JOHN-GO-TO-BED-AT-NOON

A longish name for a flower--one of its three names! After all it is not saying very much; we have another better, more familiar one with at least six names, and one of them not composed of six words like our John’s, but of ten!

When it is spring I walk in sheltered places, by wood and hedge-side, to look for and welcome the first comers. Oh those first flowers so glad to be alive and out in the sun and wind once more--their first early ineffable spring freshness, remembrancers of our lost childhood, dead and lost these many dim and sorrowful years, now recovered with the flowers, and immortal once more with spring’s immortality!

Do we not all experience a feeling something like that in an early spring walk? Even a stockbroker or stockjobber knows a primrose when he sees one, and it is a yellow primrose to him too--and something more. A something to give him a thrill. It is as if he met a fairy-like child in his walk who tossed back her shining tresses at his approach to look up into his face with eyes full of laughter.

To me they are all like that. Look at this celandine, how it shines with joy and starts up to meet you half-way, throwing its arms out for the expected caress! And here too is my dear old little white friend, the wild garlic--a whole merry crowd of them by the stone hedge; happy meeting and happy greeting! Let me stoop to caress them and inhale their warm breath. It is true there are those who don’t like it and take their nice noses away when the flower would be glad to kiss them. But when a flower has no fragrance to it, like the hyacinth and blue columbine of these parts, or even red valerian--Pretty Betsy herself blushing bright pink all over--it does not seem that they love as warmly as the flower with a scented breath--sweet violet and sweet gale and vernal squill and cowslip and many more, down to the water-mint by the stream and my loving little white friend here by the stone hedge.

And when the first early blooms are gone with March, April, and May, when it is full June, I wade in the lush meadow (when the farmer is not about) to greet and talk to the taller ones, and alas! to say good-bye to them at the same time, seeing that the mower will soon come to make hay of them. One of the old friends I diligently seek at this season is John, or Johnnie, tall as any there--tall as the flaunting ox-eye daisies. Not that it is a particularly attractive flower; I have never regarded it as pretty, but merely as one of those yellow dandelion-shaped flowers which are so common with us. And it is indeed in appearance a lesser dandelion on a thin tall plant, the blooms, half-a-dozen or so to a plant, on long fine stems. It interests me chiefly on account of its singular, unflowerlike behaviour, which the name describes; also on account of its other queer name and the meaning thereof. I don’t mean goat’s-beard, but its third old English name which now, like many another, has grown offensive to ears polite, and has long been banished from our flower books, and even the dictionaries. One must go back to the old writers to find it in print: not necessarily so far back as Chaucer, who is too disgusting for anything, but to the Elizabethan and Carolines. The banned name, however, is still in use in the rural districts.

What I have written so far was all I could have said about this yellow flower until last summer; and if in time gone by any one had said to me that a day would come when Johnnie would appear to me as a wonder and delight, I should have laughed. Yet the strange experience actually came to me last June.

At a Cornish village there was a field near the cottage where I was staying, where my host had allowed his half-a-dozen cows to graze during the winter months: in April he turned them out, and a month later, passing by the field, it appeared to me that it would yield him a heavy crop of grass. One morning in June, looking at the field from a distance, it struck me that the hay would not be of a very good quality since the entire area had now turned to bright yellow with some tall flower that looked like ragwort among the grasses.

“What’s happened to your field--what is that yellow weed in it?” I said to my man.

“Oh, that’s only----” then he pulled himself up, thinking in time that I might be of the polite-eared tribe. “That’s a yellow flower,” he finished.

“Yes, I see it is,” said I. “I’ll have a look at your flower after lunch.”

But the pleasure of luncheon, especially of the omelettes my landlady made so wonderfully well, caused me to forget all about it.

About three o’clock I was out walking, half a mile from the house, when I looked back from the high ground at the village beneath me, and my eye rested on the field about which we had talked that morning. “Now what was it about that field?” said I to myself, trying to recover something all but forgotten. Then I remembered that at noon it had appeared all a sheet of yellow colour and was now of a uniform deep rather dull green! It was very odd, but I had no time to investigate until the following morning when, on visiting the field about ten o’clock, I saw it in all its glory, the whole area resplendent with its multitudinous crowded blooms of the dandelion orange-yellow, the most luminous colour in Nature; and but for the wind that waved the tall plants like a field of corn, mingling the vivid flower-tint with the green beneath, the colour would have been too dazzling in that brilliant sunshine. But it was the sunlight and the motion imparted by the wind which made it so wonderful. A sheet of yellow buttercups or a field thickly grown with dandelions does not produce this effect owing to its want of motion. The stiffer the flower on its stem the less vivid in appearance is its sentient life--the less does it enjoy the air it breathes. These flowers, on tall pliant stems, danced in the wind with a gladness greater than that of Wordsworth’s daffodils. It was only when the first shock of wonder and delight was over, that, looking closely at a flower, I made the discovery that it was the goat’s-beard, the homely John-go-to-bed-at-noon, and the hardly respectable--I dare not say what!

After that I visited the field three or four times a day and found that the flower begins to open some time after sunrise and comes into its fullest bloom about ten o’clock; that at noon it begins to close, but for an hour or two the change is imperceptible, after which one notices that the field is losing its lustre, the dimness gradually growing until by three o’clock the field is all dark green again. John’s in bed, tucked up, and in a deep sleep which will last quite seventeen hours; then he won’t wake with a start, but slowly, slowly, yawning and rubbing his yellow eyes and taking at least two hours to get out of bed.

I do not know what has been said by the authorities on the physiology of plants on this habit of the flower, but it strikes the ordinary person as something abnormal or unnatural. We all know many flowers (the familiar daisy is one) which close in the evening, folding themselves up or covering their round discs with their petals as a child covers her face with her fingers, and this seems right and natural and consistent with Nature’s plan. We are not yet acquainted with all the secrets of a flower, but we at least know that its life and growth are from the sun and suppose that when the light and heat are withdrawn the work of elaboration going on within it is suspended, that the flower is asleep and at rest until the vitalising influence returns. Why then the extraordinary waste of daylight by this one flower, when all others require all the light and heat they can get? Has Johnnie’s “unconscious intelligence” found out an easier way--a method of work by means of which he is able to accomplish in his day of three or four hours as much as others can do in their twelve to sixteen hours’ day? Johnnie then should be the right flower for the Socialist to wear on his day, which would have to be in June.

I had asked my man how he could have let his field get into such a condition, since the tough wiry stems of the goat’s-beard could not be very good for his cows as winter feed, and all he could say was that it “had come like that of itself”; that in the two previous years there had been a slight sprinkling of the yellow flower--he didn’t like to name it. But how it had come about was now plain to see, for before he started mowing balls of down could be seen all over the field, shedding myriads of seeds which would produce another undesirable but exceedingly beautiful crop the following summer. The lazy stay-in-bed-for-seventeen-hours goat’s-beard was actually ahead of the other flowers in ripening its seed!

* * * * *

That shining yellow field, which continues to shine in memory, just now serves to remind me of other plants and flowers that, commonly seen, have no special attraction, but which occasionally find their day of fullest perfection and triumph on some abandoned and waste ground--a field perhaps once, long years ago, under cultivation.

I have described some cases of this kind in _Nature in Downland_, where the turf was ruined for ever by the plough on the high South Downs a century ago, then left for Nature to work her will on the desolated spot. But we are most familiar with the sight of her beautifying processes in the remains of mediaeval buildings scattered about the land, in old castles and abbeys and towers, draped with ivy, the rough stone walls flushed with green and grey and yellow colours of moss and lichen and rainbow-tinted algae, decorated too with yellow wallflower, ivy-leafed toad-flax, and red valerian. Thus Nature glorifies our “builders of ruins.”

And going back to remoter ages, I have in my rambles come upon two wonderfully beautiful flower effects, one in a Roman road, unused probably since Roman times; the other more ancient still on a British earthwork. I found the first one spring day when cycling over the high down country near Dorchester. I caught sight of what looked to me like a broad band of snow lying across the green hills. Coming to it I found the old Roman road, which is there very distinct and has a closer turf and a brighter green than the downs it lies across, so thickly overgrown with daisies that the crowded flowers were actually touching and had obliterated the green colour of the ground under them. It was a wonderful sight, for all these millions of small blossoms occupied the road only, not a daisy being seen on the green down on either side, and the loveliness was of so rare a quality, so rich yet so delicate, a beauty almost supernatural, that I could not bear to walk or ride on it. It was like a road leading to some unearthly brighter place--some paradise of flowers.

In the other case the site was an earthwork in Wiltshire, built probably thousands of years ago, and the flower selected to decorate it was the yellow bird’s-foot trefoil.

There are in that part of Wiltshire many such remains, grim dykes, with or without walls at the side, and walls with a foss on one or in some instances on both sides. This one was a very deep ditch at the side of a wall ten to fifteen feet high, with a flat top eight to ten feet broad. It winds over a large down then dips down to a broad level valley, and rising over the hill opposite disappears at last in the arable land on that side. Standing on the high down or on the top of the wall it has the shape and appearance of a vast green serpent with its mile-long coil lying in a series of curves across the earth. As in the case of the old Roman green roads, the turf of the earthwork is a different and brighter shade of green than that of the valley.

At this place I once met and had a long talk about the far past with a man of a singularly lively mind for a Wiltshire peasant. He told me that on numberless occasions since his boyhood he had stood looking at this great earthwork in wonder, asking himself who and what the people were that made it. “I have often,” he said, “had the idea that they must have been mad; for allowing that they had a use for such a wall and ditch why did they make it go winding all over the place instead of carrying it in a straight line and saving more than half the labour it cost to build it?” I could only suggest in reply that it was no doubt a very ancient earthwork, dating back to the time when metal tools were unknown in England and that the chalk had to be scooped up with sharp flints; that when they came to a very hard bit they had to make a bend to get round it. I also assured him that they could not have been mad as no such disease was known to the old ancient people.

Now in spring the flat top of this earthwork in all that space where it lies across the level valley, the broad level top of the bank is grown over with the bird’s-foot trefoil, the yellow flowers as crowded as the daisies on the old Roman road, with not one flower to be seen growing on the green sloping sides. A green serpent still in appearance but its whole back now a shining yellow.

When I dream of South Wiltshire in spring, when the wild flowers are in bloom, it is to look again on that wonderful green and yellow serpent.