had the happiness of seeing this better flower in its green home, a
spot where it is, perhaps, more abundant than anywhere in England; but
the spot I will not name, nor even the county; the locality is not
given in the books I have consulted, yet it is, alas! too well known
to many whose only pleasure in wild flowers is to gather them greedily
to see them die indoors. For we live indoors and reck not that Nature
is deflowered, so that we return with hands or arms full of some new
brightness to add to the decorations of our interiors.
Coming one May Day to a small rustic village, I passed the schoolhouse
just when the children were trooping back in the afternoon, and noticed
that many of them were carrying bunches of fritillaries. They told
me where they had got them, in a meadow by the neighbouring river;
then one little girl stepped forward and asked me very prettily to
accept her bunch. I took it and gave her two or three pence, whereupon
the other children, disregarding the imperious calls of their
schoolmistress, who was standing outside, all flocked round and eagerly
pressed their nosegays on me. But I had as many as I wanted; my desire
was to see the flower growing, so I went my way and returned another
day to look for the favoured spot. I found it a mile from the village,
at a place where the lovely little river divides into three or four,
with long strips of greenest meadowland between the currents, with
ancient pollard willows growing on the banks. These were the biggest
pollards I have ever seen, and were like huge rudely shaped pillars
with brushwood and ivy for capitals, some still upright, others leaning
over the water, and many of them quite hollow with great gaps where the
rind had perished. I saw no chequered daffodils, but it was a beautiful
scene, a green, peaceful place, with but one blot on it--a dull, dark
brown patch where ground had been recently ploughed in the middle
of the largest and fairest meadow in sight. A sudden storm of rain
drove me to seek shelter at one of the old crumbling pollards, where,
by cramming myself into the hollow trunk, I managed to keep dry. In
half-an-hour it was over and the sky blue again; then, coming out, that
brown piece of ground in the distance looked darker than ever amidst
the wet sun-lit verdure, and I marvelled at the folly of ploughing up
a green meadow in spring; for what better or more profitable crop than
grass could be grown in such a spot?
Presently, as I walked on and got nearer, the unsightly brown changed
to dark purple; then I discovered that it was no ploughed ground before
me, but a vast patch of flowers--of fritillaries growing so close that
they darkened the earth over an area of about three acres! It was a
marvellous sight, and a pleasure indescribable to walk about among
them; to stand still in that garden with its flowers, thick as spikes
in a ripe wheat-field, on a level with my knees; to see them in such
surroundings under the wide sky in that lucid atmosphere after the
rain, the pendulous cups still sparkling with the wet and trembling
in the lightest wind. It would have been a joy to find a single
blossom; here, to my surprise, they were in thousands, and in tens
and in hundreds of thousands, an island of purple on the green earth,
or rather purple flecked with white, since to every hundred or more
dark-spotted flowers there was one of an ivory whiteness and unspotted.
But it is not this profusion of blossoms, which may be a rare
occurrence--it is the individual flower which has so singular an
attractiveness. It is, I have said, a better flower than the blue
columbine; in a way this tulip is better than any British flower. A
tulip without the stiffness and appearance of solidity which makes the
garden kinds look as if they had been carved out of wood and painted,
but pendulous, like the harebell, on a tall slender stem, among the
tall fine-leafed grasses, and trembling like the grasses at every
breath; in colour unlike any other tulip or any flower, a pink that
is like a delicate, luminous flesh-tint, minutely chequered with dark
maroon purple.
Our older writers on plants waxed eloquent in describing their
“fritillaria” or “Ginny-flower,” and even the driest of modern
botanists writes that it is a flower which, once seen, cannot be
forgotten. That is because of its unlikeness to all others--its
strangeness. In the arrangement of its colours it is unique, and
furthermore, it is the darkest flower we have. This effect is due to
the smallness of the tessellated squares, since at a distance of a few
feet the dark violet maroon kills or absorbs the bright delicate pink
colour, and makes the entire blossom appear uniformly dark.
The flower which, combining strangeness with beauty, comes nearest
to the chequered daffodil is the henbane, with an exceedingly dark
purple centre and petals a pale clouded amber yellow delicately veined
with purple brown. But in the henbane the dark and pale hues are
seen contrasted. In flowers like these, but chiefly in the chequered
daffodil, we see that the quality of strangeness, which is not in
itself an element of beauty, has yet the effect of intensifying the
beauty it is associated with. Thus, if we consider other admired
species--briar-rose, pink convolvulus, rock-rose, sea-poppy, yellow
flag, bugloss, blue geranium, water forget-me-not, flowering rush, and
grass of Parnassus, for example--and many more might be named--we see
that in beauty, pure and simple, these equal and exceed the fritillary;
yet this impresses us more than the others, and surprises us into
thinking it more beautiful because its beauty strikes us more sharply.
It is not sufficient to say that the sharper impression is due merely
to the unusual appearance. I rather incline to believe that the source
of the vivid interest excited is that faculty of the mind supposed to
be obsolete, but which still faintly lives in all of us, though we may
be unconscious of it--a faculty which sees a hidden meaning or spirit
in all strange appearances in the natural world. It is the “sense of
mystery,” and is with us in sight of a magnificent and strange sunset,
and of any unusual atmospheric strangeness, down to the smallest
objects that engage our attention--an insect, a flower, even our
chequered daffodil of the river-fields.
XXIX
CONCERNING LAWNS, WITH INCIDENTAL OBSERVATIONS ON EARTHWORMS
I am not a lover of lawns; on the contrary, I regard them, next to
gardens, as the least interesting adjuncts of the country-house.
Grass, albeit the commonest, is yet one of the most beautiful things
in Nature when allowed to grow as Nature intended, or when not too
carefully trimmed and brushed. Rather would I see daisies in their
thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall
stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the
too-well-tended lawn grass. This may be regarded as the mental attitude
of the wild man from the woods, but something may be said for it. Sir
Walter Raleigh explained, centuries ago, the reason of our desire for
and pleasure in trim gardens, lawns, parks, and neatly cut hedges of
box and privet and holly: those surroundings of the house were invented
as a refuge from the harsh, brambly outside wilderness, the stinging
nettles, scratching thorns, sharp hurtful stones and hidden pits--from
all the roughnesses and general horriblenesses of an incult Nature.
But that’s all a feeling of long ago, it may be answered; it has gone
out now, and we have come back to Nature--the dear old beautiful
mother! Have we indeed? Lawns have not gone out; on the contrary, it
appears to me that the idea of the lawn, like the idea of clothes,
has entered into our souls and manifests itself more and more in all
our surroundings, our dwellings, our persons, our habits. Sir Almroth
Wright cried out a little while ago against our habit of scrubbing our
bodies every day and rubbing them dry with rough towels to polish and
make them shine like our glass, china, and plated table-ware. When
Nathaniel Hawthorne came to the Old Home from an outlandish United
States of America where this idea of the lawn had not yet penetrated
so deeply, he spent some time at a great country-house where he stayed
in running about the lawns and park in search of a nettle, or weed,
or wilding of some kind to rest his eyes on. The novel smoothness and
artificiality of everything made him mad. And if Sir Walter Raleigh
himself were to return to us in all his glory and splendour, and if
some one, opening the History of the World, should read that passage
about lawns to him, I think he would cry out: “Oh, but you have now
gone too far in that direction! Your rooms, your tables, all the
thousand appointments of your establishment, your own appearance, your
hard-scraped skins, your conversation suffocate me. Let me out--let me
go back to the place I came from!”
What then of all the beautiful things we say of Nature? it may be
asked. Why, only this: it amounts to as much as all the beautiful
things we say about painted pictures, jewels, tapestries, old lace,
Chippendale furniture, and what not. We are not _in_ Nature; we are
out of her, having made our own conditions; and our conditions have
reacted upon and made us what we are--artificial creatures. Nature is
now something pretty to go and look at occasionally, but not too often,
nor for too long a time.
So much in defence of my attitude concerning lawns. There is no doubt
that, seen at a right distance, a fine country-house or mansion,
standing isolated from other buildings and from trees and gardens,
looks best on a level green expanse. At this moment I recall Shaw
House, Avington House, and two or three others, but every reader
who knows England will have the image of half-a-dozen or more such
buildings in his mind.
Now I think that this grass setting would be just as effective or more
effective if left more in its natural state. Seen closely, the smooth
lawn is a weariness to the eye like all smooth monotonous surfaces;
like the smooth or oily unwrinkled sea, for example, which the eye
refuses to dwell on; or like the blue sky without a cloud or a soaring
bird on it. Such a sky may be good to be under but tiresome to the
vision after three seconds. If you look at it for a whole minute,
or for an hour without weariness, it is because you are thinking of
something, which means that you are occupied with seeing mental images
and not the sky. An acre or so of green linoleum or drugget, drawn
evenly and smoothly over the ground surrounding a large house, would
probably have as good an effect as a perfectly smooth grass lawn. But
into this question I am not going any further. I write about lawns
because there are such things, and I have to see them and sometimes
live in sight of one. I have had one before my eyes for hours this very
day while staying at a friend’s house in the country. A week ago I went
up to London for a couple of days, and on my return my hostess informed
me that I had no sooner left than the gardener presented himself before
her to ask her if now that her visitor had gone away for a day or two
she would allow him to sweep the lawn and make it tidy.
It was a good-sized lawn, with a group of well-grown birches on the
west side, and one day in early November the south-west wind blew
and carried thousands of small yellow heart-shaped leaves over the
green expanse, making it beautiful to look at. By and by the gardener
came with his abhorred brushwood-broom and swept that lovely novel
appearance away, to my great disgust. Then the blessed wind blew again
and roared all night, swaying the trees and tossing out fresh clouds
on clouds of the brilliant little leaves all over the monotonous sheet
of green, and lo! in the morning it was beautiful once more. And I
stood and admired it, and it was like walking on a velvet green carpet
embroidered with heart-shaped golden leaves. Naturally, when I saw the
gardener coming on with his broom, I cried out aloud and brought the
lady of the house on the scene, and she graciously ordered him off. It
was only when I went up to town that he was allowed to work his will.
I now propose to tell the story of another lawn of which I had the
supervision for two or three months; a small lawn at a cottage
surrounded by green fields lent to me by a friend one summer end; it
was mowed and looked after generally by a man who came once a week
from the village, and he also had the garden to see after. In July
and August, when the sun was low enough to allow one to sit out of
doors and of the shade of trees I lounged and read and drank my tea
there, and noticed that it was abundantly sprinkled with plantains.
Now I don’t mind plantains on a lawn because, as I have already said
and ingeminated, lawns are nothing to me unless flowers are allowed
to blossom and leaves blown from coloured woods to lie on them, but
I remembered my friends who had lent me their paradisaical retreat
with its green lawn from which, idling in my canvas chair, I looked
on a green valley and a swift chalk stream with coots and moorhens
disporting themselves on it, and beautiful hanging woods beyond.
I remembered them, and in my desire to do something to express my
gratitude I said I would clear this one lawn of its plantains.
Going to the tool-house, I found a long, narrow, sharp-pointed trowel,
which was just what I wanted, and also saw there an important-looking
weed-killing instrument and a can of poison, which I certainly did not
want. I started taking up the plantains, working the trowel down to
the end of the root so as to leave nothing of the tenacious cunning
creature in the ground. By and by the man from the village came and saw
the beginning of my work--my little harvest gathered from four or five
square yards of lawn. He smiled, and when I asked him why he smiled,
he said the lawn had been in that condition for the past ten years and
nothing could be done to get rid of the plantains. He couldn’t say
how many quarts of poison had been squirted into the roots, but they
refused to die, and so on and so forth. On his next visit he found a
huge heap of uprooted plantains in the middle of the lawn, left there
for his special benefit, and not one growing plantain left on the lawn.
“Ah, yes,” he said--it was just what I had expected him to say--“the
fact is I’ve never had the time to do it properly. Always too busy with
the rose garden, and plantains take a lot of time, you know. Certainly
we did what we could with the weed-killer, but it seems it didn’t
amount to much.”
What it amounted to was this: here and there all about the lawn were
round brown spots, the size of a crown-piece or larger, where the grass
had perished and refused to grow again. These unsightly spots marked
the places where plantains had been destroyed by the weed-killer, the
metal point of which is thrust into the centre of the plant and the
poison squirted in. Now this poison does not kill the plantain only
but the roots of the grasses as well--hence the naked brown spots. How
long does the poison keep its potency in the moist mould? A long time,
I should think, seeing that these naked spots were some months old. I
also wanted to know if the poison was deadly to other forms of life in
the soil, especially to earthworms. To ascertain this I took up mould
enough from one of the barren spots to fill a flower-pot, then filled
a second flower-pot with mould from outside the lawn, then went to the
rose-garden at the back to dig for worms, and selecting two full-grown
vigorous specimens, put one in each pot. The following day I turned
them out and found that the first one had lost its vigour, and not only
was it languid in its motions, but the colour had changed to a dull
pink and had wholly lost the rainbow bloom of the healthy earthworm.
There was no change in the healthy colour and activity of the second
worm. I put them back in their respective pots and examined them again
next day: the first was dead, its body a dull red and flabby. The
second was still just as strong and active and of as fresh and healthy
a colour as when first taken from the earth.
I was satisfied that weed-killers are even more potent than I had
thought them. As a bird-lover I had always hated them on account
of their destructiveness to the small birds of the homestead, the
blackbird and song-thrush, chaffinch, robin, dunnock, and other species
that are accustomed to seek for small morsels on the gravelled walks
where these poisons are so much used by gardeners to extirpate the
small hardy weeds that root themselves in such places.
I didn’t pursue the matter further, and the subject of lawns and
earthworms was out of my mind for two or three weeks when something
happened at the end of August to revive my interest in it. There came
a wet day followed by a gale of wind which lasted a part of the night,
and next morning I found that the wind in its violence had well-nigh
stripped a row of young false acacia trees growing on the south side of
their still living green leaves and sprinkled them abundantly all over
the lawn. As I sat out of doors that afternoon I didn’t quite like the
disorderly appearance of the long green leaves torn off before their
time lying all about me, and I took it into my head to sweep them away,
but when I set myself to do it with the brushwood broom, not a leaf
could I sweep from its place! I then discovered to my surprise that the
leaves were all made fast to the ground; every leaf had been seized and
dragged by an earthworm to its run, the terminal leaflet rolled up and
pulled into the hole, but no further could the leaf go, since the next
two opposite leaflets on the stem were like a cross-bar and prevented
further progress. In every case the terminal leaflet was buried and
the rest of the leaf lying out on the grass.
We know that earthworms live on the vegetable mould in which they move
and have their being, and nourish themselves by passing the earth they
remove in excavating their tunnels through their bodies. It is assumed
by naturalists that they extract certain “salts” on which they live
from the soil they swallow. But as the worm is not a vegetable I prefer
to believe that they exist on the microscopic organisms in the mould.
Be this as it may, the worm does not live by mould alone; he is also a
vegetable eater and feeds on decayed leaves of trees when they fall in
his way, dragging them into his hole by night. But the leaf he prefers
is the decayed one, and it struck me that these lawn worms were in an
extraordinary state of leaf-hunger to seize upon and drag these fresh
living leaves into their holes as soon as the wind had torn them off.
The conclusion I formed was that the lawn earthworm is a starved worm,
and I began to examine and compare the lawn worms with those living
in the soil away from the lawn. I found that when I dug for worms in
the moist earth in likely spots away from the lawn, the mere act of
striking the spade or fork deep into the soil brought the worms with
a rush to the surface, and in many instances the rush was so rapid
that at the moment when the spade was being driven deep down by the
foot, a big vigorous worm would appear on the surface thrusting half
the length of his long body straight up and looking like the round
polished stem of some species of squill or lily springing miraculously
from the earth. Worms, I found, are extraordinarily sensitive to earth
vibration: thus when one walks upon or strikes the ground with a stick,
they go deeper down; but when the vibrations come from beneath or
from the earth around them, they rush to the surface to escape from a
subterranean enemy pursuing them in their own element. On the lawn I
never succeeded in making the worms rush up to the surface by striking
a spade or fork into the soil; and when I dug up a number of worms from
the lawn and compared them with others from the soil outside, I found
a great difference in them. The lawn worms were much smaller and were
not nearly so vigorous in their movements as the others. The wonder was
that worms should be found living in such numbers in the lawn soil in
these somewhat unnatural conditions, when just outside the lawn there
was a soil easier to penetrate and abundance of decaying leaves for
them to feed on.
These incidental observations on earthworms in their relation to
lawns caused me to regret that I had not made a better use of my
opportunities of studying these creatures on former occasions, as it
now appeared to me that much yet remains to be discovered anent their
habits and effect on the soil and vegetation. My knowledge of them was
little more than that of the ordinary person, and how much _he_ knows
about the subject let the following incident show.
One evening I was with Mr. Frank E. Beddard at his club, and taking
advantage of the occasion, asked him some question about earthworms,
he being the greatest authority in the universe on the subject. It
happened that another friend of his, a famous angler, was sitting near
and overheard our conversation.
“Ah, yes--worms,” he said. “Before I forget all about it, I want to
ask you if the worm we dig up in the sand for bait is the same as the
common earthworm.”
“No,” said the other.
“Well, but they are both worms, are they not?”
“Yes.”
“And if they are both worms, what’s the difference?”
“They are both worms, and differ as much as a cat from a squirrel--both
mammals.”
And that was all he would say: the subject of their differences could
not be profitably discussed on that occasion and with persons who knew
so little.
Like everybody else I had read Darwin’s classic, but what one reads
does not inform the mind much unless one observes and thinks for
oneself at the same time. The wonderful story of the action of
earthworms on the earth’s surface only came home to me during the
excavations at Silchester, when year after year the pavements and
floors and foundations of houses and temples and public and private
baths were uncovered until the entire 200 acres within the walls had
been disclosed. It is not necessary to describe here, since we have it
all in Darwin, just how the worms succeeded in burying in a century
or two all that remained of a ruined Silchester--the outside wall
excepted--to a depth of three to four feet beneath the surface. We
know that for the last 800 years the ground has been cultivated above
the buried city. When watching these excavations I discovered one fact
about worms which Darwin missed. Among the best finds at Silchester
were the large and in some cases uninjured mosaic floors of the more
important houses, some of which were removed intact to Reading Museum,
and may be seen there.
When one of these fine large floors was uncovered it remained _in situ_
until the late autumn, when it was taken up and removed. Observing
these floors, after they had been washed and scrubbed until they looked
as fresh as if made yesterday instead of nigh on twenty centuries
ago, it surprised me to find that worms were quite abundant beneath
them, that they came to the surface through small borings which were
not noticed unless closely looked for; they came up by night, and in
the morning the workmen had to sweep the castings away to make the
floors clean. The question that suggested itself was: why did the worms
continue to penetrate beneath the stone and cement floor after it had
been buried so deep in the ground, and when they had, and had enjoyed
for over a thousand years at the least, a soil formed of vegetable
mould as deep as earthworms require to live and flourish in? A depth of
three or four feet of mould is as much as they require, but they will,
Darwin says, occasionally go deeper to five or six feet, and he gives
nine feet as the greatest depth at which they have been found. Now at
Silchester I saw some taken from a depth of twenty-five feet, and very
many at eighteen to twenty feet. This was when the old Roman wells and
other deep pits were cleaned out.