Seven Lectures on the United Kingdom for use in India: Reissued for use in the United KingdomMackinder, Halford John
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Seven Lectures on the United Kingdom for use in India: Reissued for use in the United Kingdom
Mackinder, Halford John
Great Britain
Fruit is grown in large quantity for the markets of the great
town populations. Here in this slide is one of the finest of the
northern fruits, the strawberry, which you probably know. See how
it is coloured, like so many other things northern. And here is yet
another crop of England. The vast cities with their millions of
people--many of them well-to-do--demand in their houses the flowers
of the country. Therefore there are parts of England where not merely
corn and cattle, and not merely fruit, but also flowers are grown for
the supply of the towns. This is the best known of the flowers of
England, the rose, which grows also in other parts of the world, but
is pre-eminently the national emblem of England, and praised as such
in English poetry.
[Sidenote: 48. Hay-stack.]
Let us turn for a moment finally to a side of English life which
is different from all that we know here in the tropics. There are
seasons in Britain, not rainy seasons and dry seasons, but seasons
of heat and of cold. In the winter the vegetation stops growing, and
there is little food in the fields for the animals. Then all the life
of the land, animal and human, must be maintained by foresight, by
the storage of the fruits of summer, or by the import of supplies
from other countries. The cattle are kept alive by means of hay, that
is to say, of grass cut in the summer, dried in the sun, heaped into
hay-stacks, and there preserved until required in the winter. This is
a hay-stack laid by for the winter supply of the animals.
[Sidenote: 49. Beech--Autumn Tints.]
When the hay and the corn have been harvested and the apples have
been gathered and turned to cider, and the roses have bloomed, and
the strawberries have been eaten or boiled to jam, then the summer
wanes, and a change sets in. Day by day, as September and October
pass, the green leaves of the trees gradually turn to all manner of
brilliant hues of red and brown, and presently, as the rains and the
winds increase, they fall and litter all the ground as we see them
here. At last, in November, the trees become naked, and show the
tracery of their branches against the sky.
[Sidenote: 50. Park--Autumn Tints.]
[Sidenote: 51. River Scene with Autumnal Beeches.]
There are few more splendid natural scenes than those of the fall
of the northern year. Let us look at one or two more of them
photographed in colour. This is an English park in the autumn, and
this a wood by a river bank.
[Sidenote: 52. Virginia Creeper.]
[Sidenote: 53. Hughenden Church--Autumn creepers.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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