OF all the host of alluring things that make for themselves homes on
our hillside, one of the most lovely is the foxglove. Yet there is
no blatancy about its beauty, nor a great blaze of light as when the
ox-eye daisies wave over the fields in June.
There is something more subtle than even its colouring that attracts
one to this flower, for there is mind-rest, there is balm for anxious
hearts, there is new hope and new courage, with whispers of happiness,
in the depths of a foxglove bell.
If you doubt this, go on a foxglove quest; leave everything bearing the
hall-mark of advanced up-to-dateness far behind you—though I’ve nothing
to say against the train that takes you away from towns to the place
where the foxgloves grow! Forget all the regulation ways of enjoying
yourself, and search out the haunts of the carillon of the wilds.
You will find them on the shady sides of the hedges, their spikes of
bells pushing up through hawthorn and sloe, through the tangle of
bramble and bryony, cleavers and dog rose that scramble over the
pollarded nut-bushes, beeches, elm-stumps, and ash-boles, amid all
the dear delights that go to make that poem of loveliness—an English
hedgerow.
You will also find them in little hollows and dells, in small ravines
and in craggy places—in any spot where they can get a little moisture
for the roots and occasional sunshine for the flowers, with a certain
amount of immunity from the devastating hand of the human marauder.
Give them but a ghost of a chance to seed themselves (though this is
what the greedy flower-gatherer invariably denies them), and they will
spread with great rapidity, and paint the face of nature with a rich
glowing carmine that almost makes you hold your breath when first you
see the broad sweeps of colour on certain hillsides in mid-June.
When you have found them, in any of their haunts, lift one of the bells
and look right into it, delighting in the splashes and markings, the
fine filaments and the silken texture, the pink and purple and crimson,
the dark brown and white, the poise of the stalk, the droop of the
bells, the balance that the leaf-arrangement gives to the whole plant,
and the many other characteristics that go to make up one of the most
exquisite of nature’s products.
The trouble is that in sparse soil, or in wind-swept places, the plant
does not grow so tall as in a protected and secluded spot. Hence when
we meet it in the open, its bells hang downwards below the eye-line,
and we do not often remember to stoop and lift one, to see what message
the bee left for us. Perhaps that is one reason why it seems to me
that, while sunflowers and hollyhocks spend their days in gazing after
grown-ups, foxgloves are for ever nodding smilingly and encouragingly
to little children.
To those who are accustomed to agricultural scenery, where the
landscape shows far expanses of pasture-land and cornfields, with wide
spreading low-roofed farms clustered around with barns and ricks, our
hills come as a surprise with their uneven surfaces, and the scarcity
of soil in comparison with the superabundance of rock.
And even taking into consideration all the cleared spaces and small
farms, the outstanding feature of the country, so far as the eye can
see, is timber. This is a region of woods and coppices, with springs
that bubble up at the roots of sturdy trees, protected by their
thick leafage from the onslaughts of the sun. This is a land of dim
grey-green mystery, of silences that make one tread with reverent awe
till one is brought back to earth, by the ring of the woodman’s axe,
the leisurely song of his saw, and the crish-crash of a tree as it
falls.
In the course of time, the woods have to be cut; some are cut every
fourteen years; others are left much longer; it all depends on the
kind of tree and the purpose for which it is being grown.
But though the woods are cut periodically, it is not so devastating
a process as one might imagine. For one thing, it is clean work; for
another, it is surface work; and then it is all done in the open air,
with hand-tools and no machinery, and it is carried out on nature’s own
lines. Hence there is no underground disturbance that would prevent
further growth, and no smoke of power-driven machinery pollutes the
earth and air.
Yet there would be something very pathetic about the felling of the
trees, as you walk over ground that has been cut, were it not for the
magical display of beauty nature puts forth in such circumstances,
multitudes of flowers springing into being that otherwise would not
have come to birth.
At first you see but the prostrate trunks of the trees, with ivy still
clinging to the bark; there they lie, with branches lopped, each
surrounded by piles of small timber cut into regulation lengths for
various commercial purposes; with “cords” of faggots for firing, and
stacks of stuff for pea sticks and similar purposes.
Yet you are not long wandering over the newly-cleared slopes before you
see things that were not evident before.
In winter you discover a red-gold carpet—too golden to be brown, too
brown to be red—where lie the leaves of the beeches that you never
noticed when the trees were standing.
Then, as spring breathes life into the sleeping earth, the dead leaves
stir, silently, mysteriously, no human ear can detect the rustle, no
human eye can see the movement, yet the leaves lift and move apart,
disclosing the yellow and green, and silvery-pink of the primrose buds.
Still further the dead leaves lift, and the violets look out, and then
run all over the place. The wind-flowers push up next, and before you
realize what has happened, the place is literally dancing with them.
Where did they all come from?
Last spring you went through this very wood and saw only a few
scattered about at wide distances, where there chanced to be a filter
of light through the dense branches overhead. Now the place is an open
air ball-room of curtesying sprites.
Such are the wonderful ways of the woods!
In sheltered spots where the cold winds cannot reach, cushions
of wood-sorrel unfurl their pale-green leaves, and then send up,
cautiously and shyly, the fragile bells that look as though a breath
would blow them away. The woodruff also sets to work, for there must be
beauty of odour as well as beauty of colour and form, and something
will be needed to take the place of the violets when they go.
By this time the bluebells are ready to come out; but there is no
shyness about these, sturdy in their growth, no obstacle seems to
hinder them; up come the green spears, making their own way through
dead leaves and twigs and moss and acorn cup, through thickets of
low-lying bramble, through carpets of close-growing ivy; if a dead
branch or a tree trunk lies in their way, they peep out at one side,
“Is there a trifle of daylight here?” And up they come, carpeting with
blue the open spaces between the huge masses of rock that lie pell-mell
about the surface; while the humble little ground-ivy lays cool green
fingers, and a little later its violet-blue flowers, over the cream
and silver of the birches, the soft grey of the beeches, and the rough
bark of the oaks, where the felled trunks lie among the up-springing
grass, sensing for the last time the coming of spring and summer on the
hillside.
Then it is, when the bluebells have turned to papery seed-pods, and the
primroses have paled away into space, that the foxgloves begin to shake
out their flowers and the hillside glows and palpitates with colour.
They flourish with a joyous abandon that is positively infectious,
and makes one feel there is still much left to live for. The way they
suddenly appear when the trees are down—whole battalions of them—where
only a season before there were regiments of larches, or thick woods
of mixed timber, is really marvellous. Undoubtedly the ground must be
packed with seed; more than this, there must always be young seedlings
coming up among the undergrowth or in sheltered crevices where the
larch needles do not penetrate; for no sooner are the trees cut than
foxgloves start to spread their leaves to the light, and by the
following summer, often before half the timber has been carried, you
find them by the thousand—and that is a very low estimate—dotted all
over the rough land, and, with a host of ferns, trying to cover up
all that is maimed, and bare, and jagged, to hide the scars where the
mighty have fallen, to give beauty for ashes in a very literal sense.
Moreover, there seems an almost uncanny intelligence in the way they
adapt themselves to their environment. You would think they knew that
the winds from the far-off Channel blow strong at times, across these
high open spaces; for you find that they invariably place themselves in
the shelter of a big boulder, or settle down in a little hollow with a
protecting flank of rockery, evidently conscious that their tall stems
would be lashed down flat if exposed to the full force of the wind. Or
you find them growing, it may be, at the foot of a crumbling gate post,
or against an ivy-covered rock, or rows of them nestling close up to a
lichen-covered stone wall; and in this way their beauty is enhanced by
the background.
And when they find themselves in an uncongenial setting—springing up in
the very centre of a woodland path perhaps, or out in the open where
the woodmen have been lopping the branches from a felled tree, and
there is much devastation to be covered over and atoned for—there the
foxglove lays its leaves as flat as possible against the earth, so as
to offer the least inducement to the passer-by to injure it. And though
it still sends up its flowers as bravely as it knows how, they are only
a foot high, not the five and six feet of the foxglove in the shelter.
Yet if it be possible, in the least bit possible, it leans against the
pile of faggots, or gently touches the desolate trunk of what was once
a majestic old tree—and who dare say that the silent companionship
counts for nothing?
* * * * *
As I write this, in a year of the Awful War, there are some who would
tell me that foxgloves will not find the people in food; while others
see no value in the larches apart from their service as mine-props.
Yet, while I would not under-estimate the utilitarian worth of crops
and timber, the age-old truth is still insistent: Man cannot live by
bread alone.
You may clear from the surface of the land every plant that is not
edible; you may fell every tree that does not serve for telegraph
pole or pit wood; you may tabulate the food-productive qualities of
the whole earth, and serve it out in a blue-book as literature for
the people; you may manufacture electricity till there is no longer
any night, and the mysteries of the twilight and the moonlight and
the starlight are lost to us for ever; you may destroy the birds till
there isn’t one Glad-song left in the caterpillar-riddled orchards
and gardens; you may harness the rivers and streams for mechanical
purposes, and drown the voices of the weir in the whirr of wheels,
till there isn’t an ounce of energy flowing to waste throughout the
length and breadth of the country; you may turn all Nature into a huge
commercial enterprise that is the last word in economics and efficient
organization—and what will be the result?
Machines in place of souls!
Germany strove to subserve everything to her own materialistic ends,
and the price of her hideous and colossal crime is a world’s agony.
Though this may seem but a parable, to some the reading will be clear:
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
Page 112, “contribubution” changed to “contribution” (own literary
contribution)