"Rosa sempiterna,
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol."
We have no time now for these, we must go on to the humblest group of all, yet the most wonderful, that of the grass which has given us our bread; and from that we will go back to the herbs.
79. The vast family of plants which, under rain, make the earth green for man, and, under sunshine, give him bread, and, in their springing in the early year, mixed with their native flowers, have given us (far more than the new leaves of trees) the thought and word of "spring," divide themselves broadly into three great groups—the grasses, sedges, and rushes. The grasses are essentially a clothing for healthy and pure ground, watered by occasional rain, but in itself dry, and fit for all cultivated pasture and corn. They are distinctively plants with round and jointed stems, which have long green flexible leaves, and heads of seed, independently emerging from them. The sedges are essentially the clothing of waste and more or less poor or uncultivated soils, coarse in their structure, frequently triangular in stem—hence called "acute" by Virgil—and with their heads of seed not extricated from their leaves. Now, in both the sedges and grasses, the blossom has a common structure, though undeveloped in the sedges, but composed always of groups of double husks, which have mostly a spinous process in the centre, sometimes projecting into a long awn or beard; this central process being characteristic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, as if a moss were a kind of ear of corn made permanently green on the ground, and with a new and distinct fructification. But the rushes differ wholly from the sedge and grass in their blossom structure. It is not a dual cluster, but a twice threefold one, so far separate from the grasses, and so closely connected with a higher order of plants, that I think you will find it convenient to group the rushes at once with that higher order, to which, if you will for the present let me give the general name of Drosidæ, or dew-plants, it will enable me to say what I have to say of them much more shortly and clearly.
80. These Drosidæ, then, are plants delighting in interrupted moisture— or at certain seasons—into dry ground. They are not among water-plants, but the signs of water resting among dry places. Many of the true water-plants have triple blossoms, with a small triple calyx holding them; in the Drosidæ the floral spirit passes into the calyx also, and the entire flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem laterally, as if it were the first of flowers and had made its way to the light by force through the unwilling green. They are often required to retain moisture or nourishment for the future blossom through long times of drought; and this they do in bulbs under ground, of which some become a rude and simple, but most wholesome, food for man.
81. So, now, observe, you are to divide the whole family of the herbs of the field into three great groups,—Drosidæ, Carices,* Gramineæ,— dew-plants, sedges, and grasses. Then the Drosidæ are divided into five great orders: lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, irids, and rushes. No tribes of flowers have had so great, so varied, or so healthy an influence on man as this great group of Drosidæ, depending, not so much on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, or the radiance of others, as on the strength and delicacy of the substance of their petals; enabling them to take forms of faultless elastic curvature, either in cups, as the crocus, or expanding bells, as the true lily, or heath-like bells, as the hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, like the star of Bethlehem, or, when they are affected by the strange reflex of the serpent nature which forms the labiate group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely fantastic symmetry in the gladiolus. Put by their side their Nereid sisters, the water-lilies, and you have them in the origin of the loveliest forms of ornamental design, and the most powerful floral myths yet recognized among human spirits, born by the streams of Ganges, Nile, Arno, and Avon.
* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the generic name, being the Vergilian word, and representing a larger sub-species.
82. For consider a little what each of those five tribes* has been to the spirit of man. First, in their nobleness, the lilies gave the lily of the Annunciation; the asphodels, the flower of the Elysian fields; the irids, the fleur-de-lys of chivalry; and the amaryllids, Christ's lily of the field; while the rush, trodden always under foot, became the emblem of humility. Then take each of the tribes, and consider the extent of their lower influence. Perdita's "The crown imperial, lilies of all kinds," are the first tribe, which, giving the type of perfect purity in the Madonna's lily, have, by their lovely form, influenced the entire decorative design of Italian sacred art; while ornament design of war was continually enriched by the curves of the triple petals of the Florentine "giglio," and French fleur-de-lys; so that it is impossible to count their influence for good in the middle ages, partly as a symbol of womanly character, and partly of the utmost brightness and refinement of chivalry in the city which was the flower of cities.
* Take this rough distinction of the four tribes: lilies, superior ovary, white seeds; asphodels, superior ovary, black seeds; irids, inferior ovary, style (typically) rising into central crest; amaryllids, inferior ovary, stamens (typically) joined in central cup. Then the rushes are a dark group, through which they stoop to the grasses.
Afterwards, the group of the turban-lilies, or tulips, did some mischief (their splendid stains having made them the favorite caprice of florists); but they may be pardoned all such guilt for the pleasure they have given in cottage gardens, and are yet to give, when lowly life may again be possible among us; and the crimson bars of the tulips in their trim beds, with their likeness in crimson bars of morning above them, and its dew glittering heavy, globed in their glossy cups, may be loved better than the gray nettles of the ash heap, under gray sky, unveined by vermilion or by gold.
83. The next great group, of the asphodels, divides itself also into two principal families: one, in which the flowers are like stars, and clustered characteristically in balls, though opening sometimes into looser heads; and the other, in which the flowers are in long bells, opening suddenly at the lips, and clustered in spires on a long stem, or drooping from it, when bent by their weight.