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An English Country Garden
How many gentle flowers grow
In an English country garden
I'll tell you now of some I know
And those I'll miss I hope you'll pardon
Daffodils, heart's ease and flox
Meadowsweet and lily stalks
Gentain, lupine and tall hollihocks
Roses, foxgloves, snowdrops, forget-me-nots
In an English country garden
How many insects find their home
In an English country garden
I'll tell you now of some I know
Those I miss I hope you'll pardon
Dragonflies, moths and bees
Spiders falling from the trees
Butterflies sway in the mild gentle breeze
There are hedgehogs that roam
And little gnomes
In an English country garden
How many songbirds make their nests
In an English country garden
I'll tell you now of some I know
Those I miss I hope you'll pardon
Bobolink, coo-cooing doves
Robins and the whirlwind thrush
Bluebird, lark, pigeon, nightingale
We all smile in the spring
When the birds all start to sing
In an English country garden
(Sharpe / Jordan)
Okay, so this is not exactly the kind of song you would hear in a popular London or Manchester nightclub, but I thought it would be interesting to post. The flower, insect, and bird vocabulary is particularly strong.
Yeah...right......you never would hear that song anywhere on the British club scene. In fact, I've never heard of it but I like the lyric...sort of. I looked it up on the web and it's there.
Reading through all the things you'd find in an average "English country garden" (I assume that Scottish and Welsh gardens don't count, but there you go...discrimination again so what's new! Ha ha!) ...I don't know too much about flowers and plants but the ones mentioned at least sound familiar...most of them.
Anyway, as for the birds and animals mentioned, I know for sure that some of them would never ever be found in any English (British) garden...country or urban. Two of the birds are American species....bobolink and bluebird. Unless they took a wrong turning somewhere over the Appalachians and flew a few thousand miles off course and got carried over the Atlantic on a Force 8 westerly gale they would never be found in the UK.
As for the bluebird, it was mentioned in a song from WW2 called "The White Cliffs of Dover" in which it says "There'll be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover". Again, impossible...unless they went wildly off course as I say. The nearest things to bluebirds in any English country garden would be the wee blue tits...those cheeky chirpers who hang upside down on hanging nutbaskets or demonstrate great skill and intelligence with their "tiny" bird brains by working out the quickest ways to get to food sources placed deliberately in awkward places simply to test their very high avian IQs.
The lark (woodlark or skylark) is mostly found in woods (woodlark) or over open country (skylark) and the nightingale (only found in Southern England in spring and summer) is found in thickets and copses in woodland and sings through the night as well as the day. They never venture into ECGs unless they're very large with plenty of bushes. Keats went so crazy over the famous melodic song of the nightingale that he wrote an ode to it. So did the Germans ("Es sangt im Busch die Nachtigall im klaren Mondenschein").
Sorry to pick holes in the lyric of this song but I'm sure it's lovely to listen to sometime.....no chance of that in the clubs though as we both agree.
Have your audio tuned and listen to the music and follow the words in this link. The last few lines have been added afterwards I reckon....tongue in cheek reference to Britain's litter problem! As it says, it wasn't me, honest....
http://12121.hostinguk.com/englishgarden.htm
Any song or poem that celbrates nature is one that I would like. Today England is so overpopulated that I wonder how much wildlife still exists there? Even the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area where I live has lost much of its flora and fauna over the past 40 years as more people have moved into the area. Many species of squirrels, frogs, salamanders, centipedes and coral fungi that I knew as a kid growing up here in the 1950's are now gone. Quail and garter snakes are nearly gone too.
About 20 years ago, I saw a nature documentary on PBS which said that almost all of England and Scotland were forested at one time. Today, even only about 1/4 of Scotland is forested with the European wildcat still miraculously holding out there. Wolves, bears and beavers have been gone for two to three centuries.
On a linguistic note, I think it is interesting how English distinguishes between 'garden' and 'orchard' and so does French with 'jardin' and 'verger' but Spanish, at least spoken Spanish, uses the word 'jardÃn' (har-deen) to cover both of these concepts.
<<Today England is so overpopulated that I wonder how much wildlife still exists there? >>
Of course it is a very densely-populated country, but more than 90% of the population lives on 12% of the land. England is *NOT* one big urban sprawl as many people seem to imagine. Most of it is still countryside (although for sure a lot of wildlife has disappeared in the last century or so, but that's a problem in many other places too).
<<Today, even only about 1/4 of Scotland is forested with the European wildcat still miraculously holding out there.>>
I hadn't realized there were still wildcats in Scotland. In England I think we'd shot them all by about two centuries ago. I went walking in the Lake District, Cumbria last year in a place just south of Keswick. There was a mountain stream called Cat Gill (Gill- from Norse I think) and in a guidebook there was an account of "tiger-like" creatures roaming around the area; the last one was killed in 1806.
I'm always surprised by the fact that there are still things with sharp teeth lurking in the US. I'd have thought in a country with over 200 million guns someone would have figured out a use.
http://12121.hostinguk.com/lochlomand.htm
I'm being a wee bit nationalistic by posting this one from the same thread....well, it WAS St Andrew's Day last Wednesday! The pic is of course Loch Lomond with snowcapped beinn Bhreac in the background.
Candy is quite right.....England IS densely populated (early 50m people approx) but the majority of the people live in the conurbations / metro areas and the smaller towns and cities. In the UK a "city" strictly speaking means a town with a cathedral, however small. Dunblane, in Scotland, is a city but has a population of only 8,000....but it has a cathdral. St David's, in Wales, is a city but has a population of only 1,000...but it has a cathedral.
There is plenty of open countryside (gentle countryside, downland and fen, woodlands, or moors and mountains) in England but even so you are never far away from a town/village/civilisation...or motor traffic...the car is ubiquitous everywhere but congestion is in urban areas usually.
Back to the English Country Garden...I checked the words again and two more birds....the tanager and cardinal.....are there but they shouldn't be! Two more American birds which are never seen in the UK, so I reckon the words to that song were written by an American who should have checked through the British Ornithology reference books!
I've found out that the "White Cliffs of Dover" was definitely written by an American....... 6k miles away in California, where I guess bluebirds do fly over cliffs...I don't know for sure. But not in Dover they don't.....as any bling bling Dover chav would tell you: "Nah...there ain't no bluebirds 'ere, mate!"
http://12121.hostinguk.com/wales.htm
I dedicate this one to Andrew, my friend from uni who lives in Wales......a Welshman with a Scottish name...and whom I shall see when I go down to Wales in January.
Nadolig Llawen a Flwyddyn Newydd dda i chwi, Andrew!
(Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, Andrew)
http://12121.hostinguk.com/usatribute.htm
And this is dedicated to all our American friends .....even though some of them drive us bonkers this side of the water.....and NO!...you can't use dollars over here!!!!! Grrrrrrrrr! :-)
<<In the UK a "city" strictly speaking means a town with a cathedral, however small. Dunblane, in Scotland, is a city but has a population of only 8,000....but it has a cathdral. St David's, in Wales, is a city but has a population of only 1,000...but it has a cathedral.>>
Also the only reason why Salford is a city, when its centre is only a mile from Manchester city centre. I think that since WWII, towns have been able to apply for city status without having a cathedral.
Re: "I'm always surprised by the fact that there are still things with sharp teeth lurking in the US. I'd have thought in a country with over 200 million guns someone would have figured out a use."
And indeed they have, Rick. Wolves are all but gone in the lower 48 states; slaughtered mostly in the 1870's. The range of the Grizzly bear has been reduced by more than half. Today, Canada has the most wolves and Grizzly bears in North America by far. I hate to say this as an American, but Canadians were more sensible on several things in history than Americans were. They abolished slavery sooner (1798) and largely avoided conflicts with the Indians as they moved westward (1790-1900). While the Canadian logging industry has sometimes been abusive in the way it operates, overall, Canadians have a better record on preserving the environment than Americans do.
Well, Brennus, Canada doesn't have PEOPLE.
Okay, I'm exaggerating for effect, but they have a fraction of our population, and what they have isn't exactly evenly distributed. And they have still had to import buffalo from the US to bolster their declining stocks.
Plus, as a visiting Canadian wildlife manager once explained to my wildlife management class, the Canadian government has no way to regulate the hunting of endangered species the way ours does; they aren't designed to have that kind of authority. Instead, they can only enforce laws like that through international treaties like the North American Migratory Bird Treaty.
Rick, I'm pretty happy about the fact that we still have our native carnivores: coyotes, wolves, grizzlies, polar bears, brown and black bears, wolverines, martens, ferrets, foxes, mountain lions, bobcats, lynx, alligators, the American crocodile ... jaguars have even been spotted (no pun intended) in Arizona. You can even be kicked to death by moose or gored by deer and elk. Keeps you on your toes in those national parks! (and some people's back yards...)
LOL OMFG WTF jeez Damian you realise that the links are from a BNP site? How ironic after you used to complain about Adam's posts.. and here you giving the link to the BNP.
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