EARLY MONTHS OF THE YEAR.
A ramble in search of wild-flowers in January would be pretty much 'labour in vain;' at least so far as that one special object was concerned. I do not mean to say that all nature is dead at that season, for there are mosses, lichens, and fungi to be found in abundance; but flowers, in the ordinary meaning of the word, are not to be found, unless we consider those brilliant frostwork flowers which we sometimes find as such. It was a season unusually cold for Devonshire, when, with a merry party of boys and girls, I sallied forth to see how nature looked decked in her robe of virgin white. Hill and valley were one sheet of 'innocent snow;' and every twig, leaf, and blade of grass; every spray of the furze and heath; and every broad, drooping leaf of that beautiful fern the hart's tongue (Scolopendrium vulgare), was coated with hoar-frost, and sparkling in the rosy sunbeams like the flowers in a magic garden. At Sherbrook Lake, where a rivulet of clear water usually flows along the bottom of the ravine down to the sea, there was now a hard mass of ice, on which our boys rushed for a passing slide; and above, where the deeper water lies under the shadow of the brushwood, the frost had been busy performing its frolic feats—
'And see where it has hung th' embroidered banks
With forms so various that no powers of art,
The pencil, or the pen, may trace the scene!
Here glittering turrets rise, upbearing high
(Fantastic misarrangement!) on the roof
Large growth of what may seem the sparkling trees
And shrubs of fairyland. The crystal drops,
That trickle down the branches, fast congealed,
Shoot into pillars of pellucid length,
And prop the pile they but adorned before.
Here grotto within grotto safe defies
The sunbeam; there, embossed and fretted wild,
The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes
Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain
The likeness of some object seen before.'
From the beautiful beacon cliff—to which we eagerly toil through the snow, and up and down the slippery hill-sides—we behold the sea as still and smiling as in summer, and as clearly reflecting the exquisite blue of the vault above; but each of the many little rills which the long rains preceding the frost had caused to flow over the face of the red cliffs, is now a stationary thread of silver, spell-bound by the enchaining frost; and icicles, or, as old-fashioned people call them, aglets, of three or four feet long, ornament the overhanging ledges, prone to fall to the beach—far, far below—when a thaw releases them from their present stations. But the air is so very keen that nothing but the briskness of our walk, and the enlivenment of an occasional spell of snow-balling, in which the seniors are tempted to join the juniors, prevent our stagnating into 'pellucid pillars' ourselves. So much, then, for our January ramble. The season of which I have now to speak was most different. After unusual cold, especially after snow, it is not uncommon to see an early spring appear, and so it was now, as Spenser says—
'The fields did laugh, the flowers did freshly spring,
The trees did bud, and early blossoms bore;'
and so warm was it one day towards the end of February, and the air so sweet, that I resolved on having 'Jack' and sallying forth in search of wild-flowers—not flowers of frostwork, but real spring jewels.
On this excursion, I thought it expedient to take Fanny, which, though a somewhat stubborn little beast of burden; yet so bent was I on seeing the sweet spring-like hedges and banks, that I agreed to endure Fanny; and at the given time on her I mounted, and after much persuasion, got her under-weigh: the boy George bringing up the rear.
And now on we go, Fanny rather tiresome, and George rather merciless; for when she will poke her head into the hedge, and stand stock-still to eat, or, worse still, suddenly push up against a stone-wall, to the imminent danger of crushing my foot to pieces, he thumps and pushes her till the echoes in Echo Lane reverberate with the unpoetical sound. However, on we go by degrees, and find the banks everywhere rich with fresh springing grass and deep full beds of moss, with every here and there the pale lemon-tinted petals of the primrose just peeping through the partial openings in their shrouding mantles of green; and there, above us, hangs that which I had hoped to find—the catkins of the hazel, which have been hailed by children for centuries under the names of 'Pussy-cat's tails,' or 'Baa-lamb's tails;' and a more interesting flower for examination as we pass onwards we can scarcely have, for its structure is very peculiar and beautiful. We will gather a good bunch of these pretty pendent tassel-like clusters; and see! as we break off the stems, what a shower of gold-dust is scattered over us, and flies in all directions through the air! So abundant is this yellow pollen beneath the scales of the catkins, that we shall find, if we place them in our moss-basket, that the table below them will be coated with it in the course of an hour or two. The common hazel or nut-tree affords a fine illustration of the structure of that division of plants to which most of our common European trees belong, and which, from its including the oak, is called 'the oak-tribe.' I shall not, however, expatiate on the hazel, the pride of our old copse-banks, but look beneath its long slender branches, and there, lurking modestly, do I see that pretty little yellow flower, the lesser celandine (Ficaria verna.) Every one knows this little early blossom by sight, if not by name. Its root is formed of numerous clustering tubercles, or oblong knobs, with fibres. This root is sometimes washed by the rain until these tubercles appear above ground, when, as Loudon tells us, 'ignorant people have sometimes been led to fancy that it rained wheat.' The celandine has slightly-branched stems, two or three inches in height, on which grow alternate stalked heart-shaped leaves, sheathed at the base, where they sometimes contain one or two knobs like those of the root. The flowers, which are terminal and solitary, are much like a butter-cup—of a golden yellow, and exceedingly shining within, and tinged with green on the outsides. 'After the flowre decays,' says Gerarde, 'there springeth up a little fine knop or headful of seede.' This head of seed alone is left by about May to mark where the plant grew; and even this soon dries up and disappears. Wordsworth has thrown an interest about this plant, which it would not otherwise have possessed, by his elegant little poem called The Lesser Celandine.
Here and there, also, in the more sheltered spots, we find a blossom or two of the pretty pink herb Robert (Geranium Robertianum), with its hairy red stems, and divided leaves, and star-shaped blossoms of bright rose-colour; or an early plant of the ground-ivy (Glechóma hederácea) gemming the ground with its purple, labiate flowers on the sunny bank beneath the underwood, luring one for a moment to believe that the sweet purple violets were already come: vain hope! which not only the season but the place forbids; for though I have found white violets near the scene of these excursions, in the south of England, yet I believe the sweet-scented purple do not grow in that neighbourhood. In a late ramble, there was a spot which I was eager to reach; for there I knew that I should find