Staring, winking at the skies;
Nose of gillyflowers and box;
Scented grasses, put for locks—
Which a little breeze, at pleasure,
Set a-waving round his eyes.
“Brazen helm of daffodillies,
With a glitter toward the light;
Purple violets, for the mouth,
Breathing perfumes west and south;
And a sword of flashing lilies,
Holden ready for the fight.
“And a breastplate, made of daisies,
Closely fitting, leaf by leaf;
Periwinkles interlaced,
Drawn for belt about the waist;
While the brown bees, humming praises,
Shot their arrows round the chief.”
NOTE IV.
THE EVENING PRIMROSE.
I WONDER whether the Evening Primrose is as much grown and cared for as
it deserves to be. It is an American plant, but is now found wild in
several parts of England, notably at Formby, among the Lancashire sand
hills, where tradition says it originally came from a vessel wrecked
on that barren coast. It is mentioned little, if at all, by our old
botanists, and our more modern poets have for the most part passed it
carelessly by. Southey, however, alludes to it in his well-remembered
lines to the bee, that was still at work, after the Cistus flowers
had fallen and “the Primrose of Evening was ready to burst.” Keats,
too, has a striking passage about the Evening Primrose, which I quote
a little further on, for I may perhaps make a few extracts from an
article I lately wrote in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ on “The Garden at
Nightfall,” as I have no better words in which to describe the beauty
and charm of these Œnotheras. The question arising from the veins of
flowers I have already mentioned in _The English Flower Garden_.
“I have two varieties of Œnotheras or Evening Primroses, and they
are in their full glory to-night. One is the large flowering yellow
Œnothera, which grows from five to six feet high, and which opens its
yellow blossoms night after night from early summer to late autumn. It
is a curious sight to see the blossoms begin to open. I had been in
the garden shortly after six, and the yellow buds were still folded
within the calyx. Watching closely, you saw the petals give a sudden
start—they half release themselves—and by degrees open out fully into
the blossom, which will last till morning, but begins to fade after the
sun has dried up the dews of night. Keats, whose accurate observation
of flowers is often very remarkable, speaks of
‘A tuft of evening primroses
O’er which the mind may hover till it dozes;
O’er which it well might take a pleasant sleep
But that ’tis _ever startled by the leap
Of buds into ripe flowers_.’
But more beautiful still than the yellow Œnotheras is the white
_Œnothera taraxicifolia_, the evening primrose of the dandelion leaf.
I have a bed of standard roses which I have carpeted entirely with
this Œnothera. It grows low to the ground, and its leaves, which are
deeply serrated, cover the bed. In the daytime there are the relics
of the last night’s harvest of blossom, but the flowers look faded,
and soon get a pink flush over the white—after which they wither
away. But to-night the fresh blooms are out, and I count from sixty
to seventy of them, like stars, some in clusters and some gleaming
singly from the mass of deep foliage. There is, it almost seems to me,
a positive light about them which no other white flower has, not even
the Eucharis or the Christmas rose. And then the blossoms are so large
when fully open—at least three inches across the petals. This Œnothera
is from Chili, but the yellow one comes from North America; and a
smaller yellow one, also from North America, may be found naturalized
and now quite wild in one or two places in England. The name Œnothera
(properly, I suppose, Œnothēra) is said to have been given because the
root smelt of wine; but if it is uncertain what the Greek Œnothera
really was, certainly no old Greek could know anything of these
beautiful blossoms of our Western night.
“Sir John Lubbock says that the evening primrose is probably fertilized
by moths, and it would seem at first sight most likely that this should
be the case. To-night—for the air, as I have said, is quite still and
warm—is just the night that I should expect the moths to be at work;
but after long waiting near a large yellow Œnothera (the one plant had
forty blooms), I did not see one single moth. I returned to the bed of
_Œnothera taraxicifolia_, and again I could see no moth of any kind.
Meanwhile, a little further off, among a bed of white Mediterranean
heath, which is just as much in flower by day as it is now, there are
several of these wanderers of the night—little brown moths of (I
think) two different varieties. There and there alone, and not among
the large open blossoms of the Œnotheras, or among the delicate tufts
of night-scented stock, were the moths busily engaged. Why, then, do
these night-flowers—if it be not to attract night insects, and so get
fertilized—expand their petals as evening falls? We have, I suspect,
a good deal yet to learn on these matters. Even the two Œnotheras are
very unlike in several respects. The seed-vessel of the _Œnothera
taraxicifolia_ is at the end of a long tube, some seven inches in
length, down which runs the stalk or style of the pistil, and within
this tube I have constantly found little black flies and grains of
pollen. Moreover, the pistil and the stamens of this Œnothera are as
nearly as possible the same length; so that even before the flower has
opened, a stigma or head of the pistil has got well dusted over with
the pollen of the stamens.
“In the case of the large yellow Œnothera the pistil stands out
above the stamens, and I suppose it could not be fertilized except
by the wind or (more probably) by insects. The tube that leads to
the seed-vessel is here only about two inches long, and is not
smooth but hairy, so that insects would hardly pass down. Somehow or
other, however, the yellow Œnothera bears seed much more certainly
and abundantly than the white one. I must add that the veins in both
Œnotheras, and especially in the white one, are very strongly marked;
so that a theory which carries the high sanction of Sir John Lubbock,
that veins are guides to the honey of a flower, and that they do not
exist in night-opening flowers, as they would be unseen by night and
therefore useless, can hardly, I imagine, be maintained.”
I believe it is now pretty well ascertained that the Œnothēra of the
ancients was the small Willow-herb (_Epilobium roseum_), which in my
own garden is the most familiar of weeds.
Pliny describes it as having exhilarating properties in wine, as having
leaves like those of the Almond-tree, a rose-coloured flower, many
branches, and a long root, which, when dried, has a vinous smell, and
an infusion of which has a soothing effect on wild beasts.
In Baptista Porta’s curious _Phytognomonica_ (published at the end
of the sixteenth century) he says,—speaking no doubt of this same
Epilobium,—that the dried root of the Œnothēra smells of wine; given
as a drink it soothes wild beasts and makes them tame, and rubbed on
the worst wounds it serves to heal them.
NOTE V.
THE CHRISTMAS ROSE.
THE Christmas Rose is certainly one of the most valuable of flowers,
but it is a little capricious, growing luxuriantly in one place, and
in another gradually dwindling off. With me it is always successful,
and one secret may be that the roots are never allowed to be disturbed.
This beautiful flower has rather weird associations. It is the Black
Hellebore of Pliny, and was used as a poison and in incantations.
Spenser plants it with the “dead sleeping poppy” and all other sad
and poisonous herbs in the garden of Proserpina. Often, however, it
was valued for its medicinal qualities, and was occasionally, we are
told, made use of by literary people for the purpose of sharpening up
their intellects. Gerard says that “Black Hellebore is good for mad and
furious men, for melancholike, dull, and heavie persons, for those that
are troubled with the falling sickness, for lepers, for them that are
sicke of quartaine ague, and briefly for all those that are troubled
with blacke choler, and molested with melancholie.” Cowley, too, has a
curious poem, in which the Christmas-flower (as he calls it) speaks,
and boasts that, alone of flowers, Winter “still finds me on my
guard,” though the ground is “covered thick in beds of snow,” and then
it sounds its triumphs over all sorts of ills, physical and mental:
“I do compose the mind’s distracted frame,
A gift the gods and I alone can claim.”
Old Dr. Darwin, in his _Loves of the Plants_, has a scientific interest
of quite another kind in the Christmas Rose:
“Bright as the silvery plume, or pearly shell,
The snow-white rose, or lily virgin bell,
The fair Helleboras attractive shone,
Warmed every Sage, and every Shepherd won,”
but, when the seed-vessel begins to swell,
“Each roseate feature fades to livid green.”
He adds, in a note, that “The _Helleborus niger_, or Christmas Rose,
has a large beautiful white flower, adorned with a circle of tubular
two-lipp’d nectaries. After impregnation the flower undergoes a
remarkable change, the nectaries drop off, but the white corol remains,
and gradually becomes quite green. This curious metamorphose of the
corol, when the nectaries fall off, seems to show that the white juice
of the corol were before carried to the nectaries for the purpose of
producing honey, because, when these nectaries fall off, no more of
the white juice is secreted in the corol, but it becomes green, and
degenerates into a calyx.”
Dr. Darwin’s theory may or may not be strictly accurate, but his
observation of facts is certainly undoubted.
In one of Keats’s early poems he notices the Hellebore’s curving leaf,
“As the leaves of Hellebore
Turn to whence they sprung before,
And beneath each ample curl
Peeps the richness of a pearl!”
But if poets know how to describe a Christmas Rose, there are
others who do not. A horticultural book just published, says—and
the description is a curiosity—that in the month of January, “in
our garden, on the hillside, the Christmas Rose is the sweetest and
prettiest thing to show. Its petals are weak and pale; its perfume is
very faint; if you gather it, the leaves presently fall off, and the
flower is destroyed. Leave it in the hedge, when it is almost the only
thing to gladden the eye:
“The Christmas Rose, the last flower of the year,
Comes when the holly berries glow and cheer—
When the pale snowdrops rise from the earth,
So white and spirit-like ’mid Christmas mirth.”
I wish the writer would show me this curious Christmas Rose, which
grows in a hedge, and has weak petals and a faint perfume, and is
spirit-like! What can it be? and who _could_ have written these very
unmelodious lines?
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Note I., on the Gardener Bower-bird.
[2] See Note II., on Ars Topiaria.
[3] Horace Walpole says that Bridgeman invented the sunk fence, “and
the common people called them ‘Ha! ha’s!’ to express their surprise at
finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walks.” He adds that
Kent “leaped the fence, and saw that all Nature was a garden.”
[4] See Note III., on a Poet’s Flower-bed.
[5] In _Gleanings from French Gardens_, and _Alpine Flowers for English
Gardens_.
[6] I have just seen the following hopeful advertisement:
“_Rockery Ornaments._—To be sold, 500 barrels of Conch Shells, in lots
of one or more barrels, at extremely low prices. Apply to——,” &c. &c.
[7] See Note IV., on the Evening Primrose.
[8] See Note V., on the Christmas Rose.
[9] I have adopted Professor Amos’s translation.
End of Project Gutenberg's The English Flower Garden, by Henry Arthur Bright