TURTLE-HEAD AND JEWEL-WEED
In my town, summer, whom the almanack calmly orders out on August
31st, refuses to be evicted in person and lingers serenely while
the furniture is being removed, often until late September. In
these September days I think we love her best, perhaps because we
know that soon we shall lose her, and already the parting has
begun. It is not that certain flowers that came joyously in June
are now but dry bracts and seed pods. She has given us other
beauties and fragrance to take their places. It is rather that
summer herself is gently breaking with us, giving us the full joy
of her warmth through the day, but discreetly withdrawing at
nightfall and lingering late in her own apartments of crisp
mornings when there is a tonic as of frost in the air, whereby
October woos us.
The garnishings of her house are hardly fewer while the moving van
people are so busy, and I am apt to delight in them all up to the
very moment when the sweepers, the autumn winds, come and
brusquely brush them out. Old man Barberry is very happy at this
time too. Since he hung out his queer smelling pale gold pendants
in late May he has shown no touch of color, but has wrapped
himself stoically in sober green and waited, as old men know how
to do. Now his day has come again and he is very brave in rubies
that fringe his dull attire and make him flash fire in the sun
from head to foot. Slender goldenrod girls and blue-eyed aster
children, trooping along the fields and over the hills, holding up
the train of summer as she walks so sedately, think him adorable.
If summer stops but for a moment I see them slipping slyly into
his arms, laying golden heads on his drab waistcoat and gazing
with wonder-blue eyes at his coruscating gems. I think well of old
man Barberry, too; better I fancy than he does of me. I admire his
stocky growth which has a sturdy grace of its own, and I love him
for the birds that he shelters, the yellow warblers that love to
build their cottony nests in his arms. But he was born in the
pasture long before I was and he usually resents my advances. His
trident spines have a sarcastic touch that tingles, and with them
he bids me keep my distance. But he is a wise old man in his love
for gentle beauty and he makes a fine picture of gold and green,
ruby fire and tender blue as he folds all these youngsters in his
embrace. Those spines he must fold very close, even to the
withdrawing of them into his orange colored cambium layers, for
there is never an ouch from the group.
These are summer's flowers for remembrance, the goldenrod and
asters. She gives them to us and goes, making all early autumn
glow with her memory thereby. But old man Barberry may have these
if he will. I like best to remember her by others less common and
less permanent, flowers of shy dignity that begin to think of
departure when summer does, and vanish with the flash of her
trailing garments. Two of these, the turtle-head and the jewel-weed,
are little known to careless passers, and elderly pasture
shrubs have no chance to lure them with Attleboro jewelry. They
have their abode in cool springs in seclusion behind the pine-clad
hillside, and would, I fancy, be ashamed to be seen wandering
wantonly about the open fields. I have to make pilgrimage to their
home in the middle of the fountain head marsh to meet them, nor
are their real beauties revealed to one who carelessly splashes
in. Instead, he is liable to be mired in black mud and see nothing
so good as his way out again, nor will he even notice the elfin
laughter of black crickets and green grasshoppers who rub their
preposterously long hind legs together in glee at the joke, so
eager will he be for dry land.
The right of way leads over a level, firm trunk of a fallen tree,
one that has been so long down that only a mossy ridge indicates
its existence, to a sphagnum mound which tops a stump as old as
the causeway. A swamp maple grows at this stump as a back for my
seat in this reception room of the jewel-weeds. I think it is the
sway of the slender maple that puts me in rhythm with the mood of
the place and gives me eyes to see things as they are, for after a
little the rough swamp snarl of straggling growth unravels itself,
and things stand revealed.
There is the rough bedstraw. Somebody who saw it first shall burn
for calling such a sweet little plant such a mischancy name. I
protest that the bedstraw is worthy a better. To be sure it is
rough. The prickles that line the edges of its stems all point
back, and while they do not wound they hold you tenaciously when
you touch them. Thus the plant clings to other woodier stems and
climbs vicariously. But why bedstraw? I trust that none of the
people who came out of the ark and set about naming things as they
followed had to make bedding of these rough stems. With the whorls
of slim green leaves that climb with the slender stalks the plants
make lace and a green mist all about, underfoot in the marsh, lace
that drapes tall plants to which it clings, a green mist out of
which shine constellations of tiny star blooms. Picking these
constellations to pieces one might place a hundred of the tiny,
four-pointed stars on a copper cent and never overlap the petals,
yet they shine above the green as Orion and Cassiopaea do over the
frost fog of a winter night, they are so vividly white.
I never see this at first. It is only after the tranquillity of
the place has shrunk my unwieldy bulk to the patient potency of
the tiny herbs themselves that I have the sight. It is admirable,
this potent patience of these wee things that are born in bogs yet
in their own world grow stars the memory of which lasts as long in
the consciousness of man as does that of the Pleiades. If you
pluck them you will see by turning them over that these
constellations are as whitely bright to small eyes that look from
below, from the ooze of the bog or the roots of marsh grass, as
they are to our great eyes that look from above. Of an early
September morning in the clear stillness I feel that they loom
like varnished planets of the sky in their own lowly heaven of
coruscating dew that coats all things with a milky way of white
fire drops, a dew that has risen all night from the warmth below
and, chilled by the cold blue void of space, has hesitated on
every leaf and twig, frightened into immobility; infinitesimal
drops as shining white and as close together as the stars in a
winter night sky. At dawn all the bog world is crusted with this
dew.
A great gravelly hill rises abruptly from the southern edge of
this boggy home of shy plants, clothed with century old pines.
These are so high and so dense that the sun's rays cannot come
through with any directness, instead they are so filtered and
reflected from gloss of leaf and gray of trunk that they have no
power to dry up this dew, they simply light it up, nor can the
little morning winds that play at surf bathing in the pine tops,
dancing hand in hand, ducking with little shouts of laughter and
singing songs learned from the roar of breakers on gray rocks,
come down to drink them up; so the stars of this under-forest
heaven remain to keep the bedstraw constellations company until
nearly noon. By way of the lower heaven of bedstraw blooms the eye
rises easily to the forest of jewel-weeds. These at least are
rightly, if unconsciously, named. It is not only the bloom but the
whole weed that is a jewel when the morning sun is low and the
reflected light slides level into the forest among purple stems
that shoal into transparent green as they slender toward the
leaves. These, too, seem transluscent and glow, and then some
sprite seems to have suddenly turned on the jewels. Strange that
they did not flash to my eyes even before I came to the place, on
my way down the hill. Perhaps it is some trick of light and shade
that makes them flash on at a certain time and glow like
transparent gold shot through with light. No jeweller could make
these: they are such as a fairy prince might, hang on the pale
green breast of a dryad, a nuptial gift of surpassing value out of
fairy coffers.
At the thought I see more clearly still and each plant becomes a
slender personality of the forest, a nymph whose purple life-blood
runs clear in delicate veins under a skin of transluscent green.
Out of what trees they stepped seems not difficult to tell. Surely
this one came down out of a pasture elm to bathe slim feet in the
cool spring water. Here are smaller, more slender creatures that
came from white birches, and that group of stately ones stepped
out of the tall white pines that stand on the slope nearby. No
wonder the other creatures of the glade adore these slim green
dryads of the swamp. The misty green bedstraw fawns about their
feet and makes lace for their gowns. The polygonum blushes pink
and stretches long arms toward them. The white alders, to whose
tips beauty and fragrance still cling bend over them and toss
white petals and perfume their way, while even the homely
bur-marigold seems to glow a little better yellow in fondness, though
it very properly keeps its distance. Rough rushes nod three-cornered
approval and I am sure the spinulose wood ferns crowd down into
wetter spots than anywhere else, just to get sight of them.
In fact they stand in such wet ground that you might think
them Nephrodium cristatum instead of Nephrodium spinulosum were it
not for the delicate fringing of their fronds which no other fern
can equal. While these things happen I think I can see the dryads
quiver with delight and their jewels dance and flash, living
creatures rather than gems. Surely if anyone may wear living
jewels it should be dryads. They have a trick of facing you, these
jewels, and looking like golden butterflies just spreading petal
wings for a flight. At such times I am minded not to move suddenly
lest they go off over the treetops like a flock of goldfinches. If
they should I should not be surprised. With a change of light or
position they change appearance again and become tiny gold
dragons, winged dragons with gaping mouths and little keen brown
eyes that size you up. Again each is but an ear-pendant, beaten of
thin gold hanging beneath the shell-green ear of the dryad.
All these are early morning fancies, born, I dare say, of the fine
flavor of the place, drunk in dew. At noon, when the sun shines
direct into the marshy glade, the dryads have gone back into their
trees for a noonday nap and the jewel-weeds are but weeds after
all, though beautiful ones. Bees come sailing along and plunge at
the open cornucopia of the lower petal, which was the very
dragon's mouth, after the honey in its tip. Honey bees would find
ready entrance, but the burly bumblebees are far too fat. These
light on the lip, through inherited habit, no doubt, but
immediately turn to the recurved honey-holding tip and plunge the
proboscis through its slender texture, stealing the honey from
flower after flower. In a day's watching I have seen only
bumblebees gathering honey from these flowers, and I wonder about
the fertilization which certainly requires that insects should go
in and out at that open dragon mouth, not little chaps, but buzzy,
fuzzy creatures that will brush off the pollen and carry it.
[Illustration: Captain's Hill from Marsh Margin]
I have no doubt about the bumblebees and the turtle-heads. Each
vivid white corolla of the groups that stand so stiffly on the
ends of the long stalks seems especially made for a bumblebee. He
goes into it as a hand into a glove, flattening himself amazingly
for the entrance, but finding room to work in the interior, though
not enough to turn about in. On his way in, what pollen he already
may have collected on his furry back slips easily off on the very
lip of the stigma which waits at the strategic point with the
antlers crowding well forward, but firmly held a hair's breadth
behind it. Thus each bloom is fertilized with the pollen from some
other, insuring cross-fertilization. The bumblebee takes his toll
in honey, but when he comes to back out he has trouble. If you
will listen close by you will hear him buzzing and burbling like
an overheated teakettle as he struggles. The arching filaments of
those fuzzy stamens have tangled his short legs and he is shaking
the pollen out of the antlers all into the fur of his yellow
overcoat. Before he gets out he is right mad and loaded with
pollen for the fertilization of the next bloom. He comes squeezing
out, as flat as a pancake, sharp end first, and though I watch
close by I am very respectfully motionless. But he gets all over
it by the time he has flown to the next bloom and his hum as he
prods his way in has the tone of a cheerful "Good morning."
The turtle-heads have none of the frail loveliness of the
jewel-weeds that suggest half-visible dryads, but they have a stanch
beauty of their own which I think makes them seem very comely.
Each corolla is a smooth, opaque white through which no light may
pass. It is easy to know how it looks inside a jewel of the
jewel-weed. From without the imagination can appreciate that glow of
pale gold which must there suffuse all things. To such tiny midges
and beetles, spiders and moths as may enter it must be like
walking about in the heart of the Tiffany yellow diamond. The
bumblebee might tell how it seems in the turtlehead petal, if he
knows. I fancy, however, he is so everlastingly busy and so mad
with the filaments when he is inside that he has no time to think
of atmosphere. Often the pure white of this flower is tinged with
a soft shading of delicate rose near the tip of the petal. It is
an unobtrusive shading, as shy as the bloom itself. Ashes of roses
might describe the tint better, for it is as gentle as the fading
pink of a sunset sky, a shade that has dropped thence to the lips
of these blossoms hiding in the dusk of the swamp. You see it best
by looking close into the very face of the flower as the bumblebee
does when about to alight on it, and I think it is set there to
show him the way. By the time he has seen that, he is near enough
to be drawn by the faint but ravishing perfume which is breathed
out by the flower. It is so faint that you must come like the bee
to the very lip of the corolla before you will find it. It is so
tender and of such refinement that when once you get it you will
think no blossom has its equal. The white alder at this time of
year is prodigal of rich and delectable odors. The jewel-weed with
all its beauty has none that my sense can perceive. But that of
Chelone glabra, as modest and withdrawn as the flower itself,
seems hardly to belong in the swamp for all the beauty of the
place. It should rather be that of some delicately nurtured plant,
some rare orchid of sheltered conservatories, it is so delicate
and delightful.
The jewel-weed is as frail as a dream for all its vigorous growth
which reaches sometimes six feet. If you pluck it it withers
before you can get it home to put in water and its jewels shrivel
to nothing on the way. Turtle-head is far different and I like it
for its sturdiness, but most of all I like it because it is the
hast of a small friend of mine, the Baltimore butterfly. In summer
you may see this little fellow, a plaid of yellow and orange on
black, the Baltimore colors, whence his name, flitting about,
never far from the place where the turtle-head grows. If you see
one you may be almost sure that the other is nearby. I have not
seen the butterfly for many weeks, but among the stalks of Chelone
I find the webs which shelter its children. These tiny caterpillars
will feed on the leaves till winter, then by some witchery of nature
survive the frost and snow and zero weather, sheltered only by this
filmy, flimsy home, finish their growth in the spring, waxing fat
on the young leaves and by late May be floating about, more
Baltimore butterflies.
There can be no better evidence of the witchery and romance of the
place than this, that these frail pulpy creatures should with no
covering worth the name withstand cold that under similar
conditions would kill me before Christmas time. When I think of
this dreams of dryads that troop down from the hillsides and
stand, slender and adorable jewel-weeds, where the cool springs
ooze from beneath the gravelly hill, do not seem in the least
absurd or improbable.