Nay, but the farmer will not, he has no romance about him, and will quote me lines like these:—
“Bluebottle, thee my numbers fain would raise,
And thy complexion challenge all my praise,
Thy countenance like summer skies is fair;
But ah! how different thy vile manners are.
A treacherous guest, destruction thou dost bring
To th’ inhospitable field where thou dost spring,
Thou blunt’st the very reaper’s sickle, and so
In life and death becom’st the farmer’s foe.”
But cowslips, and buttercups—
“The winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes.”
Shakespeare.
—And the chaste and pretty ox-eye daisy, even a farmer will not object to my adoring, for the very names of these bring to his mind sleek-sided cattle wading in spring time knee-deep in fields of green sweet grass.
And what shall I say of gowan or mountain-daisy? Oh! what should I say, but repeat the lines of our own immortal bard:—
“Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,
Thou’s met me in an evil hour,
For I maun crush among the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To save thee now is past my power,
Thou bonnie gem?”
The spotted orchis is a sweet-scented Highland moorland gem, but right glad I was to find it meeting me on the banks of Northumberland. Far over the borders grew the pretty Scottish bluebell, and on rough patches of ground the trailing lilac rest-harrow.
Singly, a sprig of bluebells may not look to much advantage, but growing in great beds and patches, and hanging in heaps to old rained walls, or turf-capped dykes, they are very effective indeed.
I had meant to speak in this chapter of many other flowers that grow by the wayside—of the dove’s foot cranebill, of the purple loose-strife, of the sky-blue chicory and the pink-eyed pimpernel, of the golden bird’s-foot trefoil, of purple bugles, of yellow celandine, and of clover red and white. I had even meant to throw in a bird or two—the lark, for instance, that seems to fan the clouds with its quivering wing, the fluting blackbird of woodland and copse, the shrill-voiced mocking mavis, that makes the echoes ring from tree to tree; the cushat, that croodles so mournfully in the thickets of spruce; the wild-screaming curlew, and mayhap the great eagle itself.