While, according to a piece of folk-lore current in East Anglia, "Wheat well-sown is half-grown." The Scotch have a proverb warning the farmer against premature sowing:—
"Nae hurry wi' your corns,
Nae hurry wi' your harrows;
Snaw lies ahint the dyke,
Mair may come and fill the furrows."
And according to another old adage we are told how:—
"When the aspen leaves are no bigger than your nail,
Is the time to look out for truff and peel."[7]
In short, it will be found that most of our counties have their items of weather-lore; many of which, whilst varying in some respect, are evidently modifications of one and the same belief. In many cases, too, it must be admitted that this species of weather-wisdom is not based altogether on idle fancy, but in accordance with recognised habits of plants under certain conditions of weather. Indeed, it has been pointed out that so sensitive are various flowers to any change in the temperature or the amount of light, that it has been noticed that there is as much as one hour's difference between the time when the same flower opens at Paris and Upsala. It is, too, a familiar fact to students of vegetable physiology that the leaves of Porleria hygrometrica fold down or rise up in accordance with the state of the atmosphere. In short, it was pointed out in the Standard, in illustration of the extreme sensitiveness of certain plants to surrounding influences, how the Haedysarums have been well known ever since the days of Linnseus to suddenly begin to quiver without any apparent cause, and just as suddenly to stop. Force cannot initiate the movement, though cold will stop it, and heat will set in motion again the suspended animation of the leaves. If artificially kept from moving they will, when released, instantly begin their task anew and with redoubled energy. Similarly the leaves of the Colocasia esculenta—the tara of the Sandwich Islands—will often shiver at irregular times of the day and night, and with such energy that little bells hung on the petals tinkle. And yet, curious to say, we are told that the keenest eye has not yet been able to detect any peculiarity in these plants to account for these strange motions. It has been suggested that they are due to changes in the weather of such a slight character that, "our nerves are incapable of appreciating them, or the mercury of recording their accompanying oscillations."
Footnotes:
1. Tylor's "Primitive Culture," 1873, i. 130.
2. See "English Folk-lore," pp. 42, 43.
3. "Primitive Manners and Customs," p. 74.
4. Dublin University Magazine, December 1873, p. 677.