That love the rain, now lilies of the hills,”
he begins; and what lilies those could have been, unless they were lilies of the valley (which sounds absurd), I don’t know. But how could he talk about spring flowers in his country and leave anemones out? It is true, he was a Syrian; but politics don’t interest anemones. No one is to tell me that Asia Minor is without Anemone fulgens.
Fulgens is the typical Greek anemone, anyhow, as Coronaria always seems to me specifically Italian. It is a wonder of the woodlands—as of those between Olympia and Megalopolis, or of the yet denser brakes about Tatoi, where the late Constantine used to retire and meditate statecraft. Blanda, the starry purple flower of eighteen points, is commoner in the open. Nothing more beautiful than the flush of these things under the light green veil of the early year can be imagined. The gardener in England who can compass anything like it is in a good way. Luckily it is easy, for these are kindly plants, seed freely, flower in their first year, and are not so affected by climate as to change their habits to suit our calendar. Do not grow them in woods if you want them early. Our woods, in quella parte del giovinetto anno, are both cold and wet. Put them in the open, in light soil sloping to the south, and you will have as many as you want. One thing I have noticed about them is that in England fulgens is constant to its colour, whereas in Greece there are albinos, pure white and very beautiful, with black stamens. The pairing of those with the staple has produced a pink fulgens of great attractions. I have imported it, but it has not spread, and the seed of it comes up scarlet. Blanda has no sports, and is so proliferous that if it is much grown in soils that suit it very probably it will become a naturalised British subject. Here it is a weed.
Our own pair of windflowers are not nearly so easy to deal with as those two Aegean tourists. Nemorosa will only grow happily in woods, and even there does not readily transplant. Pulsatilla is subject to winter rot, as anything which lies out at nights in a fur coat must expect to be; and it reacts immediately and adversely to a rich soil. Now nemorosa grows in the fields in Germany, even in water meadows; pulsatilla in Switzerland will stand any amount of snow. But the snow in Switzerland is as dry as salt, and no flower objects to a flood when it is beginning to grow. The enemy in England is wet at the slack time. The best way to treat pulsatilla is to grow it on a steep slope, for that is how it grows itself.
Talking of nemorosa, there is a harebell blue variety of it which I have seen, but never had, and of course the yellow ranunculoides, to be met with in Switzerland, though it is not a widespread plant. I found a broad patch of it under some trees on the edge of Lake Lugano: a clear buttercup yellow, not a dirty white. I don’t call it an exciting plant, all the same, and am perfectly happy without it, and to know it the only truly yellow anemone that exists.
No offence, I hope, to the great sulphur anemone of the Alps, a noble windflower indeed. I know few things more exhilarating than to round a bluff and find a host of it in stately dance. And I know few things less so than to try to dig it up. I have devoted some hours to the pursuit, notably after a night spent at Simplon Dorf. I rose early and toiled till breakfast. I had an inefficient trowel, bought in Florence, and an alpenstock, and with them excavated some two feet of Simplon. At that depth the root of the sulphur anemone was of the thickness of a reasonable rattlesnake, and ran like the coda of a sonata, strongly, and apparently for ever. Something had to give, and it was the anemone. I coiled up what I had, brought it back with me in a knapsack, and made a home for it among my poor rocks. Nothing to speak of happened for two years, except that it let me know that it lived. Then came a Spring and a miracle. The sulphur anemone burgeoned: that is the only word for what it did. Since then it has never failed, though more than once the rocks have been rent asunder. In what goes on underground this anemone is a tree.
I do not forget—am not likely to forget—Coronaria, which in its (I must own) somewhat sophisticated form of Anemone de Caen is the glory of my blood and state in the little hanging garden I now possess. I own, it seems, the exact spot it likes. It is thoroughly at home, and proves it by flowering practically all the year round. In the dog-days, I don’t say. But who cares what happens in August? Except for that waste month—the only one in the almanac with nothing distinctive to report—I believe I have hardly failed of a handful of coronaria. Since Christmas I have not failed of a bowlful, and at this time of writing it is out in a horde. Wonderful things they are: nine inches high, four inches across, with a palette ranging from white through the pinks to red and crimson, through the lilacs to violet and the purple of night. There are few better garden flowers. Untidy? Yes, they need care. Too free with their seed? They cannot be for me. I am open to the flattery of a flower’s confidence as (still) to that of a woman’s. Another thing to its credit is its attraction for bees, with the range of tint and tinge which that involves. Your whites will be flushed with auroral rose, or clouded with violet; you will have flecks and splashes of sudden colour, the basal ring of white, whence comes its cognomen, annulata, sometimes invaded. Even the black centre with its stamens is not constant: I have one with a pale green base and stamens of yellow. With these fine things fulgens goes usefully and happily. Coronaria has no such vermilion. A bank of the two together, growing in the sun, can be seen half a mile away, and won’t look like scarlet geranium if there is a judicious admixture. To qualify that dreadful sophistication called “St. Brigid” I shall serve myself of W. S. Gilbert’s useful locution. “Nobody,” he said, “thinks more highly of So-and-so than I do; and I think he’s a little beast.”
Apennina, I think, wants a mountain. I should like to try it in some favoured ghyll in Cumberland, and some day I will. I have it on a lawn, and have had it for many years. There is no less, but no more, than there ever was. It does not seed. The two colours, china-blue and white, are delicious in partnership, though the blue is not so good as that of blanda, and the white not quite so white as nemorosa’s.
And what am I to say of hepaticas, and how écraser the botanists? Who am I to deny them with my reason—entirely satisfactory to myself—that the feeling of the two flowers is distinct and separable? What does an anemone imply? A spring woodland on a mountain slope. What an hepatica? A wet cleft in a rock, sodden last year’s leaves, ragged moss, pockmarked crust of snow—and out of them a pale star raying gold from blue. The anemone is gregarious, the hepatica solitary; the anemone is a spring flower, the hepatica a winter flower. And lastly, as a gardener, I say, the anemone can be moved, and is often much the better of it; the hepatica should not be, and is always the worse. If you plant an hepatica root and leave it alone for fifty years, you will have something worth waiting for—a ring of it as big as a cartwheel. I have not done it—but it has been done for me.