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I focused on the flora, here more rye mixed with charlock, and more lady’s bedstraw and wild carrot.

The earth was soft and crumbling, with a scattering of the weeds that are found in cultivated fields—fumitory, charlock, pimpernel and mayweed, all growing in the green gloom under the bean leaves.

The summer sun has pulverized and consumed all vegetation, and, but for a few chance patches of thistles, charlock or aramagos, there is nothing that can screen the birds from view.

So I off-saddled and knee-haltered the horse, for there was no oat-hay in the shed for him, and he had to get what picking he could from the old lands, yellow with charlock.

He had purposely selected a way that took them across many of young Whitmarsh’s ill-stocked fields, fields in which sedge and charlock wrote an indictment of neglected drains and half-hearted tillage.