Of all the host of alluring things that make for themselves homes on our hillside, one of the most lovely is the foxglove. Yet there is no blatancy about its beauty, nor a great blaze of light as when the ox-eye daisies wave over the fields in June.

There is something more subtle than even its colouring that attracts one to this flower, for there is mind-rest, there is balm for anxious hearts, there is new hope and new courage, with whispers of happiness, in the depths of a foxglove bell.

If you doubt this, go on a foxglove quest; leave everything bearing the hall-mark of advanced up-to-dateness far behind you—though I’ve nothing to say against the train that takes you away from towns to the place where the foxgloves grow! Forget all the regulation ways of enjoying yourself, and search out the haunts of the carillon of the wilds.

You will find them on the shady sides of the hedges, their spikes of bells pushing up through hawthorn and sloe, through the tangle of bramble and bryony, cleavers and dog rose that scramble over the pollarded nut-bushes, beeches, elm-stumps, and ash-boles, amid all the dear delights that go to make that poem of loveliness—an English hedgerow.

You will also find them in little hollows and dells, in small ravines and in craggy places—in any spot where they can get a little moisture for the roots and occasional sunshine for the flowers, with a certain amount of immunity from the devastating hand of the human marauder. Give them but a ghost of a chance to seed themselves (though this is what the greedy flower-gatherer invariably denies them), and they will spread with great rapidity, and paint the face of nature with a rich glowing carmine that almost makes you hold your breath when first you see the broad sweeps of colour on certain hillsides in mid-June.

When you have found them, in any of their haunts, lift one of the bells and look right into it, delighting in the splashes and markings, the fine filaments and the silken texture, the pink and purple and crimson, the dark brown and white, the poise of the stalk, the droop of the bells, the balance that the leaf-arrangement gives to the whole plant, and the many other characteristics that go to make up one of the most exquisite of nature’s products.

The trouble is that in sparse soil, or in wind-swept places, the plant does not grow so tall as in a protected and secluded spot. Hence when we meet it in the open, its bells hang downwards below the eye-line, and we do not often remember to stoop and lift one, to see what message the bee left for us. Perhaps that is one reason why it seems to me that, while sunflowers and hollyhocks spend their days in gazing after grown-ups, foxgloves are for ever nodding smilingly and encouragingly to little children.

To those who are accustomed to agricultural scenery, where the landscape shows far expanses of pasture-land and cornfields, with wide spreading low-roofed farms clustered around with barns and ricks, our hills come as a surprise with their uneven surfaces, and the scarcity of soil in comparison with the superabundance of rock.

And even taking into consideration all the cleared spaces and small farms, the outstanding feature of the country, so far as the eye can see, is timber. This is a region of woods and coppices, with springs that bubble up at the roots of sturdy trees, protected by their thick leafage from the onslaughts of the sun. This is a land of dim grey-green mystery, of silences that make one tread with reverent awe till one is brought back to earth, by the ring of the woodman’s axe, the leisurely song of his saw, and the crish-crash of a tree as it falls.

In the course of time, the woods have to be cut; some are cut every fourteen years; others are left much longer; it all depends on the kind of tree and the purpose for which it is being grown.

But though the woods are cut periodically, it is not so devastating a process as one might imagine. For one thing, it is clean work; for another, it is surface work; and then it is all done in the open air, with hand-tools and no machinery, and it is carried out on nature’s own lines. Hence there is no underground disturbance that would prevent further growth, and no smoke of power-driven machinery pollutes the earth and air.

Yet there would be something very pathetic about the felling of the trees, as you walk over ground that has been cut, were it not for the magical display of beauty nature puts forth in such circumstances, multitudes of flowers springing into being that otherwise would not have come to birth.

At first you see but the prostrate trunks of the trees, with ivy still clinging to the bark; there they lie, with branches lopped, each surrounded by piles of small timber cut into regulation lengths for various commercial purposes; with “cords” of faggots for firing, and stacks of stuff for pea sticks and similar purposes.

Yet you are not long wandering over the newly-cleared slopes before you see things that were not evident before.

In winter you discover a red-gold carpet—too golden to be brown, too brown to be red—where lie the leaves of the beeches that you never noticed when the trees were standing.

Then, as spring breathes life into the sleeping earth, the dead leaves stir, silently, mysteriously, no human ear can detect the rustle, no human eye can see the movement, yet the leaves lift and move apart, disclosing the yellow and green, and silvery-pink of the primrose buds.

Still further the dead leaves lift, and the violets look out, and then run all over the place. The wind-flowers push up next, and before you realize what has happened, the place is literally dancing with them. Where did they all come from?

Last spring you went through this very wood and saw only a few scattered about at wide distances, where there chanced to be a filter of light through the dense branches overhead. Now the place is an open air ball-room of curtesying sprites.

Such are the wonderful ways of the woods!

In sheltered spots where the cold winds cannot reach, cushions of wood-sorrel unfurl their pale-green leaves, and then send up, cautiously and shyly, the fragile bells that look as though a breath would blow them away. The woodruff also sets to work, for there must be beauty of odour as well as beauty of colour and form, and something will be needed to take the place of the violets when they go.

By this time the bluebells are ready to come out; but there is no shyness about these, sturdy in their growth, no obstacle seems to hinder them; up come the green spears, making their own way through dead leaves and twigs and moss and acorn cup, through thickets of low-lying bramble, through carpets of close-growing ivy; if a dead branch or a tree trunk lies in their way, they peep out at one side, “Is there a trifle of daylight here?” And up they come, carpeting with blue the open spaces between the huge masses of rock that lie pell-mell about the surface; while the humble little ground-ivy lays cool green fingers, and a little later its violet-blue flowers, over the cream and silver of the birches, the soft grey of the beeches, and the rough bark of the oaks, where the felled trunks lie among the up-springing grass, sensing for the last time the coming of spring and summer on the hillside.

Then it is, when the bluebells have turned to papery seed-pods, and the primroses have paled away into space, that the foxgloves begin to shake out their flowers and the hillside glows and palpitates with colour. They flourish with a joyous abandon that is positively infectious, and makes one feel there is still much left to live for. The way they suddenly appear when the trees are down—whole battalions of them—where only a season before there were regiments of larches, or thick woods of mixed timber, is really marvellous. Undoubtedly the ground must be packed with seed; more than this, there must always be young seedlings coming up among the undergrowth or in sheltered crevices where the larch needles do not penetrate; for no sooner are the trees cut than foxgloves start to spread their leaves to the light, and by the following summer, often before half the timber has been carried, you find them by the thousand—and that is a very low estimate—dotted all over the rough land, and, with a host of ferns, trying to cover up all that is maimed, and bare, and jagged, to hide the scars where the mighty have fallen, to give beauty for ashes in a very literal sense.

Moreover, there seems an almost uncanny intelligence in the way they adapt themselves to their environment. You would think they knew that the winds from the far-off Channel blow strong at times, across these high open spaces; for you find that they invariably place themselves in the shelter of a big boulder, or settle down in a little hollow with a protecting flank of rockery, evidently conscious that their tall stems would be lashed down flat if exposed to the full force of the wind. Or you find them growing, it may be, at the foot of a crumbling gate post, or against an ivy-covered rock, or rows of them nestling close up to a lichen-covered stone wall; and in this way their beauty is enhanced by the background.

And when they find themselves in an uncongenial setting—springing up in the very centre of a woodland path perhaps, or out in the open where the woodmen have been lopping the branches from a felled tree, and there is much devastation to be covered over and atoned for—there the foxglove lays its leaves as flat as possible against the earth, so as to offer the least inducement to the passer-by to injure it. And though it still sends up its flowers as bravely as it knows how, they are only a foot high, not the five and six feet of the foxglove in the shelter. Yet if it be possible, in the least bit possible, it leans against the pile of faggots, or gently touches the desolate trunk of what was once a majestic old tree—and who dare say that the silent companionship counts for nothing?

As I write this, in a year of the Awful War, there are some who would tell me that foxgloves will not find the people in food; while others see no value in the larches apart from their service as mine-props.

Yet, while I would not under-estimate the utilitarian worth of crops and timber, the age-old truth is still insistent: Man cannot live by bread alone.

You may clear from the surface of the land every plant that is not edible; you may fell every tree that does not serve for telegraph pole or pit wood; you may tabulate the food-productive qualities of the whole earth, and serve it out in a blue-book as literature for the people; you may manufacture electricity till there is no longer any night, and the mysteries of the twilight and the moonlight and the starlight are lost to us for ever; you may destroy the birds till there isn’t one Glad-song left in the caterpillar-riddled orchards and gardens; you may harness the rivers and streams for mechanical purposes, and drown the voices of the weir in the whirr of wheels, till there isn’t an ounce of energy flowing to waste throughout the length and breadth of the country; you may turn all Nature into a huge commercial enterprise that is the last word in economics and efficient organization—and what will be the result?

Machines in place of souls!

Germany strove to subserve everything to her own materialistic ends, and the price of her hideous and colossal crime is a world’s agony.

Though this may seem but a parable, to some the reading will be clear: Where there is no vision, the people perish.