There are no heaths in New England, or on the American Continent. We
know them only as they are described in books, or as they are displayed
in greenhouses. We are strangers to those immense assemblages that
furnish an uninterrupted vegetable covering to the earth’s surface, from
the plains of Germany to Lapland on the north, and to the Ural Mountains
on the east. These plains, called heaths or heathlands, are a kind of
sandy bogs, which are favorable to the growth of the Heath, while other
plants with these disadvantages of soil cannot compete with them. The
tenacity with which they maintain their ground renders them a great
obstacle to agricultural improvement. They overspread large districts to
the almost entire exclusion of other vegetation, rendering the lands
unfit to be pastured, and useless for any purpose except to furnish bees
with an ample repast but an inferior honey.
It is often lamented by the lovers of nature that the Heath, the
poetical favorite of the people, the humble flower of solitude, the
friend of the bird and the bee, affording them a bower of foliage and a
garden of sweets, and furnishing a bulwark to larks and nightingales
against the progress of agriculture,—it is often lamented that this
plant should be unknown as an indigenous inhabitant of the New World.
But if its absence be a cause for regret to those who have learned to
admire it as the poetic symbol of melancholy, and as a beautiful
ornament of the wilds, the husbandman may rejoice in its absence. We
have in America the whortleberry, whose numerous species and varieties
occupy, like the heaths of Europe, those lands which have not been
reduced to tillage, without depriving them of their usefulness to man.
They become in their beneficent products a source of profit to thousands
of indigent gleaners of the pastures, and of simple luxury to all our
inhabitants. Though Nature has denied us the barren flower, and left the
imagination unrequited, she has given us, in the place of it, a simple
fruit that furnishes annual occasions for many a delightful excursion to
the youths and children of our land, and is a simple blessing to the
poor.
The farmers of Eastern Massachusetts, who have seen the dyer’s broom
spread itself over the hills, occupying the whole ground, and entirely
displacing all valuable herbs and grasses, may form some idea of the
mischiefs attending the spread of the Heath in Europe. The heaths might
be described as tree-mosses, bearing a multitude of minute campanulate
flowers of various colors. They are not exceeded by any other plants,
except mosses, in the uniform delicacy of their structure. Hence they
are admired by florists, who find among them those multitudinous
varieties which, in other plants, are produced by culture.