narrated it in print. A devoted botanist and nature-lover, he was twice
in the same day found trespassing by a gigantic gamekeeper, who, on the
second occasion, ended all parley in the manner described in the
following "Mystical Ballad," wherein the writer has ventured somewhat to
idealize the circumstances, though the story is based on the facts.
PRESERVED.
A Poet through a haunted wood
Roamed fearless and serene,
Nor flinched when on his path there stood
A Form in Velveteen.
"Gaunt Shape, come you alive or dead,
My footsteps shall not swerve."
"You're trespassing," the Vision said:
"This place is a preserve."
"How so? Is some dark secret here
Preserved? some tale of shame?"
The Spectre scowled, but answered clear:
"What we preserve is Game."
Yet still the Poet's heart was nerved
With Phantoms to dispute:
"Then tell me, why is Game preserved?"
The Goblin yelled: "To shoot."
"But Game that's shot is Game destroyed,
Not Game preserved, I ween."
It seemed such argument annoyed
That Form in Velveteen;
For swift It gripped him, as he spake,
And, making light the load,
Upheaved, and flung him from the brake
Into the King's high-road.
And as that Bard, still arguing hard,
High o'er the palings flew,
He vows he heard this ghostly word:
"We're not preserving _you_."
* * * * *
Long time he lay on that highway,
Dazed by so weird a fall;
Then rose and cried, as home he hied:
"The Lord preserve us all!"
I have often thought it was an error on the part of the trespassing poet
not to explain to his assailant that he was a botanist; for "botanist,"
as I can testify, is a blessed word which has a soothing effect upon
many of the most irascible landowners or their satellites. Personally I
never presume to call myself botanist, except when I am found
trespassing, on which occasions I have rarely known it to fail. I recall
a Saturday afternoon when, as I was rambling in a Derbyshire dale with
Bertram Lloyd, and admiring the flowers, we were accosted by the owner
in person, who inquired with a sort of suppressed fury whether we knew
that we were on his estate. We said we were botanists, and the effect
was magical; in less than a minute we were courteously permitted to go
where we would and stay as long as we liked.
For botany is regarded as a scientific study; and even sportsmen do not
like to incur the reproach of being enemies to science. Their better
feelings may be conveyed in a familiar Virgilian line:
_Non obtusa adeo gestamus pectora Poeni._[15]
[Footnote 15: Not so obtuse of heart we Tyrians are.]
XVI
LIMESTONE COASTS AND CLIFFS
Where the most beautiful wildflowers grow, there man's
spirit is fed.--THOREAU.
A LIMESTONE soil is everywhere rich in flowers--we have seen what the
midland dales can produce--but it is especially so in the close
neighbourhood of the sea. Two instances suggest themselves; one from a
Carnarvonshire promontory, the Orme's Head; the other from Arnside
Knott, in Westmorland.
Fifty years ago the Great Orme was a wild and picturesque headland,
girdled by a footpath which made a circuit of the beetling cliffs, and
crossed by a few other tracks leading to the telegraph station at the
summit, St. Tudno's Church, and elsewhere; but in most respects still in
a primitive and unimpaired condition. I knew almost every yard of it as
a boy; and I remember, among other attractions, a hermit who lived in a
cave, and better still a wild cat--probably a fugitive from some
Llandudno lodging-house--who had her home in a stack of rocks on the
western side of the Head. On the western shore of the isthmus there was
at that time only one house; it belonged to Dean Liddell, famous as
joint author of the Greek dictionary distressfully known to generations
of students as _Liddell and Scott._
But now, owing to the "development" of Llandudno, this once beautiful
foreland has become a place almost of horror, vulgarized by trams,
motor-roads, golf-links, and all the appurtenances of "civilization;"
and were it not for the wildflowers, it might well be shunned by those
who knew it in old days. Flowers, however, are very tenacious of their
established haunts, and the remark made in Mr. J. E. Griffith's _Flora
of Carnarvonshire_ still holds good, that "the flora of this district is
quite unique, in consequence of the number of species found here, and
the rarity of many of them." The luxuriance of the flowers is indeed a
sight which can almost make one forget the "improvements" that have
ruined the scenery.
Among the plants inhabiting the rocky banks above the shore are the blue
vernal squill, the sea stork's-bill, sweet alyssum, hound's-tongue,
hemlock, henbane, mullein, and tree-mallow: to these may be added what
constitutes a herb-garden readymade--fennel, wormwood, vervain, white
horehound, wild sage, succory, and Alexanders. On the higher cliffs are
the curious samphire, pink thrift, white scurvy-grass, and great tufts
of sea-cabbage, now rarer and more local than formerly, but here waving
its pale yellow pennons in abundance. Most charming of all, the
brilliant blood-red crane's-bill, together with two kinds of rock-rose
(the hoary dwarf species as well as the common one), makes rich splashes
of colour on the grey limestone ledges. A little back from the sea,
among the bluffs that overhang the town, you may light upon the
sleepy-looking catch-fly (_silene nutans_); the tiny Hutchinsia; and in
one or two places the shrub cotoneaster, which is said to be native only
upon the Great Orme. I have, however, seen it growing apparently wild at
Capel Curig, and at a greater distance from houses than in its Llandudno
station.
Nor is it only the Great Orme that shows this floral wealth: the Little
Orme has the rare Welsh stonecrop (_sedum Forsterianum_); and on another
height in the same district, the small circular hill known as Deganwy
Rocks, there is a profusion of flowers. When I revisited it a few years
ago, not having set foot on it for nearly half a century, I found that
the villas of Deganwy had crept up almost to the base of the rocks, and
on another side there was--still worse--a camp of German prisoners, with
armed sentries supervising their labours; yet even there, close above
such scenes, were growing plants which might mark a memorable day in the
annals of a flower-lover, notably the maiden pink and the
milk-thistle--the "holy" thistle, as it is not inaptly called. The
pinks, a lovely band, were sprinkled along the turf at the foot of the
rocks; the thistles were almost at the top; between them on a stony
ledge nestled a quantity of viper's bugloss, and with it some borage,
two kindred plants which I had never before seen in company.
Nearly all the members of the Borage group are interesting--lungwort,
alkanet, forget-me-not, hound's-tongue, and bugloss--but the borage
itself, a roadside weed in South Europe, and in this country merely an
immigrant and "casual," is to me the most precious of all. My earliest
recollections of it, I must own, are as an ingredient of claret-cup at
Cambridge, its silver-grey stems floating in the wine with a pleasant
roughness to the lip; but in those unregenerate days we did not know the
real virtue of the herb, famous from old time, as Gerarde says, for its
power "to exhilarate and make the mind glad, to comfort the heart, and
for driving away of sorrow." And certainly, in another and better use,
it _does_ comfort the heart and drive sorrow away; for its "gallant blew
flowers" are of all blues the loveliest, and the black anthers give it a
peculiarly poignant look which reminds one somehow of the wistfulness of
a Gainsborough portrait. In the list of my best-beloved flowers it ranks
among the highest.
Looking north-east from the Orme's Head, one may see on a clear day,
across some sixty miles of water, the limestone hills of Westmorland,
reckoned as part of Lakeland, but geologically, botanically, and in
general character a quite separate district. Arnside Knott, a bluff
overlooking the estuary of the river Kent where it widens into
Morecambe Bay, is the presiding genius of a tract of shore and forest to
which the name of "Lily-land" has been given by Mr. J. A. Barnes in a
sketch of Arnside, and which he describes as "a perfect paradise of
wildflowers." Let us suppose ourselves transported thither, and see how
the claim holds good.
The lily of the valley is one of those favoured plants which are
everywhere highly esteemed; even the man who in general cares but little
for wildflowers takes this one to his heart, or, what is worse, to his
garden. I have already quoted Mr. C. A. Johns's queer appreciation of
this native British wildflower as "a universally admired garden plant."
On the wooded hill known as Arnside Park the "May lily," as it used to
be called (and here it is certainly not "of the valley"), covers many
acres of ground, and justifies the title "Lily-land" as applied to the
Arnside neighbourhood. What I found still more interesting was an almost
equal abundance of the stone bramble (_rubus saxatilis_), which grows
intermixed with the lilies over a large portion of the wood.
On these Westmorland Cliffs, as in those of Carnarvonshire, the
blood-red crane's-bill is conspicuous, but it is much less plentiful,
nor are the outstanding flowers of the two localities the same. One of
the commonest at Arnside is the tall ploughman's spikenard, known
locally as "frankincense": and on the lawns that skirt the Knott one
often sees the mountain-cudweed or "cat's-foot," the gromwell or "grey
millet," and the beautiful little dwarf orchis. The district is rather
rich in orchids; among others, I found the rare narrow-leaved
helleborine (_cephalanthera ensifolia_) in the Arnside woods. The deadly
nightshade is frequent; so, too, is the four-leaved herb-Paris, which a
resident described to me as being here "almost a weed." But there are
two other flowers that demand more special mention.
In a lane near Arnside Tower, a ruin that lies below the Knott on its
inland side, there is a considerable growth of green hellebore,
apparently at the very spot where its presence was recorded two
centuries ago. Though not a very rare plant, it is extremely local; and
owing to its strongly marked features, the large palmate leaves and pale
green flowers, is not likely to go unnoticed.
But the rarest of Arnside flowers is, or was, another poisonous plant of
the _ranunculus_ order, the baneberry, for which the writer of
"Lily-land," as he tells us, "hunted for years without success; till its
exact locality was at last revealed to me by one who knew, in a
situation so obvious that I felt like a man who has hunted through every
room in the house for the spectacles on his own nose." Years later, on
my certifying that I was not a knight of the trowel, Mr. Barnes was so
kind as to confide to me this same secret that had been kept hidden from
the uninitiate; but I found that the small plantation which had been
the home of the baneberry, almost within Arnside itself, had recently
been cut down, and though a few of the plants were still growing along
the side of the field, they had ceased to flower, and possibly by this
time they have ceased to exist. Even as it was, I felt myself fortunate
to have seen the baneberry in one of its few native haunts. The pale
green deeply cut leaves are much handsomer than those of its relatives
the hellebore and the monk's-hood. Its raceme of white flowers and its
black berries are also known to me; but alas, only in a garden.
Where flowers are concerned, there is little truth in the saying that
"comparisons are odious"; on the contrary it is both pleasant and
profitable to compare not only plant with plant, but the flora of one
fertile district with that of another. The natural scenery of Arnside is
yet unspoilt, and for that reason it now offers greater attractions to
the nature-lover than the ruined charms of Llandudno; but if he were
asked, for botanical reasons only, to choose between a visit to the Orme
and a visit to the Knott, the decision might be a less easy one. "How
happy could I be with either!" would probably be his thought.
XVII
ON PILGRIMAGE TO INGLEBOROUGH
It [rose-root] groweth very plentifully in the north of
England, especially in a place called Ingleborough Fels.
GERARDE.
THERE is a tale by Herman Melville which deals with the strangeness of a
first meeting between the inmates of two houses which face each other,
far and high away, on opposite mountain ranges, and yet, though daily
visible, have remained for years as mutually unknown as if they belonged
to different worlds. It was with this story in my mind that I approached
for the first time the moorland mass of Ingleborough, long familiar as
seen from the Lake mountains, a square-topped height on the horizon to
the south-east, but hitherto unvisited by me owing to the more imperious
claims of the Great Gable and Scafell. But now, at last, I found myself
on pilgrimage to Ingleborough; the impulse, long delayed, had seized me
to stand on the summit of the Yorkshire fell, and, looking
north-westward, to see the scene reversed.
Another of Ingleborough's attractions was that it is the home of
certain scarce and beautiful flowers, as has been pointed out in Mr.
Reginald Farrer's interesting books on Alpine plants. Such exceptional
rarities as the baneberry (_actaea spicata_), which grows among rocky
crevices high up on the fell--not to mention the _arenaria gothica_,
choicest of the sandworts--the mere visitor can hardly hope to discover;
but there are other and less infrequent treasures upon the hill, beyond
which my ambition did not aspire.
As I ascended the barren marshy slopes that form the eastern flank, I
realized once again how much more the labour of an ascent depends upon
the character of the ground than upon the actual height to be scaled.
Ingleborough is under 2,400 feet; yet it is far more toilsome to climb
than many a rocky peak in Wales or Cumberland that rises hundreds of
feet higher, and it is a relief at length to get a firm foothold on the
rocks of millstone grit which form the summit. Thence, from the edges
which drop sharply from the flat top, one looks out on the somewhat
desolate fells stretching away on three sides--Pen-y-ghent to the east,
Whernside to the north, and to the south the more distant forest of
Pendle--but westward there is the gleam of sand or water in Morecambe
Bay, and the eye hastens to greet the dim but ever glorious forms of the
Lakeland mountains.
In the affections of the mountain-lover Ingleborough can never be the
rival of one of these; indeed, in the strict sense, it is not a
mountain at all, but a high moor built on a base of limestone with a cap
of grit. Still, there is grandeur in the steep scarps that guard its
central stronghold; and its dark summit, when viewed from a distance
crowning the successive tiers of grey terraces, has a strength and
wildness of its own, and even suggests at points a likeness to the
massive tower of the Great Gable. To one looking down from the topmost
edges on the scattered piles of limestone below, the effect is very
curious. You see, perhaps, a mile or two distant, what looks at first
sight like a flock of sheep at pasture, but is soon discovered to be a
stone flock which has no mortal shepherd. In other parts are wide white
plateaux which, when visited, turn out to be a wilderness of low flat
rocks, everywhere weather-worn and water-worn, scooped and scalloped
into cells and basins, and so intersected by channels filled with ferns
and grasses that one has to walk warily over it as over a reef at low
tide.
But to return to the flowers. At the summit were mossy saxifrage and
vernal sandwort; and on the cliffs just below, to the western side, the
big mountain stonecrop, rose-root, not unhandsome with its yellow
blossoms, flourished in some abundance, even as it did when Gerarde
wrote of it, nearly three hundred years ago. The purple saxifrage, an
early spring flower, is also found on these rocks, but at the time when
I visited the spot, in late June, its blossoming season was over, and
nothing was visible but the leaves. There was little else but some
hawkweeds; I turned my attention, therefore, to the flowers of the lower
slopes.
There is nothing more delightful, in descending a mountain, than to
follow the leading of some rapid beck from its very source to the
valley; and it is rather disconcerting, in these limestone regions, that
the cavernous nature of the ground should make the presence of the
streams so intermittent, and that one's chosen companion should not
unfrequently disappear, just when his value is most appreciated, into
some "gaping gill" or pot-hole.
It is said of Walt Whitman that sometimes when a pilgrim was privileged
to walk with him, and was perhaps thinking that their acquaintance was
ripening to friendship, the good grey poet, with a curt nod and a
careless "good-bye," would turn off abruptly and be gone. Even so it is
with these wayward streams that course down the sides of Ingleborough.
Just when one is on the best of terms with them, they vanish and are no
more.
But with the bird's-eye primrose tinging hillsides and hollows with its
tender hue of pink, no other companionship was needed. A mountain
flower, it is the fairest of all the _Primulaceae_, that band of fair
sisters to which it belongs--primrose, cowslip, pimpernel, loosestrife,
and money-wort--all beautiful and all favourites among young and old
alike, whereever there is a love of flowers. It was worth while to make
the pilgrimage to Ingleborough, if only to see this charming little
plant in perfection on its native banks.
Nor were other flowers lacking; the wild geraniums especially were in
force. The shining crane's-bill gleamed on the pale limestone ledges;
the wood crane's-bill, a local North-country species, gave a glint of
purple in the copses at the foot of the fell; and still further down,
below the village of Clapham, there were masses of the blue meadow
crane's-bill (_geranium pratense_), the largest and not least handsome
of the family. The water-avens was everywhere by the stream sides; and
on a bank above the road the gladdon, or purple iris, was opening its
dull-tinted flowers.
XVIII
A BOTANOPHILIST'S JOURNAL
He was the attorney of the indigenous plants, and owned to a
preference of the weeds to the imported plants, as of the Indian to
the civilized man.--EMERSON.
I HAVE referred several times to Henry Thoreau, of Concord, in whose
_Journal_ a great deal is said about wildflowers; and as the volumes are
not easily accessible to English readers it may be worth while to select
therefrom a few of the more interesting passages. In all that he wrote
on the subject Thoreau appears less as the botanist than the
flower-lover; indeed, he expressly observes that he himself comes under
the head of the "Botanophilists," as Linnaeus termed them; viz. those who
record various facts about flowers, but not from a strictly scientific
standpoint. "I never studied botany," he said, "and do not to-day,
systematically; the most natural system is so artificial. I wanted to
know my neighbours, if possible; to get a little nearer to them." So
great was his zest in cultivating this floral acquaintance that, as he
tells us, he often visited a plant four or five miles from Concord half
a dozen times within a fortnight, in order to note its time of
flowering.
Books he found, in general, unsatisfactory. "I asked a learned and
accurate naturalist," he says, "who is at the same time the courteous
guardian of a public library, to direct me to those works which
contained the more particular popular account, or _biography_, of
particular flowers--for I had trusted that each flower had had many
lovers and faithful describers in past times--but he informed me that I
had read all; that no one was acquainted with them, they were only
catalogued like his books." It was the human aspect of the flower that
Thoreau craved; and he was therefore disappointed when he saw "pages
about some fair flower's qualities as food or medicine, but perhaps not
a sentence about its significance to the eye; as if the cowslip were
better for 'greens' than for yellows." Thus he complained that botanies
are "the prose of flowers," instead of what they ought to be, the
poetry. He made an exception, however, in favour of old Gerarde's
_Herball_.
His admirable though quaint descriptions are, to my mind, greatly
superior to the modern more scientific ones. He describes not
according to rule, but to his natural delight in the plants. He
brings them vividly before you, as one who has seen and delighted
in them. It is almost as good as to see the plants themselves. His
leaves are leaves; his flowers, flowers; his fruit, fruit. They are
green, and coloured, and fragrant. It is a man's knowledge added to
a child's delight. . . . How much better to describe your object
in fresh English words rather than in these conventional
Latinisms!"
Linnaeus, too, "the man of flowers," as he calls him, is praised by
Thoreau. "If you would read books on botany, go to the fathers of the
science. Read Linnaeus at once, and come down from him as far as you
please. I lost much time in reading the florists. It is remarkable how
little the mass of those interested in botany are acquainted with
Linnaeus."
Thoreau's manner of botanizing was, like most of his habits, somewhat
singular. His vasculum was his straw-hat. "I never used any other," he
writes, "and when some whom I visited were evidently surprised at its
dilapidated look, as I deposited it on their front entry-table, I
assured them it was not so much my hat as my botany-box." With this
vasculum he professed himself more than content.
I am inclined to think that my hat, whose lining is gathered in
midway so as to make a shelf, is about as good a botany-box as I
could have; and there is something in the darkness and the vapours
that arise from the head--at least, if you take a bath--which
preserves flowers through a long walk. Flowers will frequently come
fresh out of this botany-box at the end of the day, though they
have had no sprinkling.
The joy of meeting with a new plant, a sensation known to all searchers
after flowers, is more than once mentioned in the _Journal_: the
discovery of a single flower hitherto unknown to him makes him feel as
if he were in a wealth of novelties. "By the discovery of one new plant
all bounds seem to be infinitely removed." He notes, too, the not
uncommon experience, that a flower, once recognized, is likely soon to
be re-encountered. Seeing something blue, or glaucous, in a swamp, he
approaches it, and finds it to be the _Andromeda polifolia_, which had
been shown him, only a few days before, in Emerson's collection; now he
sees it in abundance. At times he adopts the method of sitting quietly
and looking around him, on the principle that "as it is best to sit in a
grove and let the birds come to you, so, as it were, even the flowers
will come."
Swamps were among Thoreau's favourite haunts: he thinks it would be a
luxury to stand in one, up to his chin, for a whole summer's day,
scenting the sweet-fern and bilberries. "That is a glorious swamp of
Miles's," he remarks; "the more open parts, where the dwarf andromeda
prevails. . . . These are the wildest and richest gardens that we have."
The fields were less trustworthy, because of the annual vandalism of the
mowing. "About these times," he writes in June, "some hundreds of men,
with freshly sharpened scythes, make an irruption into my garden when in
its rankest condition, and clip my herbs all as close as they can; and I
am restricted to the rough hedges and worn-out fields which had little
to attract them."
Among Thoreau's best-beloved flowers, if we may judge by certain
passages of the _Journal_, was the large white bindweed (_convolvulus
sepium_), or "morning-glory." "It always refreshes me to see it," he
writes; "I associate it with holiest morning hours. It may preside over
my morning walks and thoughts." Not less worthily celebrated by him, in
another mood, are the wild rose and the water-lily.