seasons. While other portions of our district are scarcely giving signs of vernal life, at Bowdon the spring flowers are often open and abundant, and this quite as markedly in the fields as in the gardens. The former is the more valuable and interesting part of the testimony thus borne to the mildness of Bowdon, since the life of cultivated plants is always in some measure artificial, or under the influence of human direction, whereas the occupants of the hedgerows are pure children of nature. In the pleasant little nook called Ashley meadows, lingering with its very latest campanula and crimsoned bramble–leaf, Autumn seems hardly gone before Spring prepares to change all again and once more to green. Dunham Park offers nothing important for several weeks after the Ashley meadows have flowers to show. The total, indeed, of the botanical productions of the former place is not a fifth of what may be found within a mile of Ashley Mill. It is well to note this, because many people suppose that a scene delightful in its picturesque is correspondingly rich in wild–flowers. Generally, no doubt, it is so, since the picturesque in scenery is almost always connected with great unevenness of surface, precipitous descents, rocks, and tumbling waters, these usually coming in turn, of geological conditions, such as are highly conducive to variety in the Flora. But when the charm of a scene depends, not on cliffs and cataracts, but simply on the agreeable intermixture of differently–tinted trees, a gently undulating surface, sweet vistas and arcades of meeting branches, and the allurements held out to the imagination by green forbidden paths and tangled thickets;—then, as in Dunham Park, the primitive causes of floral variety being absent, the flowers themselves, though they may be plentiful in their respective kinds, are necessarily few as to distinct species. It does not follow that where the variety is considerable we are to look below the turf for the explanation. Meadows and pastures are always more prolific than ground covered with forest–trees (except, perhaps, in the tropics), the reason being partly that such trees offer too much obstruction to the rays of the sun, and partly that their immense and spreading roots block up the soil and hinder the growth of smaller plants. The Ashley meadows, after all, like all other places abounding in wild–flowers, are the miniature of a romantic scene. For in landscape, as in history, wherever we go, we have only the same ideas on a larger or smaller scale, the great repeated in the little, the little repeated in the great. Here is the mighty forest, clinging to the mountain–side; here the extended plain, watered by its winding river; here the terrible chasm and deep ravine,—all, however, in that delicate and reduced measure which, while it gives us the type of nature universally, enables us to see the whole at one view.

To get to the Ashley meadows, go by the railway to Bowdon, then along the “Ashley Road” for about a mile, and then down the lane on the left hand, which leads to Mr. Nield’s model farm. After passing through the field by the farm, there is seen a small wood upon the right, in which are many beautiful treasures, and descending a little, we are in the meadows, the Bollin flowing at the farther edge, and the mill, with its weir and water–wheel, at the extremity. The very earliest spring flowers to be gathered here are those of the hazel–nut, the willow, the alder, and the poplar. People unacquainted with botany often suppose that the latter and other timber–trees belong to the flowerless class of plants. They fancy that flowers occur only upon fruit–trees, and upon ornamental shrubs, such as the lilac and laburnum. The mistake is a perfectly natural and excusable one, seeing that the established idea of a flower is of something brilliant and highly coloured. A visit to the Ashley meadows in the month of April soon shows that there are other flowers than these. The hazel is by that time overblown, being in perfection about February; but the other trees mentioned above are covered with their curious blossoms, which in every case come out before the leaves. Those of the alder and poplar resemble pendent caterpillars, of a fine brownish red; the willow–blooms are in dense clusters, green or lively yellow, according to their sex. For plants, like animals, have sex, and though in most cases male and female co–exist in the same flower, it happens with some, especially with the timber–trees of northern latitudes, that the flowers are of only one sex, some of them being male and others female. Occasionally the entire tree is male only or female only—the condition of the willow and the poplar, the yellow flowers of the former of which are the male, and the greenish ones the female. On the hedge–banks below these trees may be gathered the dogs’ mercury, an herbaceous plant of distinct sexes, readily recognised by its dark green, oval, pointed leaves. Soon after the appearance of these, the banks and open sunny spots become decked with the glossy yellow blossoms of the celandine, a flower resembling a butter–cup, but with eight or nine long and narrow petals, instead of five rounded ones. Mingled with it here and there is the musk–root, a singular but unpretending little plant, green in every part, and with its blossoms collected into a cube–shaped cluster, a flower turned to each of the four points of the compass, and one looking right up to the zenith. The roots, as implied in the name, have the odour of musk. On the moister banks, such as those at the lower edge of the wood, grows also the golden saxifrage, a pretty little plant, with flat tufts of minute yellowish bloom. Yellow, in different shades, prevails to a remarkable extent among English wild–flowers, and especially those of spring. The rich living yellow of the coltsfoot is a conspicuous example. The coltsfoot flowers, like those of the poplar tree, open before the leaves, enlivening the bare waysides in the most beautiful manner, or at least when the sun shines; for so dependent are they upon the light, that it is only when the sun falls warm and animating that they expand their delicate rays, slender as the finest needle, and reminding us, in their elegant circle and luminous colour, of the aureola round the head of a saint in Catholic pictures. At first sight, the coltsfoot might be mistaken for a small dandelion. It is easily distinguishable from that despised, but useful plant, by the scales upon its stem, the stalk of the dandelion being perfectly smooth. The leaves and flowers of the dandelion open, moreover, simultaneously. The coltsfoot, like the flower it imitates, holds high repute among the “yarb–doctors,” who know more of the genuine properties of our native plants than it is common to give them credit for.

On the banks of the Bollin and its little tributaries grows also that curious plant, the butter–bur. Appearing first as an egg–shaped purple bud, by degrees a beautiful cone or pyramid of lilac blossoms is opened out, bearing no slight resemblance to a hyacinth. Here, again, as happens with many spring flowers, and, strange to say, with two or three autumnal ones, the blossoms are ready before the leaves, which do not attain their full size till after midsummer. Then they hide the river–banks everywhere about Manchester with a thick and deceitful jungle, often lifted on stalks a yard high, and in their vast circumference reminding one of rhubarb leaves. After these earlier visitants come the furze, the purple dead–nettle, and the primrose; and in the hedges, again without leaves, the sloe or black–thorn, its milk–white bloom conspicuous from a long distance. The name black–thorn, so oddly at variance with the pure white of the flowers, refers to