Curiously enough the one which comes first to my mind is a plant universally despised and disliked by the common people and, for all I know to the contrary, by the people who are not common: they speak of it as a "weed" and a "nuisance"; nor is it a spring or summer flower but blooms in midwinter. It is already coming out now and before the middle of January will be in full bloom. This is the sweet-scented colt's-foot, sometimes called winter heliotrope, on account both of the purple colour and powerful scent of the flower. The books say that it smells of vanilla, also that the plant is an alien, but when introduced they do not say. The Victorian History of Cornwall does not mention such a plant. I have looked at the MS. work of John Rolfe (1878) on the plants of West Cornwall, in the Penzance Library, but he does not tell us how long ago it ran wild in this district. It flourishes greatly at Penzance, St. Ives and many of the neighbouring villages, rooting itself in the stone hedges and covering them entirely with a marvellously beautiful garment of round, disc-shaped, flat leaves, of all sizes from that of a crown piece to that of a dessert plate, all of the most vivid green in nature. The flowers, of a dim lilac-purple, are on thick straight stems which spring directly from the roots, and, like sweet violets, they are mostly hidden by the luxuriant leaves. The leaves, which come in winter and spring, last pretty well all the year round, and the roots, the gardeners say, are enormous, and as they push through the crevices and wind themselves about among the stones it is impossible to get rid of the plant.
One of the prettiest scenes I witnessed in West Cornwall is associated with this plant. I saw a girl of about seventeen, small for her age and of a slim figure, come out of a cottage door and walk down to the little garden gate just as I came abreast of it. At the gate was a little foot-bridge over a stream which rushed by with a good deal of noise and foam over the rocks in its bed. The stone hedges and detached masses of rock on both sides of the bridge were covered over with an enormous growth of colt's-foot, the plants flowing over into the stream and even covering some of the big boulder stones in it. That was the setting and the girl was worthy of it, standing there, fresh from the wash-tub, her arms bare to the shoulders, in her thin blue cotton gown, regarding me with lively inquisitive eyes. She had the double attraction of prettiness and singularity. It was a Cornish face, healthy but colourless as in the majority of the women, very broad, high cheek-bones; but it differed in the fineness of the features and in the pointed chin which together with the large eyes gave it that peculiar interesting cat-like form seen in some pretty women, and which is so marked in a well-known portrait of Queen Mary at Holyrood. The large eyes were of the greyish-blue colour so common in this district, with large pupils and that deepening of colour at the outer edge of the iris which takes the appearance of a black ring. These ringed blue eyes are sometimes seen in other counties but are most common in the part of Cornwall where I have observed the people. Finally in strange contrast with the large blue eyes her hair was black and being unbound the wind was blowing it all about her face and neck.
I stopped to talk to the girl and had plenty of time to get my mental sketch of her. Speaking of the colt's-foot, so abundant at her own door, she told me that she had never heard it named anything but "weed." She also assured me that she hated it, and so did every one, and she could see nothing to admire in it.
At Penzance a gardener told me he had been fighting this weed all his life and that his father before him had fought with it all his life, so that it must have established itself in that place a very long time ago.
At Madron, the famous and beautiful old village on the heights above Penzance, I saw a curious thing in January, 1907. A great part of the extensive churchyard is covered with colt's-foot, and after it had come into bloom the whole of the mass of vivid green leaves was killed by the great frost I have described in chapter xv., but strange to say the flowers were not hurt. The ground was covered with the upright thick stems, crowned with their pale purple fragrant flowers, and beneath them, dead and brown and flat on the earth, lay the leaves that lately hid them with their multitudinous green discs.
One day, meeting some boys by the side of a hedge overgrown with colt's-foot, I asked them what they called the plant, and was answered by the biggest boy who knew most that it was called "rat-plant." It was named so, perhaps, because a rat could take shelter in the leaves and run very freely about among them without being seen. Or it may be that the name was bestowed to express a feeling of dislike and contempt—the idea that it was a vegetable rat, something to be warred against, dug up and if possible extirpated. It is a pleasure to me to think we can no more get rid of Petasites fragrans, alias "rat-plant," than we can of Mus decumanus itself, or Blatta orientalis, or any other of the undesirable aliens, plant or animal, which succeed in defying our best efforts to oust them.
Perhaps some of my sober-minded readers, who know the colt's-foot and have not seen its beauty, may smile at my enthusiasm even as I have smiled at my Cornish landlady's story of Billy and his enthusiasm for another species of wild flower. Billy is a youth of about twenty, son of a small farmer in one of the villages I stayed at. This, like most of the villages on this coast, receives its quota of summer visitors who come from distant inland towns, and some of these found accommodation at Billy's parents' farm. They were ladies, and Billy was greatly impressed with their beauty and affability, their dainty dresses, and the nice way in which they passed the time, strolling about, sketching, reading, lying on the turf, and sitting in picturesque attitudes on the rocks. But what perhaps interested him most was the keen pleasure they took in the common natural objects of the place, especially the wild flowers. They talked to Billy on the subject with the result that he, too, became an admirer of wild flowers, greatly to the amusement of his neighbours.
One day my landlady, going along the village street, saw Billy driving home in the farm trap with what looked like a gigantic yellow buttonhole in his coat. "Why, Billy, whatever have you got there?" she cried when he pulled the horse up to speak to her. "Flowers," said Billy. "I saw them in a cornfield, and I left the horse and went right out into the middle of the field to get them. Ain't they pretty?" And taking the bunch, the stems of which he had thrust into his top pocket, he handed it down for her to admire.
"Goodness me, boy, it's nothing but charlock!" she exclaimed.
"Yes, I know," said Billy. "And they are very pretty; just you look at them—perhaps you never knew how pretty they are." Then he added sententiously, "They are flowers, and all flowers are beautiful."