Part 5

THE Romans used the word _Topiarius_ for their ornamental gardener, and one of his chief duties—the _Ars topiaria_ in fact—was to cut the shrubs, and especially box-trees, into figures of ships, animals, and names. There is a well-known passage in one of the letters of the younger Pliny, in which, while speaking of his garden, he describes “a sort of terrace, embellished with various figures, and bounded with a box-hedge, from which you descend by an easy slope, adorned with the representation of divers animals in box answering alternately to each other, into a lawn overspread with the soft, I had almost said the liquid, acanthus: this is surrounded by a walk, enclosed with tonsile evergreens, shaped into a variety of forms. Beyond it is the _gestatio_ [a sort of avenue in which to take exercise] laid out in the form of a circus, ornamented in the middle with box cut in numberless different figures, together with a plantation of shrubs prevented by the shears from running up too high; the whole is fenced in with a wall, covered by box, rising by different ranges to the top.” Further on he says, “Having passed through these several winding alleys, you enter a straight walk, which breaks out into a variety of others, divided off by box-hedges. In one place you have a little meadow; in another the box is cut into a thousand different forms, sometimes into letters expressing the name of the master, sometimes that of the artificer, whilst here and there little obelisks rise intermixed alternately with fruit-trees.”[9] Martial too gives a curious illustration of the _Ars topiaria_. A grove of Plane trees was adorned with _topiarian_ wild beasts,—among them a bear; a young boy thrust his hand into the bear’s wide mouth, and a viper hiding there stung him to death. What a misfortune, adds Martial, that the bear had not been a real one. This _Ars topiaria_ had been for some time in fashion in England when Addison first attacked it in the _Spectator_ of June 25th, 1712: “Our British gardeners, on the contrary, instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but, for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure.”

But this is nothing to the denunciation by Pope, which may be found in the _Guardian_ of September 29th, 1713. It is extremely humorous. He declares that

“A citizen is no sooner proprietor of a couple of yews, but he entertains the thought of erecting them into giants, like those of Guildhall. I know an eminent cook, who beautified his country-seat with a coronation dinner in greens, where you see the champion flourishing on horseback at one end of the table, and the queen in perpetual youth at the other. For the benefit of all my loving countrymen of this curious taste, I shall here publish a catalogue of greens to be disposed of by an eminent town gardener, who has lately applied to me on this head. He represents, that for the advancement of a politer sort of ornament in the villas and gardens adjacent to this great city, and in order to distinguish those places from the more barbarous countries of gross nature, the world stands much in need of a virtuoso gardener, who has a turn for sculpture, and is thereby capable of improving upon the ancients in his imagery of evergreens. I proceed to his catalogue:

“Adam and Eve in Yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the Tree of Knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the Serpent very flourishing.

“Noah’s Ark in Holly, the ribs a little damaged for want of water.

“The Tower of Babel, not yet finished.

“St. George in Box, his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to stick the Dragon by next April.

“A green Dragon of the same, with a tail of ground-ivy for the present. N.B. These two not to be sold separately.

“Edward the Black Prince in Cypress.

“A Laurustine Bear in blossom, with a Juniper Hunter in berrie.

“A pair of Giants stunted; to be sold cheap.”

And there are various other lots equally remarkable and interesting.

But the _topiarian_ art has never been either scolded or laughed entirely out of existence, and we all remember how many years later when Lovel first visits “The Antiquary” he found the house of Monkbarns “surrounded by tall clipped hedges of yew and holly, some of which still exhibited the skill of the _topiarian_ artist, and presented curious arm-chairs, towers, and the figures of St. George and the Dragon. The taste of Mr. Oldbuck did not disturb these monuments of an art now unknown, and he was the less tempted so to do, as it must necessarily have broken the heart of his old gardener.”

NOTE III.

A POET’S FLOWER-BED.

THE quaintest of all devices in flower-beds was the one which Mrs. Browning—then Elizabeth Barrett—made for herself when a child. In after years she told the story of it in a poem, and I venture to extract some stanzas, as they may not be known to all my readers, and as they illustrate my subject rather curiously. Hope End, where Miss Barrett lived, and where this “Hector” flowered, was once well known to me. Crossing the Malvern Hills on the Herefordshire side, and passing the Colwall valley, you find the ground sloping up again into a little ridge. Here, hidden away in a side valley, was the strange-looking house, with Moorish pinnacles. Here was the pond where “little Ellie” found the “swan’s nest among the reeds.” And here the young girl of nine years old, who had already drunken so deeply of “the wine of Cyprus” formed her garden-bed in the shape of her hero Hector, while a laurel stood on a mound close by, and the birds sung in an old pear-tree which cast soft shadows on the ground:

“In the garden, lay supinely A huge giant, wrought of spade! Arms and legs were stretched at length, In a passive giant strength,— And the meadow turf, cut finely, Round them laid and interlaid.

“Call him Hector, son of Priam! Such his title and degree. With my rake I smoothed his brow; Both his cheeks I weeded through: But a rhymer such as I am Scarce can sing his dignity.

“Eyes of gentianellas azure, Staring, winking at the skies; Nose of gillyflowers and box; Scented grasses, put for locks— Which a little breeze, at pleasure, Set a-waving round his eyes.

“Brazen helm of daffodillies, With a glitter toward the light; Purple violets, for the mouth, Breathing perfumes west and south; And a sword of flashing lilies, Holden ready for the fight.

“And a breastplate, made of daisies, Closely fitting, leaf by leaf; Periwinkles interlaced, Drawn for belt about the waist; While the brown bees, humming praises, Shot their arrows round the chief.”

NOTE IV.

THE EVENING PRIMROSE.

I WONDER whether the Evening Primrose is as much grown and cared for as it deserves to be. It is an American plant, but is now found wild in several parts of England, notably at Formby, among the Lancashire sand hills, where tradition says it originally came from a vessel wrecked on that barren coast. It is mentioned little, if at all, by our old botanists, and our more modern poets have for the most part passed it carelessly by. Southey, however, alludes to it in his well-remembered lines to the bee, that was still at work, after the Cistus flowers had fallen and “the Primrose of Evening was ready to burst.” Keats, too, has a striking passage about the Evening Primrose, which I quote a little further on, for I may perhaps make a few extracts from an article I lately wrote in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ on “The Garden at Nightfall,” as I have no better words in which to describe the beauty and charm of these Œnotheras. The question arising from the veins of flowers I have already mentioned in _The English Flower Garden_.

“I have two varieties of Œnotheras or Evening Primroses, and they are in their full glory to-night. One is the large flowering yellow Œnothera, which grows from five to six feet high, and which opens its yellow blossoms night after night from early summer to late autumn. It is a curious sight to see the blossoms begin to open. I had been in the garden shortly after six, and the yellow buds were still folded within the calyx. Watching closely, you saw the petals give a sudden start—they half release themselves—and by degrees open out fully into the blossom, which will last till morning, but begins to fade after the sun has dried up the dews of night. Keats, whose accurate observation of flowers is often very remarkable, speaks of

‘A tuft of evening primroses O’er which the mind may hover till it dozes; O’er which it well might take a pleasant sleep But that ’tis _ever startled by the leap Of buds into ripe flowers_.’

But more beautiful still than the yellow Œnotheras is the white _Œnothera taraxicifolia_, the evening primrose of the dandelion leaf. I have a bed of standard roses which I have carpeted entirely with this Œnothera. It grows low to the ground, and its leaves, which are deeply serrated, cover the bed. In the daytime there are the relics of the last night’s harvest of blossom, but the flowers look faded, and soon get a pink flush over the white—after which they wither away. But to-night the fresh blooms are out, and I count from sixty to seventy of them, like stars, some in clusters and some gleaming singly from the mass of deep foliage. There is, it almost seems to me, a positive light about them which no other white flower has, not even the Eucharis or the Christmas rose. And then the blossoms are so large when fully open—at least three inches across the petals. This Œnothera is from Chili, but the yellow one comes from North America; and a smaller yellow one, also from North America, may be found naturalized and now quite wild in one or two places in England. The name Œnothera (properly, I suppose, Œnothēra) is said to have been given because the root smelt of wine; but if it is uncertain what the Greek Œnothera really was, certainly no old Greek could know anything of these beautiful blossoms of our Western night.

“Sir John Lubbock says that the evening primrose is probably fertilized by moths, and it would seem at first sight most likely that this should be the case. To-night—for the air, as I have said, is quite still and warm—is just the night that I should expect the moths to be at work; but after long waiting near a large yellow Œnothera (the one plant had forty blooms), I did not see one single moth. I returned to the bed of _Œnothera taraxicifolia_, and again I could see no moth of any kind. Meanwhile, a little further off, among a bed of white Mediterranean heath, which is just as much in flower by day as it is now, there are several of these wanderers of the night—little brown moths of (I think) two different varieties. There and there alone, and not among the large open blossoms of the Œnotheras, or among the delicate tufts of night-scented stock, were the moths busily engaged. Why, then, do these night-flowers—if it be not to attract night insects, and so get fertilized—expand their petals as evening falls? We have, I suspect, a good deal yet to learn on these matters. Even the two Œnotheras are very unlike in several respects. The seed-vessel of the _Œnothera taraxicifolia_ is at the end of a long tube, some seven inches in length, down which runs the stalk or style of the pistil, and within this tube I have constantly found little black flies and grains of pollen. Moreover, the pistil and the stamens of this Œnothera are as nearly as possible the same length; so that even before the flower has opened, a stigma or head of the pistil has got well dusted over with the pollen of the stamens.

“In the case of the large yellow Œnothera the pistil stands out above the stamens, and I suppose it could not be fertilized except by the wind or (more probably) by insects. The tube that leads to the seed-vessel is here only about two inches long, and is not smooth but hairy, so that insects would hardly pass down. Somehow or other, however, the yellow Œnothera bears seed much more certainly and abundantly than the white one. I must add that the veins in both Œnotheras, and especially in the white one, are very strongly marked; so that a theory which carries the high sanction of Sir John Lubbock, that veins are guides to the honey of a flower, and that they do not exist in night-opening flowers, as they would be unseen by night and therefore useless, can hardly, I imagine, be maintained.”

I believe it is now pretty well ascertained that the Œnothēra of the ancients was the small Willow-herb (_Epilobium roseum_), which in my own garden is the most familiar of weeds.

Pliny describes it as having exhilarating properties in wine, as having leaves like those of the Almond-tree, a rose-coloured flower, many branches, and a long root, which, when dried, has a vinous smell, and an infusion of which has a soothing effect on wild beasts.

In Baptista Porta’s curious _Phytognomonica_ (published at the end of the sixteenth century) he says,—speaking no doubt of this same Epilobium,—that the dried root of the Œnothēra smells of wine; given as a drink it soothes wild beasts and makes them tame, and rubbed on the worst wounds it serves to heal them.

NOTE V.

THE CHRISTMAS ROSE.

THE Christmas Rose is certainly one of the most valuable of flowers, but it is a little capricious, growing luxuriantly in one place, and in another gradually dwindling off. With me it is always successful, and one secret may be that the roots are never allowed to be disturbed. This beautiful flower has rather weird associations. It is the Black Hellebore of Pliny, and was used as a poison and in incantations. Spenser plants it with the “dead sleeping poppy” and all other sad and poisonous herbs in the garden of Proserpina. Often, however, it was valued for its medicinal qualities, and was occasionally, we are told, made use of by literary people for the purpose of sharpening up their intellects. Gerard says that “Black Hellebore is good for mad and furious men, for melancholike, dull, and heavie persons, for those that are troubled with the falling sickness, for lepers, for them that are sicke of quartaine ague, and briefly for all those that are troubled with blacke choler, and molested with melancholie.” Cowley, too, has a curious poem, in which the Christmas-flower (as he calls it) speaks, and boasts that, alone of flowers, Winter “still finds me on my guard,” though the ground is “covered thick in beds of snow,” and then it sounds its triumphs over all sorts of ills, physical and mental:

“I do compose the mind’s distracted frame, A gift the gods and I alone can claim.”

Old Dr. Darwin, in his _Loves of the Plants_, has a scientific interest of quite another kind in the Christmas Rose:

“Bright as the silvery plume, or pearly shell, The snow-white rose, or lily virgin bell, The fair Helleboras attractive shone, Warmed every Sage, and every Shepherd won,”

but, when the seed-vessel begins to swell,

“Each roseate feature fades to livid green.”

He adds, in a note, that “The _Helleborus niger_, or Christmas Rose, has a large beautiful white flower, adorned with a circle of tubular two-lipp’d nectaries. After impregnation the flower undergoes a remarkable change, the nectaries drop off, but the white corol remains, and gradually becomes quite green. This curious metamorphose of the corol, when the nectaries fall off, seems to show that the white juice of the corol were before carried to the nectaries for the purpose of producing honey, because, when these nectaries fall off, no more of the white juice is secreted in the corol, but it becomes green, and degenerates into a calyx.”

Dr. Darwin’s theory may or may not be strictly accurate, but his observation of facts is certainly undoubted.

In one of Keats’s early poems he notices the Hellebore’s curving leaf,

“As the leaves of Hellebore Turn to whence they sprung before, And beneath each ample curl Peeps the richness of a pearl!”

But if poets know how to describe a Christmas Rose, there are others who do not. A horticultural book just published, says—and the description is a curiosity—that in the month of January, “in our garden, on the hillside, the Christmas Rose is the sweetest and prettiest thing to show. Its petals are weak and pale; its perfume is very faint; if you gather it, the leaves presently fall off, and the flower is destroyed. Leave it in the hedge, when it is almost the only thing to gladden the eye:

“The Christmas Rose, the last flower of the year, Comes when the holly berries glow and cheer— When the pale snowdrops rise from the earth, So white and spirit-like ’mid Christmas mirth.”

I wish the writer would show me this curious Christmas Rose, which grows in a hedge, and has weak petals and a faint perfume, and is spirit-like! What can it be? and who _could_ have written these very unmelodious lines?

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