BRUNELLA.
1. It ought to have been added to the statements of general law in
irregular flowers, in Chapter I. of this volume, § 6, that if the petals,
while brought into relations of inequality, still retain their perfect
petal form,--and whether broad or narrow, extended or reduced, remain
clearly _leaves_, as in the pansy, pea, or azalea, and assume no grotesque
or obscure outline,--the flower, though injured, is not to be thought of as
corrupted or misled. But if any of the petals lose their definite character
as such, and become swollen, solidified, stiffened, or strained into any
other form or function than that of petals, the flower is to be looked upon
as affected by some kind of constant evil influence; and, so far as we
conceive of any spiritual power being concerned in the protection or
affliction of the inferior orders of creatures, it will be felt to bear the
aspect of possession by, or pollution by, a more or less degraded
Spirit.[30]
2. I have already enough spoken of the special manifestation of this
character in the orders Contorta and Satyrium, vol. i., p. 91, and the
reader will find the parallel aspects of the Draconidæ dwelt upon at length
in the 86th and 87th paragraphs of the 'Queen of the Air,' where also their
relation to the labiate group is touched upon. But I am far more
embarrassed by the symbolism of that group which I called 'Vestales,' from
their especially domestic character and their serviceable purity; but which
may be, with more convenience perhaps, simply recognizable as 'Menthæ.'
3. These are, to our northern countries, what the spice-bearing trees are
in the tropics;--our thyme, lavender, mint, marjoram, and their like,
separating themselves not less in the health giving or strengthening
character of their scent from the flowers more or less enervating in
perfume, as the rose, orange, and violet,--than in their humble colours and
forms from the grace and splendour of those higher tribes; thus allowing
themselves to be summed under the general word 'balm' more truly than the
balsams from which the word is derived. Giving the most pure and healing
powers to the air around them; with a comfort of warmth also, being mostly
in dry places, and forming sweet carpets and close turf; but only to be
rightly enjoyed in the open air, or indoors when dried; not tempting any
one to luxury, nor expressive of any kind of exultation. Brides do not deck
themselves with thyme, nor do we wreathe triumphal arches with mint.
4. It is most notable, also, farther, that none of these flowers have any
extreme beauty in colour. The blue sage is the only one of vivid hue at
all; and we never think of it as for a moment comparable to the violet or
bluebell: thyme is unnoticed beside heath, and many of the other purple
varieties of the group are almost dark and sad coloured among the flowers
of summer; while, so far from gaining beauty on closer looking, there is
scarcely a blossom of them which is not more or less grotesque, even to
ugliness, in outline; and so hooded or lappeted as to look at first like
some imperfect form of snapdragon for the most part spotted also, wrinkled
as if by old age or decay, cleft or torn, as if by violence, and springing
out of calices which, in their clustering spines, embody the general
roughness of the plant.
5. I take at once for example, lest the reader should think me unkind or
intemperate in my description, a flower very dear and precious to me; and
at this time my chief comfort in field walks. For, now, the reign of all
the sweet reginas of the spring is over--the reign of the silvia and
anemone, of viola and veronica; and at last, and this year abdicated under
tyrannous storm,[31] the reign of the rose. And the last foxglove-bells are
nearly fallen; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are coming up
the burdock, and the coarse and vainly white aster, and the black
knapweeds; and there is only one flower left to be loved among the
grass,--the soft, warm-scented Brunelle.
6. _P_runell, _or_ Brunell--Gerarde calls it; and Brunella, rightly and
authoritatively, Tournefort; Prunella, carelessly, Linnæus, and idly
following him, the moderns, casting out all the meaning and help of its
name--of which presently. Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, in
English--meaning that who has this plant needs no physician.
7. As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it would reprove me for
what I have just said of the poverty of colour in its tribe; for the most
glowing of violets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of its
hooded blossoms. But their flush is broken and oppressed by the dark
calices out of which they spring, and their utmost power in the field is
only of a saddened amethystine lustre, subdued with furry brown. And what
is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the
scattered blossoms;--of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the
way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain,
and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of
the cluster broken short away altogether.
8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to
be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes.
But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to
entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are
meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind. I take my lens,
therefore--to the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with blue-winged
wasps in it,--and perceive therewith the following particulars.
9. First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a
little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is
grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old
fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out
in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into a kind of
fringe.
Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cluster of stiff white
hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the hood; for no imaginable purpose
of use or decoration--any more than a hearth-brush put for a
helmet-crest,--and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower
petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or shark-like jaw,
edged with ghastly teeth,--and yet more, that the hollow within begins to
suggest a resemblance to an open throat in which there are two projections
where the lower petal joins the lateral ones, almost exactly like swollen
glands.
I believe it was this resemblance, inevitable to any careful and close
observer, which first suggested the use of the plant in throat diseases to
physicians; guided, as in those first days of pharmacy, chiefly by
imagination. Then the German name for one of the most fatal of throat
affections, Braune, extended itself into the first name of the plant,
Brunelle.
10. The truth of all popular traditions as to the healing power of herbs
will be tried impartially as soon as men again desire to lead healthy
lives; but I shall not in 'Proserpina' retain any of the names of their
gathered and dead or distilled substance, but name them always from the
characters of their life. I retain, however, for this plant its name
Brunella, Fr. Brunelle, because we may ourselves understand it as a
derivation from Brune; and I bring it here before the reader's attention as
giving him a perfectly instructive general type of the kind of degradation
which takes place in the forms of flowers under more or less malefic
influence, causing distortion and disguise of their floral structure. Thus
it is not the normal character of a flower petal to have a cluster of
bristles growing out of the middle of it, nor to be jagged at the edge into
the likeness of a fanged fish's jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into the
likeness of a diseased gland in an animal's throat. A really uncorrupted
flower suggests none but delightful images, and is like nothing but itself.
11. I find that in the year 1719, Tournefort defined, with exactitude which
has rendered the definition authoritative for all time, the tribe to which
this Brownie flower belongs, constituting them his fourth class, and
describing them in terms even more depreciatingly imaginative than any I
have ventured to use myself. I translate the passage (vol. i., p. 177):--
12. "The name of Labiate flower is given to a single-petaled flower which,
beneath, is attenuated into a tube, and above is expanded into a lip, which
is either single or double. It is proper to a labiate flower,--first, that
it has a one-leaved calyx (ut calycem habeat _unifolium_), for the most
part tubulated, or reminding one of a paper hood (cucullum papyraceum);
and, secondly, that its pistil ripens into a fruit consisting of four
seeds, which ripen in the calyx itself, as if in their own seed-vessel, by
which a labiate flower is distinguished from a personate one, whose pistil
becomes a capsule far divided from the calyx (à calyce longò divisam). And
a labiate flower differs from rotate, or bell-shaped flowers, which have
four seeds, in that the lips of a labiate flower have a gape like the face
of a goblin, or ludicrous mask, emulous of animal form."
13. This class is then divided into four sections.
In the first, the upper lip is helmeted, or hooked--"galeatum est, vel
falcatum."
In the second, the upper lip is excavated like a spoon--"cochlearis
instar est excavatum."
In the third the upper lip is erect.
And in the fourth there is no upper lip at all.
The reader will, I hope, forgive me for at once rejecting a classification
of lipped plants into three classes that have lips, and one that has none,
and in which the lips of those that have got any, are like helmets and
spoons.
Linnaeus, in 1758, grouped the family into two divisions, by the form of
the calyx, (five-fold or two-fold), and then went into the wildest
confusion in distinction of species,--sometimes by the form of corolla,
sometimes by that of calyx, sometimes by that of the filaments, sometimes
by that of the stigma, and sometimes by that of the seed. As, for instance,
thyme is to be identified by the calyx having hairs in its throat, dead
nettle by having bristles in its mouth, lion's tail by having bones in its
anthers (antheræ punctis osseis adspersæ), and teucrium by having its upper
lip cut in two!
14. St. Hilaire, in 1805, divides again into four sections, but as three of
these depend on form of corolla, and the fourth on abortion of stamens, the
reader may conclude practically, that logical division of the family is
impossible, and that all he can do, or that there is the smallest occasion
for his doing, is first to understand the typical structure thoroughly, and
then to know a certain number of forms accurately, grouping the others
round them at convenient distances; and, finally, to attach to their known
forms such simple names as may be utterable by children, and memorable by
old people, with more ease and benefit than the 'Galeopsis Eu-te-trahit,'
'Lamium Galeobdalon,' or 'Scutellaria Galericulata,'and the like, of modern
botany. But to do this rightly, I must review and amplify some of my former
classification, which it will be advisable to do in a separate chapter.
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