In The Coldest And Most Exposed Place I Ever
Lived In, And With A Spring As Cold As This, The May Garlands Included
Orchids, And The Meadows Were Perfectly Golden With Marsh-Marigolds.
For
some reason or other the flowers seem to come as near as they can to
their time, let the weather be as hard as it may.
They are more regular
than the migrant birds, and much more so than the trees. The elm, oak,
and ash appear to wait a great deal on the sun and the atmosphere, and
their boughs give much better indications of what the weather has really
been than birds and flowers. The migrant birds try their hardest to keep
time, and some of them arrive a week or more before they are noticed.
Elm, oak, and ash are the surest indicators; the horse-chestnut is very
apt to put forth its broad succulent leaves too soon; the sycamore, too,
is an early tree in spite of everything. It has been said that of late
years we have not had any settled, soft, warm weather till after
midsummer. There has been a steady continual cold draught from the
northward till the sun reached the solstice, so that the summers, in
fact, have not commenced till the end of June. There is a good deal of
general truth in this observation; certainly we seem to have lost our
springs. I do not think I have heard it thunder this year up to the time
of writing. The absence of electrical disturbance shows a peculiar state
of atmosphere unfavourable to growth, so that the corn will not hide a
partridge, and in some places hardly a sparrow. Where did the painters
get their green leaves from this year in time for the galleries? Not from
the trees, for they had none.
A flock of rooks was waddling about in a thinly grown field of corn which
scarcely hid their feet, and a number of swallows, flying very low,
scarcely higher than the rooks' breasts, wound in and out among them. The
day was cloudy and cold, and probably the insects had settled on the
ground. The rooks' feet stirred them up, and as they rose they were taken
by the swallows. All over the field there were no other swallows, nor in
the adjacent fields, only in that one spot where the rooks were feeding.
On another occasion swallows flying low over a closely cropped grass
field alighted on the sward to try and catch their prey. There seems a
scarcity of some kinds of insect life, due doubtless to the wind. Out of
a dozen butterfly chrysalids collected, six were worthless; they were
stiff, and when opened were stuffed full of small white larvae, which had
eaten away the coming butterfly in its shell. They were the offspring of
a parasite insect, which thus provided for the sustenance of its young by
eating up other young, after the cruel way of nature. Why does one robin
carefully choose a thatched cave for its nest, out of reach except by a
ladder, and safe from all beasts of prey, and another place its nest on a
low grassy bank scarcely hidden by a plant of wild parsley, and easily
taken by the smallest boy?
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