Open hither, open hence,Scarce a bramble weaves a fence.Meredith.
Whenspeaking of some Sussex water-meadows, I mentioned as one of their many delights the views which they offer of the never distant Downs. The charm of these chalk hills is to me only inferior to that of real mountains; there are times, indeed, when with clouds resting on the summits, or drifting slowly along the coombes, one could almost imagine himself to be in the true mountain presence. I have watched, on an autumn day, a long sea of vapour rolling up from the weald against the steep northern front of the Downs, while their southern slopes were still basking in sunshine; and scarcely less wonderful than the clouds themselves are the cloud-shadows that may often be seen chasing each other across the wide open tracts which lie in the recesses of the hills.
"Majestic mountains," "exalted promontories," were among the descriptions given of the Downs byGilbert White: what we now prize in them is not altitude but spaciousness. In Rosamund Marriott Watson's words:
Broad and bare to the skiesThe great Down-country lies.
Its openness, with the symmetry of the free curves and contours into which the chalk shapes itself, is the salient feature of the range; and to this may be added its liberal gift of solitude and seclusion. Even from the babel of Brighton an hour's journey on foot can bring one into regions where a perpetual Armistice Day is being celebrated, with something better than the two minutes of silence snatched from the townsfolk's day of din.
The Downs are also open in the sense of being free, to a very great extent, from the enclosures which in so many districts exclude the public from the land. In some parts, unfortunately, the abominable practice of erecting wire fences is on the increase among sheep-farmers; but generally speaking, a naturalist may here wander where he will.
Of all the flowering plants of the Downs, the gorse is at once the earliest and the most impressive; no spectacle that English wildflowers can offer, when seenen masse, excels that of the numberless furze-bushes on a bright April day. There is then a vividness in the gorse, a depth and warmth of that "deep gold colour" beloved by Rossetti, which far surpasses the glazed metallic sheen of a fieldof buttercups. It is pure gold, in bullion, the palpable wealth of Crœsus, displayed not in flat surfaces, but in bars, ingots, and spires, bough behind bough, distance on distance, with infinite variety of light and shade, and set in strong relief against a background of sombre foliage. Thus it has the appearance, in full sunshine, almost of a furnace, a reddish underglow and heart of flame which is lacking even in the broom. To creep within one of these gorse-temples when illumined by the sun, is to enjoy an ecstasy both of colour and of scent.
With the exception of the furze, the Downland flowers are mostly low of stature, as befits their exposed situation, a small but free people inhabiting the wind-swept slopes and coombes, and well requiting the friendship of those who visit them in their fastnesses. One of the earliest and most welcome is the spring whitlow-grass, which abounds on ant-hills high up on the ridges, forming a dense growth like soft down on the earth's cheek. Here it hastes to get its blossoming done before the rush of other plants, its little reddish stalk rising from a rosette of short leaves, and bearing the tiny terminal flowers with white deeply cleft petals and anthers of yellow hue. Its near successor is the equally diminutive mouse-ear (cerastium semidecandrum), a white-petaled plant of a deep dark green, viscous, and thickly covered with hairs.
When summer has come, the flowers of the Downs are legion—yellow bird's-foot trefoil, and horse-shoevetch; milkwort pink, white, or blue; fragile rock-rose; graceful dropwort; salad burnet; squinancy-wort, and a hundred more,[7]of which one of the fairest, though commonest, is the trailing silverweed, whose golden petals are in perfect contrast with the frosted silver of the foliage. But the special ornament of these hills, known as "the pride of Sussex," is the round-headed rampion, a small, erect, blue-bonneted flower which is no "roundhead" in the Puritan sense, but rather of the gay company of cavaliers. Abundant along the Downs from Eastbourne to Brighton, and still further to the west, it is a plant of which the eye never tires.
But it is the orchids that chiefly draw one's thoughts to Downland when midsummer is approaching. "Have you seen the bee orchis?" is then the question that is asked; and to wander on the lower slopes at that season without seeing the bee orchis would argue a tendency to absent-mindedness. I used to debate with myself whether the likeness to a bee is real or fanciful, till one day, not thinking of orchids at all, I stopped to examine a rather strange-looking bee which I noticed on the grass, and found that the insect was—a flower. That, so far, settled the point; but I still think that the fly orchis is the better imitation of the two.
The early spider orchis is native on the eastern range of the Downs, near the lonely hamlet of Telscombe and in a few other localities in the heart of the hills; where, unless one has luck—and I had none—the search for a small flower on those far-stretching slopes is like the proverbial hunt for a needle in a hayloft. The only noticeable object on the hillside was an apparently dead sheep, about a hundred feet below me, lying flat on her back, with hoofs pointing rigidly to the sky; but as it wasorchis, notovis, that I was in quest of, I was about to pass on, when I saw a shepherd, who had just come round a shoulder of the Down, uplift the sheep and set her on her legs, whereupon, to my surprise, she ambled away as if nothing had been amiss with her. I learnt from the shepherd that such accidents are not uncommon, and that having once "turned turtle" the sluggish creature (as mankind has made her) would certainly have perished unless he had chanced to come to the rescue. When I told the good man what had brought me to that unfrequented coombe, he said, as country people often do, that he did not "take much notice" of wildflowers; nevertheless, after inquiring about the appearance of the orchids, he volunteered to note the place for me if he chanced to see them. Then, as we were parting, he called after me: "And if you see any more sheep on their backs, I'll thank you if you'll turn 'em over." This I willingly promised, on the principle not only of humanity, but that one good turn deserves another. Next season, perhaps, our friendly compact may be renewed.
The dingle in which Telscombe lies is rich in flowers; in the Maytime of which I am speaking, there was a profusion of hound's-tongue in bloom, and a good sprinkling of that charming upland plant, deserving of a pleasanter name, the field fleawort; but of what I was searching for, no trace. I had walked into the spider's "parlour," but the spider was not at home. More fortunate was a lady who on that same day brought to the Hove exhibition a flower which she had casually picked on another part of the Downs where she was taking a walk. Sitting down for a rest, she saw an unknown plant on the turf. It was a spider orchis.
Much less unaccommodating, to me, was the musk orchis, a still smaller species which grows in several places where the northern face of the Downs is intersected, as below Ditchling Beacon, by deep-cut tracks—they can hardly be called bridle-paths—that slant upward across the slope. I was told by Miss Robinson, of Saddlescombe, to whose wide knowledge of Sussex plants many flower-lovers besides myself have been indebted, that she once picked a musk orchis from horseback as she was riding along the hill side. It is a sober-garbed little flower, with not much except its rarity to signalize it; but an orchis is an orchis still; there is no member of the family that has not an interest of its own. Many of them are locally common on these hills; to wit, the early purple, thefly, the frog, the fragrant, the spotted, the pyramidal, and most lovely of all, the dwarf orchis; also the twayblade, the lady's-tresses, and one or two of the helleborines. The green-man orchis, not uncommon in parts of Surrey and Kent, will here be sought in vain.
But the Downs are not wholly composed of grassy sheep-walks and furze-dotted wastes; they include many tracts of cultivated land, where, if we may judge from the botanical records of the past generation, certain cornfield weeds which are now very rare, such as the mouse-tail and the hare's-ear, were once much more frequent. It is rather strange that the improved culture, which has nearly eliminated several interesting species, should have had so little effect on the charlock and the poppy, which still colour great squares and sections of the Downs with their rival tints, their yellow and scarlet rendered more conspicuous by having the quiet tones of these rolling uplands for a background.
In autumn, when most of the wealden flowers are withering, the chalk hills are still decked with gentians and other late-growing kinds; and the persistence, even into sere October, of such children of the sun as the rampion and the rock-rose is very remarkable. The autumnal aspect of the Downs is indeed as beautiful as any; for there are then many days when a blissful calm seems to brood over the great coombes and hollows, and the fields lie stretched out like a many-coloured map, the rich browns ofthe ploughlands splashed and variegated with patches of yellow and green. Then, too, one sees and hears overhead the joy-flight of the rooks and daws, as round and round they circle, higher and higher, like an inverted maelstrom swirling upward, till it breaks with a chorus of exulting cries as gladdening to the ear as is the sight of those aerial manœuvres to the eye.
The final impression which the Downs leave on the mind is, I repeat, one of freedom and space; and this is felt by the flower-lover as strongly as by any wanderer on these hills, these "blossoming places in the wilderness," as Mr. Hudson has called them, "which make the thought of our trim, pretty, artificial gardens a weariness."
Prim little scholars are the flowers of her garden,Trained to stand in rows, and asking if they please.I might love them well but for loving more the wild ones:O my wild ones! they tell me more than these.Meredith.
Thedomestication of plants, as of animals, is a concern of such practical importance that in most minds it quite transcends whatever interest may be felt in the beauty of wildflowers. But the many delights of the garden ought not to blind us to the fact that there is in the wild a peculiar quality which the domesticated can never reproduce, and that the plant which is free, even if it be the humblest and most common, has a charm for the nature-lover which the more gorgeous captives of the garden must inevitably lack. If much is gained by domestication, much is also lost. This, doubtless, is felt less strongly in the taming of plants than of animals, but in either case it holds true.
To some of us, it must be owned, zoological gardens are a nightmare of confusion, and the now almost equally popular "rock-garden" a place whichleaves an impression of dulness and futility; for while we fully recognize the interest, such as it is, of inducing Alpines to grow under altered conditions of climate, there is an irrelevance in the assembling of heterogeneous flowers in one enclosure, which perplexes and wearies the mind. For just as a cosmopolitan city is no city at all, and a Babel is no language, so a multifarious rock-garden, where a host of alien plants are grouped in unnatural juxtaposition, is a collection not of flowers but of "specimens." For scientific purposes—the determination of species, and viewing the plants in all stages of their growth—it may be most valuable: to the mere flower-lover, as he gazes on such a concourse, the thought that arises is: "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" It is a museum, a herbarium, if you like; but hardly, in any true sense, a garden.
I once had the experience of living next door to a friend who was smitten with the mania for rock-gardening, and from my study window I overlooked the process from start to finish—first the arrival of many tons of limestone blocks and chips; then the construction of artificial crags and gullies, moraines and escarpments, until a line of miniature Alps rose to view; and lastly the planting of various mountain flowers in the situations suited to their needs. Then followed many earnest colloquies between the creator of this fair scene and a neighbour enthusiast, as they walked about the garden togetherand inspected it plant by plant, much as a farmer goes his rounds to examine his oats or turnips. They surveyed the world, botanically speaking, from China to Peru. Yet somehow I felt that, just as I would rather see a sparrow at large than an eagle in captivity, so to be shown round that well-fashioned rockery was less entertaining than to show oneself round the most barren of the adjacent moors. "Herbes that growe in the fieldes," wrote a fifteenth-century herbalist, "be bettere than those that growe in gardenes."[8]
This, however, is by no means the common opinion; on the contrary, there is in most minds a disregard or veritable contempt for wildflowers as being, with a few exceptions, "weeds," and quite unworthy of comparison with the inmates of a garden.
In herHaunts of the Wild Flowers, Anne Pratt has recorded how she was invited by a cottager to throw away a bunch of "ordinary gays" that she was carrying, and to gather some garden flowers in their stead.
I once took a long walk over the moors in Derbyshire in order to visit certain rare flowers of the limestone dales, among them the speedwell-leaved whitlow-grass (draba muralis), a specimen of which I brought home. This little crucifer is very insignificant in appearance; and the fact that anyone should plod many miles to gather it so upset the gravity of an extremely demure and respectful servantgirl, when she saw it on my mantelpiece, that to her own visible shame and confusion she broke into a loud giggle, somewhat as Bernard Shaw's chocolate-cream soldier failed to conceal his amusement when the portrait of the hero of the cavalry charge was shown to him by its possessor.
Even in the case of those wildings whose beauty or scent has made them generally popular, it is thought the highest compliment to domesticate them, to bring them—poor waifs and strays that they are—from their forlorn savage state into the fold of civilization, just as a "deserving" pauper might be received into an almshouse, or an orphan child into one of Dr. Barnardo's homes. And strange to say, this reverential belief in the garden, as enhancing the merits of the wild, has found its way into many of the wildflower books: for instance, in Johns's well-known work,Flowers of the Field(of thefield, be it noted), we are informed that the lily of the valley is "a universally admired garden plant, and that the sweet-brier is "deservedly" cultivated.
The more refined wildflowers, it will be seen, can thus rise, as it were, from the ranks, at the cost of their freedom, which happens to be the most interesting thing about them, to be enrolled in the army of the civilized; and the result has been that some of the more distinguished plants, such as thedaphne mezereum, are fast losing their place among British wildflowers, and becoming nothing better thanprisoners and captives of the parterre. This disdain that is felt for whatever is wild, natural, and unowned, is largely responsible for the unscrupulous digging up of any attractive plants that may be discovered, a subject of which I propose to speak in the next chapter.
The absurdity of the typical gardener's attitude toward wildflowers is well illustrated by some remarks in Delamer'sThe Flower Garden(1856) with reference to that exceedingly beautiful plant, the tutsan. "Tutsan is a hardy shrubby St. John's-wort, largely employed by gardeners of the last century; but it has now, for the most part, retired from business, in consequence of the arrival of more attractive and equally serviceable newcomers. One or two tutsan bushes may be permitted to help to form a screen of shrubs, in consideration of the days of auld lang syne."
Fortunately the tutsan is not "retiring from business" in Nature's garden. It seems to me that, instead of carrying more and more wildflowers into captivity, it would be much wiser to set at liberty the many British plants that are now under detention. I would instruct my gardener (if I had one) to lift very carefully the daphnes, the lilies of the valley, the tutsans, the cornflowers, the woodruffs, and the rest of the native clan, and to plant them out, each according to its taste, by bank or hedgerow, in field, common, or wood.
Flower in the crannied wall,I pluck you out of the crannies.Tennyson.
Thereis, as I have said, a positive contempt in many minds for the wildflower; that is, for the flower which is regarded as being no one's "property." But the flora of a country, rightly considered, is very far from being unowned; it is the property of the people, and when any species is diminished or extirpated the loss is not private but national. We have already reached a time, as many botanists think, when the choicer British flowers need some sort of protection.
That some injury should be caused to our native flora by improved culture, drainage, building, and the extension of towns, is inevitable; though these losses might be considerably lessened if there were a more general regard for natural beauty. But that is all the stronger reason for discountenancing such damage as is done in mere thoughtlessness, or, worse, for selfish purposes; and it were greatlyto be wished that some of the good folk who pray that their hands may be kept "from picking and stealing" would so far widen the scope of their sympathies as to include the rarer wildflowers.
It cannot be doubted that there is an immense amount of wasteful flower-picking by children, and also by persons who are old enough to know better. Nothing is commoner, in Spring, than to see piles of freshly gathered hyacinths or cowslips abandoned by the roadside; and many other flowers share the same fate, including, as I have noticed, the beautiful green-winged meadow orchis. Trippers and holiday-makers are often very mischievous: I have seen them, for instance, on the ramparts of Conway Castle, hooking and tearing the red valerian which is an ornament to the grey old walls. I was told by a friend who lives in a district where the rare meadow-sage (salvia pratensis) is native, that he is compelled to pluck the blue flowers just before the August bank-holiday, in order to save the plant itself from being up-rooted and carried off.
Primroses, abundant as they still are in many places, have nearly disappeared from others, in consequence of the depredations of flower-vendors; and there was a time when they were seriously threatened in the neighbourhood of London because a certain fashionable cult was at its height. Witness the following "Idyll of Primrose Day" by some unknown versifier:
How blest was dull old Peter Bell,Whom Wordsworth sung in days of yore!A primrose by a river's brimA yellow primrose was to him,And it was nothing more.Alas! 'tis something more to us;No longer Nature's meekest flower,But symbol of consummate Quack,Who by tall talk and knavish knackCould plant himself in power.For his sweet sake we mourn, each spring,Our lanes and hedgerows robbed and bare,Our woods despoiled by clumsy clown,That primrose-tufts may come to townFor tuft-hunters to wear.And so, on snobbish Primrose Day,We envy Peter's simple lore:A primrose, worn with fulsome fuss,A yellow primrose is to us,Alas! and something more.
The nurseryman and the professional gardener have also much to answer for in the destruction of wildflowers. Take the following instance, quoted from theFlora of Kent, with reference to the cyclamen: "Towards the end of August, 1861, I was shown the native station of this plant. . . . The people in those parts had found out it was in request, and had almost entirely extirpated it, digging up the roots, and selling them for transplantation into shrubberies." In the same work it is recorded that, when the frog orchis was found in some abundance near Canterbury, "in a wonderfully short space oftime the whole of this charming colony was dug and extirpated."
Again, if it be permissible to call a spade a spade, what shall be said of those roving knights of the trowel, the unconscionable rock-gardeners who ride abroad in search of some new specimen for their collections? A late writer of very charming books on the subject has feelingly described how, after the discovery of some long-sought treasure, he craved a brief spell of repose, a sort of holy calm, before commencing operations. "We blessed ones," he said, referring to botanists as contrasted with ornithologists, "may sit down calmly, philosophically, beside our success, and gently savour all its sweetness, until it is time to take out the trowel after half an hour of restful rapture in our laurels."[9]
Other flower-fanciers there are who show much less circumspection. In Upper Teesdale, where the rare blue gentian (gentiana verna) is found on the upland pastures, I was told that a "gentleman" had come with two gardeners in a motor, and departed laden with a number of these beautiful Alpine flowers for transplantation to his private rockery. The nation which permits such a theft—far worse than stealing from a private garden—deserves to possess no wildflowers at all; and such a botanist, if botanist he can be called, deserves to be himself transplanted, or transported—to Botany Bay.
The same vandalism, in varying degrees, has beenat work in every part of the land, and nothing has yet been done effectively to check it, whether by legislation, education, or appeal to public opinion: it seems to be absolutely no one's business to protect what ought to be a cherished national possession. In no district, perhaps, has the greed of the collector been more unabashed than among the mountains of Cumberland and North Wales. "Thanks to the inconsiderate rapacity of the fern-getter," wrote Canon Rawnsley, in an Introduction to aGuide to Lakeland, "the few rarer sorts are fast disappearing. ... There has been, in the time past, quite a cruel and unnecessary uprooting of the rarer ferns and flowers;" and he went on to ask: "When will travellers learn that the fern by the wayside has a public duty to fulfil?"
All such remonstrances have hitherto been in vain: neither the fear of God nor the fear of man has deterred the collector from his purpose. It is pleasant to read that in the seventeenth century a Welsh guide alleged "the fear of eagles" as a reason for not leading one of the earliest English visitors to the haunts of Alpine plants on the precipices of Carnedd Llewelyn; but unfortunately eagles are now as scarce as nurserymen and fern-filchers are numerous.
I found a deep hollow on the side of a great hill, a green concave, where I could rest and think in perfect quiet.Richard Jefferies.
I found a deep hollow on the side of a great hill, a green concave, where I could rest and think in perfect quiet.Richard Jefferies.
Asa range of hills, the North Downs are inferior to those of Sussex in beauty and general interest. Their outline suggests no "greyhound backs" coursing along the horizon; nor have they that "living garment" of turf, woven by centuries of pasturing, which Hudson has matchlessly described. Their northern side is but a gradual slope leading up to a bleak tableland; and only when one emerges suddenly on their southern front, with its wide views across the weald, do their glories begin to be realized. In this steep declivity, facing the sun at noon, there is a distinctive and unfailing charm, quite unlike that of the corresponding escarpment of the South Downs: it forms, as it were, an inland riviera, a sheltered undercliff, green with long waving grasses, and sweet with marjoram and thyme, a haven where the wandering flower-lover may revelin glowing sunshine, or take a siesta, if so minded, under that most friendly of trees the white-beam.
I have memories of many a pious Sabbath spent in this enchanted realm, with the wind in the beeches for anthem, and for incense the scent of marjoram enriching the air. To one who knows these fragrant banks it seems strange that though the wild thyme has been so celebrated by poets and nature-writers, the marjoram, itself a glorified thyme, has by comparison gone unsung. We are told in the books that it is a potherb, an aromatic stimulant, even a remedy for toothache. It may be all that; but it is something much better, a thing of beauty which might cure the achings not of the tooth only, but of the heart. Its relatives the lavender and the rosemary have not more charm. It was theamaracusof Virgil, the flower on whose sweetness the young Iulus rested, when he was spirited away by Venus to her secret abode:
She o'er the prince entrancing slumber strows,And, fondling in her bosom, far awayBears him aloft to high Idalian bowers,Where banks of marjoram sweet, in soft repose,Enfold him, propped on beds of fragrant flowers.[10]
Who could wish for a diviner couch?
Along this range of hills the chalk-pits, used or disused, are frequent at intervals, some of such size as to form landmarks visible at the distance of twenty or thirty miles. For a botanist, these amphitheatres,large or small, have always an attraction; for though they vary much in the quality of their flowers, and some have little to show beyond the commoner plants of a calcareous soil, there are a few which present a surprising array of the choicer kinds; and to light upon one of these treasure-troves is a joy indeed. I have in mind a large semicircular disused pit, lying high among the Downs, and bordered with abrupt grassy banks and coppices of beech, hazel, and fir, where during the past thirty years I have spent many long summer days, sometimes writing under the shade of the trees, at other times idling among the flowers, or watching the snakes that lie basking in the sun, or the kestrels that may often be seen hovering over the adjacent slopes. For all their unrivalled openness and sense of space, the Sussex Downs have no such "sun-trap" to show.
One has heard of "the music of wild flowers."[11]I used to call the floor of this chalk-pit "the orchistra," so numerous are the orchids that adorn it. The spotted orchis, the fragrant orchis, the pyramidal orchis, the bee orchis, the butterfly orchis, and the twayblade—these six are stationed there within a small compass. The marsh orchis grows below; the fly orchis is in the neighbouring thickets; in the beech-woods are the bird's-nest orchis, the broad-leaved helleborine, with its rare purple variety (epipactis purpurata), and the large white helleborine or egg orchis. A dozen of the family within thecircuit of a short walk! The man orchis seems to be absent, though it grows in some plenty in similar places on the same line of hills.
Another feature of the chalk-pit is the viper's bugloss. If, as Thoreau says, there is a flower for every mood of the mind, the viper's bugloss must surely belong to that mood which is associated with the pomps and splendours of the high summer noontide. Gorgeous and tropical in its colouring beyond all other British flowers, as it rears its bristly green spikes, studded profusely with the pink buds that are turning to an equally vivid blue, it seems instinct with the spirit of a fiery summer day. Like other members of the Borage group, it has the warm southern temperament; its name, too, suits it well; for there is something viperish in the almost fierce beauty of the plant, as if some passionate-hearted exotic had sprung up among the more staid and sober representatives of our native flora. Its richness never palls on us; we no more tire of its brilliance than of the summer itself.
Akin to the bugloss, though less striking and less abundant, is the hound's-tongue, with its long downy leaves and numerous purple-red buds of a sombre and sullen hue that is not often to be matched. It has the misfortune, so we are told, to smell of mice; were it not for this hindrance to its career, it might justly be held in high esteem. Among the larger plants prominent on ledges of the chalk, or in near neighbourhood, are the mullein, the teazle, theploughman's-spikenard, and the deadly nightshade or dwale. The buckthorn is frequent in the hedges and thickets; and the traveller's-joy is climbing wherever it can get a hold.
But it is on the shelving banks that skirt the margin of the pit that the comeliest flowers are to be found; the most beautiful of all, perhaps, is the rock-rose, a plant so delicate that its small golden petals will scarcely survive a journey in the vasculum, yet so hardy that it will flower to the very latest autumn days. The wild strawberry is creeping everywhere; and the crimson of the grass vetchling may occasionally be seen among the ranker herbage, to which the stalk seems to belong; on the shorter turf is the small squinancy-wort, lovely cousin of the woodruff, its pink and white petals chiselled like the finest ivory.
The elegant yellow-wort, glaucous and perfoliate, and the handsome pink centaury, are common on the Downs; so, too, in the late summer, will be their less showy but always welcome relative, the autumnal gentian: all three have the firm and erect habit that is a property of the Gentian tribe. It is one of the many merits of these chalk hills that their flower-season is a prolonged one. Not the gentians only, with yellow-wort and centaury, are still vigorous in the autumn, but also the blue fleabane, clustered bell-flower, vervain, marjoram, basil, and many labiate herbs. Even in October, when the glory has long departed from the lowlandsof the weald, there remains a brave show of blossom on these delectable hills.
The Pilgrim's Way, often no more than a grassy track, runs eastward along the base of the Downs, interrupted here and there by the encroachment of parks and private estates, which now block the ancient route to Canterbury; but where Nature has provided so many shrines and cathedrals of her own, there is no need of any others; certainly I never lacked a holy place wherein to make my vows, many as were the pilgrimages on which I started.
On one occasion that I recall, I was joined in my quest by a rather strange fellow-traveller, a man who met me, coming from the opposite direction, and eagerly asked whether I had seen anyone on the hillside. When I assured him that nobody had passed that way, he turned and walked in my company, and presently confided to me that he was an attendant at a lunatic asylum, and was in pursuit of an inmate who had escaped an hour or two before. We went a short distance together, he peering into the coombes and bushy hollows, as incongruous a pair as could be imagined; yet it occurred to me that his mission, too, might be considered a botanical one, since there is a plant named the madwort—nay, worse, the "German madwort," a title which, in those feverish war-days, would of itself have justified incarceration. Nevertheless, as I always sympathize with escaped prisoners (provided, of course, that it is notmybed under which they conceal themselves), I was secretly glad that my companion's search was unavailing.
To return to my chalk-pit: I have mentioned but a few of the many flowers that belong there; within a mile, or less, others and quite different ones are flourishing. The rampion, though very local in Surrey, is found in places along these Downs; so, too, is the strange yellow bugle, or "ground pine," which is much more like a diminutive pine than a bugle; also the still stranger fir-rape (monotropa), which lurks in the thickest shade of the beech-woods. That interesting shrub, the butcher's-broom, or "knee holly," as it is more agreeably called, is another native: it wears its small flower daintily, like a button-hole, on the centre of the rigid leaves of deepest green.
A few miles east there is another chalk-pit which, though inferior in the number of its flowers, has a sprinkling of the man orchis, whose shape, if there is any likeness at all, seems to suggest a toy man dangling from a string; a simile which I prefer to that of a dead man dangling from the gallows. In the woods that crown this pit there is a profusion of the deadly nightshade; and I noticed that during the war-summers, when there was a scarcity of belladonna, these plants were regularly harvested by some enterprising herbalist.
Such are a few of the delights of the Surrey undercliff; but alas! they are vanishing delights, for theproximity to London has rendered all this district peculiarly liable to change. How could it be otherwise, when from the top of the ridge the dome of "smoky Paul's" is visible on a clear day, and a view of the Crystal Palace, "that dreadful C.P." as one has heard it called, can seldom be avoided. What havoc has been wrought in the Surrey hills by the advance of "civilization," may be learnt by anyone who studies the district with a sixty-year-oldFlora of Surreyfor guide. Between Merstham and Godstone, for instance, the hillsides, which were then free, open ground, have become in the saddest sense "residential," and the wildflowers have suffered in proportion. One may still find there the narrow-leaved everlasting pea, "hanging in festoons on thickets and copses," but other equally valued plants have disappeared or are disappearing. The marsh helleborine was once plentiful, it seems, in a swampy situation near Merstham; but when, by dint of careful trespassing and circumnavigation of barbed wire, I reached a place which corresponded exactly with that indicated in theFlora, not a single flower was to be seen. Probably some conscientious gardener had "transplanted" them.
It is impossible to doubt that this process will be continued, and that every year more wild land will be broken up in the building of villas and in the making of gardens, with the inevitable shrubberies, gravel walks, flower-borders, and lawn-tennis courts. The trim parterre with its "detested calceolarias,"as a great nature-lover has described them, will more and more be substituted for the rough banks that are the favourite haunts of marjoram and rock-rose. How can the owners of such a fairyland have the heart to sell it for such a purpose? In Omar's words:
I often wonder what the vintners buyOne half so precious as the stuff they sell.
The common, overgrown with fern, . . .Yields no unpleasing ramble; there the turfSmells fresh, and rich in odoriferous herbsAnd fungus fruits of earth, regales the senseWith luxury of unexpected sweets.Cowper.
Stretchedbetween the North Downs and the weald, through the west part of Kent and the length of Surrey, runs the parallel range of greensand, which in a few places, as at Toys Hill and Leith Hill, equals or overtops its rival, but is elsewhere content to keep a lower level, as a region of high open commons and heaths. The light soil of this district shows a flora as different from that of the chalk hills on its north as of the wealden clays on its south; so that a botanist has here the choice of three kingdoms to explore.
In natural beauty, these hills can hardly compare with the Downs. "For my part," wrote Gilbert White, "I think there is something peculiarly sweet and amusing in the shapely figured aspect of chalk hills, in preference to those of stone, which are rugged,broken, abrupt, and shapeless."[12]The same opinion was held by William Morris, who once declined to visit a friend of his (from whom I had the story) because he was living on just such a sandy common in west Surrey, where the formless and lumpish outline of the land was a pain to the artistic eye. For hygienic reasons, however, a sandy soil is reputed best to dwell upon; and I have heard a tale—told as a warning to those who are over-fastidious in their choice of a site—of a pious old gentleman who, being determined to settle only where he could be assured of two conditions, "a sandy soil and the pure gospel," finally died without either in a Bloomsbury hotel.
The gorse and broom in spring, and in autumn the heather, are the marked features of the sandy Common: the foxglove, too, which has a strong distaste for lime, here often thrives in vast abundance, and makes a great splash of purple at the edge of the woods. But even apart from these more conspicuous plants, the "barren heath," as it is sometimes called, is well able to hold its own in a flower-lover's affection; though the absence of the finer orchids, and of some other flowers that pertain to the chalk, makes it perhaps less exciting as a field of adventure. In Crabbe's words:
And then how fine the herbage! Men may sayA heath is barren: nothing is so gay.
From May to September the Common is sprinkled with a bright succession of flowers—the slendermœnchia, akin to the campions and chickweeds, dove's-foot, crane's-bill; tormentil; heath bedstraw; speedwells of several species; autumnal harebell, and golden rod—each in turn playing its part. Among the aristocracy of this small people are the bird's-foot, an elfin creature, with tiny pinnate leaves and creamy crimson-veined blossoms; the modest milkwort, itself far from a rarity, yet so lovely that it shames us in our desire for the rare; and the trailing St. John's-wort, which we hail as the beauty of the family, until presently, meeting with its "upright" sister of the smooth heart-shaped leaves and the golden red-stained buds, we are forced to own that to her the name ofhypericum pulcrummost rightly belongs.
But the chief prize of the sandy heath is the Deptford pink, a rare annual of uncertain appearance, which bears the unmistakable stamp of nobility: it is a red-letter day for the flower-lover when he finds a small colony of these comely plants on some dry grassy margin. It was on a bank in Westerham Park that I first met with them; and there they reappeared, though in lessening numbers, in the two succeeding seasons. There was also a solitary flower, growing unpicked, strange to say, close beside one of the most frequented tracks that skirt the neighbouring Common.
In the woods of beech and fir with which the hill is fringed there are more fungi than flowers; andhere too the "call of the wild" is felt, though to a feast of a less ethereal order. Fungus hunting is one of the best of sports, and a joy unknown to those who imagine that the orthodox "mushroom" of the market is the only wholesome species; and it is worthy of note that, whereas the true meadow mushroom is procurable during only a few weeks of the year, the fungus-eater can pursue his quarry during six or seven months, so great is the variety at his disposal. Among the delicacies that these woods produce are the red-fleshed mushroom, a brown-topped warty plant which becomes rufous when bruised; the gold-coloured chantarelle, often found growing in profusion along bushy paths and dingles; the big edible boletus, ignored in this country, but well appreciated on the Continent; and best of all, deserving indeed of its Latin name, theagaricus deliciosus, or orange-milk agaric, so called because its flesh, when broken, exudes an orange-coloured juice. It is easy to identify these and many other species with the help of a handbook, and it therefore seems strange that Englishmen, as compared with other races, should be prejudiced against the use of this valuable form of food. As for the country-folk who live within easy reach of such dainties, yet would rather starve than eat a "toadstool," what can one say of them?
O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint![13]
From the south side of these fir-woods one formerly emerged, almost at a step, on to the escarpment that overlooks the weald, and at one of the finest viewpoints in Kent or Surrey; but the trees were felled during the war by Portuguese woodmen imported for that lamentable purpose. The spot is remembered by me for another reason; for there, in the years before the madness of Europe, used to sit almost daily a very aged man, whose home was on the hillside close by, and who was brought out, by his own wish, that he might spend his declining days not in moping by a kitchen fire, but in gazing across the wide expanse of weald, where all the landmarks were familiar to him, and of which he seemed never to weary. No more truly devout old age could have been desired; for there was no mistaking his genuine love for what Richard Jefferies called "the pageant of summer," the open-air panorama of the seasons, as observed from that heathery watch-tower. The only cloud on his horizon, so to speak, was the flock of aeroplanes which even then were beginning to mar the sky's calmness: of these he would sagely remark that "if man had been intended to fly, the Almighty would have given him wings." Had the old philosopher known to what hellish uses those engines were presently to be put, he might have wondered still more at such thwarting of the divine intent.
Of sandpits there are several on the Common, and their disused borders are favourite haunts forwildflowers. The "least" cudweed, a slender wisp of a plant, is native there; the small-flowered crane's-bill, which is liable to be confounded with the dove's-foot; also one or two curious aliens, such as the Canadian fleabane, and the Norwegianpotentilla, which resembles the common cinquefoil but has smaller flowers.
But what most allured me to the spot was the sheep's scabious, or, as it is more prettily named in the Latin,Jasione montana, a delightful little plant, baffling alike in name, form, and colour. It is called a scabious, yet is not one. It is classed as a campanula, and seen through a lens is found to be not one but many campanulas, a number of tiny bells united in a single head. Then its hue—was there ever tint more elusive, more indefinable, than that of its many petals? Is it grey, or blue, or lavender, or lilac, or what? We only know that the flower is very beautiful as it blooms on sandy bank or roadside wall.
At the side of a small plantation that borders the heath there thrives the alien small-flowered balsam, which, like some of its handsomer kinsfolk, seems to be quickly extending its range. Near the same spot I noticed several years ago, on a winter day, a patch of large soft pale-green leaves, which at a hasty glance I took to be those of the scented colt's-foot; but when I passed that way in the following spring I was surprised to see that several long stalks, bearing bright yellow composite flowers, had risenfrom the mass of foliage. It proved to be the leopard's-bane, probably an "escape" from some neighbouring garden, but already well established and thriving like any native.
But the Common does not consist wholly of dry ground; in one place, near the centre of the golf-course, there is a marshy depression, and in it a small pond where the water is a foot or two deep in winter, but in a hot summer almost disappears. Here a double discovery awaits the inquirer. The muddy pool is full of one of the rarer mints—pennyroyal—and with it grows the curioushelosciadium inundatum, or "least marsh-wort," a small umbelliferous plant which has more the habit and appearance of a water crowfoot, its lower leaves being cut in fine hair-like segments.
Nor do the fields and lanes that adjoin the heath lack their distinctive charm. The orpine, or "live-long," a handsome purple stonecrop, is not uncommon by the hedgeside; and the lovelygeranium striatum, or striped crane's-bill, an occasional straggler from gardens, has made for itself a home; a hardy little adventurer it is, and one hopes it may yet win a place among British flowers, as many a less desirable immigrant has done. Poppies and corn-marigolds are a wonder of red and gold in the cultivated fields, the poppies as usual looking their best (if agriculturists will pardon the remark) when they have a crop of wheat for a background. The queer little knawel springs up among spurrey andparsley-piert; and in one locality is the lesser snapdragon, which always commands attention, partly for its uncommonness, and partly as a scion of the romantic race ofAntirrhinum, which has a fascination not for children only, but for all lovers of the quaint.
I have mentioned the golf-course. To many a Common the golfers are becoming what the builders are to the Downs—invaders who, by the trimming of grass and cutting down of bushes, are turning the natural into the artificial, and appropriating for the use of the few the possession of the many. To everyone his recreation ground; but are not the golf clubs getting rather more than their portion?
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes.Milton.
I spokejust now of a love of the quaint. Quaintness, though it may exist apart from beauty, is often associated with it, and, unlike grotesqueness, has a pleasurable interest for the spectator. In flowers it is usually suggested by some abnormality of shape, as in the snapdragon; less frequently, as in the fritillary, by a singular effect of colouring. Perhaps it is to the orchis group that one would most confidently apply the word; for they arrest attention not so much by their beauty as by their strangeness: one of them, indeed, the dwarf orchis, is undeniably beautiful, while another, the bird's-nest, is as ugly as a broom-rape; the others, if one tried to find a comprehensive epithet, might fairly be described as quaint.
This quality in the orchids is not due solely to the odd likeness which some of them present to certain insects; for, as far as British species are concerned, the similarity, with a few exceptions, issomewhat fanciful. If it be granted that the fly, the bee, and the spider orchis are justly named—though even in these the resemblance is not always recognized when pointed out—it is no less true that one looks in vain for the semblance of a "butterfly," or of a "frog," in the plants that are so entitled, and it takes some ingenuity to discover the "man" inaceras anthropophora, or the "egg" in the white helleborine. But there is a charming quaintness in nearly all members of the family, owing largely to the peculiar structure of the lower lip of the corolla or the unusual length of the spur.
The very name of the snapdragon is a proof of its hold upon the imagination: what mediæval romance and unfailing charm for children—and for adults—is conveyed in the word! The plant is at its best when clad in royal hue of purple; the white robe also has its glory; but the intermediate forms, striped and mottled, that are so fancied in gardens, are degenerates from a noble type. Seen on the walls of some ancient ruin, the snapdragon is a wonder and a delight; it is to be regretted that its place is now so often usurped by the red valerian, in comparison a mere upstart and pretender. The lesser snapdragon or calf's-snout, with the toadflaxes and fluellens, shares in the characteristic quaintness of its tribe.
I will next instance the "perfoliates," plants not confined to any one order, but alike in having a stem which passes midway through the leaf or pairof leaves, a most engaging curiosity of structure. It is by this peculiarity that the yellow-wort, a gentian with glaucous foliage and blossoms like "patines of bright gold," mainly wins its popularity. But the quaintest of perfoliates is the hare's-ear, or "thorow-wax," as it used to be called, of which, as Gerarde wrote, "every branch grows thorow every leaf, making them like hollow cups or saucers." The thorow-wax owes its attractiveness to these singular glaucous leaves, which might be compared with an artist's palette; in some measure, also, to the sharp-pointed bracts by which the minute yellow flowers are enfolded—features that lend it a distinction which many much more beautiful plants do not possess.
From no catalogue of quaint plants could the butterwort be omitted. "Mountain-sanicle" was its old name; and all climbers are acquainted with it, as it studs the wet rocks on the lower hillsides with pale green or yellowish leaves like starfish on a seashore. Its flowering-season is short, but full of interest, for lo! from its centre there rise in June one or two long and dainty stems, each bearing at its extremity a drooping purple flower that might at first glance be taken for a violet—a violet springing from a starfish!
It is a long step from these conspicuous examples of the quaint to the small and modest moschatel, a hedge-flower which is likely to go unobserved unless it be made a special object of inquiry.Adoxa,"the unknown to fame," is its Greek title; but if it has little claim to beauty in the ordinary sense, there is no slight charm in its delicate configuration, and in the whimsical arrangement of its five slender flower-heads—a terminal one, facing upwards, supported by four lateral ones, with a resemblance to the faces of a clock; whence its not inappropriate nickname, "the clock-tower." A fairy-like little belfry it is, whose chimes must be listened for, if at all, in the early spring, for it hastens to get its flowering finished before it is overgrown by the rank herbage of the roadside.
There are many other flowers that might claim a place in this chapter, such as the sundews and the bladderworts; the mimulus and ground pine; the samphire and sea-rocket; the mullein and the teazle; and not least, the herb Paris, with that large quadruple "love-knot" into which its leaves are fashioned. But it must suffice to speak of one more.
The fritillary, which shall close the list, is quaint to the point of being bizarre: its various names bear witness to the freakishness of its apparel—"guinea-flower," "turkey-hen," "chequered lily," "snake's-head," and so forth. It was aptly described by Gerarde as "chequered most strangely. . . . Surpassing the curiousest painting that art can set down"; and in addition to this gorgeous colouring, the bell-like shape and heavy poise of its flower-heads contribute to the striking effect. From Gerarde to W. H. Hudson, who has portrayed itvery beautifully in hisBook of a Naturalist, the fritillary has been fortunate in its chroniclers; in its name, which it shares with a handsome family of butterflies, it can hardly be said to have been fortunate. For apart from the consideration that it is no great honour to a fine insect or flower to be likened to that instrument of human folly, a dicebox (fritillus), there is the practical difficulty of pronouncing the word as the dictionaries tell us it must be pronounced, with the accent on the first syllable; and not the dictionaries only, but the poets, as in Arnold's oft-quoted but very cacophonous line:
I know what white, what purple fritillaries. . . .
Why must so quaintly charming a flower be so barbarously named that one's jaw is well-nigh cracked in articulating it?
A gaily chequered, heart-expanding view,Far as the circling eye can shoot around,Unbounded tossing in a flood of corn.Thomson.
Thatpart of Hertfordshire where the Chiltern Hills, after curving proudly round from Tring to Dunstable, and almost rivalling the South Downs in shapeliness, die away at their north-east extremity, over Hitchin, to a bare expanse of ploughland, has the aspect of a broad plain swept by all winds of heaven, but is found, when explored, to be by no means devoid of charm. There, by a paradox, the very extent of the great hedgeless cornfields, reclaimed from the wild, gives the landscape a sort of wildness; it is in fact the district whence the Royston crow got its name, that hooded outlaw to whose survival a wide tract of open country was indispensable; and there is a pleasure in wandering over it which is unguessed by the traveller who rushes through in an express to Cambridge, and marvels at the tameness of the land.
The wildflowers of cultivated fields are as distinctive as those of heath or hillside. It would be difficult to name any two more beautiful "weeds" than the succory and the corn "blue-bottle"—the light blue and the dark blue; both have deservedly won their "blues"—and when to these is added the corn-cockle (lychnis githago), the rich veined purple of its petals set off by the long pointed green sepals and leaves, what handsomer trio could be wished? Unhappily these flowers have become much scarcer than they used to be; but in the Hertfordshire fields they are still frequently to be admired.
The intensive culture of which we nowadays hear so much has this drawback for the botanist, that it is robbing him of some plants which he is very loth to lose. The most striking of these, perhaps, is that quaint "perfoliate" of which I have already spoken, the thorow-wax or hare's-ear, which in Gerarde's time was so plentiful in the wheatland as to be what he calls its "infirmitie": now it is decidedly rare. I have never been so fortunate (except in dreams) as to see itin situ; but I have for several years grown it from the seed of a specimen gathered by a friend in the cornfields near Baldock, and have always been impressed by its elegance. It is a delicate and fastidious plant, thriving only, as I have noticed, when the conditions are quite favourable: this may account for its steady diminution in many counties, while coarser and hardier weeds are legion.
A more abiding "infirmitie" of some Hertfordshirecornfields is the crow-garlic, a wild onion whose pink umbels often surmount the crop in hundreds. Wishing to learn their local name, I once asked a farm-hand at Letchworth what he called the flowers. After gazing at them sternly, he said to me: "They'renotflowers. They're a disease." I suggested that whatever their demerits might be from the point of view of an agriculturist, they must, strictly speaking, be regarded as flowers: this he grudgingly conceded; but as if regretting to have made so large an admission, he called after me, as I left him: "They're a disease." His pertinacity on this point reminded me of the reaffirmations of Old Kaspar, in Southey's poem, "After Blenheim":
"Nay, nay" ... quoth he,"It was a famous victory."
The crow-garlic, as it happens, is rather a pretty plant; and the opprobrious name "disease" might be much more suitably assigned to the tall broom-rape, an unwholesome-looking parasite which lives rapaciously at the expense of the great knapweed, and is occasionally met with in the district of which I am speaking.
An extremely local umbellifer, said to have been formerly so abundant about Baldock that pigs were turned out to fatten on its roots, is the bulbous caraway, which looks like a larger edition of the common earth-nut. None of the country-folk whom I questioned seemed to have any knowledge of itsuses; from which it would appear that its virtues, like those of many once famous herbs, have been forgotten in these sceptical modern times. It is well, perhaps, thatcarum bulbocastanumshould be saved from the pigs; for in that unlovely region its white umbels serve to lighten up the monotony of the waysides.
An unexpected discovery is always welcome. In a waste field, about a mile from Royston, I once found a tall branching plant with an abundance of yellow cruciferous flowers, which I should not have recognized but for the fact that a year or two previously my friend Edward Carpenter had sent me a specimen from Corsica. It was the woad, famous as the source of the blue dye with which the ancient Britons stained themselves. A mere "casual" in Hertfordshire, it is said to be established in a few chalk-quarries near Guildford and elsewhere.
Thus far I have spoken of none but field flowers; but the district does not consist wholly of cultivated land, for even in that wilderness of tillage there are oases which have never felt the plough, and where the flora is of a different order. Therfield Heath, near Royston, is one of them, a grassy slope where the handsome purple milk-vetch is plentiful, and one may find, though in less abundance, the sprightly field fleawort, which seems more familiar as an ornament of the high chalk Downs.
Nor are water springs wanting in the bare ploughlands. The little river Ivel, which leaps suddenlyto light near Baldock, and thence races northward to join the Bedfordshire Ouse, is a clear trout-stream by whose banks it is pleasant (whatever the trespass notices may threaten) to wander, and to watch the quick-glancing fish. At the hamlet of Radwell, in a moist copse, there is a patch of the rare monk's-hood, a poisonous flower of which later mention will be made. A joint tributary of the Ouse, and not less inviting, is the oddly named Hiz, which has its source on Oughton Common, a boggy flat near Hitchin, where both the butterwort and the grass of Parnassus are recorded as having grown and may perchance be growing still: as for the marsh orchis, one cannot cross the Common without seeing it.
Then at Ickleford, a village on the banks of the Hiz, there is a pond which has been "occupied" (to use a military term) by the water-soldier, a stout aquatic which takes its name from the rigid swordlike leaves enclosing the three-petaled flowers. Peculiar to the eastern counties, this water-soldier is said to have been introduced at Ickleford over half a century ago; and there it now makes a fine array, having thriven wonderfully in spite of the worn-out pots and pans, and other refuse, for which, in Hertfordshire as elsewhere, the nearest pool or stream is thought a fit receptacle.
A mile or two west of the source of the Hiz at Oughton Head, stands High Down, where begins or ends, according to the direction of the wayfarer, the northern escarpment of the Chilterns, at thispoint crossed, recrossed, and crossed again, by the curiously indented boundary-line between Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire; and here on the steep front of the Pirton and Barton hills, in the one county or the other, may be seen in early spring the most beautiful of English anemones, the pasque-flower. On the few occasions when I have visited the place the summer was well advanced, and I was too late for that gorgeous flower; I had to content myself with the pyramidal orchis at the foot of the hills, and with great blossoming sheets of white candytuft in the fields above.
For all these excursions there is no better starting-point than Letchworth, first of Garden Cities, which has sprung rapidly into being from what was until recent years an unadorned expanse of agricultural ground with Norton Common as its centre. This Common, originally a bit of wild fen, now almost surrounded by cottages and gardens, is to the nature-lover the most attractive feature of Letchworth; and though its flora has inevitably suffered from the inroads of the juvenile population, it can still show such plants as the marsh orchis, the small valerian, and the rare sulphur-coloured trefoil. It is watered by a diminutive river—the unceremonious might say ditch—known as the Pix, whose current, like that of the Cam, would almost seem to be determined by the direction of the wind, but is reputed to flow northward, to join its fleeter brethren, the Hiz and the Ivel, in their course to the Ouse.
I mention this rather forlorn stream, because it has sometimes occurred to me that, as an attempt is made to protect the wild birds on Norton Common, it might be expedient to lend a helping hand also to the flowers, or even to embellish the banks of the Pix (and so to re-invite the pixies to sport thereby), with a few hardy riverside plants, such as comfrey, tansy, hemp-agrimony, purple loosestrife, and yellow loosestrife, which were probably once native there, and would almost certainly flourish in such a spot. Is it legitimate thus to come to the rescue of wild nature? That is a question on which botanists are not quite agreed, and its consideration shall therefore be reserved for the following chapter.