The Call of the Wildflower Part 2

But botanists rarely invent names so well. The nomenclature of plants, like that of those celestial flowers, the stars, is a queer jumble of ancient and modern, cla.s.sical learning and mediaeval folk-lore, in which the really characteristic features are often overlooked. In this respect the Latin names are worse offenders than the English; and one is sometimes tempted, in disgust at their pedantic irrelevance, to ignore them altogether, and to exclaim with the poet:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.

But this would be an error; for a name does greatly enhance the interest of an object, be it boy, or bird, or flower; and the Greek and Latin plant-names, c.u.mbrous and far-fetched though many of them are--as when the saintfoin is absurdly labelled _on.o.brychis_, on the supposition that its scent provokes an a.s.s to bray--form, nevertheless, a useful link between botanists of different nations and a safeguard against the confusion that arises from a variety of local terms.

Among the English names also there are some clumsy appellations, and in a few cases the Latin ones are much pleasanter: _stellaria_, for example, as I have already said, is more elegant than "st.i.tchwort."

"What have I done?" asks the small cousin of the woodruff, in Edward Carpenter's poem, when it justly protests against its hideous christening by man:

What have I done? Man came, Evolutional upstart one, With the gift of giving a name To everything under the sun.

What have I done? Man came (They say nothing sticks like dirt), Looked at me with eyes of blame, And called me "Squinancy-wort."

But on the whole the English names of flowers are simpler and more suggestive than the Latin; certainly "monk's-hood" is preferable to _aconitum_, "rest-harrow" to _ononis_, "flowering rush" to _butomus_; and so on, through a long list: and it therefore seems rather strange that the native t.i.tles should sometimes be ousted by the foreign. I have met botanists who had quite forgotten the English, and were obliged to ask me for the scientific term before they could sufficiently recall the plant of which we were speaking.

The prefix "common" is often very misleading in the English nomenclature. Anyone, for example, who should go confidently searching for the "common hare's-ear" would soon find that he had got his work cut out. There are, in fact, not many plants that are everywhere common; most of those that are so described should properly be cla.s.sed as _local_, because, while plentiful in some districts, they are infrequent in others.

Botanical names fall mainly into three cla.s.ses, the medicinal, the commemorative, the descriptive. The old uses of plants by the herbalists mark the prosaic origin of many of the names; some of which, such as "goutweed," at once explain themselves, as indicating supposed remedies for ills that flesh is heir to. Others, if less obvious, are still not far to seek; the "scabious," for example, derived from the Latin _scabies_, was reputed to be a cure for leprosy: a few, like "eye-bright" (_euphrasia_, gladness), have a more cheerful significance.

When we turn to such t.i.tles as _centaurea_, for the knapweed and cornflower, some explanation is needed, to wit, that Chiron, the fabulous centaur, was said to have employed these herbs in the exercise of his healing art.

The commemorative names are mostly given in honour of accomplished botanists, it being a habit of mankind, presumably prompted by the acquisitive instincts of the race, to name any object, great or small--from a mountain to a mouse--as _belonging_ to the person who discovered or brought it to notice. In the case of wildflowers this is not always a very felicitous system of distinguishing them, though perhaps better than the utilitarian jargon of the pharmacopoeia.

Sometimes, indeed, it is beyond cavil; as in the fit a.s.sociation of the little _linnaea borealis_ with the great botanist who loved it; but when a number of the less important professors of the science are immortalized in this way, there seems to be something rather irrelevant, if not absurd, in such nomenclature. Why, for example, should two of the more charming crucifers be named respectively _Hutchinsia_ and _Teesdalia_, after a Miss Hutchins and a Mr. Teesdale? Why should the water-primrose be called _Hottonia_, after a Professor Hotton; or the sea-heath _Frankenia_, after a Swedish botanist named Franken; and so on, in a score of other cases that might be cited? The climax is reached when the _rubi_ and the _salices_ are divided into a host of more or less dubious sub-species, so that a Bloxam may have his bramble, and a Hoffmann his willow, as a possession for all time!

The most rational, and also the most graceful manner of naming flowers is the descriptive; and here, luckily, there are a number of t.i.tles, English or Latin, with which no fault can be found. Spearwort, mouse-tail, arrow-head, bird's-foot, colt's-foot, blue-bell, bindweed, crane's-bill, snapdragon, shepherd's purse, skull-cap, monk's-hood, ox-tongue--these are but a few of the well-bestowed names which, by an immediate appeal to the eye, fix the flower in the mind; they are at once simple and appropriate: in others, such as Adonis, Columbine, penny-cress, cranberry, lady's-mantle, and thorow-wax, the description, if less manifest at first sight, is none the less charming when recognized. The Latin, too, is at times so befitting as to be accepted without demur; thus _iris_, to express the rainbow tints of the flowers, needs no English equivalent, and _campanula_ has only to be literally rendered as "bell-flower." In _campanula hederacea_, the "ivy-leaved bell-flower," we see nomenclature at its best, the petals and the foliage of a floral gem being both faithfully described.

A glance at a list of British wildflowers will bring to mind various other ways in which names have been given to them--some familiar, some romantic, a few even poetical. Among the homely but not unpleasing kind, are "Jack by the hedge" for the garlic mustard; "John go to bed at noon"

for the goat's-beard; "creeping Jenny" for the money-wort; and "lady's-fingers" for the kidney-vetch. Of the romantically named plants the most conspicuous example is doubtless the forget-me-not, its English name contrasting, as it does, with the more realistic Latin _myosotis_, which detects in the shape of the leaves a likeness to a mouse's ear.

None, perhaps, can claim to be so poetical as Gerarde's name for the clematis; for "traveller's joy" was one of those happy inspirations which are unfortunately rare.

VI

THE OPEN DOWNLAND

Open hither, open hence, Scarce a bramble weaves a fence.

MEREDITH.

WHEN speaking of some Suss.e.x 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 by Gilbert White: what we now prize in them is not alt.i.tude but s.p.a.ciousness. In Rosamund Marriott Watson's words:

Broad and bare to the skies The 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 seen _en ma.s.se_, 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 surpa.s.ses the glazed metallic sheen of a field of b.u.t.tercups. It is pure gold, in bullion, the palpable wealth of Croesus, 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-gra.s.s, 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-shoe vetch; 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 Suss.e.x," 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.

[Footnote 7: See the beautiful chapter on "The Living Garment," in Mr.

W. H. Hudson's _Nature in Downland_.]

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 gra.s.s, 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 Tels...o...b.. 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 was _orchis_, not _ovis_, that I was in quest of, I was about to pa.s.s 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 Tels...o...b.. 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 Saddles...o...b.., to whose wide knowledge of Suss.e.x 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, the fly, 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 h.e.l.leborines. 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 gra.s.sy 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 of the 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 manoeuvres to the eye.

The final impression which the Downs leave on the mind is, I repeat, one of freedom and s.p.a.ce; 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."

VII

PRISONERS OF THE PARTERRE

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.

THE domestication 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 which leaves 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 a.s.sembling 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 together and 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]

[Footnote 8: Quoted in _A Garden of Herbs_, by E. S. Rohde.]

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 her _Haunts 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-gra.s.s (_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 servant girl, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt when the portrait of the hero of the cavalry charge was shown to him by its possessor.