Larch Wood
When the sun is shining and the larch is turging green, it only needs a little breeze to make things perfect, for the swaying of the soft green leaves and the sight of the neat red-brown cones has a beauty beyond description. Late in the afternoon we stepped off the road and into the larch wood. There is more light among larches than among pines and firs, and there is more shelter than in a wood of beeches and oaks at this time of year. We walked down the cone-strewn path to the bottom of the wood and came back up again, disturbing a pigeon that went out overhead and a rabbit that scuttled from one patch of bramble to the next. Farther along the wood we saw that ugliness that for some reason country folk must perpetrate for lack of a refuse-collection. An ancient mattress lay across the bluebell leaves. A few yards from it was a bedstead. Lumbered with all kinds of unwanted things, the cottager seems to find a bedstead an item he must put out of sight, when he cannot make it part of his garden fence, and so he carries it to the nearest wood and leaves it there.
Previous page
