Of Primrose love on St. Valentine”—
though the time of its flowering probably has to do with that. But among the many strange and unpleasant things which have been used in the flavouring of love philtres saffron does not appear to have had a place.
It has been used for many other things. “The crocus rayed with gold” is among the flowers which crown Sophocles’ “mighty goddess.” The Greeks also, we know, reckoned it among perfumes. Aristophanes, in The Clouds, has a somewhat unquotable line on the subject. Among the Easterns it was held a choice spice: “Spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes,” were the spices that were to flow out from the garden of the Beloved in The Song of Solomon. One old authority held it to be the food of the fairies, and the humans in his day held it in high esteem. But now it is fallen from its high estate, and, though the County Council or some other body might still prosecute a man for selling adulterated saffron, it would be disinterested philanthropy, and bear no resemblance to the burning of offenders at Nuremberg in the fifteenth century for a similar offence. In Persia it is still much used as a condiment; in a less degree in Spain; in Holland one finds it flavouring rice boiled with milk; here in England it lingers still in the saffron cakes of Cornwall, otherwise it plays small part, except as a food-colouring matter. For that it seems to have been in use in Shakespeare’s time. The clown, who has so many things to buy for Perdita’s shearing feast, ticks it off among the rest: “I must have saffron,” he says, “to colour the warden pies.” And we, though we have lost the receipt for warden pies, still use saffron to colour our cookery. Especially is this the case in Russia, where the law holds that all food-colouring must be vegetable,—a singular law, when one comes to think that all the alkaloid poisons are of vegetable origin, and for real nastiness it is hard to beat some of the dyes of Nature’s providing.
But it was as a drug that the saffron crocus was most greatly prized among the peoples of middle and western Europe. In the late middle ages it appears to have been much used as an eye-wash,—one feels it was fortunate folk did not have to try their eyes then as now. By Gerard’s time it was in great favour for many things; he speaks of it as making “the senses more quicke and lively, shaking off heavie and drowsie sleep, and making a man merrie.” “It is a herb of the Sun and under the Lion,” writes N. Culpeper, student of physic and astrology in 1652. “Let not above 10 grains be given at one time, for if the Sun, which is the fountain of life, may dazzle the eyes and make them blinde, a Cordial being taken in an inordinate quantity may hurt the heart instead of helping it.” This view possibly led to crocus standing in an early Victorian Language of Flowers for “excess,” or—in the generous way that one small flower might then be interpreted to mean a whole phrase—“beware of excess of love.” But it is more than as a cordial for the heart that N. Culpeper regards saffron: “It quickens the brain,” he says, “for the Sun is exalted in Aries, as well as he hath his house in the Dragon head, it helps the Consumption of the Lungs and difficulty of breathing, it is an excellent thing in epidemical diseases, as Pestillence, Small Pox, and Measles; it is an excellent expulsive medicine and a notable remedy for the Yellow Jaundice.” More than this can hardly be asked of one plant. After it the humble snowdrop is a mere nobody.
The snowdrop may, with justice, be called humble, certainly it has a much better right to the title than the violet. Gerard, by the way, speaks of it as a “bulbous violet,” though there seems little resemblance between them, except the ascribed qualities of humility and retirement, which are entirely undeserved in one case. Violets like sunshine, a good position, and fat living, and, though the leaves hide the flowers in some varieties, it is of those that the scent is strongest and most betraying. It is not the fault of the plant if it is suffered to “blush unseen.” But snowdrops really do like retirement and poor ground. In Holland they decline entirely to grow in the open in fields or gardens, and they cannot thrive, really cannot live, in manure and all fat soil. All the snowdrop bulbs which are raised in Holland are grown under hedges or in orchards, where the roots of the trees impoverish the ground and take from it what the little bulbs dislike. Mostly they are grown by the smaller growers, who sell them to the big ones in their immediate neighbourhood. It is possibly this preference for overgrown places and neglected soil which has made snowdrops flourish and increase so in the orchards and overgrown gardens of old monasteries. It has been suggested that it is because they were planted there in such abundance in the old days when they were sacred to the Virgin, and were used to strew her altars on the Feast of the Purification,—when they, the Fair Maids of February, as they were called, were the only maids who had any right within those walls. But since they flourish equally well in old shrubberies and orchards unconnected with monasteries and monastic history, it looks rather as if soil and situation has a good deal to do with it too.
A CROCUS FIELD
They have long been grown in Holland. The old Dutch name was Somer Sottekens, though what it means I have not been able to discover. Somer, no doubt, is another form of “Zomer” (summer), though snowdrops no more then than now bloomed nor yet were planted in summer; Sottekens remains, to me at least, a mystery. The first snowdrops came from Germany and Hungary, and the later blooming sort from Constantinople. In Parkinson’s day there was no talk of them being native to England. They had not been in the country long enough to have increased and naturalised themselves, as they have in some districts now. Undisturbed, in both England and Holland they increase rapidly, by offsets, according to the usual bulb habit; if they like the situation, often forming clumps twenty or thirty strong, and continuing to grow in land that has long gone out of cultivation.
In England the flower is not so much admired as it used to be, when it—
Chaste snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,