The Amateur Nature Lover

It is possible that an education entirely urban is not the best
conceivable preparation for descriptive articles upon the country. On
the other hand, your professional nature-lover is sometimes a little
over-familiar with his subject. He knows the names of all the things,
and he does not spare you. Besides, he is subtle. The prominent features
are too familiar to him, and he goes into details. What respectable
townsman, for instance, knows what "scabiosa" is? It sounds very
unpleasant. Then the professional nature-lover assumes that you know
trees. No Englishman can tell any tree from any other tree, except a
very palpable oak or poplar. So that we may at least, as an experiment,
allow a good Londoner to take his unsophisticated eyes out into the
sweet country for once, and try his skill at nature-loving, though his
botany has been learned over the counter of flower-shops, and his
zoology on Saturday afternoons when they have the band in the Gardens.
He makes his way, then, over by Epsom Downs towards Sutton, trying to
assimilate his mood to the proper flavour of appreciation as he goes,
and with a little notebook in the palm of his hand to assist an
ill-trained memory. And the burthen of his song is of course the autumn
tints.

The masses of trees towards Epsom and Ewell, with the red houses and
Elizabethan façades peeping through their interstices, contain, it would
seem, every conceivable colour, except perhaps sky-blue; there are
brilliant yellow trees, and a kind of tree of the most amazing gamboge
green, almost the green of spring come back, and tan-coloured trees,
deep brown, red, and deep crimson trees. Here and there the wind has
left its mark, and the grey-brown branches and their purple tracery of
twigs, with a suggestion of infinite depth behind, show through the
rents in the leafy covering. There are deep green trees--the amateur
nature-lover fancies they may be yews--with their dense warm foliage
arranged in horizontal masses, like the clouds low down in a sunset; and
certain other evergreens, one particularly, with a bluish-green covering
of upstanding needles, are intensely conspicuous among the flame tints
around. On a distant church tower, and nearer, disputing the possession
of a gabled red house with a glowing creeper, is some ivy; and never is
the perennial green of ivy so delightful as it is now, when all else is
alight with the sombre fire of the sunset of the year....

The amateur nature-lover proceeds over the down, appreciating all this
as hard as he can appreciate, and anon gazing up at the grey and white
cloud shapes melting slowly from this form to that, and showing lakes,
and wide expanses, and serene distances of blue between their gaps. And
then he looks