COUNTRY LIFE
HERE is an amateur's winter bouquet of wild flowers picked during d casual walk in the neighbourhood of Richard Jefferies' birthplace: white' dead nettle, red campion, grotuidsel, hawkbit, nipplewort, dandelion, daisy, ivy-leaved toad-flax, sole 'thistle, yarrow and ragwort. Numbers more, of course, could be added in almost any country walk, such as primroses, buttercups, may-weed, so-called, and various kecksies. Such might have been picked in December to the tune of thrushes and robins, and perhaps tits, larks and wrens. "If winter comes can spring be far behind ? " A cold winter may have a warm preface ; and some doggerel rhymes suggest a rural belief that the warmer the end of the year the colder the beginning of the next; but at least the winter is shortened.
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