. A few years ago the roads, too, would have been corridors of bridal blossom ; but the levelling of such hedges has been widespread, though doubtless it is possible to argue that the view is wider and uninter- rupted by way of compensation for the barbed wire.
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