Lamb, we all know, had a love of tags and proverbs, and could string them with anyone. Not more surely than Howell could, who has a long letter of advice to a friend, upon marriage, consisting entirely of them. As thus:
“Sir, although I am none of those that love to have an oar in everyone’s boat, or such a busybody as deserves to be hit in the teeth, yet you and I having eaten a peck of salt together, and having a hint that you are upon a business that will make or mar you, for a man’s best fortune or his worst’s a wife, I would wish you to look before you leap, and make more than two words to a bargain.”
He keeps it up with immense zest for two full sheets, and ends all with “yours to the altar.” If Lamb knew that, he would never have forgotten it—and I believe he never did.
CROCUS AND PRIMROSE
This year, it deserves to be recorded, the first crocus and the first primrose flowered together on January 18th. I know not when this article will appear; it may well be that Spring will have set in with its usual severity, in other words, that in mid-March we may be snowbound, and in mid-winter, as is now customary, before my record can be read. That is as may be, but my duty is clear. For the moment, and until we have become used to the new procession of Seasons, a first crocus and first primrose on the 18th of January constitute an event in South Wilts, if they do not in the rest of England. And lest any caviller should arise, as assuredly he will, and tell me that my primrose was the last, not the first, I may as well nip him in the bud of his endeavour by declaring that leaf and flower are alike new growth. It is true that many primulas have a second flowering—my japonicas always do. But I do not observe that they make new leaf twice a year. Here, the primrose, which is comparatively rare even in the woods, and unknown in the hedges, disappears altogether, like the cowslip, until new growth begins. The cowslip is our only native primula.
Such things—I don’t mean the early flowering, but the flowering of such things at all—are events in the garden, red-letter days in its year. The flowers themselves, to some one of them, to some another, are vocal; for there is a real language of flowers, very different from that made out of them by the love-sick. It has no syntax, and is incommunicable by speech. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard ...! So with flower-language. The first wild crocus talks to me immediately of Greece, where on the top of rugged Chelmos I saw it in perfection burning its way into the snow. I had climbed up there to see Homer’s Στυγὁς ὑδατος ἁιπἁ ῥἑεθρα, a sight, I am bound to say, not at all remarkable. Charon could have hopped over it. It was the crocuses that I remarked: the orange, called, I think, bulbo-codium, and a white striped with brown, which I have always known as the Scotch crocus, but which in botany is named biflorus. It is no use my saying that that is the way to grow them. It is Nature’s way, but cannot be ours, unless they will seed themselves, as some will. So far as I know, those two will not. They will increase otherwise; but by seeding flowers alone will you get the happy accidents which make a natural wild garden. They tell me, by the by, that you can hardly now obtain that most beautiful of all crocus, the blue Imperati, an autumn flower. I don’t know whether I am singularly favoured—I hope not; but at any rate, I can obtain, within reason, as much Imperati—not as I want, for that could never be, but as is good for me. I put some few dozen into a rock-garden which I then had, some fifteen years ago, and it has increased a hundredfold. So have some other species of crocus. Imperati grows very large and, unfortunately, very lax. Heavy rain in September will beat it down to a purple jelly. But when fair weather lasts out that loveliest month of the year crocus Imperati is a theme for poets.
As for the nurseryman’s crocus, colour is its real point; and it should be grown in masses for that alone; in masses where it can get the sun, and the bees can get it. Unfortunately it has many enemies. In London it lures the sparrows into Bacchic orgies; obscenely they tear it petal from petal. In the country field-mice seek it in the bud and eat the embryo flower. I have tried everything, Stockholm tar and sand mixed in layers in the barrow; read lead and paraffin; strawberry netting, soot and such like. I owe my best remedy to the discovery I have made that, much as mice like crocuses, they like toasted cheese yet more. One or two traps with that for a bait will save vast numbers of crocuses, for it is a mistake to suppose that many mice are involved. A pack of field-mice is a terrible thought, but only a nightmare happily. One mouse, with the whole night before him, will ruin a border.