In applying the term “distinguished-looking” to the little Thesium, I am minded to do so because, just as with the flowers of the plain, there is an élite among Alpines. One can hardly explain why. Like the Roman Emperor who, when asked to define time, said, “I know when you do not ask me,” one feels there is an élite among flowers, though one is scarcely able to define it. And the feeling is real and undoubtedly well-founded. Nor, to feel this, is it necessary to go to florist’s garden-flowers, where vulgarity is rampant (though often highly prized and priced). The feeling comes in the presence of any field of wild flowers—the feeling that, by their form and bearing, some plants are more well-bred than others. This cannot be altogether accounted for by their colour or conspicuousness. The little Thesium, or the little silver-leaved Alchemilla are neither of them bright, conspicuous plants. It is the general habit that impresses: the “atmosphere” with which they surround themselves. How manifest this is when one meets with the Paradise Lily surrounded by a sea of Hieracium, Bistort, Blue Bottle, Trollius, Geranium, and Salvia. One singles out the Lily at once, though it be close beside the exquisite white Marguerite; and one’s heart goes out to it, above its companions, as a thing of greater breeding—a thing taking rank with any Lœlia or Dendrobium.
A cat is not a horse because it is born in a stable; and all Alpines are not of the same caste because they are born in the Alps. Among things Alpine, as among things of the plain, there is degree in attainment. Some things have had occasion to travel along lines that have led them to greater refinement than others—just as man, himself, is evidently the product of particular occasion for such travel. We cannot blink ourselves to the fact that there are weeds even among the Alpines—though there are not so many as 280, the number said to exist in England.
Degree in refinement is, perhaps, to some extent indicated by the way a plant will take care of itself. All plants have some means of fending for themselves, and these means are as varied in morality as are such means among human beings. Some are born fighters, brazen, pushing, and quarrelsome; others win through life by comparative self-effacement. Some elbow their way to any place they want; others, seemingly, are content to be where they are wanted. All, of course, battle more or less faithfully, but some are forceful, self-assertive, while others resign themselves to unobtrusiveness. No plant can accept with entire equanimity what does not altogether agree with it; but many can rough it, putting up with conditions that will kill others or compel them to retire. Hence we have weeds: rough-souled invaders who make themselves too common.
Although “the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common,” and although, therefore, we may admire, and quite reasonably admire, all that so capably wrestles with extremes of circumstance as do the Alpines, yet we can and must admit that some are more “classy” than others. For instance, the Alpine Plantain is, according to our instinct and possibly according to fact, on a lower rung of the ladder of vegetable society than is the Alpine Auricula. Both struggle with much the same rigours and disabilities, but we feel obliged to find that the latter has evolved greater refinement than the former from its struggles. In short, Maeterlinck’s “goût du mieux de la Nature” is as pronounced in degree among Alpines as it is among valley flowers; there is an aristocracy even in the Alps.
And how admirable, for the most part, are the names these plants bear; how befitting the romantic character and circumstance which surrounds them. Linaria, Saponaria, Salvia, Ajuga, Anthyllis, Potentilla, Artemisia—what could be more charming? Are they not a thousand times more suggestive and more æsthetic than their English counterparts—Toadflax, Soapwort, Sage, Bugle, Kidney Vetch, Cinquefoil, Wormwood? Indeed, I am not sure but that, taking them as a whole, Latin names are not more satisfactory and picturesque for every kind of flower—quite apart from the important and simplifying question of a common vantage ground for gardener, scientist, and general public. The anonymous writer of “Studies in Gardening,” an admirable series of essays contributed to the Times, pleads persuasively for the use, as far as possible, of English names in both gardening books and papers. He holds—and in so doing he is by no means singular—that “the rage for Latin names has gone so far that you will now sometimes see lilies called liliums”; he bemoans the growing use of Sedum instead of Stone-crop, and of Antirrhinum instead of Snapdragon, and he calls it an “unnecessary use of botanical terms,” and thinks that “the want of beautiful English names to many beautiful flowers seems a reproach to their beauty.” But there are other authorities, equally numerous, who hold a contrary view, considering that too much is being made of English names, and that “confusion worst confounded” is a very natural consequence. One catches the sound of more than two voices in the discussion: one hears not only the several plaints of botanist and flower-lover, but also the claims of the champion of folk-lore, the mere amateur gardener, the uncompromising patriot, and the incorrigible sentimentalist. And something in reason is said by each one of them—although honours are not so easy as to enable one to call it a case of six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. For, perhaps, those who strive for a langue bleu in this domain and choose Latin have the weightier cause at heart. George Crabbe, the poet, once wrote an English treatise on botany, but never published it, because of the remonstrances of the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who objected to degrading the science of botany by treating it in a modern language. Such rigorous adhesion to Latin is of the relatively narrow past; nor is this dead tongue likely ever again to be a subject for such blind idolatry. No doubt in time a becoming compromise will be arrived at by the two camps—a compromise that will allow a rose to be a rose, and not oblige it to be always and only a Rosa.
“Men of science are pitiless tyrants,” says Alphonse Karr in “Les Fleurs Animées.” “See what they have done for Botany, that charming and graceful study!... Without pity or mercy, they have brutally seized upon the frail daughters of sky and dew; they have crushed and mutilated them; they have thrown them into the crucible of Etymology, and after all these awful tortures, and as if to assure themselves of impunity, they have hidden their victims beneath a heap of barbarous names. Thus, thanks to them, the Hawthorn, that symbol of virginity and hope, sighs under the dreadful name Mespilus oxyacantha.... All that is frightful, is it not?... Unfortunately, it is all very necessary. To admire is not to know, and, in order to know, system and method are indispensable.... How could we do without the help of Etymology? Pardon, then, these men of science, who have done nothing but obey the law of necessity, and enter into the beautiful domain from which they have dissipated the darkness.” This is delightfully put and is all very true. Latin nomenclature does tend immensely to dispel confusion, though in certain quarters it may wound the sense of sentiment, and we shall no doubt always have confirmed adherents of popular names.
But, however it may be with the use of popular names in England, I venture to think we have better things to do than to Anglicise the Alpines in their Swiss home, and that—as says a well-known botanist—“when English names are coined for species which do not even occur in Britain, the result is sometimes ridiculous, e.g. ‘Dodonœus’s French Willow’ for an Epilobium.” And it is not alone ridiculous: it is often paltry and in the worst of taste, and it will frequently drive romance and beauty from the Alpine landscape. What is there æsthetic, or even useful, about “Mignonette-leaved Lady’s Smock” for Cardamine resedifolia; “Neglected Pinkwort” for Dianthus neglectus; “Doronic Groundsel” for Senecio Doronicum; or “Glacier’s Yarrow” for Achillea nana? Are not the Latin names truer and more beautiful? And are they not as easy of retention as their English substitutes? Shall we say that Campanula barbata is not a truer title than “Bearded Harebell” for a plant that has nothing of the English Harebell about it except “family”? Or shall we say that it is not just as easy, as the botanist already quoted points out, to remember Atriplex deltoidea as “Deltoid-leaved Orache”? Those who, advocating English nomenclature to this extent in the Alps, plead the cause of intelligible simplicity, irresistibly recall the complicated efforts of those who aim at the Simple Life. And, on the whole, their efforts are no less ugly.
HAYMAKING at Champex in the middle of July.