It is really a very short list, and as of course all of these do not
appear at once there really is rather a scarcity of wild flowers, so far
at least as variety goes. Just in the spring there is a burst of colour,
and again in the autumn; but for the rest, if we set aside the roses in
June, there seems quite an absence of flowers during the summer. The
wayside is green, the ditches are green, the mounds green; if you enter
and stroll round the meadows, they are green too, or white in places
with umbelliferous plants, principally parsley and cow-parsnip. But
these become monotonous. Therefore, I am constrained to describe it as a
district somewhat lacking flowers, meaning, of course, in point of
variety.

Compared with the hedges and fields of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire,
Berkshire, and similar south-western localities, it seems flowerless. On
the other hand, southern London can boast stretches of heath, which,
when in full bloom, rival Scotch hillsides. These remarks are written
entirely from a non-scientific point of view. Professional botanists may
produce lists of thrice the length, and prove that all the flowers of
England are to be found near London. But it will not alter the fact that
to the ordinary eye the roads and lanes just south of London are in the
middle of the summer comparatively bare of colour. They should be
visited in spring and autumn.

Nor do the meadows seem to produce so many varieties of grass as farther
to the south-west. But beetles of every kind and size, from the great
stag beetle, helplessly floundering through the evening air and clinging
to your coat, down to the green, bronze, and gilded species that hasten
across the path, appear extremely numerous. Warm, dry sands, light
soils, and furze and heath are probably favourable to them.

From this roadside I have seldom heard the corncrake, and never once the
grasshopper lark. These two birds are so characteristic of the meadows
in southwestern counties that a summer evening seems silent to me
without the "crake, crake!" of the one and the singular sibilous rattle
of the other. But they come to other places not far distant from the
road, and one summer a grasshopper-lark could be heard in some meadows
where I had not heard it the two preceding seasons. On the mounds field
crickets cry persistently.

At the end of the hedge which is near a brook, a sedge-reedling takes up
his residence in the spring. The sedge-reedlings here begin to call v