Part 19

Our own name for the wild daffodil is Lent Lily, a beautiful and sufficient one, and, to judge by the poets again, the plant has been well distributed. Shakespeare saw it in Warwickshire, and Herrick in Devon; Clare in Northamptonshire, and Wordsworth in the Lakes. Mr. Housman knows it in Salop, and Mr. Masefield in Worcestershire. I know that it is in Sussex and Cornwall, and on the edges of the New Forest. It may be in North Wilts, almost certainly is in the upper Thames Valley; but it is not here, to the best of my belief. I imagine that it does not care for chalk, for though I make it do, it does not thrive, that is, spread itself. Rather, it degenerates, as it used in Kent, where I lived as a boy, and in two or three years turned itself into the old “greenery-yallery” mophead which, whatever Parkinson may say, is not a true variety at all but a bad kind of recidivist. Now, my expert friend, Mr. George Engleheart, who lives across the hills, but on loam, grows daffodils which are a wonder of the realm; but the point is that his discards, which he throws into ditches or stuffs into holes to take their chance, never degenerate into doubles. His ground is a soapy yellow loam, on which you can grow any mortal thing; and a visit to his daffodil fields, as it were just now, is an experience which I have had and promise myself again. All the same, honesty moves me to say--_miror magis!_ He, of course, is a scientist who has grown grey in the pursuit, and I am a sciolist. The beautiful things whose minute differences of hue and measurement are of such moment to him; the nicety of the changes which you can ring upon perianth and calyx--such modulations do not, in my judgment, give the thrill or sudden glory which flowers growing freely and in masses give me: such a thrill as you get from Poet’s Narcissus in a Swiss pasture, or such as Wordsworth’s sister, and then Wordsworth, had from the wind-caught drift of daffodils in Gowbarrow Park; or such as I had in an orchard in North Cornwall, where, as it seemed, under a canopy of snow and rose some god at a picnic had spilled curds and whey all over the sward. The flowers were so thick together as to be distinguishable only as colour: they streamed in long rivers of yellow and white down the hill. My description is less poetical than literal. The things looked eatable, they were so rich.

If you can get such a thrill on your own ground it is by the grace of God. Mr. Engleheart does not grow bulbs for the thrills of the unscientific, though no doubt he has some of his own. But there is one glory of the unskilled and another of the skilled--indeed, the latter has two, for as well as the pure delight of having “pulled off” a delicate bit of cross-breeding, there is added the hope of gain. Your new daffodil should be a gold-mine, and rightly so, because it may represent the work, the thought, and the anxieties of seven years or even more. I heard of a grower once who, at the season of distribution, had his bulbs out upon his studio table, where they were being sorted, priced and bestowed. In one heap he had certain triumphs of science which were worth, I was told, £90 the bulb. From that point of bliss you could run down through the pounds to the shillings and bring up finally upon the articles which went out at ten shillings a hundred, or even less. There then they lay out, “so many and so many and such glee.” And then, O then--“a whirl blast,” as Wordsworth says, “from behind the hill” swept in at the open door, lifted all the sheets of paper and their freight together, and scattered the priced bulbs higgledy-piggledy on the floor. There was tragic work! Bang went all your ninety pounders; for a bulb in the hand may be worth a thousand on the floor.

One of those unaccountable facts in entomology which are always cropping up in gardening has much exercised my learned friend. Although he has never imported a bulb, nevertheless into his bulb-farm there has imported itself the daffodil parasite--out of the blue, or the black. He showed it me one day, a winged beast somewhere in appearance between a wasp and a hoverfly. I saw bars upon its body, and short wings which looked as if they were made of talc. This creature has a _lues_ for laying its eggs in the daffodil bulb, and to do so pierces it through and through. Last of all the bulb dies also. There seems to be no remedy but pursuit, capture and death. Just so have the figs at Tarring called up the _beccafico_ from Italy. Can these things be, without our special wonder?

To grow and bring to flower every daffodil you put in the ground is not what I call gardening. Reasonable treatment will ensure it, for the flower is in the bulb before you plant it. As well might you buy from the florist things in full bud, plunge them into your plots, and call _that_ gardening. Yet it is the gardening of the London parks, and of certain grandees, who ought to know better. If you are graced by nature or art to make daffodils feel themselves at home, you are in the good way. Wisley is so graced; not, I think, Kew. At Wisley they have acclimatised those two charming narcissi, _bulbocodium_ and _cyclamineus_, which really carpet the ground. When I was last there they were all over the paths, in the ditches, and in the grass. I daresay they required drastic treatment, for Wisley, after all, was made for man, and not for daffodils. Yet if Wisley were my garden, I know that I should be so flattered by the confidence of those pretty Iberians that I should let them do exactly as they pleased. If a plant chose to make itself a weed, I would as readily allow it as I would a weed which chose to make itself a plant--within reason. I add that qualification, that tyrant’s plea, because I have just remembered what occurred when I was once rash enough to introduce _Mulgedium alpinum_ from Switzerland. There is no shaking off that insatiable succubus. I was reconciled to giving up a garden on its account, and full of hope that I should never see it again. But I brought with me a peony and some phloxes, and _Mulgedium_ was coiled about their vitals like a tapeworm. It is with me to this hour.

The prettiest thing that a narcissus ever did was done to an old lady I used to know who lived in a cottage in Sussex. Somebody had given her half-a-dozen Jonquil bulbs, which she planted and left alone. They took kindly to her and her cottage garden, and seeded all over it. When I came to know her, the little patch of ground, the dividing ditch, the bank beyond it, and some of the arable beyond that were golden with jonquils; and on days of sun-warmed wind you could smell them from afar. As, with trifling exceptions, it is the sweetest and most carrying scent in the garden, that is not surprising. Hawthorn is such another. Somewhere in Hakluyt’s _Voyages_ is an account of the return of an embassy from the Court of Boris Godounov. The sailors knew that they were near Sussex before they could see the white cliffs by the smell of the may wafted over sea. What a welcome home!

WINDFLOWERS

“Anemones, which droop their eyes Earthward before they dare arise To flush the border....”

says the poet, and says truly, for I believe there is no exception to his general statement. The point is really one in the argument between the gardeners and the botanists, as to whether you are to reckon hepaticas as anemones. I shall come to that presently, and here will only point out that hepaticas do _not_ droop their eyes, or hang their heads, as I prefer to say. Let that be remembered when the scientist tries, as he is so fond of doing, to browbeat the mild Arcadian. Except for that remark I don’t call to mind that the poets have sung about the windflowers. None of them has likened his young woman to a windflower. Meleager, indeed, when he is paying a compliment to his Zenophile, pointedly leaves it out.

“Now bloom white violets, now the daffodils That love the rain, now lilies of the hills,”

he begins; and what lilies those could have been, unless they were lilies of the valley (which sounds absurd), I don’t know. But how could he talk about spring flowers in his country and leave anemones out? It is true, he was a Syrian; but politics don’t interest anemones. No one is to tell me that Asia Minor is without _Anemone fulgens_.

Fulgens is the typical Greek anemone, anyhow, as Coronaria always seems to me specifically Italian. It is a wonder of the woodlands--as of those between Olympia and Megalopolis, or of the yet denser brakes about Tatoi, where the late Constantine used to retire and meditate statecraft. Blanda, the starry purple flower of eighteen points, is commoner in the open. Nothing more beautiful than the flush of these things under the light green veil of the early year can be imagined. The gardener in England who can compass anything like it is in a good way. Luckily it is easy, for these are kindly plants, seed freely, flower in their first year, and are not so affected by climate as to change their habits to suit our calendar. Do not grow them in woods if you want them early. Our woods, _in quella parte del giovinetto anno_, are both cold and wet. Put them in the open, in light soil sloping to the south, and you will have as many as you want. One thing I have noticed about them is that in England fulgens is constant to its colour, whereas in Greece there are albinos, pure white and very beautiful, with black stamens. The pairing of those with the staple has produced a pink fulgens of great attractions. I have imported it, but it has not spread, and the seed of it comes up scarlet. Blanda has no sports, and is so proliferous that if it is much grown in soils that suit it very probably it will become a naturalised British subject. Here it is a weed.

Our own pair of windflowers are not nearly so easy to deal with as those two Aegean tourists. Nemorosa will only grow happily in woods, and even there does not readily transplant. Pulsatilla is subject to winter rot, as anything which lies out at nights in a fur coat must expect to be; and it reacts immediately and adversely to a rich soil. Now nemorosa grows in the fields in Germany, even in water meadows; pulsatilla in Switzerland will stand any amount of snow. But the snow in Switzerland is as dry as salt, and no flower objects to a flood when it is beginning to grow. The enemy in England is wet at the slack time. The best way to treat pulsatilla is to grow it on a steep slope, for that is how it grows itself.

Talking of nemorosa, there is a harebell blue variety of it which I have seen, but never had, and of course the yellow ranunculoides, to be met with in Switzerland, though it is not a widespread plant. I found a broad patch of it under some trees on the edge of Lake Lugano: a clear buttercup yellow, not a dirty white. I don’t call it an exciting plant, all the same, and am perfectly happy without it, and to know it the only truly yellow anemone that exists.

No offence, I hope, to the great sulphur anemone of the Alps, a noble windflower indeed. I know few things more exhilarating than to round a bluff and find a host of it in stately dance. And I know few things less so than to try to dig it up. I have devoted some hours to the pursuit, notably after a night spent at Simplon Dorf. I rose early and toiled till breakfast. I had an inefficient trowel, bought in Florence, and an alpenstock, and with them excavated some two feet of Simplon. At that depth the root of the sulphur anemone was of the thickness of a reasonable rattlesnake, and ran like the _coda_ of a sonata, strongly, and apparently for ever. Something had to give, and it was the anemone. I coiled up what I had, brought it back with me in a knapsack, and made a home for it among my poor rocks. Nothing to speak of happened for two years, except that it let me know that it lived. Then came a Spring and a miracle. The sulphur anemone burgeoned: that is the only word for what it did. Since then it has never failed, though more than once the rocks have been rent asunder. In what goes on underground this anemone is a tree.

I do not forget--am not likely to forget--Coronaria, which in its (I must own) somewhat sophisticated form of _Anemone de Caen_ is the glory of my blood and state in the little hanging garden I now possess. I own, it seems, the exact spot it likes. It is thoroughly at home, and proves it by flowering practically all the year round. In the dog-days, I don’t say. But who cares what happens in August? Except for that waste month--the only one in the almanac with nothing distinctive to report--I believe I have hardly failed of a handful of coronaria. Since Christmas I have not failed of a bowlful, and at this time of writing it is out in a horde. Wonderful things they are: nine inches high, four inches across, with a palette ranging from white through the pinks to red and crimson, through the lilacs to violet and the purple of night. There are few better garden flowers. Untidy? Yes, they need care. Too free with their seed? They cannot be for me. I am open to the flattery of a flower’s confidence as (still) to that of a woman’s. Another thing to its credit is its attraction for bees, with the range of tint and tinge which that involves. Your whites will be flushed with auroral rose, or clouded with violet; you will have flecks and splashes of sudden colour, the basal ring of white, whence comes its cognomen, annulata, sometimes invaded. Even the black centre with its stamens is not constant: I have one with a pale green base and stamens of yellow. With these fine things fulgens goes usefully and happily. Coronaria has no such vermilion. A bank of the two together, growing in the sun, can be seen half a mile away, and won’t look like scarlet geranium if there is a judicious admixture. To qualify that dreadful sophistication called “St. Brigid” I shall serve myself of W. S. Gilbert’s useful locution. “Nobody,” he said, “thinks more highly of So-and-so than I do; and _I_ think he’s a little beast.”

Apennina, I think, wants a mountain. I should like to try it in some favoured ghyll in Cumberland, and some day I will. I have it on a lawn, and have had it for many years. There is no less, but no more, than there ever was. It does not seed. The two colours, china-blue and white, are delicious in partnership, though the blue is not so good as that of blanda, and the white not quite so white as nemorosa’s.

And what am I to say of hepaticas, and how _écraser_ the botanists? Who am I to deny them with my reason--entirely satisfactory to myself--that the _feeling_ of the two flowers is distinct and separable? What does an anemone imply? A spring woodland on a mountain slope. What an hepatica? A wet cleft in a rock, sodden last year’s leaves, ragged moss, pockmarked crust of snow--and out of them a pale star raying gold from blue. The anemone is gregarious, the hepatica solitary; the anemone is a spring flower, the hepatica a winter flower. And lastly, as a gardener, I say, the anemone can be moved, and is often much the better of it; the hepatica should not be, and is always the worse. If you plant an hepatica root and leave it alone for fifty years, you will have something worth waiting for--a ring of it as big as a cartwheel. I have not done it--but it has been done for me.

TULIPS

One day short of St. Valentine’s (when Nature still takes the liberties which men used to allow themselves) I am able to announce tulips in bud in the open border, which is as much of a record as my crocuses were on the 18th of January. I don’t speak of a sheltered or fruitful valley by any means. What they may be doing with flowers at Wilton and Wilsford has no more relation to me than their goings-on at Torquay or Grange-over-Sands. Up this way, for reasons which it would be tedious to report, the spring comes slowly--as a rule. This year is like no other that I can remember, as no doubt the reckoning will be.

I know what tulip it is. There is only one which would be so heedlessly daring. It is that noble wild Tuscan flower which the people of the Mugello and thereabouts call _Occhio del Sole_, which has a sage green leaf, a long flower-stalk of maroon, and atop of that a great chalice of geranium red with yellow base and a black blotch in the midst. Looking into the depths from above there is the appearance of a lurid eye. But its real name is _Praecox_, and Parkinson says that it flowers in January. I don’t believe him. I have had it for years, and never saw it before mid-March. Parkinson is vague about tulips, classing them mostly by colour and inordinate names of his own. You may have the Crimson Prince, or Bracklar; or the Brancion Prince; or a Duke, “that is more or less faire deep red, with greater or lesser yellow edges, and a great yellow bottome.” Then there is a Testament Brancion, or a Brancion Duke; and lastly The King’s Flower, “that is, a crimson or bloud red, streamed with a gold yellow”--which ought to look indifferent well at Buckingham Palace. _Praecox_ used to grow freely in the hill country above Fiesole, always on cultivated ground; and I have found lots of it in the _poderi_ of Settignano, not so much as of the ordinary blood red, a smaller and meaner flower altogether; but enough to make a walk under the olives in very early Spring an enchantment. Ages ago Mrs. Ross sent me a hamper of them, which has lasted me ever since; for this tulip increases freely, and is invaluable as the first of its family.

The next to appear will be the little Persian _violacea_, with its crinkled wavy leaves flatlings, and the pointed bud, which gives a rose-coloured flower when open, slightly retroflexed, enough so, at least, to make it plain that the familiar ornament of Persian and Rhodian tiles was adapted from it. I always thought its name was _persica_; but Weathers, I see, makes that a bronze flower, and names _violacea_ as the earliest of all the Persians, which mine certainly is. So that, as they say, is that. I find it happiest among rocks, as all bulbs, except lilies, are if they can get there. How else secure the baking in summer which is so necessary? A pretty thing it is, in short, charming to discover for yourself in a corner of a man’s rock-garden, all the more so as you will make your discovery at a season when you least expect tulips; but there is nothing of a “sudden glory” to be had from it. Nobody could be knocked off his æsthetic perch by a Persian tulip, still less off his moral perch. I have known that done by one of the Caucasian tulips--it led to swift and stealthy work with a penknife at Kew. But that was a long time ago, and the delinquent can never do it again, for a final reason.

The loveliest tulip in the world--I speak only of natural flowers, not of nurserymen’s monsters--is, in my opinion, the little _Bandiera di Toscana_, the sword-leaved, sanguine-edged thing with the narrow bud of red and white, which opens in the sun to be a milky star. It is the loveliest, alike in colour and in habit, but one of the most fastidious. Short of lifting it, which the true gardener disdains to do, there is no certainty that it will spring up again when the time comes round. Your best chance is on rocks, I daresay; and I have succeeded with it in a border under a south wall with a pent of thatch over. It does not like frost, and abominates rain at the wrong time of year. It clings, in fact, to its Mediterranean habits, which some things contentedly lose--Iris _stylosa_, for instance, which flowers here better in November than it does in April. I have my _clusianas_--for that is their proper name--now in a terraced border, full south, under clumps of mossy saxifrage, and they do as well as can be expected. They return with the swallows, and open wide to the sun; but I am not going to pretend that they ramp. If I could afford it I would put them in a place where they could take their chance of the spade; for there is this to be said of all the Florentine tulips that, although they are not designedly lifted, they grow in a country where every square yard of ground is cultivated, and consequently are turned over by the plough of the spade every year--no doubt to their vast benefit. But you must not mind how many of them you slice, or bury upside down, or leave above ground at that work--and I _do_ mind.

The truly marvellous _Greigi_ is just showing itself: no increase there, I am sorry to say. Weathers says that it “reproduces itself freely.” Not here, O Apollo. I cannot make any Caucasian tulips have families; they are resolute Malthusians; nevertheless, I shall have my few bubbles of scarlet as before, and before they have done with me they will be as large as claret-glasses, on short stems, which are the best kind of claret-glasses. I could do with a hundred of them, but I don’t know what to give them that I have not given. They grow on limestone at home, and I give them limestone. They are never disturbed in the Caucasus, and I never disturb them. It is my distance from the equator that beats me. So I must be content with my three or four--only I shan’t boast of them to ladies from Aix-les-Bains. A tulip, by the way, which I covet, but have not so far been able to obtain, is called, I _think_, _saxatilis_. It has rather a sprawly growth, but several flowers on the stalk, and is sweetly scented. In colour it is faint and indeterminate; flushes of mauve, white and yellow. Several nurserymen offer me bulbs by that name, some have induced me to buy them; but it has never been the right thing. I may be wrong, or they may be: I must ask an expert. It may be priceless, in which case I shan’t have it. I bought some Peruvian _pseudo-crocus_ once, of a marvellous blue indeed--not a gentian, but a kingfisher blue--at seven and sixpence per bulb, and the mice, mistaking it for a real crocus, ate them all. “These are my crosses, Mr. Wesley.” But, if we are talking about money, Mrs. Ross _gave_ me a tulip once which was worth, so she told me, twenty pounds. Certainly it was very handsome, a tall Darwin of bronze feathered with gold: called _Buonarroti_. It was prolific, and in no short time filled the border in which it grew. If its sons had been worthy of their sire there might have been hundreds of pounds’ worth of them, all growing naked in the open air. But I observed that they grew paler year by year; and when I returned to the garden after a five years’ absence I could not believe that I had ever planted such a bilious tulip. My grand old _Occhi del Sole_, on the other hand, were as vivid as ever.

I have never possessed the so-called native English tulip, whose botanical name is _silvestris_; but I have seen it. I know where it grows, and blows, and could take you to the place--only I shall not. My father found it by chance, and brought a flower of it home in high feather. He found it, truly enough, in a wood, so its name describes its habits. Now, I inquire, is it an indigenous plant? It is what I doubt. If it is, it must have existed from all time; the Iberians must have grown it on their lenches, or found it lower down, in the jungle. Yet it is unknown to the poets; and the word “tulip,” remark, is a Turkish word disguised. Parkinson knows nothing of _Tulipa silvestris_. Far more probably it came from the South, in the maw of some straying bird--perhaps a hoopoo, or the hold of an adventuring ship. That was how we became possessed of the wild peony which is, or was, to be found on an island in the Severn Sea. Who is to say how that happened? Perhaps Spanish sailors had a peony growing in the after-cabin to Our Lady of Seven Dolours, and were shipwrecked with her and it on the strand of Lundy. How did two ilexes come to be growing out of the Guinigi tower at Lucca? How did a fig-tree find itself in the middle arch of the bridge at Cordova? There are more ways of accounting for a wild tulip in Kent than by imagining that God Almighty bade it grow there.