Proserpina Volume II Part 7

23. In the following number of 'Proserpina' I have been tempted to follow, with more minute notice than usual, the 'conditions of adversity' which, as they fret the thistle tribe into jagged malice, have humbled the beauty of the great domestic group of the Vestals into confused likenesses of the Dragonweed and Nettle: but I feel every hour more and more the necessity of separating the treatment of subjects in 'Proserpina' from the microscopic curiosities of recent botanic ill.u.s.tration, nor shall this work close, if my strength hold, without fulfilling in some sort, the effort begun long ago in 'Modern Painters,' to interpret the grace of the larger blossoming trees, and the mysteries of leafy form which clothe the Swiss precipice with gentleness, and colour with softest azure the rich horizons of England and Italy.

CHAPTER V.

BRUNELLA.

1. It ought to have been added to the statements of general law in irregular flowers, in Chapter I. of this volume, -- 6, that if the petals, while brought into relations of inequality, still retain their perfect petal form,--and whether broad or narrow, extended or reduced, remain clearly _leaves_, as in the pansy, pea, or azalea, and a.s.sume no grotesque or obscure outline,--the flower, though injured, is not to be thought of as corrupted or misled. But if any of the petals lose their definite character as such, and become swollen, solidified, stiffened, or strained into any other form or function than that of petals, the flower is to be looked upon as affected by some kind of constant evil influence; and, so far as we conceive of any spiritual power being concerned in the protection or affliction of the inferior orders of creatures, it will be felt to bear the aspect of possession by, or pollution by, a more or less degraded Spirit.[30]

2. I have already enough spoken of the special manifestation of this character in the orders Contorta and Satyrium, vol. i., p. 91, and the reader will find the parallel aspects of the Draconidae dwelt upon at length in the 86th and 87th paragraphs of the 'Queen of the Air,' where also their relation to the l.a.b.i.ate group is touched upon. But I am far more embarra.s.sed by the symbolism of that group which I called 'Vestales,' from their especially domestic character and their serviceable purity; but which may be, with more convenience perhaps, simply recognizable as 'Menthae.'

3. These are, to our northern countries, what the spice-bearing trees are in the tropics;--our thyme, lavender, mint, marjoram, and their like, separating themselves not less in the health giving or strengthening character of their scent from the flowers more or less enervating in perfume, as the rose, orange, and violet,--than in their humble colours and forms from the grace and splendour of those higher tribes; thus allowing themselves to be summed under the general word 'balm' more truly than the balsams from which the word is derived. Giving the most pure and healing powers to the air around them; with a comfort of warmth also, being mostly in dry places, and forming sweet carpets and close turf; but only to be rightly enjoyed in the open air, or indoors when dried; not tempting any one to luxury, nor expressive of any kind of exultation. Brides do not deck themselves with thyme, nor do we wreathe triumphal arches with mint.

4. It is most notable, also, farther, that none of these flowers have any extreme beauty in colour. The blue sage is the only one of vivid hue at all; and we never think of it as for a moment comparable to the violet or bluebell: thyme is unnoticed beside heath, and many of the other purple varieties of the group are almost dark and sad coloured among the flowers of summer; while, so far from gaining beauty on closer looking, there is scarcely a blossom of them which is not more or less grotesque, even to ugliness, in outline; and so hooded or lappeted as to look at first like some imperfect form of snapdragon for the most part spotted also, wrinkled as if by old age or decay, cleft or torn, as if by violence, and springing out of calices which, in their cl.u.s.tering spines, embody the general roughness of the plant.

5. I take at once for example, lest the reader should think me unkind or intemperate in my description, a flower very dear and precious to me; and at this time my chief comfort in field walks. For, now, the reign of all the sweet reginas of the spring is over--the reign of the silvia and anemone, of viola and veronica; and at last, and this year abdicated under tyrannous storm,[31] the reign of the rose. And the last foxglove-bells are nearly fallen; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are coming up the burdock, and the coa.r.s.e and vainly white aster, and the black knapweeds; and there is only one flower left to be loved among the gra.s.s,--the soft, warm-scented Brunelle.

6. _P_runell, _or_ Brunell--Gerarde calls it; and Brunella, rightly and authoritatively, Tournefort; Prunella, carelessly, Linnaeus, and idly following him, the moderns, casting out all the meaning and help of its name--of which presently. Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, in English--meaning that who has this plant needs no physician.

7. As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it would reprove me for what I have just said of the poverty of colour in its tribe; for the most glowing of violets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of its hooded blossoms. But their flush is broken and oppressed by the dark calices out of which they spring, and their utmost power in the field is only of a saddened amethystine l.u.s.tre, subdued with furry brown. And what is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the scattered blossoms;--of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the way that here and there, only in their cl.u.s.ter, its bells rise or remain, and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of the cl.u.s.ter broken short away altogether.

8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes.

But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind. I take my lens, therefore--to the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with blue-winged wasps in it,--and perceive therewith the following particulars.

9. First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into a kind of fringe.

Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cl.u.s.ter of stiff white hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the hood; for no imaginable purpose of use or decoration--any more than a hearth-brush put for a helmet-crest,--and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or shark-like jaw, edged with ghastly teeth,--and yet more, that the hollow within begins to suggest a resemblance to an open throat in which there are two projections where the lower petal joins the lateral ones, almost exactly like swollen glands.

I believe it was this resemblance, inevitable to any careful and close observer, which first suggested the use of the plant in throat diseases to physicians; guided, as in those first days of pharmacy, chiefly by imagination. Then the German name for one of the most fatal of throat affections, Braune, extended itself into the first name of the plant, Brunelle.

10. The truth of all popular traditions as to the healing power of herbs will be tried impartially as soon as men again desire to lead healthy lives; but I shall not in 'Proserpina' retain any of the names of their gathered and dead or distilled substance, but name them always from the characters of their life. I retain, however, for this plant its name Brunella, Fr. Brunelle, because we may ourselves understand it as a derivation from Brune; and I bring it here before the reader's attention as giving him a perfectly instructive general type of the kind of degradation which takes place in the forms of flowers under more or less malefic influence, causing distortion and disguise of their floral structure. Thus it is not the normal character of a flower petal to have a cl.u.s.ter of bristles growing out of the middle of it, nor to be jagged at the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish's jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into the likeness of a diseased gland in an animal's throat. A really uncorrupted flower suggests none but delightful images, and is like nothing but itself.

11. I find that in the year 1719, Tournefort defined, with exact.i.tude which has rendered the definition authoritative for all time, the tribe to which this Brownie flower belongs, const.i.tuting them his fourth cla.s.s, and describing them in terms even more depreciatingly imaginative than any I have ventured to use myself. I translate the pa.s.sage (vol. i., p. 177):--

12. "The name of l.a.b.i.ate flower is given to a single-petaled flower which, beneath, is attenuated into a tube, and above is expanded into a lip, which is either single or double. It is proper to a l.a.b.i.ate flower,--first, that it has a one-leaved calyx (ut calycem habeat _unifolium_), for the most part tubulated, or reminding one of a paper hood (cucullum papyraceum); and, secondly, that its pistil ripens into a fruit consisting of four seeds, which ripen in the calyx itself, as if in their own seed-vessel, by which a l.a.b.i.ate flower is distinguished from a personate one, whose pistil becomes a capsule far divided from the calyx (a calyce long divisam). And a l.a.b.i.ate flower differs from rotate, or bell-shaped flowers, which have four seeds, in that the lips of a l.a.b.i.ate flower have a gape like the face of a goblin, or ludicrous mask, emulous of animal form."

13. This cla.s.s is then divided into four sections.

In the first, the upper lip is helmeted, or hooked--"galeatum est, vel falcatum."

In the second, the upper lip is excavated like a spoon--"cochlearis instar est excavatum."

In the third the upper lip is erect.

And in the fourth there is no upper lip at all.

The reader will, I hope, forgive me for at once rejecting a cla.s.sification of lipped plants into three cla.s.ses that have lips, and one that has none, and in which the lips of those that have got any, are like helmets and spoons.

Linnaeus, in 1758, grouped the family into two divisions, by the form of the calyx, (five-fold or two-fold), and then went into the wildest confusion in distinction of species,--sometimes by the form of corolla, sometimes by that of calyx, sometimes by that of the filaments, sometimes by that of the stigma, and sometimes by that of the seed. As, for instance, thyme is to be identified by the calyx having hairs in its throat, dead nettle by having bristles in its mouth, lion's tail by having bones in its anthers (antherae punctis osseis adspersae), and teucrium by having its upper lip cut in two!

14. St. Hilaire, in 1805, divides again into four sections, but as three of these depend on form of corolla, and the fourth on abortion of stamens, the reader may conclude practically, that logical division of the family is impossible, and that all he can do, or that there is the smallest occasion for his doing, is first to understand the typical structure thoroughly, and then to know a certain number of forms accurately, grouping the others round them at convenient distances; and, finally, to attach to their known forms such simple names as may be utterable by children, and memorable by old people, with more ease and benefit than the 'Galeopsis Eu-te-trahit,'

'Lamium Galeobdalon,' or 'Scutellaria Galericulata,'and the like, of modern botany. But to do this rightly, I must review and amplify some of my former cla.s.sification, which it will be advisable to do in a separate chapter.

CHAPTER VI.

MONACHA.

1. It is not a little vexing to me, in looking over the very little I have got done of my planned Systema Proserpinae, to discover a grave mistake in the specifications of Veronica. It is Veronica chamaedrys, not officinalis, which is our proper English Speedwell, and Welsh Fluellen; and all the eighth paragraph, p. 74, properly applies to that. Veronica officinalis is an extremely small flower rising on vertical stems out of rec.u.mbent leaves; and the drawing of it in the Flora Danica, which I mistook for a stunted northern state, is quite true of the English species,[32] except that it does not express the rec.u.mbent action of the leaves. The proper representation of ground-leaf.a.ge has never yet been attempted in any botanical work whatever, and as, in rec.u.mbent plants, their grouping and action can only be seen from above, the plates of them should always have a dark and rugged background, not only to indicate the position of the eye, but to relieve the forms of the leaves as they were intended to be shown. I will try to give some examples in the course of this year.

2. I find also, sorrowfully, that the references are wrong in three, if not more, places in that chapter. S. 971 and 972 should be transposed in p. 72.

S. 294 in p. 74 should be 984. D. 407 should be inserted after Peregrina, in p. 76; and 203, in fourth line from bottom of p. 78, should be 903. I wish it were likely that these errors had been corrected by my readers,--the rarity of the Flora Danica making at present my references virtually useless: but I hope in time that our public inst.i.tutes will possess themselves of copies: still more do I hope that some book of the kind will be undertaken by English artists and engravers, which shall be worthy of our own country.

3. Farther, I get into confusion by not always remembering my own nomenclature, and have allowed 'Gentianoides' to remain, for No. 16, though I banish Gentian. It will be far better to call this eastern mountain species 'Olympica': according to Sibthorpe's localization, "in summa parte, nive soluta, montis Olympi Bithyni," and the rather that Curtis's plate above referred to shows it in luxuriance to be liker an asphodel than a gentian.

4. I have also perhaps done wrong in considering Veronica polita and agrestis as only varieties, in No. 3. No author tells me why the first is called polite, but its blue seems more intense than that of agrestis; and as it is above described with attention, vol. i., p. 75, as an example of precision in flower-form, we may as well retain it in our list here. It will be therefore our twenty-first variety,--it is Loudon's fifty-ninth and last. He translates 'polita' simply 'polished,' which is nonsense. I can think of nothing to call it but 'dainty,' and will leave it at present unchristened.

5. Lastly. I can't think why I omitted V. Humifusa, S. 979, which seems to be quite one of the most beautiful of the family--a mountain flower also, and one which I ought to find here; but hitherto I know only among the mantlings of the ground, V. thymifolia and officinalis. All these, however, agree in the extreme prettiness and grace of their crowded leaf.a.ge,--the officinalis, of which the leaves are shown much too coa.r.s.ely serrated in S.

984, forming carpets of finished embroidery which I have never yet rightly examined, because I mistook them for St. John's wort. They are of a beautiful pointed oval form, serrated so finely that they seem smooth in distant effect, and covered with equally invisible hairs, which seem to collect towards the edge in the variety Hirsuta, S. 985.

For the present, I should like the reader to group the three flowers, S.

979, 984, 985, under the general name of Humifusa, and to distinguish them by a third epithet, which I allow myself when in difficulties, thus:

V. Humifusa, caerulea, the beautiful blue one, which resembles Spicata.

V. Humifusa, officinalis, and, V. Humifusa, hirsuta: the last seems to me extremely interesting, and I hope to find it and study it carefully.

By this arrangement we shall have only twenty-one species to remember: the one which chiefly decorates the ground again dividing into the above three.

6. These matters being set right, I pa.s.s to the business in hand, which is to define as far as possible the subtle relations between the Veronicas and Draconidae, and again between these and the tribe at present called l.a.b.i.ate.

In my cla.s.sification above, vol. i, p. 200, the Draconidae include the Nightshades; but this was an oversight. Atropa belongs properly to the following cla.s.s, Moiridae; and my Draconids are intended to include only the two great families of Personate and Ringent flowers, which in some degree resemble the head of an animal: the representative one being what we call 'snapdragon,' but the French, careless of its snapping power, 'calf's muzzle'--"Muflier, muflande, or m.u.f.fle de Veau."--Rousseau, 'Lettres,' p.

19.

7. As I examine his careful and sensible plates of it, I chance also on a bit of his text, which, extremely wise and generally useful, I translate forthwith:--

"I understand, my dear, that one is vexed to take so much trouble without learning the names of the plants one examines; but I confess to you in good faith that it never entered into my plan to spare you this little chagrin.

One pretends that Botany is nothing but a science of words, which only exercises the memory, and only teaches how to give plants names. For me, I know _no_ rational study which is only a science of words: and to which of the two, I pray you, shall I grant the name of botanist,--to him who knows how to spit out a name or a phrase at the sight of a plant, without knowing anything of its structure, or to him who, knowing that structure very well, is ignorant nevertheless of the very arbitrary name that one gives to the plant in such and such a country? If we only gave to your children an amusing occupation, we should miss the best half of our purpose, which is, in amusing them, to exercise their intelligence and accustom them to attention. Before teaching them to name what they see, let us begin by teaching them to see it. _That_ science, forgotten in all educations, ought to form the most important part of theirs. I can never repeat it often enough--teach them never to be satisfied with words, ('se payer de mots') and to hold themselves as knowing nothing of what has reached no farther than their memories."

8. Rousseau chooses, to represent his 'Personees,' La m.u.f.flaude, la Linaire, l'Euphraise, la Pediculaire, la Crete-de-coq, l'Orobanche, la Cimbalaire, la Velvote, la Digitale, giving plates of snapdragon, foxglove, and Madonna-herb, (the Cimbalaire), and therefore including my entire cla.s.s of Draconidae, whether open or close throated. But I propose myself to separate from them the flower which, for the present, I have called Monacha, but may perhaps find hereafter a better name; this one, which is the best Latin I can find for a nun of the desert, being given to it because all the resemblance either to calf or dragon has ceased in its rosy petals, and they resemble--the lower ones those of the mountain thyme, and the upper one a softly crimson cowl or hood.

9. This beautiful mountain flower, at present, by the good grace of botanists, known as Pedicularis, from a disease which it is supposed to give to sheep, is distinguished from all other Draconidae by its beautifully divided leaves: while the flower itself, like, as aforesaid, thyme in the three lower petals, rises in the upper one quite upright, and terminates in the narrow and peculiar hood from which I have named it 'Monacha.'

10. Two deeper crimson spots with white centres animate the colour of the lower petals in our mountain kind---mountain or mora.s.s;--it is vilely drawn in S. 997 under the name of Sylvatica, translated 'Proc.u.mbent'! As it is neither a wood flower nor a proc.u.mbent one,[33] and as its rosy colour is rare among mora.s.s flowers, I shall call it simply Monacha Rosea.

I have not the smallest notion of the meaning of the following sentence in S.:--"Upper lip of corolla not rostrate, with the margin on each side furnished with a triangular tooth immediately below the apex, but without any tooth below the middle." Why, or when, a lip is rostrate, or has any 'tooth below the middle,' I do not know; but the upper _petal_ of the corolla is here a very close gathered hood, with the style emergent downwards, and the stamens all hidden and close set within.

In this action of the upper petal, and curve of the style, the flower resembles the l.a.b.i.ates,[34] and is the proper link between them and the Draconidae. The capsule is said by S. to be oval-ovoid. As eggs always _are_ oval, I don't feel farther informed by the epithet. The capsule and seed both are of entirely indescribable shapes, with any number of sides--very foxglove-like, and inordinately large. The seeds of the entire family are 'ovoid-subtrigonous.'--S.

11. I find only two species given as British by S., namely, Sylvatica and Pal.u.s.tris; but I take first for the Regina, the beautiful Arctic species D.

1105, Flora Suecica, 555. Rose-coloured in the stem, pale pink in the flowers (corollae pallide incarnatae), the calices furry against the cold, whence the present ugly name, Hirsuta. Only on the highest crests of the Lapland Alps.

(2) Rosea, D. 225, there called Sylvatica, as by S., presumably because "in pascuis subhumidis non rarae." Beautifully drawn, but, as I have described it, vigorously erect, and with no dec.u.mbency whatever in any part of it.