“Is the man going mad? thought I. He is very like Don Quixote. ‘What color are they, I say?’ repeated he vehemently. ‘I am sure I don’t know, sir,’ said I, with the meekness of ignorance. ‘I knew you didn’t. No more did I—an old fool that I am!—till this young man comes and tells me. Black as ash buds in March. And I’ve lived all my life in the country; more shame for me not to know. Black: they are jet black, madam.”
The “young man” he refers to is Tennyson, and the quotation, “Black as ash buds in the front of March,” is a simile used in “The Gardener’s Daughter,” and it shows how acute Tennyson’s powers of observation were, and how true his descriptions of nature.
The buds of the ash open later in the spring than those of other trees, and the leaves unfold very slowly. Tennyson also noted this characteristic:—
“Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love,
Delaying as the tender ash delays
To clothe herself, when all the woods are green?”
The rare fitness of this simile might pass unheeded if we did not study trees first and poetry afterwards.
In Europe ash seeds were used for medicine. They were called lingua avis by the old apothecaries, on account of a fancied resemblance to the tongues of birds; young ash seeds were also pickled and used in salads. Evelyn says the wood “is of all others the sweetest of our forest fuelling, and the fittest for ladies’ chambers.”
The horsechestnuts, the maples, and the ashes are the three genera of large trees which have opposite leaf-scars.
Chapter V
THE WALNUTS AND HICKORIES