is no part of eastern North America that is botanically richer, I
suppose--is the azaleas. When I drove up from Walhalla, on the 6th
of May, the woods were bright, mile after mile, with the common pink
species (_A. nudiflora_); and at Highlands, in some of the dooryards,
I found in full bloom a much lovelier kind,--also pink, and also
leafless,--_A. Vaseyi_, as it turned out: a rare and lately discovered
plant, of which the village people are justly proud. I could not
visit its wild habitat without a guide, they told me. Within a week
or so after my arrival the real glory of the spring was upon us: the
woods were lighted up everywhere with the flame-colored azalea; and
before it was gone,--while it was still at its height, indeed,--the
familiar sweet-scented white azalea (_A. viscosa_), the “swamp pink”
of my boyhood, came forward to keep it company and lend it contrast.
By that time I had seen all the rhododendrons and azaleas mentioned in
Chapman’s Flora, including _A. arborescens_, a tardy bloomer, which
a botanical collector, with whom I was favored to spend a day on the
road, pointed out to me in the bud.
The splendor of _A. calendulacea_, as displayed here, is never to be
forgotten; nor is it to be in the least imagined by those who have seen
a few stunted specimens of the plant in northern gardens. The color
ranges from light straw-color to the brightest and deepest orange, and
the bushes, thousands on thousands, no two of them alike, stand, not in
rows or clusters, but broadly spaced, each by itself, throughout the
hillside woods.
They were never out of sight, and I never could have enough of them.
Wherever I went, I was always stopping short before one bush and
another; admiring this one for the brilliancy or delicacy of its floral
tints, and that one for its bold and pleasing habit. For as the plants
do not grow in close ranks, so they do not put forth their flowers in
a mass. They know a trick better than that. Thousands of shrubs, but
every one in its own place, to be separately looked at; and on every
shrub a few sprays of bloom, each well apart from all the others; one
twig bearing nothing but leaves, another full of blossoms; a short
branch here, a longer one there; and again, a smooth straight stem
shooting far aloft, holding at the tip a bunch of leaves and flowers;
everything free, unstudied, and most irregularly graceful, as if the
bushes had each an individuality as well as a tint of its own. Often
it was not a bush that I stood still to take my fill of, but a single
branch,--as beautiful, I thought, as if it had been the only one in the
world.
One walk on Satulah--not to the summit, but by a roundabout course
through the woods to a bold cliff on the southern side (all the
mountains, as a rule, are rounded on the north, and break off sharply
on the south)--was literally a walk through an azalea show; first the
flame-colored, bushes beyond count and variety beyond description; and
then, a little higher, a plentiful display of the white viscosa, more
familiar and less showy, but hardly less attractive.
Better even than this wild Satulah garden was a smaller one nearer
home: a triangular hillside, broad at the base and pointed at the top,
as if it were one face of a pyramid; covered loosely with grand old
trees,--oaks, chestnuts, and maples; the ground densely matted with
freshly grown ferns, largely the cinnamon osmunda, clusters of lively
green and warm brown intermixed; and everywhere, under the trees and
above the ferns, mountain laurel and flame-colored azalea,--the laurel
blooms pale pink, almost white, and the azalea clusters yellow of every
conceivable degree of depth and brightness. A zigzag fence bounded
the wood below, and the land rose at a steep angle, so that the whole
was held aloft, as it were, for the beholder’s convenience. It was a
wonder of beauty, with nothing in the least to mar its perfection,--the
fairest piece of earth my eye ever rested upon. The human owner of it,
Mr. Selleck (why should I not please myself by naming him, a land-owner
who knew the worth of his possession!), had asked me to go and see
it; and for his sake and its own, as well as for my own sake and the
reader’s, I wish I could show it as it was. It rises before me at this
moment, like the rhododendron cliffs on Walden’s Ridge, and will do so,
I hope, to my dying day.
VIRGINIA
A NOOK IN THE ALLEGHANIES
I
I left Boston at nine o’clock on the morning of April 23, and reached
Pulaski, in southwestern Virginia, at ten o’clock the next forenoon,
exactly on schedule time,--or within five minutes of it, to give
the railroad no more than its due. It was a journey to meet the
spring,--which for a Massachusetts man is always a month tardy,--and
as such it was speedily rewarded. Even in Connecticut there were
vernal signs, a dash of greenness here and there in the meadows, and
generous sproutings of skunk cabbage about the edges of the swamps;
and once out of Jersey City we were almost in a green world. At Bound
Brook, I think it was, the train stopped where a Norway maple opposite
my window stood all in a yellow mist of blossoms, and chimney swifts
were shooting hither and thither athwart the bright afternoon sky. By
the time Philadelphia was reached, or by the time we were done with
running in and out of its several stations, the night had commenced
falling, and I saw nothing more of the world, with all that famous
valley of the Shenandoah, till I left my berth at Roanoke. There the
orchards--apple-trees and peach-trees together--were in full bloom,
and on the slopes of the hills, as we pushed in among them, rounding
curve after curve, shone gorgeous red patches of the Judas-tree, with
sprinklings of columbines, violets, marsh-marigolds, and dandelions,
and splashes of deep orange-yellow,--clusters of some flower then
unknown to me, but pretty certainly the Indian puccoon; not the
daintiest of blossoms, perhaps, but among the most effective under such
fugitive, arm’s-length conditions. A plaguing kind of pleasure it is
to ride past such things at a speed which makes a good look at them
impossible, as once, for the better part of a long forenoon, in the
flatwoods of Florida and southern Georgia, I rode through swampy places
bright with splendid pitcher-plants, of a species I had never seen and
knew nothing about; straining my eyes to make out the yellow blossoms,
deploring the speed of the train,--which, nevertheless, brought me into
Macon several hours after I should have been in Atlanta,--wishing for
my Chapman’s Flora (packed away in my trunk, of course), and bewailing
the certainty that I was losing the only opportunity I should ever have
to see so interesting a novelty. And still,--I can say it now,--half a
look is better than no vision.
For fifty miles beyond Roanoke we traveled southward; but an ascent of
a thousand feet offset, and more than offset, the change of latitude,
so that at Pulaski we found the apple-trees not yet in flower, but
showing the pink of the buds. The venerable, pleasingly unsymmetrical
sugar maples in the yard of the inn (the reputed, and real, comforts
of which had drawn me to this particular spot) were hung full of pale
yellow tassels, and vocal with honey-bees. Spring was here, and I felt
myself welcome.
Till luncheon should be ready, I strayed into the border of the wood
behind the town, and, wandering quite at a venture, came by good
luck upon a path which followed the tortuous, deeply worn bed of a
brook through a narrow pass between steep, sparsely wooded, rocky
hills. Along the bank grew plenty of the common rhododendron, now in
early bud, and on either side of the path were trailing arbutus and
other early flowers. Yes, I had found the spring, not summer. And the
birds bore the same testimony: thrashers, chippers, field sparrows,
black-and-white creepers, and a Carolina chickadee. Summer birds, like
summer flowers, were yet to come. A brief song, repeated at intervals
from the ragged, half-cleared hillside near a house, as I returned to
the village, puzzled me agreeably. It should be the voice of a Bewick’s
wren, I thought, but the notes seemed not to tally exactly with my
recollections of a year ago, on Missionary Ridge. However, I made
only a half-hearted attempt to decide the point. There would be time
enough for such investigations by and by. Meanwhile, it would be a poor
beginning to take a first walk in a new country without bringing back
at least one uncertainty for expectation to feed upon. It is always
part of to-day’s wisdom to leave something for to-morrow’s search. So
I seem to remember reasoning with myself; but perhaps a thought of the
noonday luncheon had something to do with my temporizing mood.
In any case no harm came of it. The singer was at home for the season,
and the very next morning I went up the hill and made sure of him: a
Bewick’s wren, as I had guessed. I heard him there on sundry occasions
afterward. Sometimes he sang one tune, sometimes another. The song
heard on the first day, and most frequently, perhaps, at other times,
consisted of a prolonged indrawn whistle, followed by a trill or
jumble of notes (not many birds trill, I suppose, in the technical
sense of that word), as if the fellow had picked up his music from
two masters,--a Bachman finch and a song sparrow. It soon transpired,
greatly to my satisfaction, that this was one of the characteristic
songsters of the town. One bird sang daily not far from my window
(the first time I heard him I ran out in haste, looking for some new
sparrow, and only came to my senses when halfway across the lawn),
and I never walked far in the town (the city, I ought in civility
to say) without passing at least two or three. Sometimes as many
as that would be within hearing at once. They preferred the town to
the woods and fields, it was evident, and for a singing-perch chose
indifferently a fence picket, the roof of a hen-coop, a chimney-top, or
the ridgepole of one of the churches,--which latter, by the bye, were
most unchristianly numerous. The people are to be congratulated upon
having so jolly and pretty a singer playing hide-and-seek--the wren’s
game always--in their house-yards and caroling under their windows. As
a musician he far outshines the more widely known house wren, though
that bird, too, is excellent company, with his pert ways, at once
furtive and familiar, and his merry gurgle of a tune. If he would only
come back to our sparrow-cursed Massachusetts gardens and orchards, as
I still hope he will some time do, I for one would never twit him upon
his inferiority to his Bewickian cousin or to anybody else.
The city itself would have repaid study, if only for its unlikeness
to cities in general. It had not “descended out of heaven,” so much
was plain, though this is not what I mean by its unlikeness to other
places; neither did it seem to have grown up after the old-fashioned
method, a “slow result of time,”--first a hamlet, then a village, then
a town, and last of all a city. On the contrary, it bore all the marks
of something built to order; in the strictest sense, a city made with
hands. And so, in fact, it is; one of the more fortunate survivals of
what the people of southwestern Virginia are accustomed to speak of
significantly as “the boom,”--a grand attempt, now a thing of the past,
but still bitterly remembered, to make everybody rich by a concerted
and enthusiastic multiplication of nothing by nothing.
Such a community, I repeat, would have been an interesting and very
“proper study;” but I had not come southward in a studious mood. I
meant to be idle, having a gift in that direction which I am seldom
able to cultivate as it deserves. It is one of the best of gifts. I
could never fall in with what the poet Gray says of it in one of his
letters. “Take my word and experience upon it,” he writes, “doing
nothing is a most amusing business, and yet neither something nor
nothing gives me any pleasure.” He begins bravely, although the
trivial word “amusing” wakens a distrust of his sincerity; but what a
pitiful conclusion! How quickly the boom collapses! It is to be said
for him, however, that he was only twenty years old at the time, and
a relish for sentiment and reverie--that is to say, for the pleasures
of idleness--is apt to be little developed at that immature age. I had
passed that point by some years; I was sure I could enjoy a week of
dreaming; and, unlike Bewick’s wren, I took to the woods.
To that end I returned again and again to the brookside path, on which
I had so fortunately stumbled. A man on my errand could have asked
nothing better, unless, perchance, there had been a mile or two more of
it. Following it past two or three tumble-down cabins, the stroller was
at once out of the world; a single bend in the course of the brook, and
the hills closed in behind him, and the town might have been a thousand
miles away. Life itself is such a path as this, I reflected. The forest
shuts behind us, and is open only at our feet, with here and there a
flower or a butterfly or a strain of music to take up our thoughts, as
we travel on toward the clearing at the end.
For the first day or two the deciduous woods still showed no signs
of leafage, but tall, tree-like shadbushes were in flower,--fair
brides, veiled as no princess ever was,--and a solitary red maple
stood blushing at its own premature fruitfulness. Here a man walked
between acres of hepatica and trailing arbutus,--the brook dividing
them,--while the path was strewn with violets, anemones, buttercups,
bloodroot, and houstonia. In one place was a patch of some new yellow
flowers, like five-fingers, but more upright, and growing on bracted
scapes; barren strawberries (_Waldsteinia_) Dr. Gray told me they
were called, and one more Latin name had blossomed into a picture. A
manual of botany, annotated with place-names and dates, gets after
a time to be truly excellent reading, a refreshment to the soul, in
winter especially, as name after name calls up the living plant and
all the wild beauty that goes with it. And with the thought of the
barren strawberry I can see, what I had all but forgotten, though it
was one of the first things I noticed, the sloping ground covered with
large, round, shiny, purplish-green (evergreen) leaves, all exquisitely
crinkled and toothed. With nothing but the leaves to depend upon, I
could only conjecture the plant to be galax, a name which caught my eye
by the sheerest accident, as I turned the pages of the Manual looking
for something else; but the conjecture turned out to be a sound one, as
the sagacious reader will have already inferred from the fact of its
mention.
In such a place there was no taking many steps without a halt. My gait
was rather a progressive standing still than an actual progress; so
that it mattered little whither or how far the path might carry me. I
was not going somewhere,--I was already there; or rather, I was both at
once. Every stroller will know what I mean. Fruition and expectation
were on my tongue together; to risk an unscriptural paradox, what I saw
I yet hoped for. The brook, tumbling noisily downward,--in some places
over almost regular flights of stone steps,--now in broad sunshine, now
in the shade of pines and hemlocks and rhododendrons, was of itself a
cheerful companionship, its inarticulate speech chiming in well with
thoughts that were not so much thoughts as dumb sensations.
Here and there my footsteps disturbed a tiny blue butterfly, a
bumblebee, or an emerald beetle,--lovers of the sun all of them, and
therefore haunters of the path. Once a grouse sprang up just before me,
and at another time I stopped to gain sight of a winter wren, whose
querulous little song-sparrow-like note betrayed his presence under
the overhanging sod of the bank, where he dodged in and out, pausing
between whiles upon a projecting root, to emphasize his displeasure
by nervous gesticulatory bobbings. He meant I should know what he
thought of me; and I would gladly have returned the compliment, but
saw no way of doing so. It is a fault in the constitution of the world
that we receive so much pleasure from innocent wild creatures, and can
never thank them in return. Black-and-white creepers were singing at
short intervals, and several pairs of hooded warblers seemed already
to have made themselves at home among the rhododendron bushes. Just
a year before I had taken my fill of their music on Walden’s Ridge,
in Tennessee. Then it became almost an old story; now, if the truth
must be told, I mistook the voice for a stranger’s. It was much better
than I remembered it; fuller, sweeter, less wiry. Perhaps the birds
sang better here in Virginia, I tried to think; but that comfortable
explanation had nothing else in its favor. It was more probable, I was
bound to conclude, that the superior quality of the Kentucky warbler’s
music, which was all the time in my ears on Walden’s Ridge, had put
me unjustly out of conceit with the performance of its less taking
neighbor. At all events, I now voted the latter a singer of decided
merit, and was ready to unsay pretty much all that I had formerly
said against it. I went so far, indeed, as to grow sarcastic at my
own expense, for in my field memoranda I find this entry: “The hooded
warbler’s song is very little like the redstart’s, in spite of what
Torrey has written.” Verily the pencil is mightier than the pen, and a
note in the field is worth two in the study. Yet that, after all, is an
unfair way of putting the matter, since the Tennessee note also was
made in the field. Let one note correct the other; or, better still,
let each stand for whatever of truth it expresses. Happily, there is no
final judgment on such themes. One thing I remarked with equal surprise
and pleasure: the song reminded me again and again of the singing of
Swainson’s thrush; not by any resemblance between the two voices, it
need hardly be said, but by a similarity in form. Oven-birds were here,
speaking their pieces in earnest schoolroom fashion; a few chippering
snowbirds excited my curiosity (common _Junco hyemalis_, for aught I
could discover, but I profess no certainty on so nice a point); and
here and there a flock of migrating white-throated sparrows bestirred
themselves lazily, as I brushed too near their browsing-places.
So I dallied along, accompanied by a staid, good-natured,
woodchuck-loving collie (he had joined me on the hotel piazza, with a
friendly look in his face, as much as to say, “The top of the morning
to you, stranger. If you are out for a walk, I’m your dog”), till
presently I came to a clearing. Here the path all at once disappeared,
and I made no serious effort to pick it up again. Why should I go
farther? I could never be farther from the world, nor was I likely
to find anywhere a more inviting spot; and so, climbing the stony
hillside, over beds of trailing arbutus bloom and past bunches of
birdfoot violets, I sat down in the sun, on a cushion of long, dry
grass.
The gentlest of zephyrs was stirring, the very breath of spring, soft
and of a delicious temperature. My New England cheeks, winter-crusted
and still half benumbed, felt it only in intermittent puffs, but the
pine leaves, more sensitive, kept up a continuous murmur. Close about
me--close enough, but not too close--stood the hills. At my back,
filling the horizon in that direction, stretched an unbroken ridge,
some hundreds of feet loftier than my own position, and several miles
in length, up the almost perpendicular slope of which, a very rampart
for steepness, ranks of evergreen trees were pushing in narrow file.
Elsewhere the land rose in separate elevations; some of them, pale with
distance, showing through a gap, or peeping over the shoulder of a less
remote neighbor. Nothing else was in sight; and there I sat alone,
under the blue sky,--alone, yet with no lack of unobtrusive society.
At brief intervals a field sparrow somewhere down the hillside gave
out a sweet and artless strain, clear as running water and soft as the
breath of springtime. How gently it caressed the ear! The place and
the day had found a voice. Once a grouse drummed,--one of the most
restful of all natural sounds, to me at least, “drumming” though it be,
speaking always of fair weather and woodsy quietness and peace; and
once, to my surprise, I heard a clatter of crossbill notes, though I
saw nothing of the birds,--restless souls, wanderers up and down the
earth, and, after the habit of restless souls in general, gregarious
to the last. A buzzard drifted across the sky. Like the swan on
still St. Mary’s Lake, he floated double, bird and shadow. A flicker
shouted, and a chewink, under the sweet-fern and laurel bushes, stopped
his scratching once in a while to address by name a mate or fellow
traveler. A Canadian nuthatch, calling softly, hung back downward
from a pine cone; and, nearer by, a solitary vireo sat preening his
feathers, with sweet soliloquistic chattering, “the very sound of happy
thoughts.” I was with him in feeling, though no match for him in the
expression of it.
Again and again I took the brookside path, and spent an hour of dreams
in this sunny clearing among the hills. Day by day the sun’s heat did
its work, melting the snow of the shadbushes and the bloodroot, and
bringing out the first scattered flushes of yellowish-green on the
lofty tulip-trees, while splashes of lively purple soon made me aware
that the ground in some places was as thick with fringed polygala as
it was in other places with hepatica and arbutus. No doubt, the fair
procession, beauty following beauty, would last the season through.
A white violet, new to me (_Viola striata_), was sprinkled along the
path, and on the second day, as I went up the hill to my usual seat, I
dropped upon my knees before a perfect vision of loveliness,--a dwarf
iris, only two or three inches above the ground, of an exquisite, truly
heavenly shade, bluish-purple or violet-blue, standing alone in the
midst of the brown last year’s grass. Unless it may have been by the
cloudberry on Mount Clinton, I was never so taken captive by a blossom.
I worshiped it in silence,--the grass a natural prayer-rug,--feeling
all the while as if I were looking upon a flower just created. It would
not be found in Gray, I told myself. But it was; and before many days,
almost to my sorrow, it grew to be fairly common. Once I happened upon
a white specimen, as to which, likewise, the Manual had been before me.
New flowers are almost as rare as new thoughts.
It was amid the dead grass and rust-colored stones of this same
hillside that I found, also, the velvety, pansy-like variety of the
birdfoot violet, here and there a plant surrounded by its relatives of
the more every-day sort. This was my first sight of it; but I saw it
afterward at Natural Bridge, and again at Afton, from which I infer
that it must be rather common in the mountain region of Virginia,
notwithstanding Dr. Gray, who, as I now notice, speaks as if Maryland
were its southern limit. Indeed, to judge from my hasty experience,
Alleghanian Virginia is a thriving-place of the violet family in
general. In my very brief visit, I was too busy (or too idle, but my
idleness was really of a busy complexion) to give the point as much
attention as I now wish I had given to it, else I am sure I could
furnish the particulars to bear out my statement. At Pulaski, without
any thought of making a list, I remarked abundance of _Viola pedata_,
_V. palmata_, and _V. sagittata_, with _V. pubescens_, _V. canina
Muhlenbergii_, and four forms new to my eyes,--_V. pedata bicolor_
and _V. striata_, just mentioned, _V. hastata_ and _V. pubescens
scabriuscula_. If to these be added _V. Canadensis_ and _V. rostrata_,
both of them common at Natural Bridge, we have at least a pretty
good assortment to be picked up by a transient visitor, whose eyes,
moreover, were oftener in the trees than on the ground.