Argonne Forest

“ Lastly, from its very nature, the New Forest is ever beautiful, at every season of the year, even in the depth of winter. The colouring of summer is not more rich. Then the great masses of holly glisten with their brightest green; the purple light gathers round the bare oaks, and the yews stand out in their shrouds of black. Then the first budding branch of furze sparkles with gold, and the distant hill-side glows with the red layers of beech-leaves. And if a snow-storm passes up from the sea, then every bough is suddenly covered with a silver filigree of whitest moss. ”

“ From the Acorn Patch (the last of the old plantations) a large quantity of young oaks have been transplanted into the open parts of the Forest and the upper part of Russell’s Enclosure. The trees drawn out are thriving, and many of them grow faster than the trees remaining in the Acorn Patch. There is a great quantity of holly and other underwood scattered on the parts where the trees are planted, and which serves for shelter and protection, and the soil is very good. ”

“ It grows in Chewton Glen, in all the lanes in the neighbourhood, on Ashley Common, close to the Osmanby Ford River, and rears its golden-brown pannicles in the boggy thickets near Rufus’s Stone. But before it, in beauty, stands the lady-fern, with its delicate fronds and its tender green, growing in the open spaces of the beech woods, as at Stonehard and Puckpits, and bending over the Forest streams in large leafy clumps. Then, too, in all the large woods grows the sweet-scented mountain fern (Lastrea Oreopteris) ”

“ Springs of pure water were in abundance, trickling down the steep rugged sides of this wooded glen. The children wandered onwards, delighted with the wild picturesque path they had chosen, sometimes resting on a huge block of moss-covered stone, or on the twisted roots of some ancient gray old oak or pine, whilst they gazed with curiosity and interest on the lonely but lovely landscape before them. Across the lake, the dark forest shut all else from their view, rising in gradual far-off slopes till it reached the utmost boundary of sight. ”

“ To think that hardly an hour ago she wanted to plunge, in Bernard’s company, into the dark Villandraut road, between the rows of menacing pines! She cared no more for one country than another, pines or poplars, plain or ocean. Nothing interested her except living creatures, beings of blood and flesh. “It is not the stone-built city that I love, nor lectures nor museums, but the living forest that stirs within it, racked by passions more furious than any storm. The lamentations of the pines of Argelouse, at night, were so strangely moving because they seemed so nearly human.” ”

“ The Avon still flows on with its floating gardens of flowers—lilies and arrowhead, and the loosestrife waving its crimson plumes among the green reeds. The Forest streams, too, still flow on the same, losing themselves in the woods, eddying round and round in the deep, dark, prison-pools of their own making, and then escaping over shallows and ledges of rolled pebbles, left dry in the summer, and on which the sunlight rests, and 15 the shadows of the beeches play, but in the winter chafed by the torrent. ”

“ Then other open spaces in the velvety green stood out to greet his eye. These were also in many cases the work of man, but from such far different causes. Large white snags stood like gaunt tombstones marking the glory of once mighty trees. These snags could have resulted from only one thing—forest fires. Where the fires were of recent occurrence, the ground was still burned black, but in the older fire areas the second growth timber had made its appearance and the ground was covered by the small trees with which nature hoped to restore the forests to their former grandeur. ”

“ The mountain labors incessantly to re-create, but what can it do against such fearful odds? and what shall we do when it can no longer furnish pine to build our homes, or wood to warm them? Delve deeper and deeper under the Alleghanies? In about two hundred and fifty years the noble forests, which set the early discoverers wild with enthusiasm, have been steadily driven farther and farther back into the interior, until “the forest primeval” exists not nearer than a hundred miles inland. Then the great northern wilderness began at the sea-coast. It is now in the vicinity of Lake Umbagog. ”

“ The dark forest of Arden opens wide its great arms of foliage to welcome and conceal you; the kindly forest heaps up its silkiest moss in the depths of its grottoes for your bed; it bends its leafy arches over your brow to protect you from the rain and sun; it pities you with the tears of its springs and the sighs of its bleating fawns and deer ”

“ These wooded lawns are more beautiful than English park scenery; all the more beautiful for the air of neglect about them, as if not much care of men were bestowed upon them, though enough to keep wildness from growing into deformity, and to make the whole scene like nature idealized—the woodland scenes the poet dreamed of—a forest of Ardennes, for instance. These lawns and gentle valleys are beautiful, moreover, with fountains flashing into marble basins, or gushing like natural cascades from rough rocks ”

“ A noble piece of Nature's handiwork is that same Yallé forest. The river flows sluggishly through its centre in a breadth of perhaps ninety yards, and the immense forest trees extend their giant arms from the high banks above the stream, throwing dark shadows upon its surface, enlivened by the silvery glitter of the fish as they dart against the current. Little glades of rank grass occasionally break the monotony of the dark forest; sandy gullies in deep beds formed by the torrents of the rainy season cut through the crumbling soil and drain toward the river. ”

“ In the whole country the arboreal distribution is peculiar. The forests are confined entirely to the main ranges of mountains and their immediate offshoots. The more distant prolongations are bare and rocky. I remember once in travelling from Turkestan to Kabul, everyone stopped and stared, for there on a mountain a solitary tree could be seen; it looked most extraordinary. In the valleys there are poplars and willows, which have been planted by the peasants for use afterwards as roofing beams, and there are orchards of fruit-trees, but I never saw a forest, a wood, nor even a spinney. ”

“ And once again the silence of the forest was broken in the night by the sound of human creatures on the prowl. Through the undergrowth which lies thickest at the Lonrai end of the woods, to the left of the intersecting main road, the measured tread of a footfall could be faintly perceived—it was a strange and halting footfall, as of a man walking with a stump.
Behind the secular willow, which stands in the centre of the small clearing beside the stagnant pool in the very heart of this dense portion of the forest, a lonely watcher crouched, waiting. ”

“ I remember well the first time I ever understood that there is a Forest of Arden, and that they who choose may wander through its arched aisles of shade and live at their will in its deep and beautiful solitude; a solitude in which Nature sits like a friend from whose face the veil has been withdrawn, and whose strange and foreign utterance has been exchanged for the most familiar speech. Since that memorable afternoon under the apple trees I have never been far from the Forest, although at times I have lost sight of the line which its foliage makes against the horizon. ”

“ The air was chill, the sun was hidden 264 by old Solidor, and the stream had diminished to a silent rill winding among sear grass and yellowed willows. The valley behind them was vague with mist. The southern boundary of the forest was in sight.
At last the topmost looming crags of the Continental Divide cut the sky-line, and then in the smooth hollow between two rounded grassy summits Berrie halted, and they all silently contemplated the two worlds. To the west and north lay an endless spread of mountains, wave on wave, snow-lined, savage, sullen in the dying light ”

“ Golden sunshine bathed the slopes, planted with Scotch fir, all irregular in chance groups or singly, mingled with silver birch, and it made a harmony in gold and silver and bronze, for the bracken was turning already.
It seems a pity that most of those who come from afar should see the New Forest under its least gracious aspect. Unluckily the holiday time is late summer, just when the full, heavy leafage takes on its most monotonous green, dim and jaded after a dry season, gloomy in a wet one; when flowers are few and birds are silent. ”

“ How to cross this Mountain-wall of the Argonne; or what in the world to do with it?—There are marchings and wet splashings by steep paths, with sackerments and guttural interjections; forcings of Argonne Passes,—which unhappily will not force. Through the woods, volleying War reverberates, like huge gong-music, or Moloch's kettledrum, borne by the echoes; swoln torrents boil angrily round the foot of rocks, floating pale carcasses of men. In vain! Islettes Village, with its church-steeple, rises intact in the Mountain-pass, between the embosoming heights ”

“ Nothing else
would grow, the fir tree might. And it did. To-day the vast extent of
the Landes is almost entirely covered with dark forests in perpetual
verdure.
These have transformed the district, adding not only to the improvement
of its sanitary condition, but creating a new source of wealth. Out of
the boundless vistas of fir trees there ever flows a constant stream of
resin, which brings in large revenues. Passing through the forest by
the railway line from La Mothe to Arcachon, one sees every tree marked
with a deep cut. ”

“ The finest beech-wood is that of Mark Ash. There you may see true beech-forms, the boles spangled with silver scales of lichen, and the roots—more fangs than roots—grasping the earth, feathered with the soft green down of moss.
But not in individual trees lies the beauty of the Forest, but in the masses of wood. There, in the long aisles, settles that depth of shade which no pencil can give, and that colouring which no canvas can retain, as the sunlight pierces through the green web of leaves, flinging, as it sets, a crown of gold round each tree-trunk. ”

“ May 28th.—The most extraordinary blight is now upon the trees that I believe ever was known: it is confined entirely to the oak, and chiefly to the large trees, although in some parts it is extending to the young plantations. The whole of the High Meadow woods and great part of the Forest, particularly Russell’s Enclosure, and where the timber is thick, are entirely stripped of their leaves, and look as if fire had passed through them. Where a beech stands amongst them, it is perfectly green, and the oaks all around quite brown. ”

“ One learns that it takes more than a collection of trees to make a forest, as we know it in this country. Unless they house that spirit of wildness and purity like a temple, they fail to satisfy. In walking to Selborne, I skirted Wolmer Forest, but it had an uninviting look. The Hanger on the hill above Selborne, which remains nearly as it was in White's time,—a thrifty forest of beeches,—I explored, [41] but found it like the others, without any distinctive woodsy attraction—only so much soil covered with dripping beeches, too dense for a park and too tame for a forest. ”

“ Here and there, too, as at Fritham, small farmsteads show their scanty crops of corn, or, as at Alum Green and Queen’s North, green lawns pierce and separate the woods, pastured by herds of cattle, with forest pools white with buckbean, and the little milkwort waving its blue heath on the banks.
These are the main characteristics of the New Forest, and, in some points at least, were the same in the days of the Red King. Nature, when left to herself, even in the course of centuries, changes little. The wild boars, and the wolves, and the red deer, are gone. ”

“ The road makes long curves and zigzags to avoid the heights, but the old track through the trees still remains, and shortens the distance at the expense of a little exertion in climbing.
The wildness increases beyond Eybenstock. The forest descends upon the road, and you walk for an hour at a stretch under the shade of firs, with beech and birch sparsely intermingled, and here and there a stately 49 pine springing from a mighty base to a height far above the rest, the topmost branches edged with gold by the declining sunbeams. ”

“ I may add, as showing the former nature of the woods, that the charcoal found in the barrows, embankments, and the Roman potteries, is made from oak and beech, but principally the latter. Since, too, the deer have been destroyed, young shoots of holly are springing up in all directions, and another generation may, perhaps, see the Forest resembling its old condition. As a proof, beside the entry in Domesday, that the Hordle Cliffs were covered with timber, the fishermen dredging for the septaria in the Channel constantly drag up large boles of oaks, locally known as “mootes.” ”

“ Behind us stands Godshill inclosure, and the Forest with its dark moors and woods. Below winds the Avon, with its orchards nestling on the hill side, stretching its silver coil of waters along the green meadows, the sunlight gleaming on each bend and turn. ”

“ Farther south still, tree-ferns and pines occur; but, speaking broadly, the ranges on the east have beech forest, while the west has pine forest and a sub-tropical flora of its own. The road ziz-zagged in loops down a steep descent above a torrent. Bare, forbidding rocks and screens of loose stones ran up on one side, and presently we arrived at a place where they had all run down in a terrific rock-slide. The road was gone. A forlorn coach and one or two buggies had been abandoned there, but already a narrow track was scratched across the face of the débris. ”