The prettiest thing that a narcissus ever did was done to an old lady I used to know who lived in a cottage in Sussex. Somebody had given her half-a-dozen Jonquil bulbs, which she planted and left alone. They took kindly to her and her cottage garden, and seeded all over it. When I came to know her, the little patch of ground, the dividing ditch, the bank beyond it, and some of the arable beyond that were golden with jonquils; and on days of sun-warmed wind you could smell them from afar. As, with trifling exceptions, it is the sweetest and most carrying scent in the garden, that is not surprising. Hawthorn is such another. Somewhere in Hakluyt’s Voyages is an account of the return of an embassy from the Court of Boris Godounov. The sailors knew that they were near Sussex before they could see the white cliffs by the smell of the may wafted over sea. What a welcome home!
WINDFLOWERS
“Anemones, which droop their eyes
Earthward before they dare arise
To flush the border....”
says the poet, and says truly, for I believe there is no exception to his general statement. The point is really one in the argument between the gardeners and the botanists, as to whether you are to reckon hepaticas as anemones. I shall come to that presently, and here will only point out that hepaticas do not droop their eyes, or hang their heads, as I prefer to say. Let that be remembered when the scientist tries, as he is so fond of doing, to browbeat the mild Arcadian. Except for that remark I don’t call to mind that the poets have sung about the windflowers. None of them has likened his young woman to a windflower. Meleager, indeed, when he is paying a compliment to his Zenophile, pointedly leaves it out.
“Now bloom white violets, now the daffodils