The charm of such botanizing is not alone in finding or in hoping to find some new flower: even more enduring is the pleasure that comes from the recognition of the faces of old friends in new surroundings. An April day's journey was made one long pleasure; for the swamplike ditch just below the road-bed shone golden with the intense yellow of the marsh-marigold, an old friend from my earliest childhood; and when the railway ran half-way up a hillside, I spied, amid the dead leaves of last year, the little clumps of the clustering blue hepaticas, and recognized even in those fleeting glances the singularly starry effect produced by the numerous white stamens; and as the train crossed over the creeks, that flow over rocky bottoms from out the hemlock woods, I saw in the opening up of the creek bed the June-berry trees in showers of white bloom, looking doubly white against the dark green of the hemlocks, just as I had seen them the day before in the hemlock woods of Mill Creek at my own home.
One of the keenest pleasures of the railway botanist comes from his enjoyment of the massed color of great quantities of flowers of the same kind. One morning our train was running along through the level Jersey country; it was at that wretched hour of the morning when you have just taken your place in someone else's seat while the porter is getting your own ready, and you have that all-over miserable feeling that comes from a night's ride in a stuffy sleeper. In an instant all discomfort was forgotten in the sight of a wide salt meadow which seemed one mass of the pink swamp-mallows. The gray morning mist was turned silvery white by the rising sun, and giving color to it all were the wide stretches of the flowers. It was all one shimmering mass of misty silvery-gray, sunlight radiance, and rose-color as delicate as that of the lining of some seashells.
Once again, this time on one of our home roads near Pittsburg, I felt the beauty of the color of great masses of flowers. The railway runs along about half-way up the bluffs by the side of the Beaver River; as we rounded a curve, the steep bank above me turned suddenly intensely red with the vivid color of the scarlet campion. Only those who notice most closely have any idea how rare a color in our wild flowers any shade of true red is. Nearly all the flowers that are commonly spoken of as red are in reality purplish pink or reddish lilac. Indeed I know only two wild flowers whose color is a true red. One of these is the cardinal lobelia, whose petals are of the darkest, clearest, most velvety red; and the other flower is the scarlet campion. The color of this latter is true scarlet, and the river bluff that June morning fairly glowed with its bloom. It is Holmes who compares the color of the cardinal flower to that of drops of blood new fallen from a wounded eagle's breast; but any true comparison for the color of this other flower must be founded on life, and on life when it is at its fullest of strength and of enjoyment.
Even the most ardent of car-window botanists will not claim that the only place from which the beauty of the color of flowers in mass can be appreciated is the window of a railway train. To all there come memories of fitful spring days when in long country drives they have seen partly worn-out meadows and barren hillsides turned to the softest blue-gray mist by the delicate color of countless blossoms of houstonia. And as they drove slowly along the partly dried, muddy roads of mid-April the effect of every varying phase of the spring weather on the massed color sank slowly into their consciousness. They had time to notice how blue was the color-mist lying on the sheltered meadows in the sunshine, and how coldly gray it grew as it crept up the hillsides across which the chill spring wind was blowing.
And if one lives in a country where there are chestnut ridges, one looks forward through all the spring to that one week of late June and earliest July when the chestnut trees will be in bloom. The long staminate flowers of the chestnut are a soft cream-yellow with a greenish tint; and on the ridges where the trees grow in abundance the great irregular masses of their blossoming tops do not stand out against their background of the dark green foliage of midsummer, but blend softly with it, giving to all such an indescribable effect of lightness and airiness that the whole wooded ridge seems not to be fastened securely to the earth, but to be floating cloud-like above it. During that one week of the chestnut-blossoming one stops at door or at window in the midst of the early morning work to watch for the moment when the first rays of the rising sun, falling on the cream-yellow of the chestnut tops, turn them into their own deep gold; and at the restful close of day one lingers on the doorstep through the long June twilight till their blossoming tops can no longer be distinguished from the dark foliage of the other trees in the gathering darkness.
All one's life long the pictures of old meadow lands gray-blue with the mist of the houstonias are recalled by the alternate glinting sunshine and bleak gloom of an April day; and the blossoming chestnut woods form the background to many recollections of the old home life. But these pictures which have become a part of one's inmost consciousness are scarcely more dear than that one, seen for a few moments, of the low-lying Jersey meadows flushing rose-pink with the mallows in the misty morning sunshine; or than that other 'vision of scarce a moment,' the river bluff scarlet with the flowers of the campion, seen from the windows of a railway train.
Studies in Solitude
By Fannie Stearns Gifford