Virtually unknown, except to the scientific, in America, where it has never been native, the ordinary or Scottish variety of heather, wherever seen, has been largely imported by the sons and daughters of Scotland. Heather is now found sporadic on the Atlantic Coast from Newfoundland to New Jersey. More welcome than the thistle, in which many hillsides of Scotland “are very fertile,” as Dr. Johnson remarks, the heather has brought beauty to the eye and charm to the landscape, instead of calamity, as in Australia, where it “is nigh unto cursing, whose end is to be burned.”
As for usefulness, the heather to the Scots is almost what the bamboo is to the Japanese, in its myriad applications to rural purposes. It is, first of all, to the women, a broom plant. The largest stalks are made into a broom; or, as the Scotch say, the “besom,” which readers of Isaiah associate chiefly with destruction. The shorter stems are tied into bundles that serve as brushes. It is Scotch humor that calls a low, worthless woman a “besom,” while the proverb declares that “there is little to the rake to get, after the besom.” The long trailing shoots of the heather are woven into baskets. Dug up with the peat about its roots, the “cling heath” not only makes good fuel, but it often supplies the only material for heating and cooking that can be obtained on the dry moors.
In primitive days, the “shealings,” or huts of the Highlanders, were constructed of heath stems connected together with peat mud, and worked into a kind of mortar, with dry grass or straw. Even to-day hunting-lodges, temporary sheds, and cattle houses are often built in the same way and roofed with the same plant. The luxurious bed of the ancient Gael was made by spreading the heather on the floor or bunk, with its flowers upward, making a soft and springy mattress. To-day, many a deer-stalker, hill shepherd, or tramping tourist is glad to make bedding of the same material. In former times, before Scotland had become almost a synonym for whiskey and her glens for distilleries, the young shoots were used in brewing, as a substitute for hops, while for tanning material they have always served.
After the heather ripens, the seeds remain a long time in the capsules, and furnish food to serve all kinds of birds, but especially to the red grouse, which finds here the major portion of its sustenance. The tender tops yield a large part of the winter fodder of the hill flocks; for, when the mountain grasses and rushes are no longer luscious or accessible, the sheep will perforce crop the heather. This fact is the basis of one of those cherished notions, which local pride, especially when “there’s money in it,”—and of like nature all over the world,—has so generously furnished. It is a notion, almost dangerous in some localities to dispute, that the fine flavor of Scotch mutton comes from the sheep’s diet of heather tops, which menu, however, exists much more largely in popular imagination than in actual reality.
Despite the pressure of the trade and the demand for the daily square miles of newspaper stock required for an insatiable reading public, manufacturers have not yet been able to make heather stalks compete with other materials in making paper. The stalks are not sufficiently fibrous for this special purpose.
Two of the four hundred and twenty known species of heather yield great store of honey, furnishing a plentiful supply to the bees in moorland districts. To secure a good crop, thousands of hives are annually transported to the moors during heather-blossom time. It is highly probable that from this honey the ancient Picts brewed the mead, said by Boethius to have been made from the flowers themselves.
In the long stretch of the æons and centuries, through the alchemy of sun and water, the heather has deposited the peat which to-day serves for fuel, and of which recent science has, with the aid of molasses, made food for horses and cattle.
Of the known species of the genus Erica, most are native to the south of Africa, but the British Isles produce seven species, of which some have been found only in Ireland. The heather “bells,” so often alluded to in British song, are the flowers of the cross-leaved and the five-leaved heather. Apart from song, these blooms flourish in the field of rhetoric and conversation sparkles with references to them. “To take to the heather” is a euphemism for absconding. To be “on one’s own native heather” is to be at home. “The heather has taken fire” when a man is in passion, an orator is eloquent, or the populace is in anger.
The heather, or “heath,” as many natives call it, has its own inhabitants. The little sandpiper is called the “heather peeper.” Then there is the heath fowl, or moor hen,—its young being called the “heath polt,” or pullets,—and the “black grouse” is her husband. According to Thompson, in his “Seasons,”—
“O’er the trackless waste