• Country Life
Official Spring Spring, bearing gifts, is no more to be trusted than the Greeks. She is as fickle and treacherous, and as devious and protracted in fulfilment. What she weaves she as readily undoes again, deceiving but never altogether dismaying her suitors. In other temperate lands, remote from the sea, spring is a step, a brief month when snow and ice dissolve into verdure and flowers. In England spring is a stroll, an imperceptible arriving by lengthening and softening days at summer. Watery aconites and snowdrops, with their tinge of unflower-like greenishness, give way to crocuses, they to daffodils, and they to tulips, irises and peonies, a progress from diffident submissiveness to confident flamboyance. China and Japan and mountain regions have contributed lovely flowering shrubs and plants to brighten our winter and early spring gardens, but they never quite look com- fortable and at home, as do snowdrops and crocuses, under a sullen cold sky.
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