The Call of the Wildflower Part 5

THOMSON.

THAT part 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-c.o.c.kle (_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 it _in 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 coa.r.s.er and hardier weeds are legion.

A more abiding "infirmitie" of some Hertfordshire cornfields 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're _not_ flowers. 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 a.s.signed 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 its uses; 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, that _carum bulbocastanum_ should 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 gra.s.sy 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 suddenly to 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 trespa.s.s 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 b.u.t.terwort and the gra.s.s of Parna.s.sus 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 this point 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.

XIII

THE SOWER OF TARES

An enemy hath done this.

THE sowing of wildflowers is deprecated by some botanists, presumably as an interference with natural processes, an unauthorized attempt to play Providence in the vegetable kingdom; but the subject is one that seems to call for fuller discussion than it usually receives.

We are told in the parable that the man who sowed tares among the wheat was an enemy; and certainly if there was an intention to injure the crop the expression was not too strong. But I have sometimes wondered whether the reprehensible act may not have been that of some botanical enthusiast, who, loving wildflowers not wisely but too well, was trying to save from extinction some rare weed of the cornfields which was disappearing under improved methods of culture.

That this way of augmenting the flora of a country is nowadays not uncommon may be guessed from the frequent occurrence in botanical works of the comment "probably planted." Only a few pages back, I referred to the case of a pond in Hertfordshire now strongly held by a battalion of water-soldiers, the descendants of imported plants. There is evidence, too, that the practice has occasionally been indulged in by naturalists of great distinction, an amusing instance being that of the venerable and much-respected Gerarde, whose description of the peony as growing wild near Gravesend drew from his editor, Johnson, the following remark: "I have beene told that our author himselfe planted the peionie there, and afterwards seemed to finde it there by accident; and I doe believe it was so, because none before or since have ever seene or heard of it growing wilde in any part of this kingdome."[14]

[Footnote 14: _The Herball_, by J. Gerarde. Enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson, 1636.]

Again, it is stated in Canon Vaughan's _Wild Flowers of Selborne_ that Gilbert White himself "was once guilty of this misdemeanour." He sowed, not tares in wheat, but seeds of the gra.s.s of Parna.s.sus in the Hampshire bogs, and sowed them according to his own statement unsuccessfully; it would appear, however, from what Canon Vaughan discovered that White was "more successful than he imagined." However that may be, the question that arises is whether a judicious extension of the range of wildflowers by the agency of man is really a thing to be censured. May not a flower-lover occasionally sow his "wild oats"?

It must be admitted that the objections to such a practice are not retrospective, for if it be a misdemeanour, it is one that is condoned, perhaps hallowed, by time. For as it is impossible to draw a strict line between flowers that were accidentally imported or "escapes" from ancient gardens, and those that were planted deliberately, we wisely ask no questions in the case of old-established plants of foreign origin, but receive them into our flora as aliens that have become naturalized and are honourably cla.s.sed as "denizens"; when they have once made good their tenure of the soil, it seems to matter little by what means they arrived. Thus, for example, the starry trefoil, which colonized the Sh.o.r.eham shingles over a century ago, having apparently come as a stowaway on board some foreign ship, was not only tolerated but highly regarded by English botanists, and its recent destruction is felt to be a national loss. Would it have detracted from its value, if, as indeed may have happened, it had been purposely sown on the beach? On the contrary, it seems desirable that it should now be restored in that manner.

Such planting, of course, if done at all, should be done circ.u.mspectly, and on a fixed principle, not as an amus.e.m.e.nt for irresponsible persons or children. I know a flower-lover who, in a district where that beautiful St. John's-wort, the tutsan, was dwindling through depredations, or through some unexplained malady, carefully restored the balance in a score or so of suitable spots; and surely such action was much to be commended. But it is not desired that everyone should be planting tutsan everywhere; nor is there any danger of such a fashion arising, for there is much less tendency to plant than to pluck, to create than to destroy; and for that reason it would be folly to reintroduce any rare plant like the lady's slipper, where the collector would quickly reap what the enthusiast had sown.

Such was the objection, it seems to me, to a proposal made some years ago by Edward Carpenter and others, that the diminishing numbers of the rarer b.u.t.terflies should be reinforced by breeding. One would not willingly repeat the comedy of the angling craze, which solemnly stocks rivers with fish in order to pull them out again for pastime.

Nor, because _some_ planting of wildflowers may be un.o.bjectionable, does it follow that all such enterprises are deserving of praise. A recent announcement that the Llanberis side of Snowdon, a locality rich in British mountain flowers, was being sown by Kew experts with the seeds of a number of "Alpines" from Switzerland, was likely to be more agreeable to rock-gardeners than to mountain-lovers, who have a regard for the distinctive character of Snowdon itself, and of its native flora. A country which has allowed its finest mountain to be exploited for commercial purposes, as Snowdon has been, is perhaps hardly in a position to protest against a Welsh hillside being planted with alien Swiss flowers, and even with Chinese rhododendrons; but nevertheless such schemes are thoroughly incongruous and barbaric. What sort of mountains do we desire to have? A piece of nature, or a nursery-garden?

A Snowdon, or a Snowdon-c.u.m-Kew?

Be it understood, then, that the sowing of tares is by no means recommended as a practice: all that is here urged is that a sweeping condemnation of it is not warranted by the facts, inasmuch as circ.u.mstances, not dogma, must in each case decide whether it be blameworthy, or harmless, or beneficial. And apart from common sense, there is one natural safeguard which will prevent any undue growth of wildflowers, viz. the remarkable fastidiousness of the choicer plants in regard to soil and conditions: they will flourish where it suits them to flourish, not elsewhere. Certain auxiliaries, too, Nature has in the rabbits, water-voles, and other wild animals that are herbivorous in their tastes; for it is very interesting to observe how quickly the appearance of a strange plant will attract the attention of such gourmands.

I was once the owner of a sloping meadow in which there were some springs; and thinking it would be pleasant to have a water-garden I had a small pond made, into which I introduced some aquatic plants, and among them, most accommodating of all, the water-violet, which grew l.u.s.tily and sent up a number of its graceful stalks with whorls of pink blossoms. But just at that time a water-vole took up his residence there, and developing a remarkable fondness for a new savour in his salads, quickly made havoc of my _Hottonia pal.u.s.tris_. The neighbours a.s.sured me I must trap him; but to treat a fellow-vegetarian in that way was out of the question, especially as his confidence in me was so great that he would sit nibbling my favourite aquatic, which seemed also to be _his_ favourite, while I stood within a few yards. It was clear that if the cult of the water-violet involved the killing of the water-vole it had got to be abandoned.

In this way, among others, does Nature protect herself against an excessive interference on man's part with the distribution of wildflowers.

XIV

DALES OF DERBYSHIRE

Deeper and narrower grew the dell; It seemed some mountain, rent and riven, A channel for the stream had given, So high the cliffs of limestone gray Hung beetling o'er the torrent's way.

SCOTT.

THE limestone Dales of Derbyshire are narrow and deep, and their streams, when visible (for they often lurk underground), are swift, strong, and of crystal clearness. The sides of the glens are in some places precipitous with bluffs and pinnacles of grey rock; in others, ridged and streaked with terraces of alternate crag and turf; above the cliffs there is often a tableland of bleak pastures divided by stone walls, as dreary a scene as could be imagined, when contrasted with the picturesque dales below.

The flowers of these limestone valleys immediately recall those of the chalk: the marjoram, the basil, the great knapweed, the traveller's-joy, the rock-rose, the musk-thistle--these and many other familiar friends make us seem, at first sight, to be back in Suss.e.x or Surrey. But in reality we are a hundred and fifty miles nearer to the arctic zone, and that difference is clearly reflected in the flora; for when we look around, a number of new plants make their appearance, of which a dozen or more are very rare, or quite unknown, in the south. I once lived for several years on the hills above Chesterfield, a good way to the east of this limestone country; and to visit the nearest of the Dales there was a walk of seven miles, to and fro, across the intervening high moors that form the southern b.u.t.tress of the Pennines. Stoney Middleton is far from being one of the pleasantest of Peakland villages; but such was the interest of its flora that the fourteen-mile trudge, and more, was often undertaken during the summer months.

After traversing the great heathery moors devoted to the cult of the grouse, and descending from the rocky rampart of gritstone known as Curbar Edge, one crosses the valley of the Derwent; and here a pause may be made to notice a patch of sweet Cicely, one of the loveliest of the umbelliferous tribe. It is a charming sight, as it stands up tall in the sunshine, with its soft feathery cream-white ma.s.ses of foliage and its fernlike leaflets; too fair and fragile, it would seem, for human hands, for it droops very soon if cut. Every part of it--stalk, leaves, flowers, and fruit--has the same aromatic fragrance (its local name is "anise"), and so gracious is it to sight, scent, and touch, that one longs to bathe one's senses in its luxuriance.

Middleton Dale, naturally beautiful, but sadly deformed by lime-kilns, is famous for a cliff known as the Lover's Leap, from which an enamoured maiden is said to have thrown herself down. Had it been the love of flowers, rather than of man, that tempted her to that dizzy verge, there would have been no cause for surprise; for there are many alluring plants on the ledges of the scarp, including a brilliant show of wild wallflowers. In May and June there may be found along the northern side of the dale the yellow petals of the spring cinquefoil (_potentilla verna_), a gem of a flower, which, in Mr. Reginald Farrer's words, "clings to the white cliff-face, and from far off you see a splash of gold on the greyness." A month later the equally attractive Nottingham catch-fly (_silene nutans_) will be abundant on the rocks; a plant of nocturnal habits which expands its petals and becomes fragrant in the evening, but "nods," as its Latin name avows, in the daytime, when it wears a sleepy and somewhat dissipated look, like a wa.s.sailer--a white campion that has been "on spree." By night its beauty is beyond cavil.

On the lower slopes is a colony of a still stranger-looking flower, the woolly-headed thistle, whose involucre is so bulky, and its scales so densely wrapped in white down, that it has an almost grotesque appearance, as of a thistle with "swelled head." It is, however, a very handsome plant; and when growing in vast numbers, as I have seen it in one of its special haunts, near Wychwood Forest, in Oxfordshire, it makes a glorious spectacle.

Of the three species of saxifrages--the rue-leaved, the meadow, and the mossy--that thrive along the bottom of the dale, the two former are southern as well as northern flowers; but the presence of the mossy saxifrage is a sign that we are in a mountainous region, and as such it is always welcome. With these grows the graceful vernal sandwort, another flower of the hills, and so often the companion of saxifrages that it is naturally a.s.sociated with them in the mind.

But Middleton Dale, the nearest to my starting-point, and therefore the most frequently visited by me, is much surpa.s.sed in floral wealth by the long valley of the Wye, which in its course from Buxton to Bakewell bears the names successively of Wye Dale, Chee Dale, Miller's Dale, and Monsal Dale. In one or another of these four glens nearly all the rarer limestone flowers have their station. You may find, for instance, three very local crucifers: the two whitlow-gra.s.ses, _draba incana_ and _draba muralis_, remarkable only as being scarce in other parts of the kingdom; and the really beautiful little _Hutchinsia_, with its tiny white blossoms and finely cut pinnate leaves. Jacob's-ladder, a handsome blue flower, very uncommon in a wild state, is also native on the bluffs and slopes in Chee Dale and elsewhere: in fact a stroll along almost any of the limestone escarpments will bring new treasures to sight.

But the flower which I best love is one which grows by the streamside--in Wye Dale it is in profusion--the modest water-avens, often strangely undervalued by writers who describe it as "dingy." Thus in Delamer's _The Flower Garden_ it is stated that this avens "is more remarkable for having been one of the favourites, the whims, the caprices of the great Linnaeus, than for anything else: it is hard to say what, in a British meadow-weed, could so take the fancy of the Master."

Was ever such blindness of eye, such hardness of heart? And the wiseacre goes on to say that "it is impossible to account, logically, for attachments and sympathies."

Logic, truly, would be out of place in such a connection; but it is not difficult to understand Linnaeus's feelings towards the water-avens.

There is a rare beauty in the droop of its bell-like head, and in its soft and subdued tints--the deep rufous brown of the long sepals, through which peep the silky petals in hues that range from creamy white to vinous red, and all steeped in a quiet radiance as of some old stained gla.s.s. I must own to thinking it the most tenderly beautiful of all English wildflowers. The hybrid between the water-avens and the common avens is occasionally found by the Wye: one which I saw in Miller's Dale had green sepals and petals of pale yellow.

The Alpine penny-cress (_thlaspi alpestre_), a crucifer native on limestone rocks, may be seen on the High Tor at Matlock, where it grows with the vernal sandwort on debris at the mouth of caves; a graceful little plant with white flowers and a smooth unbranched stem so closely clasped by the narrow leaves as to give it the look of a perfoliate.