PATCHES OF HEATHER.
I’ll give you joy of all your hot-house fruit, if you’ll leave me to my Wild Strawberries. I’ll wish you pleasure of Signor What’s-his-name, the violin player, if you’ll but listen to my choir of thrushes. What do you care to eat? Here’s nothing over substantial, I’ll admit; but there’s good wine in the brook, and food for a day in the fields and hedges. Nuts, Blackberries, Wortleberries, Wild Raspberries, Mushrooms, Crabs and Sloes, and Samphire for preserving; Elderberries to make into a cordial; and Wild Strawberries, that’s my chiefest dish at this season—food for princesses.
Come to the cliffs with your leaf of Wild Strawberries, and I can show you blue Flax, and Sea Pinks, yellow Sea-Cabbage, and Sea Convolvulus, and Golden Samphire; you shall have Sandwort, and Viper’s Bugloss, and Ploughman’s Spikenard, and Horned Poppies, and Thyme, in plenty. We will choose a fanciful flower for the table, the yellow Elecampane that gave a cosmetic to Helen of Troy. And the mention of her who set Olympus and Earth in a blaze of discord makes me remember how Hermes, of the golden wand, gave to Odysseus the plant he had plucked from the ground, black at the root, and with a flower like to milk—“Moly the Gods call it, but it is hard for mortal men to dig; howbeit with the Gods all things are possible.”
Any manner of imaginings may come to those who make a feast of Wild Strawberries. We may follow our Classic idea and discuss the Hydromel, or cider of the Greeks; the syrup of squills they drank to aid their digestion, or the absinthe they took to promote appetite. We might even try to make one of their sweet wines of Rose leaves and honey, such a thing would go well with our Wild Strawberries. These things might all come out of our country garden and give us a ghostly Greek flavour for our pains. There were Wild Strawberries, I think, on Mount Ida where Paris was shepherd, whence they fetched him when Discord threw the Golden Apple.
It is almost impossible to reach out a hand and pick a flower without plucking a legend with it.
I had taken, I thought, England for my garden, and Wild Strawberries for my dish, but I find that I have taken the world for my flower patch, and am sitting to eat with ancient Greeks. Let me but pick the Pansy by my hand and I find that Spenser plucked its fellow years ago:
“Strew me the ground with Daffe-down-dillies,
And Cowslips, and King-cups, and loved Lilies,
The pretty Paunce (that is my wild Pansy)