Excerpt from The Roll of the Seasons: A Book of Nature Essays The natural year is a ring which can be said to begin and to end nowhere. The diarist is most likely to open his notes on the first of January, because that is the day on which his artificial year opens. As soon as the winter solstice is past we look for signs of waking on the part of flowers and more animate creatures, yet many of them begin their new round of life as soon as the hush of autumn has fallen. The time of the aconite's high summer is commonly called winter. Spring, according to the calendar, does not come till after the snowdrop has blossomed and set its seed. Summer isthe autumn of a very large part of the floral world and the winter of many spring insects. 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.