COUNTRY LIFE
The Proud-pied Month
We must all have felt (for at least a week in this April) 'iat England in "the sweet o' the year" is of peculiar loveli- ,ess. There are a good many stories of foreign visitors who iave been astounded at the wealth of colour. The most valuable is of Linnaeus, greatest of botanists, who burst into thanksgivings when he first saw a hillside of gorse. We are toi.d that the Japanese go forth in spring to worship the cherry- blossom. There are favoured places in England where it is massed in incomparable splendour. It happens that the two best displays known to me combined the cherry and daffodil. One tree, now like a bridal robe, stands in the midst of the real Lent lily, the small wild daffodil. A more splendid sight is a group of cherries, well over a hundred years old, that flower over a carpet of more gorgeous garden daffodils. The wild cherry is, I think, more abundant in the shires of Hen- ford and Buckingham, but readers of A. E. Housman will ossibly deny this. The quality of England, compared with most countries, is the massing of colour. Gorse is massed, heather is massed, primroses and bluebells and sometimes oxgloves are massed. The wealth of our flowers is in their ,heer number in particular spots rather than in their variety.
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