Country diary 1926: The floor of the wood is starred with white anemones

31 March 1926: Lifted above their green crinoline of deep-cut leaf, they keep their individuality like the stars in the sky NEW FOREST: As you bicycle down the long slope of the Manor drive between two walls of rhododendrons twenty feet or more in height you get few glimpses of the woodland stretching at their backs; just the tree tops rising above the hedge of sombre green, broken now by crimson blossoms and helping to close you in, and that is all. And then the green walls end abruptly and you get a sudden vision, as I did yesterday, of the sunlit floor of the wood, starred thick with white anemones, one stretch and then another and another. When primroses carpet a copse they make a sheet of clear pale yellow; bluebells are a sea of blue. But wood anemones, like daffodils, make a crowd, and not a mass. The white stars lifted above their green crinoline of deep-cut leaf keep their individuality like the stars in the sky, their frail petals never emerging in a blurred and indistinguishable whole.