He said, "Nothing is lovelier in flowers than true colour. Form is nothing
to Nature; it is one of Art's tricks. Here I may have a succession of pure
washes by mere concentration of what I find. The downs give me everything;
all I have to do is to group them.

"Here is my design. For early spring, cowslips in a cloud. Scattered
broadcast, they are happy accidents which you come upon walking; but if
you mass them their scent tells, and you find they are nearer the colour
of oranges than of limes.

"For mid-April and early May I have the orchids--a blood-spatter on the
bottom; higher the flecked white, the pink, and the yellow with brown.
Then for a shelf among rocks the milk-worts, the sky-blue, the white and
the pink; with these I float out May like Fra Angelico. For June there are
Ragged Robins like filaments of rosy cloud, and Forget-me-not to drift
like wood-smoke over the chalk rubble. In July I have a pageant. Foxglove
and Eglantine make melodious my woods; Ladies' Slipper gives a golden cope
to the hillside, with purple campanula to wind about it like a scarf.
After this--August, September, October--our uplands faint out in
semitones: grey scabious, grey harebell, pale bed-straw, white
meadowsweet, like the lace of an old lady's cap. But even so, if I must
have a sunset glow of brown-pink, herb-willow gives it me. Pinch out the
leader of each slim spike, and you make a different plant of it." Thus the
poet embroidered the philosopher's text, and kept away from his memories,
and husbanded his pence.

These things, at any rate, he did, collecting with diligence the plants to
his hand, separating them from the grasses and bents in which they hid,
massing them and marshalling to his purposes. The thing was done with