Chapter Twenty Four.
Wild Flowers—A Hedgerow in July—Hedgerows in General—In Woodland and Copse—In Fields and in Moorlands.
“Ye wildlings of Nature, I doat upon you,
For ye waft me to summers of old,
When the earth teemed around me with fairy delight.
And when daisies and buttercups gladdened my sight,
Like treasures of silver and gold.”
Campbell.
“Fair, my own darling, are the flowers in spring...
Rathe primrose, violet, and eglantine,
Anemone and golden celandine.
Not less delicious all the birds that sing
Carols of joy upon the amorous wing,
Earine, in these sweet hours of thine.”
Mortimer Collinz (to his wife).
From the day we started from the tree-clad plains of bird-haunted Berks till that on which, after crossing the wild Grampian range, we rolled into the capital of the Scottish Highlands, the Wanderer was gay interiorly with wild and garden flowers.
Did we purchase these flowers? Never once, for, strange as it may seem, I do not think that I ever left a town or village or humblest hamlet without having a bouquet or two presented to me.
Nor were the persons who brought those flowers always such as one would feel inclined to associate with the poetry that floated around their floral gifts.
A rosebud or a lily, in the fair fingers of a beautiful girl, is idyllic; it is in keeping with nature. But what say you to a bunch of sweet-scented carnations, pinks, and lilac pea-blooms trailing over the toil-tinted fingers of some rustic dame of forty?
Would you not accept the latter almost as readily as the former? Yes, you would, especially if she said,—
“Have a few flowers, sir? I know you are fond of them.”
Especially if you knew that a great kindly lump of a heart was beating under a probably not over-fashionable corset, and a real living soul peeping out through a pair of merry laughing eyes.
But rough-looking men, ay, even miners, also brought me flowers.
And children never failed me. Their wee bits of bouquets were oft-times sadly untidy, but their wee bits of hearts were warm, so I never refused them.
Some bairnies were too shy to come right round to the back door of the Wanderer with their floral offerings; they would watch a chance when they imagined I was not looking, lay them on the coupé, and run.
Which of the wild flowers, I now wonder, did I love the best? I can hardly say. Perhaps the wild roses that trailed for ever over the hedgerows. But have they not their rivals in the climbing honeysuckle and in the bright-eyed creeping convolvulus? Yes, and in a hundred other sweet gems.
Not a flower can I think of, indeed, that does not recall to my mind some pleasant scene.
“Even now what affections the violet awakes;
What loved little islands, twice seen in their lakes,
Can the wild water-lily restore;
What landscapes I read in the primrose’s looks,
And what pictures of pebbles and minnowy brooks,
In the vetches that tangle the shore.”
If any proof were needed that I had derived the most intense pleasure from the constant companionship of the wild flowers in my caravan rambles, it is surely to be found in the fact that I am writing this chapter, on a bitter winter’s morning in the month of March, sitting in my garden wigwam. When I essayed to commence work to-day I found my writing fluid was frozen, and I could not coax even a dip from the bottle until I had set it over the stove.
And yet it is a morning in March.
Last year at this time the sun was warm, the air was balmy, the crocuses, primroses, snowdrops, and even the tulips were in bloom, and the brown earth was soft and dry. Now it is as hard as adamant. But there is beauty even in this wintry scene. If I take a walk into the garden I find that the hoarfrost brightens everything, and that the tiniest object, even a blade of grass or a withered leaf, is worthy of being admired.
That tall row of spectre-like poplar trees—whether it be winter or summer—is a study in itself. But last night those trees were pointing at the stars with dark skeleton fingers. Those fingers are pointing now at the blue, blue sky, but they seem changed to whitest coral. Those elm trees along the side of yonder field are clothed with a winter foliage of hoarfrost. Seems as though in a single night they had come again into full leaf, and those leaves had been changed by enchantment into snow. As the sunlight streams athwart them they are beautiful beyond compare.
My wild-birds are here in the garden and on the lawns in dozens, huddled in under the dwarf spruces, firs, and laurels, and even cock-robin looks all of a heap.
Hey presto! I have but to shut my eyes and think back, and the scene is changed. I see before me—
A Hedgerow in July.
Where am I? Away up north on a Yorkshire wold. The horses are out and grazing on the clovery sward by the roadside.
How silent it is!
As I lie here on my rugs on the coupé, I can hear a mole rustling through the grass at the hedge-foot. But the hedgerow itself, and all about it, how refreshing to look upon!
Surely no billhook or axe of woodsman has ever come near it since first it began to grow. Its very irregularity gives it additional charm. The hedge itself is really of blackthorn, but its white or pink-ticked blossoms have faded and given place to haws. Here and there, as far as you can see, up through it grow wild dwarf oak bushes, their foliage crimson or carmine tipped, dwarf plane-trees, with broad sienna leaves, that glitter in the sunshine as if they had been varnished; and elder-trees with big white stars of blossom, and rougher leaves of darkest green. Young elms, too, are yonder, and infant ash trees with stems as black as ink and strangely tinted leaves.
(Plane-trees, so-called, but in reality the Sycamore: the Acer pseudo-platanus of naturalists.)
“The sycamore, capricious in attire,
Now green, now tawny, and ere autumn yet
Has changed the woods, in scarlet honours bright.”
Here and there wild roses, pale pink or deepest crimson, blush out; here and there are patches of honeysuckle, and here and there waves of the white flowery bryony roll foaming over the green.
In some places the light and tender-leaved woody nightshade, whose berries in bunches of crimson and green are so pretty in autumn, impart a spring-like appearance to this hedgerow.
Nor does the beauty of my hedgerow end here for all along beneath grow rare and lovely grasses, interspersed with star-eyed silenes and gorgeous spikes of the purple stachys, while the adjoining sward is carpeted over with beds of brilliant clover, red and white, with golden bird’s-foot trefoil, and patches of pale blue speedwells.
Bees are very busy all over this glory of colour, humming as they fly from flower to flower, but becoming abruptly silent as soon as their feet touch the silken blossoms. And birds there are too, though now they have for the most part ceased to sing, except the robin and a yellow-hammer, and these birds will continue lilting long after even the autumn tints are on the trees.
Hedgerows in General.
These were almost ever with us—one long-drawn delight. For five hundred miles, indeed, they accompanied the Wanderer on her journey. When, at any time, they left us for a space, and stone fences or wooden palings took their place, we were never happy until they again appeared.
From memory I jot down the names of a few of the plants and flowers that mingled with them, or trailed over or through them, constituting their chief charm and beauty.
First on the list, naturally enough, come the rose gems, including the sweetbriar or eglantine, with its deep pink flowers and sweetly-scented leaves; the field-rose, the Rosa arvensis, with pale pink blossoms, and the charming Rosa canina, or dog-rose, with petals of a darker red.
As I have already said, these roses grew everywhere among the hedges, in garlands, in wreaths, and in canopies, and always looked their best where the blackthorns had not been disfigured by touch of billhook or pruning shears.
In the earlier spring the hedges had a beauty of their own, being snowed over with clustering blossoms.
The bryony and the honeysuckle I have already mentioned. The green and crimson berries on the former, when the summer begins to wane, are rivalled only by those of the charming woody nightshade.
Regarding the honeysuckle, a naturalist in a London magazine wrote the other day as follows:—
“In the ordinary way, the branches grow out from the parent stem and twine round the first support they meet front right to left;”—the italics are mine—“but should they fail to find that support, two branches will mutually support each other, one twining from left to right, the other from right to left.”
Now the fact is that the honeysuckle twines from left to right, and if two or three branches are together, as we often find them, it is the weaker who twine round the stronger,—still from left to right.
The wild convolvulus, with its great white bell-like blossoms, that so often stars the hedgerows with a singular beauty, twines always to meet the sun.
The Vicia cracca, or purple climbing vetch, is an object of rare loveliness in July and August. It is a species of clustering-blossomed tare or sweet-pea, with neat, wee green leaves, and flowers of a bluish purple. It is not content with creeping up through the hedge, but it must go crawling along over the top to woo the sunshine.
Later on in summer and early autumn blooms the well-known bramble—the black-fruited rubus.
No poet, as far as I am aware, has yet celebrated the purple trailing vetch in song, but the bramble has not been forgotten.
Hear Elliott’s exquisite lines:—
“Though woodbines flaunt and roses glow
O’er all the fragrant bowers,
Thou needst not be ashamed to show
Thy satin-threaded flowers.
For dull the eye, the heart is dull,
That cannot feel how fair,
Amid all beauty, beautiful,
Thy tender blossoms are.
* * * * *.
“While silent showers are falling slow,
And ’mid the general hush,
A sweet air lifts the little bough,
Low whispering through the bush.
The primrose to the grave has gone;
The hawthorn flower is dead;
The violet by the moss’d grey stone
Hath laid her weary head;
But thou, wild bramble, back dost bring,
In all their beauteous power,
The fresh green days of life’s fair spring,
And boyhood’s blossoming hour.”
Nestling down by the hedgerow foot, among tall reeds and grey or brown seedling grasses, is many and many a charming wild flower, such as the stachys, the crimson ragged-robbin, with flowers like coral, and the snow-white silene.
Woodland and Copse.
Far away in bonnie Scotland, where the woods are mostly composed of dark, waving, brown-stemmed pine-trees, feathery larches—crimson-tasselled in early spring—or gloomy spruces, there is often an absence of any undergrowth, unless it be heather. But English copses are often one wild tanglement of trailing flowering shrubs, with banks of bracken or ferns.
I have often stopped to admire the marvellous beauty of these copse-lands; their wealth of silent loveliness has more than once brought the tears to my eyes.
So now I refrain from describing them, because any attempt to do so would end in failure. But, reader, have you seen an English woodland carpeted with deep-blue hyacinths, with snowy anemones, or with the sweet wee white pink-streaked sorrel, with its bashful leaves of bending green? Have you seen the golden-tasselled broom waving in the soft spring wind? Or, later on in the season, the tall and stately foxgloves blooming red amidst the greenery of a fern bank? If not, a treat, both rich and rare, may still be yours.
Is it not said that the wild anemone or wind-flower grew from the tears shed by Venus over the grave of Adonis?
“But gentle flowers are born, and bloom around,
From every drop that falls upon the ground:
Where streams his blood, there blushing springs the rose,
And where a tear has dropped a wind-flower blows.”
I think it must be the wood-anemone that is referred to as the snowdrop in that bonnie old Scottish song, My Nannie’s awa’:—
“The snowdrop and primrose our woodlands adorn,
And violets blaw in the dews o’ the morn,
They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blaw,
They mind me on Nannie—and Nannie’s awa’.”
Fields and Moorland.
Turning to these, what oceans of beauty I saw everywhere around me during all the months of my travel!
In May, many of the uplands were covered with the yellow-blooming furze or whins. The black forest, for instance, ’twixt Guildford and Frimley, was a sight worth travelling long miles to look upon; while nothing could excel the fragrance of the perfume shed everywhere around.
The furze lies low to the ground where it has plenty of sunlight, but straggles upwards to seek the light when it grows in the woodlands.
Sweet-scented thistles of every shade—I had almost added “and every shape”—grew plentifully in corners of fields we passed, mostly prickly, but some harmless; lilac, pale pink, dark crimson, and purple; field thistles, milk thistles, melancholy thistles, and nodding thistles.
This latter species I found growing in glorious profusion on the links of Musselburgh, and I quite adorned my caravan with them.
Wherever thistles grow in fields, the tansy is not far off; a showy, yellow, too-hardy flower, without, in my opinion, a vestige of romance about it. Perhaps the sheep think differently, for long after Scottish fields and “baulks” are picked bare, they can always find a pluck of sweet green grass by taking their tongues round a tansy stem.
The yellow meadow vetchling is a beautiful, bright-yellow, pea-like flower, that dearly loves a snug corner under a hedge or bush of furze.
The pink-blossomed geranium-like mallow we all know. It is none the less lovely, however, because common; and here is a hint worth knowing—it looks well in a vase, and will bloom for weeks in water.
But a far more lovely flower, that I first foregathered with, I think, in Yorkshire, is the wild blue geranium, or meadow crane’s-bill. Words alone could not describe its beauty, it must be seen. It mostly grows by the wayside.
Need I even name the corn-marigold, or the blush of the corn-poppies among green growing wheat, or the exquisitely lovely sainfoin, that sheds its crimson beauty over many a southern field; or the blue and charming corn-flower, that delights to bloom amid the ripening grain?
Oh! dear farmer, call it not a weed, hint not at its being a hurt-sickle—rather admire and love it.
Nay, but the farmer will not, he has no romance about him, and will quote me lines like these:—
“Bluebottle, thee my numbers fain would raise,
And thy complexion challenge all my praise,
Thy countenance like summer skies is fair;
But ah! how different thy vile manners are.
A treacherous guest, destruction thou dost bring
To th’ inhospitable field where thou dost spring,
Thou blunt’st the very reaper’s sickle, and so
In life and death becom’st the farmer’s foe.”
But cowslips, and buttercups—
“The winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes.”
Shakespeare.
—And the chaste and pretty ox-eye daisy, even a farmer will not object to my adoring, for the very names of these bring to his mind sleek-sided cattle wading in spring time knee-deep in fields of green sweet grass.
And what shall I say of gowan or mountain-daisy? Oh! what should I say, but repeat the lines of our own immortal bard:—
“Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,
Thou’s met me in an evil hour,
For I maun crush among the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To save thee now is past my power,
Thou bonnie gem?”
The spotted orchis is a sweet-scented Highland moorland gem, but right glad I was to find it meeting me on the banks of Northumberland. Far over the borders grew the pretty Scottish bluebell, and on rough patches of ground the trailing lilac rest-harrow.
Singly, a sprig of bluebells may not look to much advantage, but growing in great beds and patches, and hanging in heaps to old rained walls, or turf-capped dykes, they are very effective indeed.
I had meant to speak in this chapter of many other flowers that grow by the wayside—of the dove’s foot cranebill, of the purple loose-strife, of the sky-blue chicory and the pink-eyed pimpernel, of the golden bird’s-foot trefoil, of purple bugles, of yellow celandine, and of clover red and white. I had even meant to throw in a bird or two—the lark, for instance, that seems to fan the clouds with its quivering wing, the fluting blackbird of woodland and copse, the shrill-voiced mocking mavis, that makes the echoes ring from tree to tree; the cushat, that croodles so mournfully in the thickets of spruce; the wild-screaming curlew, and mayhap the great eagle itself.
But I fear that I have already wearied the reader, and so must refrain.
Stay though, one word about our Highland heather—one word and I have done. I have found both this and heath growing in England, but never in the same savage luxuriance as on the wilds of the Grampian range. Here you can wander in it waist-deep, if you are not afraid of snakes, and this Erica cineria you will find of every shade, from white—rare—to pink and darkest crimson:—
“Those wastes of heath
That stretch for leagues to lure the bee,
Where the wild bird, on pinions strong,
Wheels round, and pours his piping song,
And timid creatures wander free.”
I trust I may be forgiven for making all these poetical quotations, but as I commenced with one from the poet Campbell, so must I end with one from the selfsame bard. It is of the purple heath and heather he is thinking when he writes:—
“I love you for lulling me back into dreams
Of the blue Highland mountains, and echoing streams,
And of birchen glades breathing their balm.
While the deer is seen glancing in sunshine remote,
And the deep-mellow gush of the wood-pigeon’s note,
Makes music that sweetens the calm.”