but we find it sparingly in one or two places; and though a plant
indigenous to Britain, yet it is not improbable that it has strayed from
cultivation, and become naturalized in many of the places in which we
now find it. Its uses as an herb of celebrity for some complaints of
cattle occasioned its being fostered in many a cottage garden long since
erased, where the good wife was the simple doctress of the village, when
perhaps mortality was not more extensive than in these days of greater
pretension and display. Modern practice yet retains preparations of this
herb, but it appears that, from the powerful manner in which they act,
great discretion is necessary in their administration. This hellebore is
one of our few plants that present us with a dull, unsightly, unpleasing
blossom. We have many with a corolla so small as to be little noticed;
but this plant, and the fetid iris (iris fœtidissima), produce blossoms,
that would generally be considered as darksome and cheerless. There is
no part of a vegetable which we usually admire more than its flowers,
for that endless variety of colors, shades, forms, and odors, with which
they are endowed; yet the utility of the blossom is by no means obvious.
Linnæus calls the corolla the arras, the tapestry of the plant; and we
are perfectly sensible that the blossom in very many instances is
essential in various ways to securing and perfecting the germen; that it
often contains the food of multitudes of insects, which feed on the
pollen, the honey, or the germen; and that the odor emitted by it leads
frequently various creatures to the object in request, and by their
agency the fecundation and perfecting of the seeds are often effected:
but we are astonished at the elaborate mechanism and splendor of some
species, and see the whole race of creation, with the exception of man,
utterly regardless of them. Butterflies and other insects will bask on
expanded flowers, and frequent their disks, but it is in wantonness, or
to feed on the sweet liquors they contain. The carpenter bee,[16] that
every summer cuts its little circular patches in such quantities from my
roses to line its nest in the old garden door, selects the green leaves
only, chiefly from the China, Provence, and damask kinds,[17] passing
over the petals of their blossoms as useless. That splendid insect the
rose-beetle[18] (cetonia aurata), that beds and bathes in sweetness,
will partially eat the flowers of some species of roses, and “lap the
nectar they produce;” and a few others nibble a little; but the
liliaceous tribes, and other glorious flowers, as far as we know,
furnish to insects no supply, but expand, wither, and die, unnoticed but
by the eye of man alone. Flowers that are grand, gay, cheerful or
beautiful, predominate infinitely over those that are of a sombre hue or
gloomy aspect. Employment and occupation were as much the design, as
they are found to be essential to the happiness of human life: we are
not all constituted to soar in the higher regions of scientific
research; our dispositions are as various as our intellects.
Horticulture was the first occupation instituted for man, and he cannot
pursue a more innocent and harmless employ: we were given “every herb,
and every tree upon the face of the earth.” For food, or raiment, the
immediate necessities of man, a very few of them are applicable; but we
can collect them for amusement, in admiration of their beauty. Without
this beauty, they would be no object of research; and man, who is
exclusively sensible of its existence, can alone find pleasure in
viewing it. The mind that is delighted with such admiration, must be
almost insensibly led to an attendant pleasure, the contemplation, the
perception of infinite wisdom and power, manifested in the adornment,
splendor, and formation, of even the simplest flower of the field. I
would not arrogate for man an exclusive right, or make him generally the
sole consideration of the beneficence of Providence; but there are
influences, which his reason can alone perceive, incitements to good
thoughts and worthy actions.
Flowers, in all ages, have been made the representatives of innocence
and purity. We decorate the bride, and strew her path with flowers: we
present the undefiled blossoms, as a similitude of her beauty and
untainted mind; trusting that her destiny through life will be like
theirs, grateful and pleasing to all. We scatter them over the shell,
the bier, and the earth, when we consign our mortal blossoms to the
dust, as emblems of transient joy, fading pleasures, withered hopes; yet
rest in sure and certain trust that each in due season will be renewed
again. All the writers of antiquity make mention of their uses and
application in heathen and pagan ceremonies, whether of the temple, the
banquet, or the tomb—the rites, the pleasures, or the sorrows of man;
and in concord with the usages of the period, the author of the “Book of
Wisdom” says, “Let us crown ourselves with rose-buds and flowers before
they wither.” All orders of creation, “every form of creeping things and
abominable beasts,” have been, perhaps, at one time or another, by some
nation or sect, either the objects of direct worship, or emblems of an
invisible sanctity; but though individuals of the vegetable world may
have veiled the mysteries, and been rendered sacred to particular
deities and purposes, yet in very few instances, we believe, were they
made the representatives of a deified object, or been bowed down to with
divine honors. The worship of the one true Being could never have been
polluted by any symbol suggested by the open flowers and lily-work of
the temple.
The love of flowers seems a naturally implanted passion, without any
alloy or debasing object as a motive: the cottage has its pink, its
rose, its polyanthus; the villa, its geranium, its dahlia, and its
clematis: we cherish them in youth, we admire them in declining days;
but, perhaps, it is the early flowers of spring that always bring with
them the greatest degree of pleasure, and our affections seem
immediately to expand at the sight of the first opening blossom under
the sunny wall, or sheltered bank, however humble its race may be. In
the long and sombre months of winter our love of nature, like the buds
of vegetation, seems closed and torpid; but, like them, it unfolds and
reanimates with the opening year, and we welcome our long-lost
associates with a cordiality, that no other season can excite, as
friends in a foreign clime. The violet of autumn is greeted with none of
the love with which we hail the violet of spring; it is unseasonable,
perhaps it brings with it rather a thought of melancholy than of joy; we
view it with curiosity, not affection: and thus the late is not like the
early rose. It is not intrinsic beauty or splendor that so charms us,
for the fair maids of spring cannot compete with the grander matrons of
the advanced year; they would be unheeded, perhaps lost, in the rosy
bowers of summer and of autumn; no, it is our first meeting with a long-
lost friend, the reviving glow of a natural affection, that so warms us
at this season: to maturity they give pleasure, as a harbinger of the
renewal of life, a signal of awakening nature, or of a higher promise;
to youth, they are expanding being, opening years, hilarity and joy; and
the child, let loose from the house, riots in the flowery mead, and is
“Monarch of all he surveys.”
There is not a prettier emblem of spring than an infant sporting in the
sunny field, with its osier basket wreathed with butter-cups, orchises,
and daisies. With summer flowers we seem to live as with our neighbors,
in harmony and good-will: but spring flowers are cherished as private
friendships.
The amusements and fancies of children, when connected with flowers, are
always pleasing, being generally the conceptions of innocent minds
unbiassed by artifice or pretence; and their love of them seems to
spring from a genuine feeling and admiration, a kind of sympathy with
objects as fair as their own untainted minds: and I think that it is
early flowers which constitute their first natural playthings; though
summer presents a greater number and variety, they are not so fondly
selected. We have our daisies strung and wreathed about our dress; our
coronals of orchises and primroses; our cowslip balls, &c.; and one
application of flowers at this season I have noticed, which, though
perhaps it is local, yet it has a remarkably pretty effect, forming for
the time one of the gayest little shrubs that can be seen. A small
branch or long spray of the white thorn, with all its spines uninjured,
is selected; and on these its alternate thorns, a white and a blue
violet, plucked from their stalks, are stuck upright in succession,
until the thorns are covered, and when placed in a flower-pot of moss,
has perfectly the appearance of a beautiful vernal flowering dwarf
shrub, and as long as it remains fresh is an object of surprise and
delight.
No portion of creation has been resorted to by mankind with more success
for the ornament and decoration of their labors than the vegetable
world. The rites, emblems, and mysteries of religion; national
achievements, eccentric masks, and the capricious visions of fancy, have
all been wrought by the hand of the sculptor, on the temple, the altar,
or the tomb; but plants, their foliage, flowers, or fruits, as the most
graceful, varied, and pleasing objects that meet our view, have been
more universally the object of design, and have supplied the most
beautiful, and perhaps the earliest, embellishments of art. The
pomegranate, the almond, and flowers, were selected, even in the
wilderness, by divine appointment, to give form to the sacred utensils;
the rewards of merit, the wreath of the victor, were arboraceous; in
later periods, the acanthus, the ivy, the lotus, the vine, the palm, and
the oak, flourished under the chisel, or in the loom of the artist; and
in modern days, the vegetable world affords the almost exclusive
decorations of ingenuity and art. The cultivation of flowers is of all
the amusements of mankind the one to be selected and approved as the
most innocent in itself, and most perfectly devoid of injury or
annoyance to others; the employment is not only conducive to health and
peace of mind, but probably more good-will has arisen, and friendships
been founded by the intercourse and communication connected with this
pursuit than from any other whatsoever: the pleasures, the ecstasies of
the horticulturist are harmless and pure; a streak, a tint, a shade,
becomes his triumph, which though often obtained by chance, are secured
alone by morning care, by evening caution, and the vigilance of days: an
employ which, in its various grades, excludes neither the opulent nor
the indigent, and teeming with boundless variety, affords an unceasing
excitement to emulation without contempt or ill-will.
The bouquet may be an exile now; but the revolutions of fashion will
surely return this beautiful ornament to favor again. With us the
nosegay yet retains its station as a decoration to our Sunday beaux; but
at our spring clubs and associations it becomes an essential,
indispensable appointment; a little of the spirit of rivalry seeming to
animate our youths in the choice and magnitude of this adornment. The
superb spike of a Brompton, or a ten weeks’ stock, long cherished in
some sheltered corner for the occasion, surrounded by all the gaiety the
garden can afford, till it presents a very bush of flowers, forms the
appendage of their bosoms, and, with the gay knots in their hats, their
best garments, and the sprightly hilarity of their looks, constitutes a
pleasing village scene, and gives an hour of unencumbered felicity to
common man and rural life, not yet disturbed by refinement and taste.
“Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?”
And yet the shivering of the aspen, or poplar tree (populus tremula), in
the breeze will give us the sensation of coldness, and communicate an
involuntary shuddering. The construction of the foliage of this tree is
peculiarly adapted for motion: a broad leaf placed upon a long
footstalk, so flexile, as scarcely to be able to support the leaf in an
upright posture: the upper part of this stalk, on which the play or
action seems mainly to depend, is contrary to the nature of footstalks
in general, being perfectly flattened, and, as an eminent botanist and
esteemed gentleman, Dr. I. Stokes, observes, is placed at a right angle
with the leaf, being thus peculiarly fitted to receive the impulse of
every wind that blows. This stalk is furnished with three strong nerves,
placed parallel, and acting in unison with each other; but towards the
base the stalk becomes round, and then the nerves assume a triangular
form, and constitute three distinct supports and counteractions to each
other’s motions. I know no petiole with a similar conformation, or
better calculated for the vibration of a leaf. The leaf-stalks of plants
are very curious constructions; and the nerves and vessels contained in
them, which are the vehicles of a large portion of that nourishment
which plants receive through their foliage from the air, seem in general
differently placed, and fitted for variety of operation. The poplar is a
tree that occasions at times a great deal of trouble in our pasture
lands, by the tendency which it has to extend its roots, and throw out
suckers. Three or four of this species in a hedge-row, bounding a meadow
in my occupation, oblige me every year that the field is mowed, by their
prolificacy, to send a man with his stock-ax to remove their numerous
offspringing; a mere temporary expedient, tending rather to increase the
complaint, as eradication by trenching with the spade can alone
effectually check the encroachments of runners so tenacious of life, and
rapid in growth.
The dyer’s broom[19] (genista tinctoria) abounds with us, and becomes a
perfect encumbrance in our clay-land pastures. It is seldom eaten by
cattle, except in cases of great necessity, and remains untouched, if
other food be obtainable, giving a deceitful appearance of verdure to a
naked pasture. It yet retains a place in some of our dispensatories; but
its medicinal virtues are probably never made trial of in modern
practice, the lenient assuasives of our forefathers seeming unequal to
contention with the constitutions of these days. I know not any use to
which it is applicable but for the dyer. Our poorer people a few years
ago used to collect it by cartloads, about the month of July; and the
season of “woodwaxen” was a little harvest to them: but it interfered
greatly with our haymaking. Women could gain each about two shillings a
day, clear of all expenses, by gathering it; but they complained that it
was a very hard and laborious occupation, the plant being drawn up by
the roots, which are strongly interwoven in the soil. The dyer gave them
eight-pence for a hundred weight; but I fear the amount was greatly
enhanced by the dishonest practice of watering the load, for the
specious purpose of keeping it green; and the old woodwaxers tell me,
that, without the increase of weight which the water gave the article,
they should have had but little reward for their labor. Greediness here,
however, as in most other cases, ruined the trade, the plant becoming so
injured and stinted by repeated pullings, as to be in these parts no
longer an object worth seeking for; and our farmers rather
discountenance the custom, as the “green-weed” preserves and shelters at
its roots a considerable quantity of coarse herbage, which in the winter
and spring months is of great importance to the young cattle browsing in
the pastures. The use of this dyer’s broom is to prepare woollen cloths
for the reception of another color. It communicates to the article a
dull yellow, which will then, by being dipped in another liquor or
composition, according to the shade required, receive a green hue.
Vegetable filaments, cotton, flax, &c., are very differently formed from
those threads afforded by animals, as silk and wool, and are differently
disposed to receive colors. The dye that will give a fine color to the
one, is perhaps rejected by the other; and this plant is rarely or never
used by the dyer for cotton articles. That certain natural productions
receive and retain, and others reject or soon part with artificial
colorings, are in some cases in consequence of the nature of the
substance, and in others by reason of the conformation of the fibre; but
any examination of this kind would only occasion a tedious discussion
and remain very obscure at last. We find certain effects produced and
reason upon them, but so small are the parts operated upon, minute the
agents, and equivocal the connexion, that we can do little more than
theorize upon the subject; but perhaps I may slightly instance the
difference existing in the fibre of flax and silk. The parts which
compose the filaments of the former are generally considered as being
flat and flaky, whereas those of the latter are tubular and round: this
conformation renders silk so soft to the touch, and refracting more
perfectly the rays of light, occasions much of its lustre, and the
brilliancy of its hues. Perhaps we have no art or trade less confined
within the trammels of formulæ than that of the dyer; every professor
appearing to have his own methods of acquiring particular tints and
shades, guided often in his proportions by that mutable sense, the
taste, and regulating the temperature of his compositions, not by the
thermometer, but by the feeling of the hand;—and so capricious are these
tests, so different the sensations of the operator, or the variable
influences of solar light, that success on one day does not insure a
similar result on another.
Color is probably only reflected light; but by what means the absorption
of oxygen increases the lustre is not quite obvious—yet the power of the
sun’s rays, in augmenting the intensity of the hues of many things, is
well known: there is an admirable green color for foliage, to be
obtained by the union of the light Prussian blue with the dark gamboge;
but I could never acquire this clear and lustrous, without compounding
it in the light of the sun. As the young artist will find this a most
useful pigment, I may in addition say, that a small bit of the light
Prussian, with three or four times the quantity of gamboge, must be laid
upon the pallet, or in the saucer, and with a drop or two of water, only
enough to make it work easily, be most thoroughly united and
incorporated by the finger, with the sun shining upon the mixture,
adding more gamboge repeatedly during the operation, until the blue is
subdued and a clear green produced; but if a tedious operation, yet
perseverance will ultimately produce a very brilliant permanent green.
We have our walls in many places here decorated with most of the
varieties of the great snapdragon (antirrhinum majus); the white, the
pink, and the common: and that beautiful deviation, with a white tube
and crimson termination, is slowly wandering from the garden, and mixing
with its congeners. It has not, perhaps, been generally observed, that
the flowers of this plant, “bull-dogs,” as the boys call them, are
perfect insect traps; multitudes of small creatures seek an entrance
into the corolla through the closed lips, which upon a slight pressure
yield a passage, attracted by the sweet liquor that is found at the base
of the germen; but when so admitted, there is no return, the lips are
closed, and all advance to them is impeded by a dense thicket of woolly
matter, which invests the mouth of the lower jaw—
“Smooth lies the road to Pluto’s gloomy shade;
But ’tis a long, unconquerable pain,
To climb to these ethereal realms again.”
But this snapdragon is more merciful than most of our insect traps. The
creature receives no injury when in confinement; but, having consumed
the nectareous liquor, and finding no egress, breaks from its dungeon by
gnawing a hole at the base of the tube, and returns to liberty and
light. The extraordinary manner in which the corolla of this plant is
formed, the elastic force with which the lower limb closes and fits upon
the projection of the upper, manifest the obvious design in the great
Architect, “whose hands bended the rainbow;” and the insects are
probably the destined agents whereby the germen is impregnated, for as
soon as this is effected, the limbs become flaccid, lose their
elasticity, are no longer a place of confinement, but open for the
escape of any thing that might have entered. The little black pismire is
a common plunderer of this honey.
It is a perplexing matter to reconcile our feelings to the rigor, and
our reason to the necessity, of some plants being made the instrument of
destruction to the insect world. Of British plants we have only a few so
constructed, which, having clammy joints and calyxes, entangle them to
death. The sun-dew (droseræ) destroys in a different manner, yet kills
them without torture. But we have one plant in our gardens, a native of
North America, than which none can be more cruelly destructive of animal
life, the dogsbane (apocynum androsæmifolium),[20] which is generally
conducive to the death of every fly that settles upon it. Allured by the
honey on the nectary of the expanded blossom, the instant the trunk is
protruded to feed on it, the filaments close, and, catching the fly by
the extremity of its proboscis, detain the poor prisoner writhing in
protracted struggles till released by death, a death apparently
occasioned by exhaustion alone; the filaments then relax, and the body
falls to the ground. The plant will at times be dusky from the numbers
of imprisoned wretches. This elastic action of the filaments may be
conducive to the fertilizing of the seed by scattering the pollen from
the anthers, as is the case with the berberry; but we are not sensible
that the destruction of the creatures which excite the action is in any
way essential to the wants or perfection of the plant, and our ignorance
favors the idea of a wanton cruelty in the herb; but how little of the
causes and motives of action of created things do we know! and it must
be unlimitable arrogance alone that could question the wisdom of the
mechanism of him “that judgeth rightly;” the operations of a simple
plant confound and humble us, and, like the hand-writing on the wall,
though seen by many, can be explained but by ONE.[21]
The different manner in which vegetables exert their organic powers to
effect the destruction of insects, is not perhaps unworthy of a brief
notice; some, as those above mentioned, accomplish it by means of
elastic or irritable actions, adhesive substances, and so forth; but we
have another plant in our green-houses, the glaucous birthwort (aristol.
glauca), that effects these purposes without any of these means, but
principally by conformation. The whole internal surface of the tubular
flower is beset with minute strong spines, pointing downwards; these
present no impediment to the descent of the animal which may seek for
the sweet liquor lodged upon the nectarium at the base of the blossom,
nor is there any obstruction provided for its return by means of valves
or contractions, the tube remaining open; but the creature cannot crawl
up by reason of the inverted spines, and to prevent its escape by flying
up the tube, the flower makes an extraordinary curve, bending up like a
horn, so that any winged creature must be beaten back by striking
against the roof of this neck as often as it attempts to mount, and
falling back to the bulbous prison at the base of the flower, dies by
confinement and starvation, and there we find them: a certain number of
these perishing, the blossom fades and drops off.
All the varieties of this snapdragon have the power of maintaining a
state of vegetation in great droughts, when most other plants yield to
the influence of the weather; and it is the more remarkable in these
plants, as the places in which they chiefly delight to vegetate are
particularly exposed to the influence of the sun. In that hot dry summer
of 1825, when vegetation was in general burned up and withered away, yet
did this plant continue to exist on parched walls, and draw nutriment
from sources apparently unable to afford it; not in full vigor
certainly, but in a state of verdure beyond any of its associates. The
common burnet (poterium sanguisorba) of our pastures, in a remarkable
degree, likewise possesses this faculty of preserving its verdure, and
flourishing amid surrounding aridity and exhaustion. It is probable that
these plants, and some others, have the power of imbibing that
insensible moisture, which arises from the earth even in the driest
weather, or from the air which passes over them. The immense evaporation
proceeding from the earth, even in the hottest season, supplies the air
constantly with moisture; and as every square foot of this element can
sustain eleven grains of water, an abundant provision is made for every
demand. We can do little more than note these facts: to attempt to
reason upon the causes, why particular plants are endowed with peculiar
faculties, would be mere idleness; yet, in remarking this, we cannot
pass over the conviction, that the continual escape of moisture from one
body, and its imbibition by another, this unremitting motion and
circulation of matter, are parts of that wonderful ordination, whereby
the beneficence and wisdom of Providence are manifested: without the
agency of evaporation, not dwelling on the infinitude of effects and
results, no vegetation could exist, no animal life continue.