COUNTRY LIFE -
I SUPPOSE that the tritest, most general of all references to the approach of spring is the honeysuckle which " disdains to be crossed" as Patmore wrote. It is doubtless the first of all shrubs to open its leaves, and they are proof against the hardest frosts as other early leaves, as, say, on the briar, are not. Yet these blue-green leaves which have been fully expanded for months do not impart "that spring feeling," which Tennyson found in the burgeoning of the "maze of quick." I would put first, in spite of poetic silence, the weeping willow, which is the most cheerful of trees in spite of Babylonish adjectives. It began to come into leaf and flower— and both are very much the same spring colour—about St. Valentine's Day. Compare it with the ash, so dear to Cobbett, whose buds are black in March and whose leaves blacken and fall at the first heavy frost. This willow (notably vitellina pendula) not only beacons spring in. February ; it keeps many of its leaves throughout November. A charming picture of its brightness is always to be seen at Hampton Court where it doubles itself in the water. More people, I think, would grow it in their gardens—it weeps charmingly over a bird-bath—if there were not an impression abroad that it needs water. It will flourish even on a clay bank.
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