Only, instead of the three heaths of
Surrey and Hants (the same species as those of Scotland), larger and
richer southern heaths cover the grey sands; and notably the delicate
upright spires of the bruyere, or Erica scoparia, which grows full
six feet high, and furnishes from its roots those 'bruyere' pipes,
which British shopkeepers have rechristened 'briar-roots.' Instead,
again, of the Scotch firs of Ascot, the pines are all pinasters
(miscalled P. maritima). Each has the same bent stem, carrying at
top, long, ragged, scanty, leaf-tufts, instead of the straight stem
and dense short foliage of the sturdier Scotchman; and down each stem
runs a long, fresh scar, and at the bottom (in spring at least),
hangs a lip of tin, and a neat earthen pipkin, into which distils
turpentine as clear as glass. The trees have mostly been planted
within the last fifty years, to keep the drifting sands from being
blown away. As timber they are about as valuable as those Jersey
cow-cabbage stalks, of which the curious will at times make walking-
sticks: but as producers of turpentine they have their use, and give
employment to the sad, stunted, ill-fed folk, unhealthy for want of
water, and barbarous from utter loneliness, whose only employment, in
old times, was the keeping ragged flocks about the moors.
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