step, on to the escarpment that overlooks the weald, and at one of the
finest viewpoints in Kent or Surrey; but the trees were felled during
the war by Portuguese woodmen imported for that lamentable purpose. The
spot is remembered by me for another reason; for there, in the years
before the madness of Europe, used to sit almost daily a very aged man,
whose home was on the hillside close by, and who was brought out, by his
own wish, that he might spend his declining days not in moping by a
kitchen fire, but in gazing across the wide expanse of weald, where all
the landmarks were familiar to him, and of which he seemed never to
weary. No more truly devout old age could have been desired; for there
was no mistaking his genuine love for what Richard Jefferies called "the
pageant of summer," the open-air panorama of the seasons, as observed
from that heathery watch-tower. The only cloud on his horizon, so to
speak, was the flock of aeroplanes which even then were beginning to mar
the sky's calmness: of these he would sagely remark that "if man had
been intended to fly, the Almighty would have given him wings." Had the
old philosopher known to what hellish uses those engines were presently
to be put, he might have wondered still more at such thwarting of the
divine intent.
Of sandpits there are several on the Common, and their disused borders
are favourite haunts for wildflowers. The "least" cudweed, a slender
wisp of a plant, is native there; the small-flowered crane's-bill, which
is liable to be confounded with the dove's-foot; also one or two curious
aliens, such as the Canadian fleabane, and the Norwegian _potentilla_,
which resembles the common cinquefoil but has smaller flowers.
But what most allured me to the spot was the sheep's scabious, or, as it
is more prettily named in the Latin, _Jasione montana_, a delightful
little plant, baffling alike in name, form, and colour. It is called a
scabious, yet is not one. It is classed as a campanula, and seen through
a lens is found to be not one but many campanulas, a number of tiny
bells united in a single head. Then its hue--was there ever tint more
elusive, more indefinable, than that of its many petals? Is it grey, or
blue, or lavender, or lilac, or what? We only know that the flower is
very beautiful as it blooms on sandy bank or roadside wall.
At the side of a small plantation that borders the heath there thrives
the alien small-flowered balsam, which, like some of its handsomer
kinsfolk, seems to be quickly extending its range. Near the same spot I
noticed several years ago, on a winter day, a patch of large soft
pale-green leaves, which at a hasty glance I took to be those of the
scented colt's-foot; but when I passed that way in the following spring
I was surprised to see that several long stalks, bearing bright yellow
composite flowers, had risen from the mass of foliage. It proved to be
the leopard's-bane, probably an "escape" from some neighbouring garden,
but already well established and thriving like any native.
But the Common does not consist wholly of dry ground; in one place, near
the centre of the golf-course, there is a marshy depression, and in it a
small pond where the water is a foot or two deep in winter, but in a hot
summer almost disappears. Here a double discovery awaits the inquirer.
The muddy pool is full of one of the rarer mints--pennyroyal--and with
it grows the curious _helosciadium inundatum_, or "least marsh-wort," a
small umbelliferous plant which has more the habit and appearance of a
water crowfoot, its lower leaves being cut in fine hair-like segments.
Nor do the fields and lanes that adjoin the heath lack their distinctive
charm. The orpine, or "live-long," a handsome purple stonecrop, is not
uncommon by the hedgeside; and the lovely _geranium striatum_, or
striped crane's-bill, an occasional straggler from gardens, has made for
itself a home; a hardy little adventurer it is, and one hopes it may yet
win a place among British flowers, as many a less desirable immigrant
has done. Poppies and corn-marigolds are a wonder of red and gold in the
cultivated fields, the poppies as usual looking their best (if
agriculturists will pardon the remark) when they have a crop of wheat
for a background. The queer little knawel springs up among spurrey and
parsley-piert; and in one locality is the lesser snapdragon, which
always commands attention, partly for its uncommonness, and partly as a
scion of the romantic race of _Antirrhinum_, which has a fascination not
for children only, but for all lovers of the quaint.
I have mentioned the golf-course. To many a Common the golfers are
becoming what the builders are to the Downs--invaders who, by the
trimming of grass and cutting down of bushes, are turning the natural
into the artificial, and appropriating for the use of the few the
possession of the many. To everyone his recreation ground; but are not
the golf clubs getting rather more than their portion?
XI
QUAINTNESS IN FLOWERS
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes.
MILTON.
I SPOKE just now of a love of the quaint. Quaintness, though it may
exist apart from beauty, is often associated with it, and, unlike
grotesqueness, has a pleasurable interest for the spectator. In flowers
it is usually suggested by some abnormality of shape, as in the
snapdragon; less frequently, as in the fritillary, by a singular effect
of colouring. Perhaps it is to the orchis group that one would most
confidently apply the word; for they arrest attention not so much by
their beauty as by their strangeness: one of them, indeed, the dwarf
orchis, is undeniably beautiful, while another, the bird's-nest, is as
ugly as a broom-rape; the others, if one tried to find a comprehensive
epithet, might fairly be described as quaint.
This quality in the orchids is not due solely to the odd likeness which
some of them present to certain insects; for, as far as British species
are concerned, the similarity, with a few exceptions, is somewhat
fanciful. If it be granted that the fly, the bee, and the spider orchis
are justly named--though even in these the resemblance is not always
recognized when pointed out--it is no less true that one looks in vain
for the semblance of a "butterfly," or of a "frog," in the plants that
are so entitled, and it takes some ingenuity to discover the "man" in
_aceras anthropophora_, or the "egg" in the white helleborine. But there
is a charming quaintness in nearly all members of the family, owing
largely to the peculiar structure of the lower lip of the corolla or the
unusual length of the spur.
The very name of the snapdragon is a proof of its hold upon the
imagination: what mediaeval romance and unfailing charm for children--and
for adults--is conveyed in the word! The plant is at its best when clad
in royal hue of purple; the white robe also has its glory; but the
intermediate forms, striped and mottled, that are so fancied in gardens,
are degenerates from a noble type. Seen on the walls of some ancient
ruin, the snapdragon is a wonder and a delight; it is to be regretted
that its place is now so often usurped by the red valerian, in
comparison a mere upstart and pretender. The lesser snapdragon or
calf's-snout, with the toadflaxes and fluellens, shares in the
characteristic quaintness of its tribe.
I will next instance the "perfoliates," plants not confined to any one
order, but alike in having a stem which passes midway through the leaf
or pair of leaves, a most engaging curiosity of structure. It is by
this peculiarity that the yellow-wort, a gentian with glaucous foliage
and blossoms like "patines of bright gold," mainly wins its popularity.
But the quaintest of perfoliates is the hare's-ear, or "thorow-wax," as
it used to be called, of which, as Gerarde wrote, "every branch grows
thorow every leaf, making them like hollow cups or saucers." The
thorow-wax owes its attractiveness to these singular glaucous leaves,
which might be compared with an artist's palette; in some measure, also,
to the sharp-pointed bracts by which the minute yellow flowers are
enfolded--features that lend it a distinction which many much more
beautiful plants do not possess.
From no catalogue of quaint plants could the butterwort be omitted.
"Mountain-sanicle" was its old name; and all climbers are acquainted
with it, as it studs the wet rocks on the lower hillsides with pale
green or yellowish leaves like starfish on a seashore. Its
flowering-season is short, but full of interest, for lo! from its centre
there rise in June one or two long and dainty stems, each bearing at its
extremity a drooping purple flower that might at first glance be taken
for a violet--a violet springing from a starfish!
It is a long step from these conspicuous examples of the quaint to the
small and modest moschatel, a hedge-flower which is likely to go
unobserved unless it be made a special object of inquiry. _Adoxa_, "the
unknown to fame," is its Greek title; but if it has little claim to
beauty in the ordinary sense, there is no slight charm in its delicate
configuration, and in the whimsical arrangement of its five slender
flower-heads--a terminal one, facing upwards, supported by four lateral
ones, with a resemblance to the faces of a clock; whence its not
inappropriate nickname, "the clock-tower." A fairy-like little belfry it
is, whose chimes must be listened for, if at all, in the early spring,
for it hastens to get its flowering finished before it is overgrown by
the rank herbage of the roadside.
There are many other flowers that might claim a place in this chapter,
such as the sundews and the bladderworts; the mimulus and ground pine;
the samphire and sea-rocket; the mullein and the teazle; and not least,
the herb Paris, with that large quadruple "love-knot" into which its
leaves are fashioned. But it must suffice to speak of one more.
The fritillary, which shall close the list, is quaint to the point of
being bizarre: its various names bear witness to the freakishness of its
apparel--"guinea-flower," "turkey-hen," "chequered lily,"
"snake's-head," and so forth. It was aptly described by Gerarde as
"chequered most strangely. . . . Surpassing the curiousest painting that
art can set down"; and in addition to this gorgeous colouring, the
bell-like shape and heavy poise of its flower-heads contribute to the
striking effect. From Gerarde to W. H. Hudson, who has portrayed it
very beautifully in his _Book of a Naturalist_, the fritillary has been
fortunate in its chroniclers; in its name, which it shares with a
handsome family of butterflies, it can hardly be said to have been
fortunate. For apart from the consideration that it is no great honour
to a fine insect or flower to be likened to that instrument of human
folly, a dicebox (_fritillus_), there is the practical difficulty of
pronouncing the word as the dictionaries tell us it must be pronounced,
with the accent on the first syllable; and not the dictionaries only,
but the poets, as in Arnold's oft-quoted but very cacophonous line:
I know what white, what purple fritillaries. . . .
Why must so quaintly charming a flower be so barbarously named that
one's jaw is well-nigh cracked in articulating it?
XII
HERTFORDSHIRE CORNFIELDS
A gaily chequered, heart-expanding view,
Far as the circling eye can shoot around,
Unbounded tossing in a flood of corn.
THOMSON.
THAT part of Hertfordshire where the Chiltern Hills, after curving
proudly round from Tring to Dunstable, and almost rivalling the South
Downs in shapeliness, die away at their north-east extremity, over
Hitchin, to a bare expanse of ploughland, has the aspect of a broad
plain swept by all winds of heaven, but is found, when explored, to be
by no means devoid of charm. There, by a paradox, the very extent of the
great hedgeless cornfields, reclaimed from the wild, gives the landscape
a sort of wildness; it is in fact the district whence the Royston crow
got its name, that hooded outlaw to whose survival a wide tract of open
country was indispensable; and there is a pleasure in wandering over it
which is unguessed by the traveller who rushes through in an express to
Cambridge, and marvels at the tameness of the land.
The wildflowers of cultivated fields are as distinctive as those of
heath or hillside. It would be difficult to name any two more beautiful
"weeds" than the succory and the corn "blue-bottle"--the light blue and
the dark blue; both have deservedly won their "blues"--and when to these
is added the corn-cockle (_lychnis githago_), the rich veined purple of
its petals set off by the long pointed green sepals and leaves, what
handsomer trio could be wished? Unhappily these flowers have become much
scarcer than they used to be; but in the Hertfordshire fields they are
still frequently to be admired.
The intensive culture of which we nowadays hear so much has this
drawback for the botanist, that it is robbing him of some plants which
he is very loth to lose. The most striking of these, perhaps, is that
quaint "perfoliate" of which I have already spoken, the thorow-wax or
hare's-ear, which in Gerarde's time was so plentiful in the wheatland as
to be what he calls its "infirmitie": now it is decidedly rare. I have
never been so fortunate (except in dreams) as to see it _in situ_; but I
have for several years grown it from the seed of a specimen gathered by
a friend in the cornfields near Baldock, and have always been impressed
by its elegance. It is a delicate and fastidious plant, thriving only,
as I have noticed, when the conditions are quite favourable: this may
account for its steady diminution in many counties, while coarser and
hardier weeds are legion.
A more abiding "infirmitie" of some Hertfordshire cornfields is the
crow-garlic, a wild onion whose pink umbels often surmount the crop in
hundreds. Wishing to learn their local name, I once asked a farm-hand at
Letchworth what he called the flowers. After gazing at them sternly, he
said to me: "They're _not_ flowers. They're a disease." I suggested that
whatever their demerits might be from the point of view of an
agriculturist, they must, strictly speaking, be regarded as flowers:
this he grudgingly conceded; but as if regretting to have made so large
an admission, he called after me, as I left him: "They're a disease."
His pertinacity on this point reminded me of the reaffirmations of Old
Kaspar, in Southey's poem, "After Blenheim":
"Nay, nay" ... quoth he,
"It was a famous victory."
The crow-garlic, as it happens, is rather a pretty plant; and the
opprobrious name "disease" might be much more suitably assigned to the
tall broom-rape, an unwholesome-looking parasite which lives rapaciously
at the expense of the great knapweed, and is occasionally met with in
the district of which I am speaking.
An extremely local umbellifer, said to have been formerly so abundant
about Baldock that pigs were turned out to fatten on its roots, is the
bulbous caraway, which looks like a larger edition of the common
earth-nut. None of the country-folk whom I questioned seemed to have any
knowledge of its uses; from which it would appear that its virtues,
like those of many once famous herbs, have been forgotten in these
sceptical modern times. It is well, perhaps, that _carum bulbocastanum_
should be saved from the pigs; for in that unlovely region its white
umbels serve to lighten up the monotony of the waysides.
An unexpected discovery is always welcome. In a waste field, about a
mile from Royston, I once found a tall branching plant with an abundance
of yellow cruciferous flowers, which I should not have recognized but
for the fact that a year or two previously my friend Edward Carpenter
had sent me a specimen from Corsica. It was the woad, famous as the
source of the blue dye with which the ancient Britons stained
themselves. A mere "casual" in Hertfordshire, it is said to be
established in a few chalk-quarries near Guildford and elsewhere.
Thus far I have spoken of none but field flowers; but the district does
not consist wholly of cultivated land, for even in that wilderness of
tillage there are oases which have never felt the plough, and where the
flora is of a different order. Therfield Heath, near Royston, is one of
them, a grassy slope where the handsome purple milk-vetch is plentiful,
and one may find, though in less abundance, the sprightly field
fleawort, which seems more familiar as an ornament of the high chalk
Downs.
Nor are water springs wanting in the bare ploughlands. The little river
Ivel, which leaps suddenly to light near Baldock, and thence races
northward to join the Bedfordshire Ouse, is a clear trout-stream by
whose banks it is pleasant (whatever the trespass notices may threaten)
to wander, and to watch the quick-glancing fish. At the hamlet of
Radwell, in a moist copse, there is a patch of the rare monk's-hood, a
poisonous flower of which later mention will be made. A joint tributary
of the Ouse, and not less inviting, is the oddly named Hiz, which has
its source on Oughton Common, a boggy flat near Hitchin, where both the
butterwort and the grass of Parnassus are recorded as having grown and
may perchance be growing still: as for the marsh orchis, one cannot
cross the Common without seeing it.
Then at Ickleford, a village on the banks of the Hiz, there is a pond
which has been "occupied" (to use a military term) by the water-soldier,
a stout aquatic which takes its name from the rigid swordlike leaves
enclosing the three-petaled flowers. Peculiar to the eastern counties,
this water-soldier is said to have been introduced at Ickleford over
half a century ago; and there it now makes a fine array, having thriven
wonderfully in spite of the worn-out pots and pans, and other refuse,
for which, in Hertfordshire as elsewhere, the nearest pool or stream is
thought a fit receptacle.
A mile or two west of the source of the Hiz at Oughton Head, stands High
Down, where begins or ends, according to the direction of the wayfarer,
the northern escarpment of the Chilterns, at this point crossed,
recrossed, and crossed again, by the curiously indented boundary-line
between Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire; and here on the steep front of
the Pirton and Barton hills, in the one county or the other, may be seen
in early spring the most beautiful of English anemones, the
pasque-flower. On the few occasions when I have visited the place the
summer was well advanced, and I was too late for that gorgeous flower; I
had to content myself with the pyramidal orchis at the foot of the
hills, and with great blossoming sheets of white candytuft in the fields
above.
For all these excursions there is no better starting-point than
Letchworth, first of Garden Cities, which has sprung rapidly into being
from what was until recent years an unadorned expanse of agricultural
ground with Norton Common as its centre. This Common, originally a bit
of wild fen, now almost surrounded by cottages and gardens, is to the
nature-lover the most attractive feature of Letchworth; and though its
flora has inevitably suffered from the inroads of the juvenile
population, it can still show such plants as the marsh orchis, the small
valerian, and the rare sulphur-coloured trefoil. It is watered by a
diminutive river--the unceremonious might say ditch--known as the Pix,
whose current, like that of the Cam, would almost seem to be determined
by the direction of the wind, but is reputed to flow northward, to join
its fleeter brethren, the Hiz and the Ivel, in their course to the
Ouse.
I mention this rather forlorn stream, because it has sometimes occurred
to me that, as an attempt is made to protect the wild birds on Norton
Common, it might be expedient to lend a helping hand also to the
flowers, or even to embellish the banks of the Pix (and so to re-invite
the pixies to sport thereby), with a few hardy riverside plants, such as
comfrey, tansy, hemp-agrimony, purple loosestrife, and yellow
loosestrife, which were probably once native there, and would almost
certainly flourish in such a spot. Is it legitimate thus to come to the
rescue of wild nature? That is a question on which botanists are not
quite agreed, and its consideration shall therefore be reserved for the
following chapter.
XIII
THE SOWER OF TARES
An enemy hath done this.
THE sowing of wildflowers is deprecated by some botanists, presumably as
an interference with natural processes, an unauthorized attempt to play
Providence in the vegetable kingdom; but the subject is one that seems
to call for fuller discussion than it usually receives.
We are told in the parable that the man who sowed tares among the wheat
was an enemy; and certainly if there was an intention to injure the crop
the expression was not too strong. But I have sometimes wondered whether
the reprehensible act may not have been that of some botanical
enthusiast, who, loving wildflowers not wisely but too well, was trying
to save from extinction some rare weed of the cornfields which was
disappearing under improved methods of culture.
That this way of augmenting the flora of a country is nowadays not
uncommon may be guessed from the frequent occurrence in botanical works
of the comment "probably planted." Only a few pages back, I referred to
the case of a pond in Hertfordshire now strongly held by a battalion of
water-soldiers, the descendants of imported plants. There is evidence,
too, that the practice has occasionally been indulged in by naturalists
of great distinction, an amusing instance being that of the venerable
and much-respected Gerarde, whose description of the peony as growing
wild near Gravesend drew from his editor, Johnson, the following remark:
"I have beene told that our author himselfe planted the peionie there,
and afterwards seemed to finde it there by accident; and I doe believe
it was so, because none before or since have ever seene or heard of it
growing wilde in any part of this kingdome."[14]
[Footnote 14: _The Herball_, by J. Gerarde. Enlarged and amended by
Thomas Johnson, 1636.]
Again, it is stated in Canon Vaughan's _Wild Flowers of Selborne_ that
Gilbert White himself "was once guilty of this misdemeanour." He sowed,
not tares in wheat, but seeds of the grass of Parnassus in the Hampshire
bogs, and sowed them according to his own statement unsuccessfully; it
would appear, however, from what Canon Vaughan discovered that White was
"more successful than he imagined." However that may be, the question
that arises is whether a judicious extension of the range of wildflowers
by the agency of man is really a thing to be censured. May not a
flower-lover occasionally sow his "wild oats"?
It must be admitted that the objections to such a practice are not
retrospective, for if it be a misdemeanour, it is one that is condoned,
perhaps hallowed, by time. For as it is impossible to draw a strict line
between flowers that were accidentally imported or "escapes" from
ancient gardens, and those that were planted deliberately, we wisely ask
no questions in the case of old-established plants of foreign origin,
but receive them into our flora as aliens that have become naturalized
and are honourably classed as "denizens"; when they have once made good
their tenure of the soil, it seems to matter little by what means they
arrived. Thus, for example, the starry trefoil, which colonized the
Shoreham shingles over a century ago, having apparently come as a
stowaway on board some foreign ship, was not only tolerated but highly
regarded by English botanists, and its recent destruction is felt to be
a national loss. Would it have detracted from its value, if, as indeed
may have happened, it had been purposely sown on the beach? On the
contrary, it seems desirable that it should now be restored in that
manner.