"Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year."
--_Autolycus' Song_.
Governesses used to tell us that the seasons of the year each consist of
three months, and of these March, April, and May make the springtime. I
should like to break the symmetry, and give February to spring, which
would then include February, March, April, and May. It has been said
that winter is but autumn "shyly shaking hands with spring." We will,
accordingly, make winter a short link of two months--an autumnal and a
vernal hand--December and January. It is a little sad for autumn to have
to make room for chill November alongside of the happier months of
September and October. But autumn is a season of decadence and cannot
justly complain.
The autumnal flowers, which may be allowed to figure as a prelude to
spring, are few in number. My favourite is lady's tresses
(_Spiranthes_), so called from the spiral twist in its inflorescence,
which suggests braided hair. _Gentiana amarella_ I should like to
include, but its flowering-time is from 12th August to 8th September, and
summer has the stronger claim on it. Other autumnal flowers are
laurustinus and ivy. If we go by the mean date nothing flowers in
October or November, and in December only the Christmas rose (_Helleborus
niger_) is recorded by Blomefield.
But the autumn months have a glory of their own which may vie with the
brightest hues of flowers. This great and beautiful panorama begins with
the yellowing of the lime-leaves, which may occur as early as 17th
August, but on the average is seen on 14th September. It is followed
towards the end of September by a brown tint, showing itself in the
leaves of the horse-chestnut. It is appropriate that these two species,
which are not indigenous, {2} should be the first to fade into glory.
But I must not insist on the point, for we see wych-elm leaves fall 24th
September, while the date for the common elm is 28th October; and the elm
is a foreigner compared to the wych-elm, and retains a mark of its alien
origin in not setting seeds.
The syringa (_Philadelphus_) is another foreigner, which early shows
autumnal tints--yellowing on 27th September. Then follow some native
trees: the beech and birch both turning yellow on 1st October, and being
followed by the maple on 7th October. I like the motherliness of the
half-grown beech, who refuses to drop her dead leaves in autumn, hoping
(as I imagine) that they will shelter her tender leaves in the chilly
springtime. The older beeches give up this anxious care, and doubtless
laugh among themselves over the fussiness of young mothers. They forget,
no doubt, that in the scrub at the feet of their own boles the habit
persists.
With regard to the fall of leaves, the sycamore begins to lose them 2nd
October; birch and cherry, 8th October; maple and walnut, 12th October;
aspen, 13th October; beech and elder, 13th October; ash, 14th October;
Lombardy poplar and Virginian creeper, 18th October; honeysuckle, 22nd
October; hazel, 26th October; elm, 28th October; whitethorn, 30th
October; plane, 3rd November. Judging by a single observation of
Blomefield, the larch is the last performer in the drama of autumn. It
turns yellow on 8th November, and its leaves fall 15th November.
Blomefield {3} records that on 29th November the trees are "everywhere
stript of leaves," so that some sort of colour-drama has been in progress
from the middle of September to the end of November. It may be objected
that what has been said of autumn is but a catalogue of names and dates.
And this is true enough; but when we realise the glory of autumnal
decadence, it seems (however baldly recounted) to be a fitting prelude to
the great outbreak of new life--green leaves and bright flowers that
spring gives us.
In Blomefield's "Calendar" the difference between December and January is
exaggerated. For, as it stands, it suggests that plants know that a new
year has begun, and all burst into flower on 1st January. But that
careful naturalist points out {4a} "all those phenomena which are
referred to 1st January, as the earliest date, may be considered as
occasionally showing themselves in December of the previous year."
The plants that bloom in winter, _i.e._ December and January, are few
enough. The Christmas rose gives us its white or pink flowers in
December, and the primrose may flower in the first days of
January--indeed, I seem to remember it in Kent before Christmas, but I
will not answer for it. According to Blomefield, the honour of being the
first plant to awake must be given to the honeysuckle (_Lonicera
caprifolium_), which unfolds its leaves between 1st January and 22nd
February, _i.e._ on 21st January on the average. This bold behaviour is
all the more to its credit since it is said by Hooker {4b} to be a
naturalised plant.
Then follow in order the flowers of furze, hazel, winter aconite
(_Eranthis_), hellebore (_H. foetidus_), daisy, and snowdrop; so that the
winter flowers make a most pleasant show, and tempt us to raise January
to the rank of the first month of springtime--but we must allow the
credit to be justly due to winter. In winter, too, we must be grateful
to the ivy of the bare hedgerows shining in the sun, its leaves
glistening like the simple jewels of a savage.
With February, we are agreed that spring comes in, but it is a springtime
that keeps something of the graveness of winter: though, when the silver
sunshine begins to be decorated with the singing of birds, we must call
it spring.
In February, too, the roads are no longer edged with dead white grass,
but show the fresh green of wayside plants--cow-weed, nettle, dock, and
cleavers.
The trees still stand naked, their leaf-buds waiting for a better season.
I like to think of wintering plants not as being asleep, but rather as
silent. They sing with all their green tongues when spring releases them
from the cupboards (which we call buds) where she has kept them safe.
The service-tree is a hardy creature, for its buds are naked and
unprotected, like Pampas Indians who are proud of sleeping uncovered, and
of seeing, as they rise, their forms outlined in the hoar-frost. I have
only recently noticed the purple tint of alder-buds; {5} and I am
reminded of the character in _Cranford_, who needs Tennyson's words
"Black as ash-buds in March" to teach him the fact. Some trees show
their flowers early. For instance, the hanging tassels of the hazel,
from which the dusty pollen can be shaken out, and the tiny red tufts
which are all the female flower has to show. The alder, too, has a brave
crowd of lambs' tails. The elm should flower about the middle of March,
and its pink stamens make a pleasant sight. These plants are called
anemophilous--that is, _wind-loving_, as though grateful to the wind for
carrying their pollen without payment. I can imagine that the plants
employing insects to carry pollen from one to another feel superior to
the wind-fertilised clan. We may fancy the duckweed (speaking of the
pine) to say: "Of course, he is very big and of an ancient family, but
for that very reason he is primitive in his habits. I know he boasts
that he employs the winds of heaven as marriage priests, but we are
served by the animal kingdom in our unions--and that, you must allow, is
something to be proud of." {6} But duckweeds grow so crowded together
that they are probably fertilised, to a great extent, by contact with
their neighbours, without aid from the animal kingdom. We may also
imagine the duckweed reproving the pine for his extravagance in the
matter of pollen production. This, however, is necessary, because the
pollen being sown broadcast by the wind, it is a matter of chance whether
or not a grain reaches the stigma of its own species, and the chance of
its doing so is clearly increased by multiplying the number of
pollen-grains produced. Enormous quantities of the precious dust are
wasted by this prodigality. We read of pollen swept from the decks of
ships, or coating with a yellow scum lakes hidden among Tyrolean
pinewoods. Pollen is so largely dispersed in the air that it has been
supposed to be a cause of hay-fever.
Blackley found, by means of a sticky plate, which could be exposed and
covered again, when raised high in the air on a kite, that pollen is
dispersed to considerable altitudes. Wherever vegetable _debris_
collects, pollen-grains may be found. Kerner found them, together with
wind-borne seeds and scales of butterflies' wings, sticking to the ice in
remote Alpine glaciers.
Another characteristic of wind-borne pollen is dryness or dustiness; the
grains are smooth, not sculptured like the pollen meant to be carried by
insects; nor are they sticky or oily, as is often the case with
entomophilous pollen. The advantage to the plan is obvious; the grains,
from the absence of the burr-like quality, or of any other kind of
adhesiveness, do not tend to hold together in clumps, but separate easily
from one another, and float all the more easily. {7}
Several adaptations are found to favour the dispersal of the pollen.
Wind-fertilised plants are generally tall; thus in Europe, at least, the
commonest representatives of the class are shrubs or trees--witness the
fir-trees, yew, juniper, oak, hazel, birch. And where the plants are
lowly--_e.g._, grasses and sedges, and the plantains--the flowers are
more or less raised up on the haulm. An exception must be made of some
water-plants--_e.g._, the Potamogetons, where the flower-stalk is but
slightly raised above the surface.
Wind-fertilised plants have many characteristics which favour the
dispersal of the pollen. The grasses have long pendent stamens, and
versatile anthers, from which the pollen is easily shaken out by the
wind. There are, of course, exceptions to these generalisations. Such
plants as Hippuris and Salicornia have no particular adaptations: the
filaments are short, and the plants themselves are not of sufficient
height to be able to scatter forth their pollen efficiently by the mere
bending of their stems. The need for exposure to the wind is shown in
another way--namely, by the habit of the Cupuliferae (oak, hazel, etc.),
of flowering before the leaves appear; this not only favours the start of
the pollen on its flight, but is probably still more useful in increasing
its chance of reaching the stigma.
If the pollen is exposed to the wind it will be liable to be wetted and
injured. Catkins--such as those of the walnut or hazel--give some
protection to the pollen, since the stamens are covered in by tile-like
scales; but where--as in the grasses and plantains--the anthers hang far
out of the flowers, the pollen is easily injured. Some of the cereals
protect themselves against injury by means of a remarkably rapid growth
of the filaments; thus the anthers remain hidden within the flowers until
the last moment, and, under the influence of a warm sunny morning,
rapidly protrude themselves. If the scales of the flower are
artificially separated, the growth can be produced by warmth and
moisture; Askenasy describes a trick of country children, who put ears of
rye in their mouths and thus produce a miraculous growth of stamens. The
growth or rapid turgescence takes place, according to the same writer, at
the pace of one millimetre in three minutes.
The explosive male flowers of the nettle have a somewhat similar meaning.
The young stamen is bent so that the upper end of the anther touches the
base of the filament. On the inner concave side of the stamen are large
cells, whose turgescence tends to unfold the filament: I do not know by
what means the unfolding is prevented, but whatever the cause may be, it
is at last overcome and the stamen uncurls with a jerk, and scatters
forth the pollen. Here, as in the rye, the pollen is protected until the
actual moment when it starts on its voyage through the air.
Another of the Nettle tribe, _Pilea serpyllifolia_--a plant often
cultivated in our greenhouses--is also explosive, and its little puffs of
smoke-like pollen have gained for it the popular name of the artillery
plant. Its power of explosion must be of value to it as counterbalancing
the disadvantage, to a wind-fertilised plant, of such a lowly habit.
The adaptations found in the female organs are chiefly such as increase
the surface capable of receiving the pollen, and therefore increase the
chance of fertilisation. A big stigmatic surface is common: not only is
the receptive part of the style large, but it usually bears very large
stigmatic papillae, which gives a velvety hoary look to this type of
stigma. In the grasses the three divisions of the stigma are always more
or less conspicuous; and reach a climax, in this respect, in the huge
beard-like tangle of the maize.
Some of the most interesting cases of wind fertilisation are those in
which an isolated instance occurs in a Natural Order otherwise served by
insects. Thus in the Rosaceae, _Poterium sanguisorba_ is wind
fertilised, and has long pendent stamens, and a tufted stigma; while the
closely allied _Sanguisorba officinalis_, although it secretes nectar
(and this can only mean that it hopes to attract insects), retains the
tufted stigma of its anemophilous relatives.
In the case of the Kerguelen cabbage (_Pringlea antiscorbutica_), the
cause of its degeneration seems to be the want of winged insects on the
wind-blown shores on which it grows. It has acquired some anemophilous
characters--_e.g._, increased stigmatic surface and exserted anthers.
Its flowers are inconspicuous like those of wind-fertilised plants in
general, and it seems in fair way to lose its petals altogether--many
flowers only retaining a single one. The entomophilous ancestry of
Pringlea is clearly shown by the occasional remnants of coloured markings
in the petals, like those which in other flowers serve as finger-posts to
visiting-insects, and are called nectar-guides.
But these are digressions--sidepaths of tempting detail which have lured
me from the straight highway. However, they have brought me back to the
main road.
In Blomefield's _Observations in Natural History_ (p. 332), he points out
that "however much the seasons may differ in different years, the
phenomena generally follow one another in the same order. And it follows
that those which occur together any one year, will occur at or nearly
[at] the same time every other." This indeed is what we might expect,
from the circumstances of any interruption in the time of their
occurrence, due to seasonal influence, necessarily affecting them all
equally. One of the examples by which he supports his view is the
parallel behaviour of the ground-ivy (_Nepeta Glechoma_) and the
box-tree, whose flowers appear simultaneously on 3rd April, as an average
date; while in a certain backward year they flowered later, but still
close together--namely, 20th April and 19th April. There is to me an
especial charm in these duets. Thus I like to imagine that the larch is
waiting to put on its new green clothes till it hears the black-cap. Or
is it that the larch rules the orchestra, and with his green baton
signals to the songster to strike into the symphony? {11}
Shakespeare is right to make the daffodil come before the swallow dares,
since according to Blomefield the average of seventeen annual
observations gives 12th March for the daffodil's flowering-day, and the
swallow does not appear till 9th April at the earliest. Browning, too,
is scientifically safe in letting his chaffinch sing now "that the lowest
boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf."
Indeed, the most dilatory chaffinch must have been singing since 19th
February, and in fortunate seasons might have been heard on 7th January.
A floral calendar may be useful as an interpreter in antiquarian
problems. Thus Blomefield {12a} says that "the _flos-cuculi_, or
cuckoo-flower of the older botanists, was so called from its opening its
flowers about the time of the cuckoo's commencing his call." The
botanist referred to may have been Gerarde, and the flower seems to be
_Cardamine pratensis_, known as lady's smock, also as the cuckoo-flower.
Now the cuckoo begins his song (as the average of Blomefield's seventeen
years' observation near Cambridge) on 29th April, {12b} and lady's smock
blossoms 19th April. {12c} The coincidence is but moderate, but it is
cheering to find in Gilbert White's _Calendar_, with its earlier South
Country dates, that the events occur together: lady's smock, 6th to 20th
April; cuckoo, 7th to 26th April.
Wood-sorrel (_Oxalis acetosella_) was known as cuckoo-sorrel by the
Saxons. In Stillingfleet's _Calendar of Flora_ (1755), it is said to
flower on 16th April, and the cuckoo to begin his song on 17th April. It
is pleasant to find, in a Swedish calendar of flora, that the cuckoo
sings on 12th May, and the wood-sorrel flowers on 13th May. _Lychnis
flos-cuculi_, the ragged robin, flowers on 19th May, and seems to have no
kind of right to the name of a cuckoo-flower, though Gerarde remarks that
it "flowers in April and May, when the cuckoo doth begin to sing her
pleasant notes without stammering." {12d}
I remember being told by a physician that a celebrated Polish violinist
in his old age could not bear the sound of concerted music, but he would
weep over a musical score of which he said, "These beggars don't play out
of tune." This is also true of the great symphony of colour which the
springtime unfolds. The trees are double-basses, and doubtless some are
contra-fagotti, though I confess that I cannot speak positively on this
point. Then come a mass of beautiful shrub-like plants which make up the
rest of the string-band. As one who loves wind-instruments, I like to
think that the flutes, oboes, and clarinets are the flowers of my vernal
orchestra, decorating the great mass of stringed instruments with streaks
and flames of colour.
In real music, we cannot say why certain sounds make an appropriate
opening for a symphony; nor can we understand why the chorus of flowers
should (as above pointed out) be led by mezereon (_Daphne mezereum_),
followed by furze, hazel, the daisy, and the snowdrop.
Of course, their dates are not rigorously fixed: the plants just referred
to vary in their dates of flowering in the following way:
Mezereon, 11th January to 2nd February;
Furze, 1st January to 4th April;
Hazel, 1st January to 20th February;
Snowdrop, 18th January to 16th February;
the mean dates being: mezereon, 22nd January; furze, 24th January; hazel,
26th January; snowdrop, 30th January. One cause of variation in the date
of flowering is temperature, and in the early months of the year this is
probably the principal cause. Temperature must in the same way affect
the flowering of summer plants, though the result is not so striking as
in the springtime. In my article "A Procession of Flowers" (in this
volume) I have given the range of the dates of flowering for different
months.
The spring is the happiest season for those who love plants, who delight
to watch and record the advent of old friends as the great procession of
green leaves and beautiful flowers unwinds itself with a glory which no
familiarity can tarnish.
I cannot resist giving the names of some of the flowers that make this
familiar show that February and March give us. Field-speedwell
(_Veronica agrestis_), butcher's broom, _Pyrus japonica_, primrose, red
dead-nettle, crocus, dandelion, periwinkle, celandine, marsh-marigold,
sweet violet, ivy-leaved veronica, daffodil, white dead-nettle,
colt's-foot (_Tussilago farfara_), dog's mercury, buttercup (_Ranunculus
repens_), hyacinth, almond-tree, gooseberry, wood-sorrel, ground-ivy,
wall-flower. The order in which they occur is taken from the mean dates
of flowering given by Blomefield. To a lover of plants, this commonplace
list will, I hope, be what a score is to a musician, and will recall to
him some of the charm of the orchestra of living beauty that springtime
awakens.