carred and marked, as it
were, with lichen and moss. It is the home of birds. A blackbird had a
nest this spring in the bushes on the left side, a nightingale in the
bushes on the right side, and there he sang and sang for hours every
morning. A sharp, relentless shrike lives in one of the trees close by,
and is perpetually darting across the road upon insects on the sward
among the fern there. There are several thrushes who reside in this
orchard besides the lesser birds. Swallows sometimes twitter from the
tops of the apple-trees. As the grass is so safe from intrusion, one of
the earliest buttercups flowers here. The apple-bloom appears rosy on
the bare boughs only lately scourged by the east wind. After a time the
trees are in full bloom, set about into the green of the hedges and
bushes and the dark spruce behind. Bennets, the flower of the grass,
come up. The first bennet is to green things what a swallow is to the
breathing creatures of summer. White horse-chestnut blooms stand up in
their stately way, lighting the path, which is strewn with fallen
oak-flower. May appears on the hawthorn: there is an early bush of it.
Now the grass is so high the flowers are lost under it; even the
buttercups are overtopped; and soon as the young apples take form and
shape white bramble-bloom will cover the bushes by the palings. Acorns
will show on the oaks: the berries will ripen from red to black
beneath. Along the edge of the path, where the dandelions and plantains
are thick with seed, the greenfinches will come down and select those
they like best: this they often do by the footpath beside the road.
Lastly, the apples become red; the beech in the corner has an orange
spray, and cones hang long and brown upon the spruce. The thrushes after
silence sing again, and autumn approaches. But, pass when you may, this
little orchard has always something, because it is left to itself--I had
written neglected. I struck the word out, for this is not neglect, this
is true attention, to leave it to itself, so that the young trees trail
over the bushes and stay till the berries fall of their own
over-ripeness, if perchance spared by the birds; so that the dead brown
leaves lie and are not swept away unless the wind pleases; so that all
things follow their own course and bent. Almost opposite, by autumn,
when the reapers are busy with the sheaves, the hedge is white with the
large trumpet-flowers of the greater convolvulus. The hedgerow seem