"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and
hills,
When, all at once, I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
"Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly
dance."
No such sight could greet the poet's eye here. He might see ten
thousand marsh marigolds, or ten times ten thousand houstonias, but
they would not toss in the breeze, and they would not be sweet-
scented like the daffodils.
It is to be remembered, too, that in the moister atmosphere of
England the same amount of fragrance would be much more noticeable
than with us. Think how our sweet bay, or our pink azalea, or our
white alder, to which they have nothing that corresponds, would
perfume that heavy, vapor-laden air!
In the woods and groves in England, the wild hyacinth grows very
abundantly in spring, and in places the air is loaded with its
fragrance. In our woods a species of dicentra, commonly called
squirrel corn, has nearly the same perfume, and its racemes of
nodding whitish flowers, tinged with pink, are quite as pleasing to
the eye, but it is a shyer, less abundant plant. When our children
go to the fields in April and May, they can bring home no wild
flowers as pleasing as the sweet English violet, and cowslip, and
yellow daffodil, and wallflower; and when British children go to
the woods at the same season, they can load their hands and baskets
with nothing that compares with our trailing arbutus, or, later in
the season, with our azaleas; and, when their boys go fishing or
boating in summer, they can wreathe themselves with nothing that
approaches our pond-lily.
There are upward of thirty species of fragrant native wild flowers
and flowering shrubs and trees in New England and New York, and, no
doubt, many more in the South and West. My list is as follows:--
White violet (VIOLA BLANDA).
Canada violet (VIOLA CANADENSIS).
Hepatica (occasionally fragrant).
Trailing arbutus (EPIGÆA REPENS).
Mandrake (PODOPHYLLUM
PELTATUM).
Yellow lady's-slipper (CYPRIPEDIUM
PARVIFLORUM).
Purple lady's-slipper (CYPRIPEDIUM
ACAULE).
Squirrel corn (DICENTRA CANADENSIS).
Showy orchis (ORCHIS SPECTABILIS).
Purple fringed-orchis (HABENARIA
PSYCODES).
Arethusa (ARETHUSA BULBOSA).
Calopogon (CALOPOGON
PULCHELLUS).
Lady's-tresses (SPIRANTHES CERNUA).
Pond-lily (NYMPHÆA ODORATA).
Wild rose (ROSA NITIDA).
Twin-flower (LINNÆA BOREALIS).
Sugar maple (ACER SACCHARINUM)
Linden (TILIA AMERICANA).
Locust-tree (ROBINIA PSEUDACACIA).
White alder (CLETHRA ALNIFOLIA).
Smooth azalea (RHODODENDRON
ARBORESCENS).
White azalea (RHODODENDRON
VISCOSUM).
Pinxter-flower (RHODODENDRON
NUDIFLORUM).
Yellow azalea (RHODODENDRON
CALENDULACEUM),
Sweet bay (MAGNOLIA GLAUCA).
Mitchella vine (MITCHELLA REPENS).
Sweet coltsfoot (PETASITES PALMATA).
Pasture thistle (CNICUS PUMILUS).
False wintergreen (PYROLA
ROTUNDIFOLIA).
Spotted wintergreen (CHIMAPHILIA
MACULATA).
Prince's pine (CHIMAPHILIA
UMBELLATA).
Evening primrose (NOTHERA
BIENNIS).
Hairy loosestrife (STEIRONEMA
CILIATUM).
Dogbane (APOCYNUM).
Ground-nut (APIOS TUBEROSA).
Adder's-tongue pogonia (POGONIA
OPHIOGLOSSOIDES).
Wild grape (VITIS CORDOFOLIA).
Horned bladderwort (UTRICULARIA
CORNUTA).
The last-named, horned bladderwort, is perhaps the most fragrant
flower we have. In a warm, moist atmosphere, its odor is almost
too strong. It is a plant with a slender, leafless stalk or scape
less than a foot high, with two or more large yellow hood or helmet
shaped flowers. It is not common, and belongs pretty well north,
growing in sandy swamps and along the marshy margins of lakes and
ponds. Its perfume is sweet and spicy in an eminent degree. I
have placed in the above list several flowers that are
intermittently fragrant, like the hepatica, or liver-leaf. This
flower is the earliest, as it is certainly one of the most
beautiful, to be found in our woods, and occasionally it is
fragrant. Group after group may be inspected, ranging through
all shades of purple and blue, with some perfectly white, and no
odor be detected, when presently you will happen upon a little
brood of them that have a most delicate and delicious fragrance.
The same is true of a species of loosestrife growing along streams
and on other wet places, with tall bushy stalks, dark green leaves,
and pale axillary yellow flowers (probably European). A handful of
these flowers will sometimes exhale a sweet fragrance; at other
times, or from another locality, they are scentless. Our evening
primrose is thought to be uniformly sweet-scented, but the past
season I examined many specimens, and failed to find one that was
so. Some seasons the sugar maple yields much sweeter sap than in
others; and even individual trees, owing to the soil, moisture, and
other conditions where they stand, show a great difference in this
respect. The same is doubtless true of the sweet-scented
flowers. I had always supposed that our Canada violet--the tall,
leafy-stemmed white violet of our Northern woods--was odorless,
till a correspondent called my attention to the contrary fact. On
examination I found that, while the first ones that bloomed about
May 25 had very sweet-scented foliage, especially when crushed in
the hand, the flowers were practically without fragrance. But as
the season advanced the fragrance developed, till a single flower
had a well-marked perfume, and a handful of them was sweet indeed.
A single specimen, plucked about August 1, was quite as fragrant as
the English violet, though the perfume is not what is known as
violet, but, like that of the hepatica, comes nearer to the odor of
certain fruit trees.
It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of our sugar maple
are sweet-scented; the perfume seems to become stale after a few
days: but pass under this tree just at the right moment, say at
nightfall on the first or second day of its perfect inflorescence,
and the air is laden with its sweetness; its perfumed breath falls
upon you as its cool shadow does a few weeks later.
After the linnæa and the arbutus, the prettiest sweet-scented
flowering vine our woods hold is the common mitchella vine, called
squaw-berry and partridge-berry. It blooms in June, and its twin
flowers, light cream-color, velvety, tubular, exhale a most
agreeable fragrance.
Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the European, and many
of ours are fragrant. The first to bloom in the spring is the
showy orchis, though it is far less showy than several others. I
find it in May, not on hills, where Gray says it grows, but in low,
damp places in the woods. It has two oblong shining leaves, with
a scape four or five inches high strung with sweet-scented, pink-
purple flowers. I usually find it and the fringed polygala in
bloom at the same time; the lady's-slipper is a little later. The
purple fringed-orchis, one of the most showy and striking of all
our orchids, blooms in midsummer in swampy meadows and in marshy,
grassy openings in the woods, shooting up a tapering column or
cylinder of pink-purple fringed flowers, that one may see at quite
a distance, and the perfume of which is too rank for a close room.
This flower is, perhaps, like the English fragrant orchis, found in
pastures.
Few fragrant flowers in the shape of weeds have come to us from the
Old World, and this leads me to remark that plants with sweet-
scented flowers are, for the most part, more intensely local, more
fastidious and idiosyncratic, than those without perfume. Our
native thistle--the pasture thistle--has a marked fragrance, and it
is much more shy and limited in its range than the common Old World
thistle that grows everywhere. Our little, sweet white violet
grows only in wet places, and the Canada violet only in high, cool
woods, while the common blue violet is much more general in its
distribution. How fastidious and exclusive is the cypripedium!
You will find it in one locality in the woods, usually on high, dry
ground, and will look in vain for it elsewhere. It does not go in
herds like the commoner plants, but affects privacy and solitude.
When I come upon it in my walks, I seem to be intruding upon some
very private and exclusive company. The large yellow cypripedium
has a peculiar, heavy, oily odor.
In like manner one learns where to look for arbutus, for
pipsissewa, for the early orchis; they have their particular
haunts, and their surroundings are nearly always the same. The
yellow pond-lily is found in every sluggish stream and pond, but
NYMPHÆA ODORATA requires a nicer adjustment of conditions, and
consequently is more restricted in its range. If the mullein were
fragrant, or toadflax, or the daisy, or blue-weed, or goldenrod,
they would doubtless be far less troublesome to the agriculturist.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule I have here indicated,
but it holds in most cases. Genius is a specialty: it does not
grow in every soil; it skips the many and touches the few; and the
gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like
beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.
"Do honey and fragrance always go together in the flowers? "Not
uniformly. Of the list of fragrant wild flowers I have given, the
only ones that the bees procure nectar from, so far as I have
observed, are arbutus, dicentra, sugar maple, locust, and linden.
Non-fragrant flowers that yield honey are those of the raspberry,
clematis, sumac, white oak, bugloss, ailanthus, goldenrod, aster,
fleabane. A large number of odorless plants yield pollen to the
bee. There is nectar in the columbine, and the bumblebee sometimes
gets it by piercing the spur from the outside as she does with
dicentra. There ought to be honey in the honeysuckle, but I have
never seen the hive-bee make any attempt to get it.