What is it, then, this temper in some plants—malicious as it seems—intrusive, at all events, or erring,—which brings them out of their places—thrusts them where they thwart us and offend?
7. Primarily, it is mere hardihood and coarseness of make. A plant that can live anywhere, will often live where it is not wanted. But the delicate and tender ones
keep at home. You have no trouble in 'keeping down' the spring gentian. It rejoices in its own Alpine home, and makes the earth as like heaven as it can, but yields as softly as the air, if you want it to give place. Here in England, it will only grow on the loneliest moors, above the high force of Tees; its Latin name, for us (I may as well tell you at once) is to be 'Lucia verna;' and its English one, Lucy of Teesdale.
8. But a plant may be hardy, and coarse of make, and able to live anywhere, and yet be no weed. The coltsfoot, so far as I know, is the first of large-leaved plants to grow afresh on ground that has been disturbed: fall of Alpine débris, ruin of railroad embankment, waste of drifted slime by flood, it seeks to heal and redeem; but it does not offend us in our gardens, nor impoverish us in our fields.
Nevertheless, mere coarseness of structure, indiscriminate hardihood, is at least a point of some unworthiness in a plant. That it should have no choice of home, no love of native land, is ungentle; much more if such discrimination as it has, be immodest, and incline it, seemingly, to open and much-traversed places, where it may be continually seen of strangers. The tormentilla gleams in showers along the mountain turf; her delicate crosslets are separate, though constellate, as the rubied daisy. But the king-cup—(blessing be upon it always no less)—crowds itself sometimes into too burnished flame of inevitable gold. I don't know if there was anything in the
darkness of this last spring to make it brighter in resistance; but I never saw any spaces of full warm yellow, in natural colour, so intense as the meadows between Reading and the Thames; nor did I know perfectly what purple and gold meant, till I saw a field of park land embroidered a foot deep with king-cup and clover—while I was correcting my last notes on the spring colours of the Royal Academy—at Aylesbury.
9. And there are two other questions of extreme subtlety connected with this main one. What shall we say of the plants whose entire destiny is parasitic—which are not only sometimes, and impertinently, but always, and pertinently, out of place; not only out of the right place, but out of any place of their own? When is mistletoe, for instance, in the right place, young ladies, think you? On an apple tree, or on a ceiling? When is ivy in the right place?—when wallflower? The ivy has been torn down from the towers of Kenilworth; the weeds from the arches of the Coliseum, and from the steps of the Araceli, irreverently, vilely, and in vain; but how are we to separate the creatures whose office it is to abate the grief of ruin by their gentleness,
"wafting wallflower scents
From out the crumbling ruins of fallen pride,
And chambers of transgression, now forlorn,"