Here in Scilly we find land and sea flooded with spring sunshine, while on the “adjacent island” which we have just left every one is lamenting the cold and the rain. The flower-harvest is nearly over, yet still there are wide fields of dazzling white and yellow, and many hundreds of boxes will yet leave the quay for the mainland. The sweet-smelling Ornatus narcissus is now at its best, and its perfume fills the air. Arum-blossoms, thousands of them in a single field, stand stiffly waiting to be cut, while in the more exposed places late daffodils linger, nodding their yellow heads in the breeze that comes in from the sea. Everywhere there are flowers, flowers, flowers—such a wealth of flowers as one never saw before; and every one is either picking flowers, tying flowers, packing flowers, selling flowers, buying flowers, or talking of flowers. Even the tiny children can tell you the difference between a “‘natus” and a “Pheasant Eye”; and will talk wisely in a way to awe the less enlightened visitor of “Cynosures,” “Sir Watkins,” and “Peerless Primroses.”
It is barely thirty years since these sweet flower-fields first began to cover the islands. The “oldest inhabitant,” a great-grandmother of ninety-six (she died in 1913), would call to mind the kelp-making industry which occupied the people in her young days. “Eh,” she would say, “it was not a nice employ; things are better as they are.” And we can easily believe that she was right; for instead of the fragrance of the flowers the air was then filled with the thick and acrid smoke of the burning seaweed; and it was but a poor living at the best that could be made out of it.
There is now hardly a boatman in the islands who does not add to his income by having a patch of ground planted with the “lilies,” as they call them, and sending his boxes of blooms to market during the season.
But flower-growing is not the only industry of the islands. If you ask your boatman to name others as they affect himself, he will probably answer naïvely, “Fishing and visitors”; and he may also add that sometimes he is employed as a “potter.” Although the dictionary allows no other meaning to this word than “a maker of earthen vessels,” let not your imagination be betrayed into picturing a lump of wet clay and a flying wheel! It is crab and lobster pots that are in question, and quantities of these crustaceans are caught round the islands and sold to French merchants.
THE OLDEST INHABITANT
Then there is the mackerel fishery, which is at its height in May and June, when St. Mary’s Pool is full of the picturesque, brown-sailed fishing-boats from Mount’s Bay.
The other “industry” mentioned by the boatmen, that is to say “visitors,” is carried on intermittently all through the year, but is naturally most active during the spring and summer months.