I hear of the planting of flowering shrubs and trees, and of artificial cascades, and as I do so my heart goes back to the wild picturesqueness of the uncared-for Heath, with its groups of storm-bent old hawthorns, its thickets of blackthorn, and twisted crab-apple-trees, pink all over with their rosy blossoms in May.
It was under the Hawthorn bushes on the Heath that Gerard found lilies of the valley growing. I remember its coverts of swarthy furze, twice yearly glorified with golden blossoms, and how on one of these occasions, when every hillock was ablaze with its brightness, Frederika Bremer, whom her friend Mary Howitt had brought with her to the Heath, burst into tears at the first sight of the floral splendour. Her great countryman, Linnæus, is said to have fallen on his knees and thanked God for the sight.
It was on a gorse bush on North End Hill that I first found dodder, ‘like a red harp string winding about it.’ Black alders grew on the margin of the Leg of Mutton Pond, and there used to be wide spaces covered with the creeping willow, and great beds of close-growing whortleberry, which turns red in autumn, and dyed portions of the Upper Heath at that season with its crimson leaves; and upon North End Hill, breast-high coverts of branching ling, with ferns of other species, besides the common Lastrea felix mas, and Athyrium felix femina.
The vari-coloured clay and sand and gravel that overlies the Heath were then the cause of very picturesque effects. The deep orange and yellows of the gravel-pits were contrasted by the glistering hollows scooped in the hillside beyond Jack Straw’s Castle, where brown gipsies dug the ‘lily-white sand’ with which they supplied London and other housewives for domestic purposes; while in various places there cropped up little hillocks, patched with blue and yellow and ferruginous brown clay, occasionally verging to red, dashing in bits of colour in the landscape with charming pictorial effect. The very irregularity of the surface made one of its chiefest charms, and the wide beds of treacherous sphagnum bordering the old watercourse that drained into the deep-set, sullen-looking Leg of Mutton Pond were full of interest for the botanist. There grew, with their roots in the stream, clusters of turquoise-blue forget-me-nots, and the pretty yellow pimpernel, the ‘creeping Jenny’ of the London area and attic, with purple brook-lime, and pink ragged-robin with torn petals, between groups of straight brown rushes, and beds of flags, and water-mint. The silken flocks of the greater cotton-grass that lie before me grew there once, as did the little red-leaved Rosa solis or sundew, with its crook-shaped flower-scape, and atomic insect remains still held in its hinged leaves; and this brown bit of dried vegetation, a specimen of one of the loveliest of wild flowers, ‘buck-bean,’ with its curiously-feathered corolla, and these unfaded rosy flowers of bog-pimpernel, looking so large by comparison with the slender stems and tiny leaves set in couplets on them—all lived upon those pale-green sphagnum beds.
It was a delight to trace the descendants of the plants old Gerard found upon the Heath, still lingering in their ancient habitats, all but the primrose, the odorous violet, and the lily of the valley, which, before the fashion of the Wells had waned, retired from the Heath to Turner’s Wood, and was wholly lost sight of by outsiders when Lord Mansfield enclosed it in Caen Wood.
In those far-away times gipsies, with glittering eyes, bangled arms, and bright orange or red kerchiefs snooding their blue-black hair, were not the only picturesque figures to be met with on the Heath. It was no unusual thing to meet with speculative lace-makers from Buckinghamshire, in their short red cloaks, frilled with black lace, and wonderful black bonnets, with cushion and pendent vari-coloured bobbins swinging from it, selling their thread lace to chance customers, and taking orders from others who had learned the value of their wares.
But, after all, their appearance was an accident, while the gipsies’ was of common occurrence. You passed a furze clump or a sheltered hollow, and saw no one, but an instant later a nut-brown palmist stood in your path, with speculation in her eyes, and promises of love and fortune on her lips. We have changed all this. The brown hand goes uncrossed with silver, and faith in palmistry is reserved for drawing-room professors of it.