It Is Interesting To Watch This Retaking Of Old Ground By The
Wild Plants, Banished By Human Use.
Since Naboth drew his fence
about the field and restricted it to a few wild-eyed steers,
halting between the hills and the shambles, many old habitues of
the field have come back to their haunts.
The willow and brown
birch, long ago cut off by the Indians for wattles, have come back
to the streamside, slender and virginal in their spring greenness,
and leaving long stretches of the brown water open to the sky. In
stony places where no grass grows, wild olives sprawl;
close-twigged, blue-gray patches in winter, more translucent
greenish gold in spring than any aureole. Along with willow and
birch and brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of water borders,
slips down season by season to within a hundred yards of the
village street. Convinced after three years that it would come no
nearer, we spent time fruitlessly pulling up roots to plant in the
garden. All this while, when no coaxing or care prevailed upon any
transplanted slip to grow, one was coming up silently outside the
fence near the wicket, coiling so secretly in the rabbit-brush that
its presence was never suspected until it flowered delicately along
its twining length. The horehound comes through the fence
and under it, shouldering the pickets off the railings; the brier
rose mines under the horehound; and no care, though I own I am not
a close weeder, keeps the small pale moons of the primrose from
rising to the night moth under my apple-trees.
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