In This Wood-Sorrel Had Taken Root, And Flower And Leaf
Covered The Space Within, White Flower And Green Leaf Flourishing On Old
Age.
The wood-sorrel leaf, the triune leaf, is perhaps more lovely even
than the flower, like a more delicately shaped clover of a tenderer
green, and it lasts far on into the autumn.
When the violet leaves are no
more looked for, when the cowslips have gone, and the bluebells have left
nothing behind them but their nodding seed-cases, still the wood-sorrel
leaf stays on the mound, in shape and colour the same, and as pleasantly
acid to the taste now under the ripening nuts as in May. At its coming it
is folded almost like a. green flower; at Midsummer, when you are
gathering ferns, you find its trefoil deep under the boughs; it grows,
too, in the crevices of the rock over the spring. The whortleberry
leaves, that were green as the myrtle when the wood-sorrel was in bloom,
have faded somewhat now that their berries are ripening. Another beech
has gone over, and lies at full length, a shattered tube, as it were, of
timber; for it is so rotten within, and so hollow and bored, it is little
else than bark. Others that stand are tubes on end, with rounded
knot-holes, loved by the birds, that let air and moisture into the very
heart of the wood. They are hardly safe in a strong wind. Others again,
very large and much shorter, have sent up four trunks from one root, a
little like a banyan, quadruple trees built for centuries, throwing
abroad a vast roof of foliage, whose green in the midst of summer is made
brown by sacks and sacks of beech nuts. These are the trees to camp by,
and that are chosen by painters. The bark of the beech is itself a panel
to study, spotted with velvet moss brown-green, made grey with
close-grown lichen, stained with its own hues of growth, and toned by
time. To these add bright sunlight and leaf shadow, the sudden lowering
of tint as a cloud passes, the different aspects of the day and the
evening, and the changes of rain and dry weather. You may look at the
bark of a beech twenty times and always find it different. After crossing
Virgil's Bridge in the deep coombe at the bottom of Marden Hill these
great beeches begin, true woodland trees, and somehow more forest-like
than the hundreds and hundreds of acres of fir trees that are called
forest. There is another spirit among the beech trees; they look like
deer and memories of old English life.
The wood cooper follows his trade in a rude shed, splitting poles and
making hoops the year through, in warm summer and iron-clad winter. His
shed is always pitched at the edge of a great woodland district. Where
the road has worn in deeply the roots of the beeches hang over, twisted
in and out like a giant matting, a kind of cave under them.
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