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I do not remember any remarkable beeches, though there are some very famous ones, especially the Burnham beeches. No apple-trees I saw in England compare with one next my own door, and there are many others as fine in the neighborhood. I have spoken of the pleasure I had in seeing by the roadside primroses, cowslips, and daisies. Dandelions, buttercups, hawkweed looked much as ours do at home.
It occurs in widely distant families, but has a special interest for us in two genera, which are generally known as very polymorphous groups. One of them is the hawkweed or Hieracium, and the other is the dandelion or Taraxacum officinale.
There are months of warmth to follow brilliant sunshine and new beauties; but the freshness, the joyous looking forward of spring is gone. Upon these banks the first coltsfoot flowers in March, the first convolvulus in summer, and almost the last hawkweed in autumn.
In the case of the hawkweed and the dandelion there is at present no means of distinguishing between these two contrasting causes of variability. But like the garden varieties which are always propagated in the vegetative way, their constancy and uniformity are only apparent and afford no real indication of hereditary qualities.
Then some long stretch of the road would be banked on one side with crumbling rocks, festooned with heath, and golden hawkweed, and London pride, like velvet cushions covered with pink lace, and beds of white bramble blossom alive with butterflies; while above my head, and on my right, the cool canopy of oak and birch leaves shrouded me so close, that I could have fancied myself miles inland, buried in some glen unknown to any wind of heaven, but that everywhere between green sprays and grey stems, gleamed that same boundless ocean blue, seeming, from the height at which I was, to mount into the very sky.
Painter's brush, harebell, speedwell, golden-brown gaillardias, silvery hawkweed, columbines yellow and blue, heaths, and lush grasses Elizabeth sank down among them in speechless joy. Anderson gathered handfuls of columbine and vetch, of harebell and heath, and filled her lap with them, till she gently stopped him. "No! Let me only look!"
Among the second are these: Medicago lupulina, or nonesuch; Trifolium repens, or white clover; Lathyrus pratensis, or meadow lathyrus; Capsella bursa pastoris, or shepherd's purse; Vicia peregrina, or broad-podded vetch; Convolvulus arvensis, or small bindweed; Pterotheca nemausensis, a sort of hawkweed; and Poa pratensis, or smooth-stalked meadow-grass.
During this summer of which I speak, the fields were a gorgeous mass of color buttercups and daisies, and the orange hawkweed a display that rivaled the carpet of gold and purple we had seen in the San Joaquin Valley, in company with John Muir three summers before. Mr. Muir was done before starting for South America.
All things brown, and yellow, and red, are brought out by the autumn sun; the brown furrows freshly turned where the stubble was yesterday, the brown bark of trees, the brown fallen leaves, the brown stalks of plants; the red haws, the red unripe blackberries, red bryony berries, reddish-yellow fungi, yellow hawkweed, yellow ragwort, yellow hazel-leaves, elms, spots in lime or beech; not a speck of yellow, red, or brown the yellow sunlight does not find out.
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