CHAPTER XIX THE FURZE IN ITS GLORY
Fascination of the furze—The furze in literature—Evelyn on the furze—Furze faggots—The beauty the effect of contrast—Large masses of bloom—Various aspects of the furze—Fragrance—Linnæus and the furze—'The cynic a spiritual harpy—Furze at the Land's End—The stone hedges ropes of bloom—Eye-dazzling colour—Furze by the sea—Yellow and blue.
I THINK that of all plants indigenous in this island the furze delights me the most. This says a good deal for a man who takes as much pleasure as any one in green and growing things; in all of them, from the elm of greatest girth at Windsor or Badminton, or the noblest pine at Eversley, or the most aged oak at Aldermaston, down to the little ivy-leafed toad-flax growing on the wall. They move me, each in its way, according to its character, to admiration, love and reverence. No sooner do I begin to speak or even to think of them than they, or their images, are seen springing up as by a miracle round me, until I seem to be in a vast open forest where all beautiful things flourish exceedingly and each in turn claims my attention. Merely to name them, with just a word or two added to characterise the special feeling produced in each case, would fill a page or more; and the end of it all would be that the words used at the beginning would have to be said again—I think the furze is the one which pleases me best.
Now here is something which has been a puzzle to me and a cause of regret, or a sense of something missed—the fact that, excepting a word or two or a line about it in the poets, the furze is hardly to be found in literature. Think of the oak in this connection; think of the elm, the yew, the ash, the rowan, the holly, hawthorn, blackthorn, bramble, briar, bulrush and flowering rush and heather, with many, many more trees, bushes and herbs, down even to the little pimpernel, the daisy, the forget-me-not and the lesser celandine. But who, beyond the line or two, has ever in verse or prose said anything in praise of the furze?
One day, in conversation with Sir William Thisel-ton-Dyer, the late Director of Kew Gardens, who knows a great deal more of books about plants than I do, I mentioned this fact to him, and, after taking thought, he said, "It is true, there isn't much to find, but let me recommend you to read Evelyn."
It happened that I knew Evelyn and admired him for his noble diction: one really wonders how a man who looked at plants with his hard, utilitarian eyes, considering them solely for their uses, could write as he did. It is true that he saw some beauty in the holly, his favourite, but in little else. He mentions the furze as a "vegetable trifle," and even goes so far as to give it a few favourable words, but without anything about its appearance, for that did not touch him. It is not a wholly useless plant, says Evelyn; it is good for faggots, also it affords covert for wild fowl, and the tops (bruised) may be recommended for a sickly horse. "It will thoroughly recover and plump him."
I have often watched the semi-wild ponies of the New Forest browsing quite freely on the blossomed tops, which they bruised for themselves with their own molars; and now I know that the furze is also "good for faggots." I have described how, while staying at a small moorland farm during the winter, we had furze for fuel, and how the dried bushes made a glorious heat and illumination in the open wide fireplace of the old dark kitchen and living-room. A couple of months later when the plant was in full blossom—acres and miles and leagues of it—I could do no less than sing my poor little prose song of praise and gratitude. To me it is never "unprofitably gay," nor, when I handle it, does it wound my hardened fingers, causing me to recoil and cry out with the sensitive poet of the Task that it repels us with its treacherous spines as much as it attracts with its yellow bloom.
The beauty of the furze in flower—that special beauty and charm in which it excels all other plants—is an effect of contrast, and is a beauty only seen in the entire plant, over which the bloom is distributed. We see that in shape and size, and almost in colour, the blossom nearly resembles that of the broom, but the effect is far more beautiful on account of the character of the plant—the exceeding roughness of its spiny surface, the rude shapes it takes and its darkness, over which the winged flame-coloured blossoms are profusely sprinkled. And when we see many contiguous bushes they do not lose their various individual forms, nor do the blossoms, however abundant, unite, as is the case with the broom, into very large masses of brilliant colour.
I like to come upon a furze-patch growing on a slope, to sit below it and look up over its surface, thrown into more or less rounded forms, broken and roughened into sprays at the top, as of a sea churned by winds and cross-currents to lumpy waves, all splashed and crowned as it were with flame-coloured froth. With a clear blue sky beyond I do not know in all nature a spectacle to excel it in beauty. It is beautiful, perhaps above all things, just because the blossoming furze is not the "sheet of gold" it is often described, but gold of a flame-like brilliance sprinkled on a ground of darkest, harshest green. Sheets of brilliant colour are not always beautiful. I have looked on leagues of forest of Erythrina crista-galli covering a wet level marsh when the leafless trees were clothed in their blood-red blossoms and have not admired the spectacle. Again, I have ridden through immense fields of viper's bugloss, growing as high as the horse's breast and so dense that he could hardly force his way through it, and the sheet of vivid blue in a dazzling sunlight affected me very disagreeably. It is the same with cultivated fields of daffodils, tulips and other flowers, grown to supply the market; the sight pleases best at a distance of a mile or half a mile; and so in the case of a sheet of wild hyacinths, it delights the eye because it is seen under trees with a cloud of green foliage above to soften and bring the vivid hue into harmony with the general colouring.
Now in the furze, or the dark green prickly sprays, the colour and roughness of which are never wholly covered and extinguished by the blossoms, there is an appearance which has probably never been described and perhaps not observed. The plant, we see, changes its colour somewhat with the seasons. It is darkest in winter, when, seen at a distance on the pale green or grey-green chalk downs, it looks almost black. Again, in summer when the rusty appearance which follows the flowering time is put off, the new terminal sprays have a blue-green or glaucous hue like the pine and juniper. But the most interesting change, which contributes to the beauty of the furze at its best, is in the spring, when the spines are tipped with straw-yellow and minute lines of the same colour appear along the spines and finer stems, and the effect of these innumerable specks and lines which catch the light is to give a bronzed appearance to the dark mass. It is curious that that change of colour does not always take place; in many places you find the plants keep the uniform deep green of winter through the blossoming season; but the bronzed aspect is the loveliest, and makes the most perfect setting for the bloom.
There are few things in nature that more delight the eye than a wild common or other incult place overgrown with bramble mixed with furze in flower and bracken in its vivid green, and scattered groups or thickets of hawthorn and blackthorn, with tangles and trails of ivy, briony, traveller's joy and honeysuckle. Yet the loveliness of our plant in such surroundings is to my mind exceeded by the furze when it possesses the entire ground and you have its splendour in fullest measure. Then, too, you can best enjoy its fragrance. This has a peculiar richness, and has been compared with pineapple and cocoanut; I should say cocoanut and honey, and we might even liken it to apple-tart with clove for scent and flavour. Anyway, there is something fruity and appetising in the smell; but this is not all, since along with that which appeals to the lower sense there is a more subtle quality, ethereal and soul-penetrating, like the perfume of the mignonette, the scented orchis, violet, bog asphodel, narcissus and vernal squill. It may be said that flower-scents are of two sorts: those which, like fruits, suggest flavours, and those which are wholly unassociated with taste, and are of all odours the most emotional because of their power of recalling past scenes and events. In the perfume of the furze both qualities, the sensuous and the spiritual, are combined: doubtless it was the higher quality which Swinburne had in his mind when he sang
The whin was frankincense and flame.
But we regard vision as the higher or more intellectual sense, and seeing is best; and it was the sight of blossoming furze which caused Linnæus, on his first visit to England, when he was taken to see it at Putney Heath, to fall on his knees and thank God for creating so beautiful a plant.
I bring in this old story so that the cynical reader may not be cheated of his smile. He it is who said, and I believe he has had even the courage to print it, that there was nothing spontaneous in the act of the great Swedish naturalist, that he had rehearsed it beforehand, and doubtless dropped upon his knees several times in front of a pier-glass in his bedroom that very morning to make himself perfect in the action before being driven to Putney.
Linnaeus is good enough for me, and for the majority of us I imagine, but what shall we say of the mockers, the spiritual harpies who come unbidden to our sacred feasts to touch and handle everything, and to defile and make hateful whatsoever they touch? Alas, we cannot escape and cannot silence them, and may only say that we compassionate them; since, however great they may be in the world, and though intellectually they may be but little lower than the gods, yet do they miss all that is sweetest and most precious in life. And further, we can only hope that when they have finished their little mocking day, that which they now are may be refashioned by wonderful Nature into some better thing—a dark, prickly bush, let us say, with blossoms that are frankincense and flame.
Let this same fragrance sweeten our imaginations; or, better still, let us forget that such beings exist in the world—intellectuals with atrophied hearts—and see what the furze looks like in this Land's End district where it most abounds and the earth is clothed with it. In some places where the moorland has been reclaimed and parcelled out into grass fields the furze flourishes on the stone hedges: the effect is here singular as well as magnificent, when, standing on a high stone wall, you survey the surrounding country with innumerable furze-clothed hedges dividing the green fields around you in every direction, and appearing like stupendous ropes of shining golden bloom. Hedge beyond hedge they stretch away for miles to grey distant hills and the pale blue sky beyond. On some hedges the plant grows evenly, as if it had been cultivated and trimmed, forming a smooth rope of bloom and black prickles. In other and indeed most instances, the rounded big luxuriant bushes occur at intervals, like huge bosses, on the rope.
Walking by one of these hedges in a very strong sunlight about mid-May when the bloom is in its greatest perfection, the sight is actually dazzling and hurts by the intense luminous colour. It is an unusual experience, but after a mile or so one almost unconsciously averts or veils the eye in passing one of these splendid bushes on which the blossoms are too closely crowded.
Perhaps the best aspect of the plant is that of the rough unreclaimed places where the high land slopes down to the cliff and the furze grows luxuriantly along the edges and slopes of the deep clefts or little ravine-like valleys, the beds of crystal noisy little water-courses, peopled with troutlets no bigger than minnows. Here the rude, untamable plant has its wildest and most striking appearance, now in the form of a huge mound where several bushes are closely interwoven, and now growing separately like ancient dwarf trees, mixed with brown heath and grey masses of granite. Here, too, you may come upon a clump of dwarf blackthorn bushes thickly covered with their luminous crystalline white little roses, never looking so wonderful in their immaculate whiteness as when thus seen contrasted with the rough black and flame-colour of the furze.
Better still, you can here see the yellow and orange flame of the furze against the blue of the sea—a marvellously beautiful effect. I was reminded of a similar effect observed in a furzy place among the South Wiltshire downs a year before. It was one of those days when there are big dark masses of cloud in a clear sky and when the cloud shadows falling on distant woods and hills give them a deep indigo blue. The furze was in full bloom and had a new and strange glory in my eyes when seen against this deep blue of the distant landscape.
Yellow and blue—yellow and blue! A lady on the other side of the globe wrote complaining that these two colours in association had got on her nerves on account of something I had said in some book. That was the fault of the writing. In nature they never get on our nerves: they surprise us, because the sight is not an everyday one, and in some cases where they occupy a large field they intoxicate the mind with their unparalleled loveliness. It has ever been a delight to me just before harvest time to walk in fine weather near the sea just to look at the red gold of the ripe corn against the blue water. We get a similar effect from these two complementary colours at sunset when the clouds are flushed yellow and orange in a blue sky. Also in the beech woods in October the sight of the great trees in their magnificent red-gold foliage would not impress us so deeply but for the blue sky seen through and above the wood.
