United States or Russia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But the general effect was pale, or rather silvery, for Wiltshire is not a county of heavy tints. Beneath these colours lurked the unconquerable chalk, and wherever the soil was poor it emerged. The grassy track, so gay with scabious and bedstraw, was snow-white at the bottom of its ruts. A dazzling amphitheatre gleamed in the flank of a distant hill, cut for some Olympian audience.
Henceforth, I desire to live upon a flat with never a hill in sight, amidst honest folk as stupid as their own sheep, who go to church on Sundays and get drunk, not with hachich, but on brown ale, brought to them by no white-robed sorceress, but by a draggle-tailed wench in a tavern, with her musty bedstraw still sticking in her hair.
Bedstraw galium and field scabious, ox-eyes and knapweed, bladder-campions and ragged robins, mallows and crane's-bill all the flowers of the English banks seemed to be there. Where the bare rock showed itself, yellow sedum spread its gold, and in the little clefts stood stalks of cotyledon, now turning brown.
It seemed that clarity, freshness, and music were bound up in her mind with Edward. She thought only of him as she ran up the hill over the minute starry carpet of mountain bedstraw. 'Maybe there'll be no flower, and then the charm's broke, she thought hopefully. 'If the charm's broke, I canna dream, and I shanna go.
Purple vetches along the mounds, yellow lotus where the grass is shorter, and orchis succeeds to orchis. As I write them, so these things come not set in gradation, but like the broadcast flowers in the mowing-grass. Now follows the gorse, and the pink rest-harrow, and the sweet lady's bedstraw, set as it were in the midst of a little thorn-bush.
By way of the lower heaven of bedstraw blooms the eye rises easily to the forest of jewel-weeds. These at least are rightly, if unconsciously, named. It is not only the bloom but the whole weed that is a jewel when the morning sun is low and the reflected light slides level into the forest among purple stems that shoal into transparent green as they slender toward the leaves.
Here and there, on the dry bank over which the clematis projected like an eave, there stood tall campanulas, their blue bells as large as the fingerstall of a foxglove. The slender purple spires of the climbing vetch were lifted above the low hushes to which it clung; there were ferns deeper in the hedge, and yellow bedstraw by the gateways.
LADIES BEDSTRAW, OR CHEESE-RENNET. The Herb. This herb has a subacid taste, with a very faint, not disagreeable smell: the juice changes blue vegetable infusions to a red colour, and coagulates milk, thus exhibiting marks of acidity. It stands recommended as a mild styptic, and in epilepsy; but has never been much in use. GERANIUM robertianum. HERB ROBERT. The leaves.
The rough parts of the plant are discovered to be particles of flint. ERIOPHORUM polystachion. COTTON GRASS. The down of the seeds has been used, instead of feathers, for beds and cushions; and the foliage in the north of Scotland is considered useful as fodder. GALIUM verum. YELLOW LADIES' BEDSTRAW. The foliage affords the dairy-maid a fine rennet for making cheese.
Petworth seemed a possible resting-place, or Pullborough; Midhurst seemed too near, and any place over the Downs beyond, too far, and so he meandered towards Petworth, posing himself perpetually and loitering, gathering wild flowers and wondering why they had no names for he had never heard of any dropping them furtively at the sight of a stranger, and generally 'mucking about. There were purple vetches in the hedges, meadowsweet, honeysuckle, belated brambles but the dog-roses had already gone; there were green and red blackberries, stellarias, and dandelions, and in another place white dead nettles, traveller's-joy, clinging bedstraw, grasses flowering, white campions, and ragged robins.
Word Of The Day