_Fascination of the furze--The furze in literature--Evelyn on the
furze--Furze faggots--The beauty the effect of contrast--Large masses
of bloom--Various aspects of the furze--Fragrance--Linnæus and the
furze--'The cynic a spiritual harpy--Furze at the Land's End--The stone
hedges ropes of bloom--Eye-dazzling colour--Furze by the sea--Yellow and
blue._
|I THINK that of all plants indigenous in this island the furze delights
me the most. This says a good deal for a man who takes as much pleasure
as any one in green and growing things; in all of them, from the elm of
greatest girth at Windsor or Badminton, or the noblest pine at Eversley,
or the most aged oak at Aldermaston, down to the little ivy-leafed
toad-flax growing on the wall. They move me, each in its way, according
to its character, to admiration, love and reverence. No sooner do I
begin to speak or even to think of them than they, or their images, are
seen springing up as by a miracle round me, until I seem to be in a vast
open forest where all beautiful things flourish exceedingly and each in
turn claims my attention. Merely to name them, with just a word or two
added to characterise the special feeling produced in each case, would
fill a page or more; and the end of it all would be that the words used
at the beginning would have to be said again--I think the furze is the
one which pleases me best.
Now here is something which has been a puzzle to me and a cause of
regret, or a sense of something missed--the fact that, excepting a word
or two or a line about it in the poets, the furze is hardly to be found
in literature. Think of the oak in this connection; think of the elm,
the yew, the ash, the rowan, the holly, hawthorn, blackthorn, bramble,
briar, bulrush and flowering rush and heather, with many, many more
trees, bushes and herbs, down even to the little pimpernel, the daisy,
the forget-me-not and the lesser celandine. But who, beyond the line or
two, has ever in verse or prose said anything in praise of the furze?
One day, in conversation with Sir William Thisel-ton-Dyer, the late
Director of Kew Gardens, who knows a great deal more of books about
plants than I do, I mentioned this fact to him, and, after taking
thought, he said, "It is true, there isn't much to find, but let me
recommend you to read Evelyn."
It happened that I knew Evelyn and admired him for his noble diction:
one really wonders how a man who looked at plants with his hard,
utilitarian eyes, considering them solely for their uses, could write as
he did. It is true that he saw some beauty in the holly, his favourite,
but in little else. He mentions the furze as a "vegetable trifle,"
and even goes so far as to give it a few favourable words, but without
anything about its appearance, for that did not touch him. It is not
a wholly useless plant, says Evelyn; it is good for faggots, also it
affords covert for wild fowl, and the tops (bruised) may be recommended
for a sickly horse. "It will thoroughly recover and plump him."
I have often watched the semi-wild ponies of the New Forest browsing
quite freely on the blossomed tops, which they bruised for themselves
with their own molars; and now I know that the furze is also "good for
faggots." I have described how, while staying at a small moorland farm
during the winter, we had furze for fuel, and how the dried bushes made
a glorious heat and illumination in the open wide fireplace of the old
dark kitchen and living-room. A couple of months later when the plant
was in full blossom--acres and miles and leagues of it--I could do no
less than sing my poor little prose song of praise and gratitude. To me
it is never "unprofitably gay," nor, when I handle it, does it wound my
hardened fingers, causing me to recoil and cry out with the sensitive
poet of the Task that it repels us with its treacherous spines as much
as it attracts with its yellow bloom.
The beauty of the furze in flower--that special beauty and charm in
which it excels all other plants--is an effect of contrast, and is
a beauty only seen in the entire plant, over which the bloom is
distributed. We see that in shape and size, and almost in colour, the
blossom nearly resembles that of the broom, but the effect is far
more beautiful on account of the character of the plant--the exceeding
roughness of its spiny surface, the rude shapes it takes and its
darkness, over which the winged flame-coloured blossoms are profusely
sprinkled. And when we see many contiguous bushes they do not lose their
various individual forms, nor do the blossoms, however abundant, unite,
as is the case with the broom, into very large masses of brilliant
colour.
I like to come upon a furze-patch growing on a slope, to sit below it
and look up over its surface, thrown into more or less rounded forms,
broken and roughened into sprays at the top, as of a sea churned by
winds and cross-currents to lumpy waves, all splashed and crowned as it
were with flame-coloured froth. With a clear blue sky beyond I do not
know in all nature a spectacle to excel it in beauty. It is beautiful,
perhaps above all things, just because the blossoming furze is not
the "sheet of gold" it is often described, but gold of a flame-like
brilliance sprinkled on a ground of darkest, harshest green. Sheets of
brilliant colour are not always beautiful. I have looked on leagues of
forest of _Erythrina crista-galli_ covering a wet level marsh when the
leafless trees were clothed in their blood-red blossoms and have not
admired the spectacle. Again, I have ridden through immense fields of
viper's bugloss, growing as high as the horse's breast and so dense that
he could hardly force his way through it, and the sheet of vivid blue in
a dazzling sunlight affected me very disagreeably. It is the same with
cultivated fields of daffodils, tulips and other flowers, grown to
supply the market; the sight pleases best at a distance of a mile
or half a mile; and so in the case of a sheet of wild hyacinths, it
delights the eye because it is seen under trees with a cloud of green
foliage above to soften and bring the vivid hue into harmony with the
general colouring.
Now in the furze, or the dark green prickly sprays, the colour and
roughness of which are never wholly covered and extinguished by the
blossoms, there is an appearance which has probably never been described
and perhaps not observed. The plant, we see, changes its colour somewhat
with the seasons. It is darkest in winter, when, seen at a distance on
the pale green or grey-green chalk downs, it looks almost black. Again,
in summer when the rusty appearance which follows the flowering time is
put off, the new terminal sprays have a blue-green or glaucous hue like
the pine and juniper. But the most interesting change, which contributes
to the beauty of the furze at its best, is in the spring, when the
spines are tipped with straw-yellow and minute lines of the same
colour appear along the spines and finer stems, and the effect of these
innumerable specks and lines which catch the light is to give a bronzed
appearance to the dark mass. It is curious that that change of colour
does not always take place; in many places you find the plants keep
the uniform deep green of winter through the blossoming season; but the
bronzed aspect is the loveliest, and makes the most perfect setting for
the bloom.
There are few things in nature that more delight the eye than a wild
common or other incult place overgrown with bramble mixed with furze in
flower and bracken in its vivid green, and scattered groups or thickets
of hawthorn and blackthorn, with tangles and trails of ivy, briony,
traveller's joy and honeysuckle. Yet the loveliness of our plant in such
surroundings is to my mind exceeded by the furze when it possesses the
entire ground and you have its splendour in fullest measure. Then, too,
you can best enjoy its fragrance. This has a peculiar richness, and has
been compared with pineapple and cocoanut; I should say cocoanut and
honey, and we might even liken it to apple-tart with clove for scent and
flavour. Anyway, there is something fruity and appetising in the smell;
but this is not all, since along with that which appeals to the lower
sense there is a more subtle quality, ethereal and soul-penetrating,
like the perfume of the mignonette, the scented orchis, violet, bog
asphodel, narcissus and vernal squill. It may be said that flower-scents
are of two sorts: those which, like fruits, suggest flavours, and those
which are wholly unassociated with taste, and are of all odours the most
emotional because of their power of recalling past scenes and events. In
the perfume of the furze both qualities, the sensuous and the spiritual,
are combined: doubtless it was the higher quality which Swinburne had in
his mind when he sang
The whin was frankincense and flame.
But we regard vision as the higher or more intellectual sense, and
seeing is best; and it was the sight of blossoming furze which caused
Linnæus, on his first visit to England, when he was taken to see it
at Putney Heath, to fall on his knees and thank God for creating so
beautiful a plant.
I bring in this old story so that the cynical reader may not be cheated
of his smile. He it is who said, and I believe he has had even the
courage to print it, that there was nothing spontaneous in the act of
the great Swedish naturalist, that he had rehearsed it beforehand, and
doubtless dropped upon his knees several times in front of a pier-glass
in his bedroom that very morning to make himself perfect in the action
before being driven to Putney.
Linnaeus is good enough for me, and for the majority of us I imagine,
but what shall we say of the mockers, the spiritual harpies who come
unbidden to our sacred feasts to touch and handle everything, and to
defile and make hateful whatsoever they touch? Alas, we cannot escape
and cannot silence them, and may only say that we compassionate them;
since, however great they may be in the world, and though intellectually
they may be but little lower than the gods, yet do they miss all that is
sweetest and most precious in life. And further, we can only hope that
when they have finished their little mocking day, that which they now
are may be refashioned by wonderful Nature into some better thing--a
dark, prickly bush, let us say, with blossoms that are frankincense and
flame.
Let this same fragrance sweeten our imaginations; or, better still,
let us forget that such beings exist in the world--intellectuals with
atrophied hearts--and see what the furze looks like in this Land's End
district where it most abounds and the earth is clothed with it. In
some places where the moorland has been reclaimed and parcelled out into
grass fields the furze flourishes on the stone hedges: the effect is
here singular as well as magnificent, when, standing on a high stone
wall, you survey the surrounding country with innumerable furze-clothed
hedges dividing the green fields around you in every direction, and
appearing like stupendous ropes of shining golden bloom. Hedge beyond
hedge they stretch away for miles to grey distant hills and the pale
blue sky beyond. On some hedges the plant grows evenly, as if it had
been cultivated and trimmed, forming a smooth rope of bloom and black
prickles. In other and indeed most instances, the rounded big luxuriant
bushes occur at intervals, like huge bosses, on the rope.
Walking by one of these hedges in a very strong sunlight about mid-May
when the bloom is in its greatest perfection, the sight is actually
dazzling and hurts by the intense luminous colour. It is an unusual
experience, but after a mile or so one almost unconsciously averts
or veils the eye in passing one of these splendid bushes on which the
blossoms are too closely crowded.
Perhaps the best aspect of the plant is that of the rough unreclaimed
places where the high land slopes down to the cliff and the furze grows
luxuriantly along the edges and slopes of the deep clefts or little
ravine-like valleys, the beds of crystal noisy little water-courses,
peopled with troutlets no bigger than minnows. Here the rude, untamable
plant has its wildest and most striking appearance, now in the form of a
huge mound where several bushes are closely interwoven, and now growing
separately like ancient dwarf trees, mixed with brown heath and grey
masses of granite. Here, too, you may come upon a clump of dwarf
blackthorn bushes thickly covered with their luminous crystalline white
little roses, never looking so wonderful in their immaculate whiteness
as when thus seen contrasted with the rough black and flame-colour of
the furze.
Better still, you can here see the yellow and orange flame of the furze
against the blue of the sea--a marvellously beautiful effect. I was
reminded of a similar effect observed in a furzy place among the South
Wiltshire downs a year before. It was one of those days when there
are big dark masses of cloud in a clear sky and when the cloud shadows
falling on distant woods and hills give them a deep indigo blue. The
furze was in full bloom and had a new and strange glory in my eyes when
seen against this deep blue of the distant landscape.
Yellow and blue--yellow and blue! A lady on the other side of the globe
wrote complaining that these two colours in association had got on her
nerves on account of something I had said in some book. That was the
fault of the writing. In nature they never get on our nerves: they
surprise us, because the sight is not an everyday one, and in some cases
where they occupy a large field they intoxicate the mind with their
unparalleled loveliness. It has ever been a delight to me just before
harvest time to walk in fine weather near the sea just to look at the
red gold of the ripe corn against the blue water. We get a similar
effect from these two complementary colours at sunset when the clouds
are flushed yellow and orange in a blue sky. Also in the beech woods
in October the sight of the great trees in their magnificent red-gold
foliage would not impress us so deeply but for the blue sky seen through
and above the wood.
[Illustration:0331]