"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 red, 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 forty 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 (_Chimaphila maculata_).
Prince's pine (_Chimaphila umbellata_).
Evening primrose (_Oenothera biennis_).
Hairy loosestrife (_Steironema ciliatum_).
Dogbane (_Apocynum_).
Ground-nut (_Apios tuberosa_).
Adder's-tongue pogonia (_Pogonia ophioglossoides_).
Wild grape (_Vitis cordifolia_).
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, etc., 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
loaded 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 toad-flax, or the daisy,
or blueweed, 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.
[Illustration: PICKING WILD FLOWERS]
"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,
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 the dicentra. There ought to be
honey in the honeysuckle, but I have never seen the hive bee make any
attempt to get it.