The Wilderness (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from The Wilderness

To the entomologist the wilderness would be a perfect paradise, for it is the breeding place of many things - not all loved by the ordinary mortal. Many species of ants have their homes down there; and paper wasps love to make their wonderful many-celled nests on the old fruit trees.

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Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from The Wilderness

Once, long ago, part of it was garden, and the clearing between the regums and ironbarks was planted with fruit trees and roses; but the gardener went the way all flesh, and those who came after him did not have the same love for the garden. Now the bush has reclaimed its own, and roses and fruit trees are half hidden by the tangle of wild things which have gradually crept over them. Each spring the fruit blossoms still shine out on the unpruned trees - all the lovelier for their disorder and mingle with the gold of the wattles; myriads of undisturbed bulbs - ixias, freesias and sparaxis - send up their blooms among the long swordgrass, outrivalling the blooms in my own well-worked garden beds.

Lovely as the bush-girt garden must have been in its orderly days, it now holds joys undreamed of then. With the creeping return of the wattles and tecoma, the mistletoe and hardenbergia, have come back many of the shy living creatures which had been driven away by the gardening; and now that there is no more digging and planting to disturb them they live as happily as if they were a hundred miles away from men and houses, instead of in the midst of a popular suburb.

Fortunately the wilderness is not a desirable building allotment. The little creek which bisects it makes the site too damp for a house, and so no ruthless builder casts a speculative eye upon it. But the creek is an attraction for numberless creatures - birds, butterflies, bandicoots, frogs, and myriads of those tiny living things which we carelessly group together as "wogs."

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.