"Of crow-flowers, daisies, nettles, and long purples."
But the nettle here referred to was probably the stingless dead-nettle.
A Scotch farmer, with whom I became acquainted, took me on a Sunday afternoon stroll through his fields. I went to his kirk in the forenoon; in the afternoon he and his son went to mine, and liked the sermon as well as I did. These banks and braes of Doon, of a bright day in May, are eloquent enough for anybody. Our path led along the river course for some distance. The globe-flower, like a large buttercup with the petals partly closed, nodded here and there. On a broad, sloping, semi-circular bank, where a level expanse of rich fields dropped down to a springy, rushy bottom near the river's edge, and which the Scotch call a brae, we reclined upon the grass and listened to the birds, all but the lark new to me, and discussed the flowers growing about. In a wet place the "gillyflower" was growing, suggesting our dentaria, or crinkle-root. This is said to be "the lady's smock all silver-white" of Shakespeare, but these were not white, rather a pale lilac. Near by, upon the ground, was the nest of the meadow pipit, a species of titlark, which my friend would have me believe was the wood-lark,—a bird I was on the lookout for. The nest contained six brown-speckled eggs,—a large number, I thought. But I found that this is the country in which to see birds'-nests crowded with eggs, as well as human habitations thronged with children. A white umbelliferous plant, very much like wild carrot, dotted the turf here and there. This, my companion said, was pig-nut, or ground-chestnut, and that there was a
sweet, edible tuber at the root of it, and, to make his words good, dug up one with his fingers, recalling Caliban's words in the "Tempest":—
"And I, with my long nails, will dig thee pig-nuts."
The plant grows freely about England, but does not seem to be troublesome as a weed.
In a wooded slope beyond the brae, I plucked my first woodruff, a little cluster of pure white flowers, much like that of our saxifrage, with a delicate perfume. Its stalk has a whorl of leaves like the galium. As the plant dries its perfume increases, and a handful of it will scent a room.
The wild hyacinths, or bluebells, had begun to fade, but a few could yet be gathered here and there in the woods and in the edges of the fields. This is one of the plants of which nature is very prodigal in Britain. In places it makes the underwoods as blue as the sky, and its rank perfume loads the air. Tennyson speaks of "sheets of hyacinths." We have no wood flower in the Eastern States that grows in such profusion.
Our flowers, like our birds and wild creatures, are more shy and retiring than the British. They keep more to the woods, and are not sowed so broadcast. Herb Robert is exclusively a wood plant with us, but in England it strays quite out into the open fields and by the roadside. Indeed, in England I found no so-called wood flower that could not be met with more or less in the fields and along the hedges. The main reason, perhaps, is that the need of shelter is never so great there,
neither winter nor summer, as it is here, and the supply of moisture is more uniform and abundant. In dampness, coolness, and shadiness, the whole climate is woodsy, while the atmosphere of the woods themselves is almost subterranean in its dankness and chilliness. The plants come out for sun and warmth, and every seed they scatter in this moist and fruitful soil takes.