The Primrose Path What a wealthy place the West country
would be if it could capitalise its primroses—which heaven forbid. It seems to me that they have never been so full of flower and so big in flower. The flower is, as a rule, more or less "fast of its smell," but there are banks that fairly reek of the delicate scent. The sides of some of the lanes are a mosaic of prim- rose and celandine. Often the delicate scent of the primrose conflicts with the cocoa-nut scent of the gorse on the crown of the bank. Here and there is a patch as blue as a blue- bell wood with flowers of the so-called ground ivy, and in others the dog violets, instead of lurking, fairly flaunt their colours, as if to protest against the theory that yellow is the master colour of spring. An example of the slight influence of severe winter on spring events is that rabbits, of several weeks' growth, abound. Beautiful though the spring is in the English Riviera of the South West, it has not wholly cloaked the ravages of the bitter winter. That characteristic and hardy shrub, the veronica, has been killed wholesale, and the not less characteristic tamarisk, though it has survived, has suffered severely. Rock plants, usually regarded as quite hardy, such as varieties of senecio, altogether perished.
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