THE GREEN OF ENGLAND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 13, 16 January 1936, Page 3

THE GREEN OF ENGLAND

Canada is beautiful. 1 was very happy there, and would nut have missed my Canadian experience for anything, but when 1 left it, 1 left a white world, a world covered with snow. A few days later 1 stood un the deck of the ship and saw the co:ust of England. The snows of Canada were forgotten, for England, my home, was green. It was a wonderful moment. Other wanderers have told me the same tale. Whether they return from the barren browns of India, from the cold white of the far north, or from the bright colours of the tropics, the first thing wlduh strikes them on their return home is that England is green... That beting so I thought that 1 would go and study our green countryside a little the other day, and I wasted—no, not wasted, I enjoyed a couple of hours in so doing. Moreover, I did this before break fast Behind the gorse lay the dense mas« of a large wood—greens and browns, and purples, ami miarroons, all biending in harmony. The lightest green of all was shown on the larches, next came the beech, and then birch and elm, shading down to the black-green of the fir trees. The oak and ash trees were responsible for the brown-s, and purples, and ma noons. The ash were just out in a purplish-green, Imt the oaks were late, and most of them were covered with a few pink, almost red fat buds only Half left, further down the hall&ide was a beech plantation, a lovely patch of one shade green, about a half mile distant. Just over the top of it, another mile away, 1 could see the red-brick gable end of a cottage in the valley. . . Beyond it on the far hillside were patches of arable land. 1 always thought that ploughland was brown, plain brown, bat. that morning I found out that it can be heaps of colours besides. The arable fields were more like a spring catalogue of ladies’ silk stockings than anything else Still, in spite of all the various colours in the May countryside, most of the picture in front of me the other morning was green, green of every shade imaginable, and each shade i» just the right place to blend with its surroundings. Somehow 1 do not think that any artist can paint thc,se greens correctly, for as I admired them, a motor-lorry with a green tilt drove slowly through the picture from one side to the other, and I watched its progress most carefully. That tilt did not match one of the hundreds of shades of green in Nature’s painting, not one of them. Everywhere in that picture the tilt looked out of place and 1 was quite glad when it had vanished from sight. Tn a crowded street I should have said that the tilt was green, but in the seating of England’s green fields I knew it for what it was, a very poor imitation of the real thing. —A. G Street, in “’Thinking Aloud.”