and they too were shocked when I said the sight of that sodden mass
of flavourless starch and water made me sick--that it looked like
the remains of a boiled baby in the dish, boiled to a rag. For up to
then I had seen potatoes on the table as they appear when boiled in
their skins, peeled, and placed in a large shallow dish with a little
butter on them; and in that way they have the appearance of large
cream-coloured fruit, and send out an agreeable smell and have a nice
flavour.
Here was quite a different thing: this was the “homely potato” of the
British journalist--homely indeed!--stripped of its romance, spoiled
in the cooking, and made nasty to the eye. Yet this is how it is eaten
in every house in England! In Ireland and Scotland I found that the
potato was usually cooked in the proper way by people of the peasant
class. But what do the doctors, who make our digestions their life
study, say of this misuse of the potato? I don’t know. All I hear them
say about the potato is that if your digestion is bad you must not
eat it. What, then, will they say when I tell them that I have a weak
digestion, and whenever I have a bad turn I cure myself by dining for a
day or two on nothing but potatoes? Cooked in their skins, I scarcely
need add, and eaten with pepper and salt and butter. No soup or fish
or meats or sweets--nothing but potatoes for a day or two and I’m well
again. Perhaps they will say that I am not a normal subject. But we
needn’t bother about the doctors. Just now, while writing this chapter,
I asked my landlady’s daughter in the village in Cornwall where I am
staying if she had ever tasted a potato boiled in its jacket. Yes,
she had, once only, and didn’t like it because it didn’t taste like a
potato--such a funny flavour!
That “funny” flavour, so unlike the taste of the tuber boiled and
water-logged in the homely English way, is precisely the flavour which
makes it so nice to eat and so valuable as food; also, if I may slip in
the personal pathology or idiosyncratic abnormality, so perfect a cure
for indigestion. It is, in fact, the taste imparted by the salts which
mostly lie close beneath the skin, and are consequently thrown away
when the potato is peeled before boiling. You cannot avoid this waste
by scraping your potato, since scraping removes the waterproof skin,
and, the skin gone, the boiling water saturates the potato and carries
the salts away.
This is a serious matter in these days, when--as some of the newspapers
say--we are trying to economise in the matter of food, and when the
potato is beginning to be talked about. I suppose that there are about
thirty or forty millions of us who consume about half a pound of
potatoes every day; and it is not only the case that hundreds of tons
of excellent food are thrown away every day in the peeling process, but
that the most valuable elements in the potato are wasted. Perhaps the
war will teach us to value the potato properly, as, I believe, it is
and always has been valued in most countries outside these islands.
XXVII
JOHN-GO-TO-BED-AT-NOON
A longish name for a flower--one of its three names! After all it is
not saying very much; we have another better, more familiar one with
at least six names, and one of them not composed of six words like our
John’s, but of ten!
When it is spring I walk in sheltered places, by wood and hedge-side,
to look for and welcome the first comers. Oh those first flowers so
glad to be alive and out in the sun and wind once more--their first
early ineffable spring freshness, remembrancers of our lost childhood,
dead and lost these many dim and sorrowful years, now recovered with
the flowers, and immortal once more with spring’s immortality!
Do we not all experience a feeling something like that in an early
spring walk? Even a stockbroker or stockjobber knows a primrose when he
sees one, and it is a yellow primrose to him too--and something more. A
something to give him a thrill. It is as if he met a fairy-like child
in his walk who tossed back her shining tresses at his approach to look
up into his face with eyes full of laughter.
To me they are all like that. Look at this celandine, how it shines
with joy and starts up to meet you half-way, throwing its arms out for
the expected caress! And here too is my dear old little white friend,
the wild garlic--a whole merry crowd of them by the stone hedge; happy
meeting and happy greeting! Let me stoop to caress them and inhale
their warm breath. It is true there are those who don’t like it and
take their nice noses away when the flower would be glad to kiss them.
But when a flower has no fragrance to it, like the hyacinth and blue
columbine of these parts, or even red valerian--Pretty Betsy herself
blushing bright pink all over--it does not seem that they love as
warmly as the flower with a scented breath--sweet violet and sweet gale
and vernal squill and cowslip and many more, down to the water-mint by
the stream and my loving little white friend here by the stone hedge.
And when the first early blooms are gone with March, April, and May,
when it is full June, I wade in the lush meadow (when the farmer is
not about) to greet and talk to the taller ones, and alas! to say
good-bye to them at the same time, seeing that the mower will soon
come to make hay of them. One of the old friends I diligently seek
at this season is John, or Johnnie, tall as any there--tall as the
flaunting ox-eye daisies. Not that it is a particularly attractive
flower; I have never regarded it as pretty, but merely as one of those
yellow dandelion-shaped flowers which are so common with us. And it
is indeed in appearance a lesser dandelion on a thin tall plant, the
blooms, half-a-dozen or so to a plant, on long fine stems. It interests
me chiefly on account of its singular, unflowerlike behaviour, which
the name describes; also on account of its other queer name and the
meaning thereof. I don’t mean goat’s-beard, but its third old English
name which now, like many another, has grown offensive to ears
polite, and has long been banished from our flower books, and even
the dictionaries. One must go back to the old writers to find it in
print: not necessarily so far back as Chaucer, who is too disgusting
for anything, but to the Elizabethan and Carolines. The banned name,
however, is still in use in the rural districts.
What I have written so far was all I could have said about this yellow
flower until last summer; and if in time gone by any one had said to
me that a day would come when Johnnie would appear to me as a wonder
and delight, I should have laughed. Yet the strange experience actually
came to me last June.
At a Cornish village there was a field near the cottage where I was
staying, where my host had allowed his half-a-dozen cows to graze
during the winter months: in April he turned them out, and a month
later, passing by the field, it appeared to me that it would yield him
a heavy crop of grass. One morning in June, looking at the field from a
distance, it struck me that the hay would not be of a very good quality
since the entire area had now turned to bright yellow with some tall
flower that looked like ragwort among the grasses.
“What’s happened to your field--what is that yellow weed in it?” I said
to my man.
“Oh, that’s only----” then he pulled himself up, thinking in time that
I might be of the polite-eared tribe. “That’s a yellow flower,” he
finished.
“Yes, I see it is,” said I. “I’ll have a look at your flower after
lunch.”
But the pleasure of luncheon, especially of the omelettes my landlady
made so wonderfully well, caused me to forget all about it.
About three o’clock I was out walking, half a mile from the house, when
I looked back from the high ground at the village beneath me, and my
eye rested on the field about which we had talked that morning. “Now
what was it about that field?” said I to myself, trying to recover
something all but forgotten. Then I remembered that at noon it had
appeared all a sheet of yellow colour and was now of a uniform deep
rather dull green! It was very odd, but I had no time to investigate
until the following morning when, on visiting the field about ten
o’clock, I saw it in all its glory, the whole area resplendent with
its multitudinous crowded blooms of the dandelion orange-yellow, the
most luminous colour in Nature; and but for the wind that waved the
tall plants like a field of corn, mingling the vivid flower-tint with
the green beneath, the colour would have been too dazzling in that
brilliant sunshine. But it was the sunlight and the motion imparted
by the wind which made it so wonderful. A sheet of yellow buttercups
or a field thickly grown with dandelions does not produce this effect
owing to its want of motion. The stiffer the flower on its stem the
less vivid in appearance is its sentient life--the less does it enjoy
the air it breathes. These flowers, on tall pliant stems, danced in
the wind with a gladness greater than that of Wordsworth’s daffodils.
It was only when the first shock of wonder and delight was over,
that, looking closely at a flower, I made the discovery that it was
the goat’s-beard, the homely John-go-to-bed-at-noon, and the hardly
respectable--I dare not say what!
After that I visited the field three or four times a day and found that
the flower begins to open some time after sunrise and comes into its
fullest bloom about ten o’clock; that at noon it begins to close, but
for an hour or two the change is imperceptible, after which one notices
that the field is losing its lustre, the dimness gradually growing
until by three o’clock the field is all dark green again. John’s in
bed, tucked up, and in a deep sleep which will last quite seventeen
hours; then he won’t wake with a start, but slowly, slowly, yawning and
rubbing his yellow eyes and taking at least two hours to get out of bed.
I do not know what has been said by the authorities on the physiology
of plants on this habit of the flower, but it strikes the ordinary
person as something abnormal or unnatural. We all know many flowers
(the familiar daisy is one) which close in the evening, folding
themselves up or covering their round discs with their petals as a
child covers her face with her fingers, and this seems right and
natural and consistent with Nature’s plan. We are not yet acquainted
with all the secrets of a flower, but we at least know that its life
and growth are from the sun and suppose that when the light and heat
are withdrawn the work of elaboration going on within it is suspended,
that the flower is asleep and at rest until the vitalising influence
returns. Why then the extraordinary waste of daylight by this one
flower, when all others require all the light and heat they can get?
Has Johnnie’s “unconscious intelligence” found out an easier way--a
method of work by means of which he is able to accomplish in his day of
three or four hours as much as others can do in their twelve to sixteen
hours’ day? Johnnie then should be the right flower for the Socialist
to wear on his day, which would have to be in June.
I had asked my man how he could have let his field get into such a
condition, since the tough wiry stems of the goat’s-beard could not
be very good for his cows as winter feed, and all he could say was
that it “had come like that of itself”; that in the two previous years
there had been a slight sprinkling of the yellow flower--he didn’t
like to name it. But how it had come about was now plain to see,
for before he started mowing balls of down could be seen all over
the field, shedding myriads of seeds which would produce another
undesirable but exceedingly beautiful crop the following summer. The
lazy stay-in-bed-for-seventeen-hours goat’s-beard was actually ahead of
the other flowers in ripening its seed!
* * * * *
That shining yellow field, which continues to shine in memory, just now
serves to remind me of other plants and flowers that, commonly seen,
have no special attraction, but which occasionally find their day of
fullest perfection and triumph on some abandoned and waste ground--a
field perhaps once, long years ago, under cultivation.
I have described some cases of this kind in _Nature in Downland_, where
the turf was ruined for ever by the plough on the high South Downs a
century ago, then left for Nature to work her will on the desolated
spot. But we are most familiar with the sight of her beautifying
processes in the remains of mediaeval buildings scattered about the
land, in old castles and abbeys and towers, draped with ivy, the rough
stone walls flushed with green and grey and yellow colours of moss and
lichen and rainbow-tinted algae, decorated too with yellow wallflower,
ivy-leafed toad-flax, and red valerian. Thus Nature glorifies our
“builders of ruins.”
And going back to remoter ages, I have in my rambles come upon two
wonderfully beautiful flower effects, one in a Roman road, unused
probably since Roman times; the other more ancient still on a British
earthwork. I found the first one spring day when cycling over the
high down country near Dorchester. I caught sight of what looked to me
like a broad band of snow lying across the green hills. Coming to it I
found the old Roman road, which is there very distinct and has a closer
turf and a brighter green than the downs it lies across, so thickly
overgrown with daisies that the crowded flowers were actually touching
and had obliterated the green colour of the ground under them. It was
a wonderful sight, for all these millions of small blossoms occupied
the road only, not a daisy being seen on the green down on either side,
and the loveliness was of so rare a quality, so rich yet so delicate,
a beauty almost supernatural, that I could not bear to walk or ride on
it. It was like a road leading to some unearthly brighter place--some
paradise of flowers.
In the other case the site was an earthwork in Wiltshire, built
probably thousands of years ago, and the flower selected to decorate it
was the yellow bird’s-foot trefoil.
There are in that part of Wiltshire many such remains, grim dykes,
with or without walls at the side, and walls with a foss on one or in
some instances on both sides. This one was a very deep ditch at the
side of a wall ten to fifteen feet high, with a flat top eight to ten
feet broad. It winds over a large down then dips down to a broad level
valley, and rising over the hill opposite disappears at last in the
arable land on that side. Standing on the high down or on the top of
the wall it has the shape and appearance of a vast green serpent with
its mile-long coil lying in a series of curves across the earth. As in
the case of the old Roman green roads, the turf of the earthwork is a
different and brighter shade of green than that of the valley.
At this place I once met and had a long talk about the far past with
a man of a singularly lively mind for a Wiltshire peasant. He told me
that on numberless occasions since his boyhood he had stood looking at
this great earthwork in wonder, asking himself who and what the people
were that made it. “I have often,” he said, “had the idea that they
must have been mad; for allowing that they had a use for such a wall
and ditch why did they make it go winding all over the place instead of
carrying it in a straight line and saving more than half the labour it
cost to build it?” I could only suggest in reply that it was no doubt a
very ancient earthwork, dating back to the time when metal tools were
unknown in England and that the chalk had to be scooped up with sharp
flints; that when they came to a very hard bit they had to make a bend
to get round it. I also assured him that they could not have been mad
as no such disease was known to the old ancient people.
Now in spring the flat top of this earthwork in all that space where it
lies across the level valley, the broad level top of the bank is grown
over with the bird’s-foot trefoil, the yellow flowers as crowded as the
daisies on the old Roman road, with not one flower to be seen growing
on the green sloping sides. A green serpent still in appearance but
its whole back now a shining yellow.
When I dream of South Wiltshire in spring, when the wild flowers are in
bloom, it is to look again on that wonderful green and yellow serpent.
XXVIII
THE CHEQUERED DAFFODIL AND THE GLORY OF WILD FLOWERS
Never a season passes, never a month nor a week, nor even a day, when
I’m wandering in quest of the sights and sounds that draw the field
naturalist, but I stumble on something notable never previously seen,
or never seen in the same charming aspect. And the fact that it is
stumbled on when not looked for, that it comes as a complete surprise,
greatly enhances the charm. It may be a bird or mammal, or some rare or
lustrous insect, but it is in plant life where the happy discoveries
are most frequent, even to one who is not a “painfull and industrious
searcher of plantes” and knows little of their science. For not only
are the species so numerous as to be practically innumerable to one who
desires to see all things for himself, but many of the most attractive
kinds are either rare or exceedingly local in their distribution. I
will give a few instances.
What a delightful experience it was one cold sunny day in April when
I sought shelter from the furious wind at a huge rocky headland at
Zennor on the Cornish coast, and found the turf at the foot of the
rocks jewelled with the first vernal squills! And what a thrill of joy
in Scotland one June, when coming to a narrow green valley between
high rocks and woods I had my first sight of the exquisite grass of
Parnassus flowering in profusion!
One day, cycling from Salisbury to Winterbourne Gunner, I found a
pretty red flower new to me growing by the roadside in great abundance;
for a distance of three or four hundred yards the hedge-side was
thickly sprinkled with its lovely little stars. It was a geranium,
prettier than any red geranium known to me, the delicate colour
resembling that of the red horse-chestnut. It was the _Geranium
pyrenaicum_, native of central and eastern Europe, and by some
botanists supposed to be indigenous in this country. Probably the
colour varies, as some of the books describe it as purple or pale
purple.
My delight was greater when I first came upon the large blue geranium
growing among the South Wiltshire downs. The large loose plant with
large flowers and deep-cut leaves reminded me of the geranium-leafed
scented mallow, one of my favourites, and these two plants became
associated in my mind, but the mallow is rosy pink and the geranium a
pure divine (or human) blue.
One of the rarest, and to my mind one of the most beautiful, flowers
in England is the bastard balm; I have never found it but once, and it
was the way in which it came before me that has given it such a lustre
in my mind. I was motoring with friends from Land’s End to London, when
in coming through the hilly country near Tavistock I caught sight of
a flower unknown to me on a tall stalk among the thick herbage at the
roadside, and shouted to the chauffeur to stop. He did so after rushing
on a farther hundred yards or so, but very reluctantly, as he was angry
with the hills and anxious to get to Exeter. I walked back and secured
my strange lovely flower, and for the rest of the day it was a delight
to us, and I’m pretty sure that its image exists still and shines in
the memory of all who were with me in the car that day--the chauffeur
excepted.
I am bringing too many flowers into this chapter, since only one is
named in the title, but once I begin to think of them they keep me, and
a dream of fair flowers is as much to me as that Dream of Fair Women
is to the Tennysons and Swinburnes who write poetry. Or perhaps they
are more like fair little girls than grown women, the beautiful little
dear ones I loved and remember--Alice and Doris, and pensive Monica,
“laughing Allegra and Edith with golden hair,” and dozens more. But I
must really break away from this crowd to concentrate on my chequered
daffodil, only I must first be allowed to mention just one more--the
blue columbine, the wild flower, always true blue and supposed to be
indigenous. I don’t believe it; I imagine for various reasons that
it is a garden escape dating back to the Roman occupation, which
gives it a better title by some eighteen centuries to be described as
British than dozens of our wild flowers. The charming sanfoin, common
as the gipsy rose in our fields, the wild musk that flourishes by a
thousand streams from Land’s End to the Western Islands, the winter
heliotrope that spreads its green mantle over so much of England, are
by comparison aliens that emigrated but yesterday to our shores.
It was in Wiltshire again that I found my first columbines, in a vast
thicket of furze, may, and blackthorn covering about twenty acres of
ground. The plants were tall, the thin wiry stems being two or three
feet long, and produced few leaves, but flowers as large as those of
the garden plant. An old keeper who had charge of the ground told me he
had known the flower from his boyhood, and that formerly he could fill
a barrow with “collar-binds,” as he called them, any day. It was a rare
pleasure to see that columbine in its own home--the big blue quaint
flower that looked at you from its shelter of rough furze and thorn
bushes; and for the first time in my life I admired it, since in the
garden, where as a rule its peculiar beauty is dimmed by other garden
blooms, it has an inharmonious setting. But I must say of the colour
that albeit a true floral blue it is a blue of the earth, the material
world we inhabit, not the divine (or human) blue of the blue geranium
nor the more ethereal blue of the vernal squill on the sea-cliffs, and
of the wild hyacinth seen in sheets of colour under the woodland trees.
These are the floral blues that bring heaven down to us.
It is not strange perhaps that this flower should be known by bird
names, but it is odd that the names should be of birds so wide apart in
our minds as eagle and dove. _Aquilegia_, because the inverted tubes
at the base of the flower are like the curved claws of an eagle; and
columbine from its dove-like appearance, each blossom forming a cluster
of fine dark blue fairy fan-tails, with beaks that meet at the stem,
wings open, and tails outspread.
This great find made me think that I had come into a columbine country,
and I set out to look for it, but failed to find or even hear of it
anywhere in that district except at one spot on the border of Wilts and
Dorset. This was a tiny rustic village hidden among high downs, one of
the smallest, loveliest, most out-of-the-world villages in England.
In the small ancient church I found a mural tablet to the memory of
the poet Browning’s grandfather, whose humble life had been spent in
that neighbourhood. So rare was it for a stranger to appear in this
lost village that half of the population, all the forty schoolchildren
included, were eager to talk to me all the time I spent in it, and they
all knew all about the columbine. It had been abundant half a mile from
the village by the hedges and among the furze bushes, and every summer
the children were accustomed to go out and gather the flowers, and
they were seen in every cottage; and as a result of this misuse the
flower had been extirpated.
They wished it would come again!
If comparatively few persons have seen the blue native columbine, just
as few perhaps have found, growing wild, that more enchanting flower,
the snake’s-head or fritillary. Guinea-flower and bastard narcissus
and turkey-caps are some of its old English names, the last still in
common use; but the name by which all educated persons now call it is
also very old. Two centuries and a half ago a writer on plants spoke of
it as “a certaine strange flower which is called by some Fritillaria.”
Another very old name, which I like best, is chequered daffodil. As a
garden flower we know it, and we also know the wild flower bought in
shops or sent as a gift from friends at a distance. In most instances
the flowers I have seen in houses were from the Christchurch Meadows at
Oxford.
I know what white, what purple fritillaries
The grassy harvest of the river-fields
Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields,
says Matthew Arnold in his beautiful monody; the wonder is that it
should yield so many. But to see the flower in its native river-fields
is the main thing; in a vase on a table in a dim room it is no better
than a blushing briar-rose or any other lovely wild bloom removed from
its proper atmosphere and surroundings.