"I know of no flower that has so many charming tricks and manners, none with a method of growth more picturesque and fascinating. The stalks often take a curve, a twist from some current of air, or some impediment, and the fine stems will turn and bend in all sorts of graceful ways, but the bud is always held erect when the time comes for it to blossom. Ruskin quotes Lindley's definition of what constitutes a poppy, which he thinks 'might stand.' This is it: 'A Poppy is a flower which has either four or six petals and two or more treasuries united in one, containing a milky stupefying fluid in its stalks and leaves and always throwing away its calix when it blossoms.'
"I muse over their seed-pods, those supremely graceful urns that are wrought with such matchless elegance of shape and think what strange power they hold within. Sleep is there and Death, his brother, imprisoned in those mystic sealed cups. There is a hint of their mystery in their shape of somber beauty, but never a suggestion in the fluttering blossom: it is the gayest flower that blows. In the more delicate varieties the stalks are so slender, yet so strong, like fine grass stems. When you examine them, you wonder how they hold even the light weight of the flower so firmly and proudly erect; and they are clothed with the finest of fine hairs up and down the stalks and over the green calix.
"It is plain to see, as one gazes over the poppy-beds on some sweet evening at sunset, what buds will bloom in the joy of next morning's first sunbeams, for these will be lifting themselves heavenward, slowly and silently, but surely. To stand by the beds at sunrise and see the flowers awake is a heavenly delight. As the first long, low rays of the sun strike the buds, you know they feel the signal! A light air stirs among them; you lift your eyes, perhaps to look at a rosy cloud, or follow the flight of a carolling bird, and when you look back again, lo! the calix has fallen from the largest bud and lies on the ground, two half-transparent light green shells, leaving the flower-petal wrinked in a thousand folds, just released from their close pressure. A moment more and they are unclosing before your eyes. They flutter out on the gentle breeze like silken banners to the sun."
It would be tempting in a Shakespeare garden to include many kinds of this joyous, yet solemn, flower; and certainly as many were common in Elizabethan gardens it would not be an anachronism to have them. However, if the space be restricted and the garden lover a purist then the white poppy only should be planted.
VIII
Crow-flowers and Long Purples
CROW-FLOWERS (Scilla nutans). These are among the flowers Ophelia wove into a wreath. The queen tells the court:
There is a willow grove ascaunt the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There, with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.[68]
[68] "Hamlet"; Act IV, Scene VII.
Shakespeare did not select Ophelia's flowers at random. They typified the sorrows of the gentle victim of disappointed love whose end was first madness, then suicide. The crow-flowers signified "fair maiden"; the nettles, "stung to the quick"; the daisies, "her virgin bloom"; and the long purples, "under the cold hand of Death." Thus what Shakespeare intended to convey by this code of flowers was, "A fair maiden, stung to the quick, her virgin bloom in the cold hand of Death."