Lucky accidents, or happy experiments, will acclimatise difficult things sometimes. I don’t know how often or in how many places I had tried to make the Alpine gentian, verna, feel at home, when I happened to meet a soldier somewhere who lived in Ireland. He told me of his own efforts with it in artfully prepared moraines and joy-heaps of the kind. It lived, and it flowered, as it has lived and flowered, and also died, here—but it did not spread. It existed, not throve. Then, perhaps by inspiration, he put some of it into a gravel path, and left it there. Or perhaps it drifted there by itself, as such things will—I don’t remember how it was. There, at any rate, it increased and multiplied and replenished the earth, growing indeed as you may see it in Swiss pastures in early Spring, deep blue stars afloat in the streaming waters—one of earth’s loveliest sights. Ah, what an “event” for a gardener to nail that miracle every year as it comes round. I would wait for that as I do for the cuckoo. But first I must wait for a gravel path.
DAFFODILS
I don’t suppose that any flower in England, except the rose, has been more bepraised, as somebodys aid, by poets who were not gardeners, and gardeners who were not poets; and it is certainly difficult in dealing with it to leave Wordsworth out. I shan’t be able to do it, because I shall want him, but I shall do my best to reach the end of this article without quoting from A Winter’s Tale. It is satisfactory, at least, to be certified, as I am from Parkinson, that all of our poets, from Shakespeare to Mr. Masefield, have been exercised about the same plant. Parkinson says that we had two English daffodils, one which he calls Peerless Primrose, and another which can be identified as the double daffodil, and which, he says, Gerard found in an old woman’s cottage garden—just where we find it now. Neither Parkinson nor, I suspect, any of the poets had a notion that, strictly speaking, the daffodil was the Asphodel; but how it came about that the word changed its designation I am not able to say. Branching asphodel grows wild in Ireland—not, I believe, in England—and classical poetry is, of course, full of it, though it puts the stiff and stately thing to strange uses. Poets who, as it was freely declared, reclined upon beds of asphodel and moly had not found out the best sites in the Elysian Fields. No flower, however, more eloquently reports the South. I never see mine, whose seed I collected on the Acropolis at Athens, but I remember the Pont du Gard, and the sharp smell of the box-bushes, or Greece, where it clouds the slopes of Hymettus with pink, and burns brown against the sky as you labour up the winding path to Acrocorinth. It will do in England, and do well, if you can secure it sun and drouth.
Our own name for the wild daffodil is Lent Lily, a beautiful and sufficient one, and, to judge by the poets again, the plant has been well distributed. Shakespeare saw it in Warwickshire, and Herrick in Devon; Clare in Northamptonshire, and Wordsworth in the Lakes. Mr. Housman knows it in Salop, and Mr. Masefield in Worcestershire. I know that it is in Sussex and Cornwall, and on the edges of the New Forest. It may be in North Wilts, almost certainly is in the upper Thames Valley; but it is not here, to the best of my belief. I imagine that it does not care for chalk, for though I make it do, it does not thrive, that is, spread itself. Rather, it degenerates, as it used in Kent, where I lived as a boy, and in two or three years turned itself into the old “greenery-yallery” mophead which, whatever Parkinson may say, is not a true variety at all but a bad kind of recidivist. Now, my expert friend, Mr. George Engleheart, who lives across the hills, but on loam, grows daffodils which are a wonder of the realm; but the point is that his discards, which he throws into ditches or stuffs into holes to take their chance, never degenerate into doubles. His ground is a soapy yellow loam, on which you can grow any mortal thing; and a visit to his daffodil fields, as it were just now, is an experience which I have had and promise myself again. All the same, honesty moves me to say—miror magis! He, of course, is a scientist who has grown grey in the pursuit, and I am a sciolist. The beautiful things whose minute differences of hue and measurement are of such moment to him; the nicety of the changes which you can ring upon perianth and calyx—such modulations do not, in my judgment, give the thrill or sudden glory which flowers growing freely and in masses give me: such a thrill as you get from Poet’s Narcissus in a Swiss pasture, or such as Wordsworth’s sister, and then Wordsworth, had from the wind-caught drift of daffodils in Gowbarrow Park; or such as I had in an orchard in North Cornwall, where, as it seemed, under a canopy of snow and rose some god at a picnic had spilled curds and whey all over the sward. The flowers were so thick together as to be distinguishable only as colour: they streamed in long rivers of yellow and white down the hill. My description is less poetical than literal. The things looked eatable, they were so rich.
If you can get such a thrill on your own ground it is by the grace of God. Mr. Engleheart does not grow bulbs for the thrills of the unscientific, though no doubt he has some of his own. But there is one glory of the unskilled and another of the skilled—indeed, the latter has two, for as well as the pure delight of having “pulled off” a delicate bit of cross-breeding, there is added the hope of gain. Your new daffodil should be a gold-mine, and rightly so, because it may represent the work, the thought, and the anxieties of seven years or even more. I heard of a grower once who, at the season of distribution, had his bulbs out upon his studio table, where they were being sorted, priced and bestowed. In one heap he had certain triumphs of science which were worth, I was told, £90 the bulb. From that point of bliss you could run down through the pounds to the shillings and bring up finally upon the articles which went out at ten shillings a hundred, or even less. There then they lay out, “so many and so many and such glee.” And then, O then—“a whirl blast,” as Wordsworth says, “from behind the hill” swept in at the open door, lifted all the sheets of paper and their freight together, and scattered the priced bulbs higgledy-piggledy on the floor. There was tragic work! Bang went all your ninety pounders; for a bulb in the hand may be worth a thousand on the floor.
One of those unaccountable facts in entomology which are always cropping up in gardening has much exercised my learned friend. Although he has never imported a bulb, nevertheless into his bulb-farm there has imported itself the daffodil parasite—out of the blue, or the black. He showed it me one day, a winged beast somewhere in appearance between a wasp and a hoverfly. I saw bars upon its body, and short wings which looked as if they were made of talc. This creature has a lues for laying its eggs in the daffodil bulb, and to do so pierces it through and through. Last of all the bulb dies also. There seems to be no remedy but pursuit, capture and death. Just so have the figs at Tarring called up the beccafico from Italy. Can these things be, without our special wonder?
To grow and bring to flower every daffodil you put in the ground is not what I call gardening. Reasonable treatment will ensure it, for the flower is in the bulb before you plant it. As well might you buy from the florist things in full bud, plunge them into your plots, and call that gardening. Yet it is the gardening of the London parks, and of certain grandees, who ought to know better. If you are graced by nature or art to make daffodils feel themselves at home, you are in the good way. Wisley is so graced; not, I think, Kew. At Wisley they have acclimatised those two charming narcissi, bulbocodium and cyclamineus, which really carpet the ground. When I was last there they were all over the paths, in the ditches, and in the grass. I daresay they required drastic treatment, for Wisley, after all, was made for man, and not for daffodils. Yet if Wisley were my garden, I know that I should be so flattered by the confidence of those pretty Iberians that I should let them do exactly as they pleased. If a plant chose to make itself a weed, I would as readily allow it as I would a weed which chose to make itself a plant—within reason. I add that qualification, that tyrant’s plea, because I have just remembered what occurred when I was once rash enough to introduce Mulgedium alpinum from Switzerland. There is no shaking off that insatiable succubus. I was reconciled to giving up a garden on its account, and full of hope that I should never see it again. But I brought with me a peony and some phloxes, and Mulgedium was coiled about their vitals like a tapeworm. It is with me to this hour.