CROCUS AND PRIMROSE
This year, it deserves to be recorded, the first crocus and the first primrose flowered together on January 18th. I know not when this article will appear; it may well be that Spring will have set in with its usual severity, in other words, that in mid-March we may be snowbound, and in mid-winter, as is now customary, before my record can be read. That is as may be, but my duty is clear. For the moment, and until we have become used to the new procession of Seasons, a first crocus and first primrose on the 18th of January constitute an event in South Wilts, if they do not in the rest of England. And lest any caviller should arise, as assuredly he will, and tell me that my primrose was the last, not the first, I may as well nip him in the bud of his endeavour by declaring that leaf and flower are alike new growth. It is true that many primulas have a second flowering—my japonicas always do. But I do not observe that they make new leaf twice a year. Here, the primrose, which is comparatively rare even in the woods, and unknown in the hedges, disappears altogether, like the cowslip, until new growth begins. The cowslip is our only native primula.
Such things—I don’t mean the early flowering, but the flowering of such things at all—are events in the garden, red-letter days in its year. The flowers themselves, to some one of them, to some another, are vocal; for there is a real language of flowers, very different from that made out of them by the love-sick. It has no syntax, and is incommunicable by speech. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard ...! So with flower-language. The first wild crocus talks to me immediately of Greece, where on the top of rugged Chelmos I saw it in perfection burning its way into the snow. I had climbed up there to see Homer’s Στυγὁς ὑδατος ἁιπἁ ῥἑεθρα, a sight, I am bound to say, not at all remarkable. Charon could have hopped over it. It was the crocuses that I remarked: the orange, called, I think, bulbo-codium, and a white striped with brown, which I have always known as the Scotch crocus, but which in botany is named biflorus. It is no use my saying that that is the way to grow them. It is Nature’s way, but cannot be ours, unless they will seed themselves, as some will. So far as I know, those two will not. They will increase otherwise; but by seeding flowers alone will you get the happy accidents which make a natural wild garden. They tell me, by the by, that you can hardly now obtain that most beautiful of all crocus, the blue Imperati, an autumn flower. I don’t know whether I am singularly favoured—I hope not; but at any rate, I can obtain, within reason, as much Imperati—not as I want, for that could never be, but as is good for me. I put some few dozen into a rock-garden which I then had, some fifteen years ago, and it has increased a hundredfold. So have some other species of crocus. Imperati grows very large and, unfortunately, very lax. Heavy rain in September will beat it down to a purple jelly. But when fair weather lasts out that loveliest month of the year crocus Imperati is a theme for poets.
As for the nurseryman’s crocus, colour is its real point; and it should be grown in masses for that alone; in masses where it can get the sun, and the bees can get it. Unfortunately it has many enemies. In London it lures the sparrows into Bacchic orgies; obscenely they tear it petal from petal. In the country field-mice seek it in the bud and eat the embryo flower. I have tried everything, Stockholm tar and sand mixed in layers in the barrow; read lead and paraffin; strawberry netting, soot and such like. I owe my best remedy to the discovery I have made that, much as mice like crocuses, they like toasted cheese yet more. One or two traps with that for a bait will save vast numbers of crocuses, for it is a mistake to suppose that many mice are involved. A pack of field-mice is a terrible thought, but only a nightmare happily. One mouse, with the whole night before him, will ruin a border.
The primrose is vocal of my childhood and the Kentish woodlands. There they used to grow marvellously, though now I daresay that Lord Beaconsfield and his League have made an end of them. Wherever the axe had been there were they, in sheets, in a galaxy, even to the scent of milk in the spicy air. I remember now, whenever I see my first primrose of the year, the almost fainting rapture with which we used to see, smell, taste, and handle them again—on some still warm April day—after the waiting through the long winter. For winters really were long, and wintry, then—or I think so. One used to wake in the morning and find the water-bottle frozen solid, the sponge like a brick. One used to learn to skate (for which now we go to Switzerland and catch influenza in a super-heated hotel), make snowmen, blow on one’s fingers to fasten one’s shirt-collar. But I have lived in the West of England this twenty years, and can only remember one snowy Christmas. Ah, and how many warm Aprils? Perhaps as many.
But the primrose is not common here. You will find it over the hills in the greensand, and again just over the Dorset border, in Cranborne Chace: not in this valley. I make it grow, importing it, because I can’t do without it; and so do the villagers, for the same reason. But they like it coloured, and have a rooted belief that if you plant a primrose upside down it will come up with red flowers. I tell them that it is Cruelty to Primroses. They point me out red-flowering roots which have been obtained in this way; and I end the inconsequent argument by saying, Well, anyhow, I don’t want it—village logic.
As I said just now, wild gardening, by which I mean the garden use of wild flowers, is to be confessed a failure unless you can induce the flowers to seed themselves. Once you can do that, you may talk about your wild garden. Once I saw a corner of a man’s garden, where there was a waterfall, and ramondia growing as it does in the Pyrenees. That was a memorable sight. I have had my own moderate successes of the sort. Anemone blanda has become as common as groundsel; but apennina refuses to seed. The Widow iris, tuberosa, which started in life in a dry ditch under Vesuvius, and came to South Wilts in a sponge bag, is another weed. I left a garden with more of that growing in it than anybody can want. Fritillary is not a native, but seeds freely in my water meadow; colchicum, another alien, increases like coltsfoot. Both the cyclamens, the Neapolitan and the Greek, have large families, which can never be too large—and so on. Such are some of my little triumphs, of which I dare not boast lest I be rebuked as once I was by a high lady in garden society. It was not kind of her, though no doubt she did it for my good. It was a time when I was growing cushion irises, with enormous pains and exiguous results. However, one fine Spring I did induce Iris iberica to utter its extraordinary flowers—six of it, to be exact. Of that feat, meeting her at a party, I vaunted to the high lady. I can still see the glimmering of her eyelids, hear her dry voice commenting, “I had four hundred.” It may have been good for me, but was it good for her? If I had known then, as I knew afterwards, that she had flowered her four hundred at Aix-les-Bains, I think I might have rebuked her—so far as high ladies can be rebuked—by telling her that she could have had four thousand on such terms. But I knew nothing of it. There she had me.
I would not now give twopence for Iris iberica unless it would increase in my plot. I have come to make that the staple of good gardening, and would set no bounds to feats of the kind. Certainly, I am not with the purists who say—or said—that it is inartistic to grow foreign things in wild spaces. The Reverend William Mason, in the eighteenth century, who turned Capability Brown into poetry, was plainly of that opinion. It may be inartistic, but it is very jolly. I am experimenting just now with some of the plants and shrubs from Tibet which poor Farrer gave us before he died. I find that most of them grow like Jack’s beanstalk, but care very little about flowering. I have a briar-rose, a grey-leafed, bushy, spiky thing rather like Rosa Willmottia, which gives me canes tree-high, but so far no flowers. Farrer’s behymned Viburnun fragrans grows apace: its fragrance has yet to be tested. He said that it was like heliotrope, and I hope that it may prove so. Then I have a Spiraea from Tibet, which came to me from Wisley in a thumb-pot, marked “Rosa-species,” but is unmitigated Spiraea. You may practically see the thing grow if, like it, you have nothing else to do. It is now as big as a bamboo-clump, and impervious to frost. So far as it is concerned, this might be the valley of Avilion. Once only has the vast affair considered flowering. Two years ago buds showed themselves at the end of August and, with a leisureliness for which the stock had not prepared me, were ready to expand by the middle of October. They then looked as much like bunches of bananas as anything else, and if all had gone well, would no doubt have been the talk of the county. But, as you might suppose, by the time they were ready,
“Swift summer into the autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode;”
and the Spiraea, deeply offended, did nothing at all except slowly rot, and, to pursue The Sensitive Plant,
“Fill the place with a monstrous undergrowth,”
as was only to be expected. Since that check to its ardour, it has devoted itself to root-action and the results; and all I can do is to admire its rapidly maturing timber, and consider whether it or the house should be removed.
Lucky accidents, or happy experiments, will acclimatise difficult things sometimes. I don’t know how often or in how many places I had tried to make the Alpine gentian, verna, feel at home, when I happened to meet a soldier somewhere who lived in Ireland. He told me of his own efforts with it in artfully prepared moraines and joy-heaps of the kind. It lived, and it flowered, as it has lived and flowered, and also died, here—but it did not spread. It existed, not throve. Then, perhaps by inspiration, he put some of it into a gravel path, and left it there. Or perhaps it drifted there by itself, as such things will—I don’t remember how it was. There, at any rate, it increased and multiplied and replenished the earth, growing indeed as you may see it in Swiss pastures in early Spring, deep blue stars afloat in the streaming waters—one of earth’s loveliest sights. Ah, what an “event” for a gardener to nail that miracle every year as it comes round. I would wait for that as I do for the cuckoo. But first I must wait for a gravel path.