The honeysuckle outside the front door of the house had to give way after about 20 years of useful life. It not only enhanced the look of the place, for it came in a lovely semi-circular sweep over the door, but it perfumed the air for months. Moreover, for three or four years it was graced in summer by a flycatcher and its nest. It is a summer immigrant, not spectacular in its plumage but has "an agile, almost ballet-like, acrobatic flight", according to Cabot. And well observed as it performs over the river, when fly-life abounds. But back to the nest. It was almost directly over the front door, in the honeysuckle, and the nesting mother bird gazed clearly and fearlessly into your eye as you passed in and out. Not a tremor or flicker. Then she quit, or died, and while flycatchers were around the house each year, none came to the honeysuckle to nest. H. E. Bates, the English writer, puts it: "The honeysuckle rich and sun-coloured, the flower-head a lovely and fantastic clustering of many flowers in one, a cornucopia of softest amber and cream and ruby, with the scent of heaven." He goes on to say that it could be known as the tree that never rested. "For the flowers have scarcely been replaced by the shining cherry-coloured seeds before the vine is breaking into new leaf again, so that often in midwinter the honeysuckle is the true evergreen of the woods".
From experience, not every honeysuckle bears a crop of those shining, cherry-coloured seeds. According to the books, they demand moisture, and in dry summers the buds may actually shrivel before they open. It is best, if you can, to place them in moist soil where they catch the evening sun. So writes Val Bourne in a recent Country- man. They need shade at the roots and, the same writer has it, "wet summers have their own rewards." Woodbine is, of course, another name for it. And, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania says to Bottom: "Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms ... So doth the woodbine, the sweet honeysuckle, gently en- twist." Woodbine, of course, in earlier times meant only one thing to young boys who dared to smoke. It was the name of a cigarette which, in the long ago, cost 2d. for five, in a paper, not cardboard, packet.
The honeysuckle in the first line is not gone forever. It has become too heavy even to be held by two props, but from what is left, it will rise again. Y