well illustrated by some remarks in Delamer's _The Flower Garden_ (1856)
with reference to that exceedingly beautiful plant, the tutsan. "Tutsan
is a hardy shrubby St. John's-wort, largely employed by gardeners of the
last century; but it has now, for the most part, retired from business,
in consequence of the arrival of more attractive and equally serviceable
newcomers. One or two tutsan bushes may be permitted to help to form a
screen of shrubs, in consideration of the days of auld lang syne."
Fortunately the tutsan is not "retiring from business" in Nature's
garden. It seems to me that, instead of carrying more and more
wildflowers into captivity, it would be much wiser to set at liberty the
many British plants that are now under detention. I would instruct my
gardener (if I had one) to lift very carefully the daphnes, the lilies
of the valley, the tutsans, the cornflowers, the woodruffs, and the rest
of the native clan, and to plant them out, each according to its taste,
by bank or hedgerow, in field, common, or wood.
VIII
PICKING AND STEALING
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies.
TENNYSON.
THERE is, as I have said, a positive contempt in many minds for the
wildflower; that is, for the flower which is regarded as being no one's
"property." But the flora of a country, rightly considered, is very far
from being unowned; it is the property of the people, and when any
species is diminished or extirpated the loss is not private but
national. We have already reached a time, as many botanists think, when
the choicer British flowers need some sort of protection.
That some injury should be caused to our native flora by improved
culture, drainage, building, and the extension of towns, is inevitable;
though these losses might be considerably lessened if there were a more
general regard for natural beauty. But that is all the stronger reason
for discountenancing such damage as is done in mere thoughtlessness, or,
worse, for selfish purposes; and it were greatly to be wished that some
of the good folk who pray that their hands may be kept "from picking and
stealing" would so far widen the scope of their sympathies as to include
the rarer wildflowers.
It cannot be doubted that there is an immense amount of wasteful
flower-picking by children, and also by persons who are old enough to
know better. Nothing is commoner, in Spring, than to see piles of
freshly gathered hyacinths or cowslips abandoned by the roadside; and
many other flowers share the same fate, including, as I have noticed,
the beautiful green-winged meadow orchis. Trippers and holiday-makers
are often very mischievous: I have seen them, for instance, on the
ramparts of Conway Castle, hooking and tearing the red valerian which is
an ornament to the grey old walls. I was told by a friend who lives in a
district where the rare meadow-sage (_salvia pratensis_) is native, that
he is compelled to pluck the blue flowers just before the August
bank-holiday, in order to save the plant itself from being up-rooted and
carried off.
Primroses, abundant as they still are in many places, have nearly
disappeared from others, in consequence of the depredations of
flower-vendors; and there was a time when they were seriously threatened
in the neighbourhood of London because a certain fashionable cult was at
its height. Witness the following "Idyll of Primrose Day" by some
unknown versifier:
How blest was dull old Peter Bell,
Whom Wordsworth sung in days of yore!
A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
Alas! 'tis something more to us;
No longer Nature's meekest flower,
But symbol of consummate Quack,
Who by tall talk and knavish knack
Could plant himself in power.
For his sweet sake we mourn, each spring,
Our lanes and hedgerows robbed and bare,
Our woods despoiled by clumsy clown,
That primrose-tufts may come to town
For tuft-hunters to wear.
And so, on snobbish Primrose Day,
We envy Peter's simple lore:
A primrose, worn with fulsome fuss,
A yellow primrose is to us,
Alas! and something more.
The nurseryman and the professional gardener have also much to answer
for in the destruction of wildflowers. Take the following instance,
quoted from the _Flora of Kent_, with reference to the cyclamen:
"Towards the end of August, 1861, I was shown the native station of this
plant. . . . The people in those parts had found out it was in request,
and had almost entirely extirpated it, digging up the roots, and selling
them for transplantation into shrubberies." In the same work it is
recorded that, when the frog orchis was found in some abundance near
Canterbury, "in a wonderfully short space of time the whole of this
charming colony was dug and extirpated."
Again, if it be permissible to call a spade a spade, what shall be said
of those roving knights of the trowel, the unconscionable rock-gardeners
who ride abroad in search of some new specimen for their collections? A
late writer of very charming books on the subject has feelingly
described how, after the discovery of some long-sought treasure, he
craved a brief spell of repose, a sort of holy calm, before commencing
operations. "We blessed ones," he said, referring to botanists as
contrasted with ornithologists, "may sit down calmly, philosophically,
beside our success, and gently savour all its sweetness, until it is
time to take out the trowel after half an hour of restful rapture in our
laurels."[9]
[Footnote 9: From _My Rock Garden_, by Reginald Farrer, p. 257.]
Other flower-fanciers there are who show much less circumspection. In
Upper Teesdale, where the rare blue gentian (_gentiana verna_) is found
on the upland pastures, I was told that a "gentleman" had come with two
gardeners in a motor, and departed laden with a number of these
beautiful Alpine flowers for transplantation to his private rockery. The
nation which permits such a theft--far worse than stealing from a
private garden--deserves to possess no wildflowers at all; and such a
botanist, if botanist he can be called, deserves to be himself
transplanted, or transported--to Botany Bay.
The same vandalism, in varying degrees, has been at work in every part
of the land, and nothing has yet been done effectively to check it,
whether by legislation, education, or appeal to public opinion: it seems
to be absolutely no one's business to protect what ought to be a
cherished national possession. In no district, perhaps, has the greed of
the collector been more unabashed than among the mountains of Cumberland
and North Wales. "Thanks to the inconsiderate rapacity of the
fern-getter," wrote Canon Rawnsley, in an Introduction to a _Guide to
Lakeland_, "the few rarer sorts are fast disappearing. ... There has
been, in the time past, quite a cruel and unnecessary uprooting of the
rarer ferns and flowers;" and he went on to ask: "When will travellers
learn that the fern by the wayside has a public duty to fulfil?"
All such remonstrances have hitherto been in vain: neither the fear of
God nor the fear of man has deterred the collector from his purpose. It
is pleasant to read that in the seventeenth century a Welsh guide
alleged "the fear of eagles" as a reason for not leading one of the
earliest English visitors to the haunts of Alpine plants on the
precipices of Carnedd Llewelyn; but unfortunately eagles are now as
scarce as nurserymen and fern-filchers are numerous.
IX
ROUND A SURREY CHALK-PIT
I found a deep hollow on the side of a great hill, a green concave,
where I could rest and think in perfect quiet.
RICHARD JEFFERIES.
AS a range of hills, the North Downs are inferior to those of Sussex in
beauty and general interest. Their outline suggests no "greyhound backs"
coursing along the horizon; nor have they that "living garment" of turf,
woven by centuries of pasturing, which Hudson has matchlessly described.
Their northern side is but a gradual slope leading up to a bleak
tableland; and only when one emerges suddenly on their southern front,
with its wide views across the weald, do their glories begin to be
realized. In this steep declivity, facing the sun at noon, there is a
distinctive and unfailing charm, quite unlike that of the corresponding
escarpment of the South Downs: it forms, as it were, an inland riviera,
a sheltered undercliff, green with long waving grasses, and sweet with
marjoram and thyme, a haven where the wandering flower-lover may revel
in glowing sunshine, or take a siesta, if so minded, under that most
friendly of trees the white-beam.
I have memories of many a pious Sabbath spent in this enchanted realm,
with the wind in the beeches for anthem, and for incense the scent of
marjoram enriching the air. To one who knows these fragrant banks it
seems strange that though the wild thyme has been so celebrated by poets
and nature-writers, the marjoram, itself a glorified thyme, has by
comparison gone unsung. We are told in the books that it is a potherb,
an aromatic stimulant, even a remedy for toothache. It may be all that;
but it is something much better, a thing of beauty which might cure the
achings not of the tooth only, but of the heart. Its relatives the
lavender and the rosemary have not more charm. It was the _amaracus_ of
Virgil, the flower on whose sweetness the young Iulus rested, when he
was spirited away by Venus to her secret abode:
She o'er the prince entrancing slumber strows,
And, fondling in her bosom, far away
Bears him aloft to high Idalian bowers,
Where banks of marjoram sweet, in soft repose,
Enfold him, propped on beds of fragrant flowers.[10]
[Footnote 10: _AEneid_, I. 691-4.]
Who could wish for a diviner couch?
Along this range of hills the chalk-pits, used or disused, are frequent
at intervals, some of such size as to form landmarks visible at the
distance of twenty or thirty miles. For a botanist, these
amphitheatres, large or small, have always an attraction; for though
they vary much in the quality of their flowers, and some have little to
show beyond the commoner plants of a calcareous soil, there are a few
which present a surprising array of the choicer kinds; and to light upon
one of these treasure-troves is a joy indeed. I have in mind a large
semicircular disused pit, lying high among the Downs, and bordered with
abrupt grassy banks and coppices of beech, hazel, and fir, where during
the past thirty years I have spent many long summer days, sometimes
writing under the shade of the trees, at other times idling among the
flowers, or watching the snakes that lie basking in the sun, or the
kestrels that may often be seen hovering over the adjacent slopes. For
all their unrivalled openness and sense of space, the Sussex Downs have
no such "sun-trap" to show.
One has heard of "the music of wild flowers."[11] I used to call the
floor of this chalk-pit "the orchistra," so numerous are the orchids
that adorn it. The spotted orchis, the fragrant orchis, the pyramidal
orchis, the bee orchis, the butterfly orchis, and the twayblade--these
six are stationed there within a small compass. The marsh orchis grows
below; the fly orchis is in the neighbouring thickets; in the
beech-woods are the bird's-nest orchis, the broad-leaved helleborine,
with its rare purple variety (_epipactis purpurata_), and the large
white helleborine or egg orchis. A dozen of the family within the
circuit of a short walk! The man orchis seems to be absent, though it
grows in some plenty in similar places on the same line of hills.
[Footnote 11: See note on p. 12.]
Another feature of the chalk-pit is the viper's bugloss. If, as Thoreau
says, there is a flower for every mood of the mind, the viper's bugloss
must surely belong to that mood which is associated with the pomps and
splendours of the high summer noontide. Gorgeous and tropical in its
colouring beyond all other British flowers, as it rears its bristly
green spikes, studded profusely with the pink buds that are turning to
an equally vivid blue, it seems instinct with the spirit of a fiery
summer day. Like other members of the Borage group, it has the warm
southern temperament; its name, too, suits it well; for there is
something viperish in the almost fierce beauty of the plant, as if some
passionate-hearted exotic had sprung up among the more staid and sober
representatives of our native flora. Its richness never palls on us; we
no more tire of its brilliance than of the summer itself.
Akin to the bugloss, though less striking and less abundant, is the
hound's-tongue, with its long downy leaves and numerous purple-red buds
of a sombre and sullen hue that is not often to be matched. It has the
misfortune, so we are told, to smell of mice; were it not for this
hindrance to its career, it might justly be held in high esteem. Among
the larger plants prominent on ledges of the chalk, or in near
neighbourhood, are the mullein, the teazle, the ploughman's-spikenard,
and the deadly nightshade or dwale. The buckthorn is frequent in the
hedges and thickets; and the traveller's-joy is climbing wherever it can
get a hold.
But it is on the shelving banks that skirt the margin of the pit that
the comeliest flowers are to be found; the most beautiful of all,
perhaps, is the rock-rose, a plant so delicate that its small golden
petals will scarcely survive a journey in the vasculum, yet so hardy
that it will flower to the very latest autumn days. The wild strawberry
is creeping everywhere; and the crimson of the grass vetchling may
occasionally be seen among the ranker herbage, to which the stalk seems
to belong; on the shorter turf is the small squinancy-wort, lovely
cousin of the woodruff, its pink and white petals chiselled like the
finest ivory.
The elegant yellow-wort, glaucous and perfoliate, and the handsome pink
centaury, are common on the Downs; so, too, in the late summer, will be
their less showy but always welcome relative, the autumnal gentian: all
three have the firm and erect habit that is a property of the Gentian
tribe. It is one of the many merits of these chalk hills that their
flower-season is a prolonged one. Not the gentians only, with
yellow-wort and centaury, are still vigorous in the autumn, but also the
blue fleabane, clustered bell-flower, vervain, marjoram, basil, and many
labiate herbs. Even in October, when the glory has long departed from
the lowlands of the weald, there remains a brave show of blossom on
these delectable hills.
The Pilgrim's Way, often no more than a grassy track, runs eastward
along the base of the Downs, interrupted here and there by the
encroachment of parks and private estates, which now block the ancient
route to Canterbury; but where Nature has provided so many shrines and
cathedrals of her own, there is no need of any others; certainly I never
lacked a holy place wherein to make my vows, many as were the
pilgrimages on which I started.
On one occasion that I recall, I was joined in my quest by a rather
strange fellow-traveller, a man who met me, coming from the opposite
direction, and eagerly asked whether I had seen anyone on the hillside.
When I assured him that nobody had passed that way, he turned and walked
in my company, and presently confided to me that he was an attendant at
a lunatic asylum, and was in pursuit of an inmate who had escaped an
hour or two before. We went a short distance together, he peering into
the coombes and bushy hollows, as incongruous a pair as could be
imagined; yet it occurred to me that his mission, too, might be
considered a botanical one, since there is a plant named the
madwort--nay, worse, the "German madwort," a title which, in those
feverish war-days, would of itself have justified incarceration.
Nevertheless, as I always sympathize with escaped prisoners (provided,
of course, that it is not _my_ bed under which they conceal
themselves), I was secretly glad that my companion's search was
unavailing.
To return to my chalk-pit: I have mentioned but a few of the many
flowers that belong there; within a mile, or less, others and quite
different ones are flourishing. The rampion, though very local in
Surrey, is found in places along these Downs; so, too, is the strange
yellow bugle, or "ground pine," which is much more like a diminutive
pine than a bugle; also the still stranger fir-rape (_monotropa_), which
lurks in the thickest shade of the beech-woods. That interesting shrub,
the butcher's-broom, or "knee holly," as it is more agreeably called, is
another native: it wears its small flower daintily, like a button-hole,
on the centre of the rigid leaves of deepest green.
A few miles east there is another chalk-pit which, though inferior in
the number of its flowers, has a sprinkling of the man orchis, whose
shape, if there is any likeness at all, seems to suggest a toy man
dangling from a string; a simile which I prefer to that of a dead man
dangling from the gallows. In the woods that crown this pit there is a
profusion of the deadly nightshade; and I noticed that during the
war-summers, when there was a scarcity of belladonna, these plants were
regularly harvested by some enterprising herbalist.
Such are a few of the delights of the Surrey undercliff; but alas! they
are vanishing delights, for the proximity to London has rendered all
this district peculiarly liable to change. How could it be otherwise,
when from the top of the ridge the dome of "smoky Paul's" is visible on
a clear day, and a view of the Crystal Palace, "that dreadful C.P." as
one has heard it called, can seldom be avoided. What havoc has been
wrought in the Surrey hills by the advance of "civilization," may be
learnt by anyone who studies the district with a sixty-year-old _Flora
of Surrey_ for guide. Between Merstham and Godstone, for instance, the
hillsides, which were then free, open ground, have become in the saddest
sense "residential," and the wildflowers have suffered in proportion.
One may still find there the narrow-leaved everlasting pea, "hanging in
festoons on thickets and copses," but other equally valued plants have
disappeared or are disappearing. The marsh helleborine was once
plentiful, it seems, in a swampy situation near Merstham; but when, by
dint of careful trespassing and circumnavigation of barbed wire, I
reached a place which corresponded exactly with that indicated in the
_Flora_, not a single flower was to be seen. Probably some conscientious
gardener had "transplanted" them.
It is impossible to doubt that this process will be continued, and that
every year more wild land will be broken up in the building of villas
and in the making of gardens, with the inevitable shrubberies, gravel
walks, flower-borders, and lawn-tennis courts. The trim parterre with
its "detested calceolarias," as a great nature-lover has described
them, will more and more be substituted for the rough banks that are the
favourite haunts of marjoram and rock-rose. How can the owners of such a
fairyland have the heart to sell it for such a purpose? In Omar's words:
I often wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell.
X
A SANDY COMMON
The common, overgrown with fern, . . .
Yields no unpleasing ramble; there the turf
Smells fresh, and rich in odoriferous herbs
And fungus fruits of earth, regales the sense
With luxury of unexpected sweets.
COWPER.
STRETCHED between the North Downs and the weald, through the west part
of Kent and the length of Surrey, runs the parallel range of greensand,
which in a few places, as at Toys Hill and Leith Hill, equals or
overtops its rival, but is elsewhere content to keep a lower level, as a
region of high open commons and heaths. The light soil of this district
shows a flora as different from that of the chalk hills on its north as
of the wealden clays on its south; so that a botanist has here the
choice of three kingdoms to explore.
In natural beauty, these hills can hardly compare with the Downs. "For
my part," wrote Gilbert White, "I think there is something peculiarly
sweet and amusing in the shapely figured aspect of chalk hills, in
preference to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and
shapeless."[12] The same opinion was held by William Morris, who once
declined to visit a friend of his (from whom I had the story) because he
was living on just such a sandy common in west Surrey, where the
formless and lumpish outline of the land was a pain to the artistic eye.
For hygienic reasons, however, a sandy soil is reputed best to dwell
upon; and I have heard a tale--told as a warning to those who are
over-fastidious in their choice of a site--of a pious old gentleman who,
being determined to settle only where he could be assured of two
conditions, "a sandy soil and the pure gospel," finally died without
either in a Bloomsbury hotel.
[Footnote 12: _Natural History of Selborne_, ch. lvi.]
The gorse and broom in spring, and in autumn the heather, are the marked
features of the sandy Common: the foxglove, too, which has a strong
distaste for lime, here often thrives in vast abundance, and makes a
great splash of purple at the edge of the woods. But even apart from
these more conspicuous plants, the "barren heath," as it is sometimes
called, is well able to hold its own in a flower-lover's affection;
though the absence of the finer orchids, and of some other flowers that
pertain to the chalk, makes it perhaps less exciting as a field of
adventure. In Crabbe's words:
And then how fine the herbage! Men may say
A heath is barren: nothing is so gay.
From May to September the Common is sprinkled with a bright succession
of flowers--the slender _moenchia_, akin to the campions and
chickweeds, dove's-foot, crane's-bill; tormentil; heath bedstraw;
speedwells of several species; autumnal harebell, and golden rod--each
in turn playing its part. Among the aristocracy of this small people are
the bird's-foot, an elfin creature, with tiny pinnate leaves and creamy
crimson-veined blossoms; the modest milkwort, itself far from a rarity,
yet so lovely that it shames us in our desire for the rare; and the
trailing St. John's-wort, which we hail as the beauty of the family,
until presently, meeting with its "upright" sister of the smooth
heart-shaped leaves and the golden red-stained buds, we are forced to
own that to her the name of _hypericum pulcrum_ most rightly belongs.
But the chief prize of the sandy heath is the Deptford pink, a rare
annual of uncertain appearance, which bears the unmistakable stamp of
nobility: it is a red-letter day for the flower-lover when he finds a
small colony of these comely plants on some dry grassy margin. It was on
a bank in Westerham Park that I first met with them; and there they
reappeared, though in lessening numbers, in the two succeeding seasons.
There was also a solitary flower, growing unpicked, strange to say,
close beside one of the most frequented tracks that skirt the
neighbouring Common.
In the woods of beech and fir with which the hill is fringed there are
more fungi than flowers; and here too the "call of the wild" is felt,
though to a feast of a less ethereal order. Fungus hunting is one of the
best of sports, and a joy unknown to those who imagine that the orthodox
"mushroom" of the market is the only wholesome species; and it is worthy
of note that, whereas the true meadow mushroom is procurable during only
a few weeks of the year, the fungus-eater can pursue his quarry during
six or seven months, so great is the variety at his disposal. Among the
delicacies that these woods produce are the red-fleshed mushroom, a
brown-topped warty plant which becomes rufous when bruised; the
gold-coloured chantarelle, often found growing in profusion along bushy
paths and dingles; the big edible boletus, ignored in this country, but
well appreciated on the Continent; and best of all, deserving indeed of
its Latin name, the _agaricus deliciosus_, or orange-milk agaric, so
called because its flesh, when broken, exudes an orange-coloured juice.
It is easy to identify these and many other species with the help of a
handbook, and it therefore seems strange that Englishmen, as compared
with other races, should be prejudiced against the use of this valuable
form of food. As for the country-folk who live within easy reach of such
dainties, yet would rather starve than eat a "toadstool," what can one
say of them?
_O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint!_[13]
[Footnote 13: Thrice blest, if they but knew what joys are theirs!]