THE CHEQUERED DAFFODIL AND THE GLORY OF WILD FLOWERS

Never a season passes, never a month nor a week, nor even a day, when I’m wandering in quest of the sights and sounds that draw the field naturalist, but I stumble on something notable never previously seen, or never seen in the same charming aspect. And the fact that it is stumbled on when not looked for, that it comes as a complete surprise, greatly enhances the charm. It may be a bird or mammal, or some rare or lustrous insect, but it is in plant life where the happy discoveries are most frequent, even to one who is not a “painfull and industrious searcher of plantes” and knows little of their science. For not only are the species so numerous as to be practically innumerable to one who desires to see all things for himself, but many of the most attractive kinds are either rare or exceedingly local in their distribution. I will give a few instances.

What a delightful experience it was one cold sunny day in April when I sought shelter from the furious wind at a huge rocky headland at Zennor on the Cornish coast, and found the turf at the foot of the rocks jewelled with the first vernal squills! And what a thrill of joy in Scotland one June, when coming to a narrow green valley between high rocks and woods I had my first sight of the exquisite grass of Parnassus flowering in profusion!

One day, cycling from Salisbury to Winterbourne Gunner, I found a pretty red flower new to me growing by the roadside in great abundance; for a distance of three or four hundred yards the hedge-side was thickly sprinkled with its lovely little stars. It was a geranium, prettier than any red geranium known to me, the delicate colour resembling that of the red horse-chestnut. It was the _Geranium pyrenaicum_, native of central and eastern Europe, and by some botanists supposed to be indigenous in this country. Probably the colour varies, as some of the books describe it as purple or pale purple.

My delight was greater when I first came upon the large blue geranium growing among the South Wiltshire downs. The large loose plant with large flowers and deep-cut leaves reminded me of the geranium-leafed scented mallow, one of my favourites, and these two plants became associated in my mind, but the mallow is rosy pink and the geranium a pure divine (or human) blue.

One of the rarest, and to my mind one of the most beautiful, flowers in England is the bastard balm; I have never found it but once, and it was the way in which it came before me that has given it such a lustre in my mind. I was motoring with friends from Land’s End to London, when in coming through the hilly country near Tavistock I caught sight of a flower unknown to me on a tall stalk among the thick herbage at the roadside, and shouted to the chauffeur to stop. He did so after rushing on a farther hundred yards or so, but very reluctantly, as he was angry with the hills and anxious to get to Exeter. I walked back and secured my strange lovely flower, and for the rest of the day it was a delight to us, and I’m pretty sure that its image exists still and shines in the memory of all who were with me in the car that day--the chauffeur excepted.

I am bringing too many flowers into this chapter, since only one is named in the title, but once I begin to think of them they keep me, and a dream of fair flowers is as much to me as that Dream of Fair Women is to the Tennysons and Swinburnes who write poetry. Or perhaps they are more like fair little girls than grown women, the beautiful little dear ones I loved and remember--Alice and Doris, and pensive Monica, “laughing Allegra and Edith with golden hair,” and dozens more. But I must really break away from this crowd to concentrate on my chequered daffodil, only I must first be allowed to mention just one more--the blue columbine, the wild flower, always true blue and supposed to be indigenous. I don’t believe it; I imagine for various reasons that it is a garden escape dating back to the Roman occupation, which gives it a better title by some eighteen centuries to be described as British than dozens of our wild flowers. The charming sanfoin, common as the gipsy rose in our fields, the wild musk that flourishes by a thousand streams from Land’s End to the Western Islands, the winter heliotrope that spreads its green mantle over so much of England, are by comparison aliens that emigrated but yesterday to our shores.

It was in Wiltshire again that I found my first columbines, in a vast thicket of furze, may, and blackthorn covering about twenty acres of ground. The plants were tall, the thin wiry stems being two or three feet long, and produced few leaves, but flowers as large as those of the garden plant. An old keeper who had charge of the ground told me he had known the flower from his boyhood, and that formerly he could fill a barrow with “collar-binds,” as he called them, any day. It was a rare pleasure to see that columbine in its own home--the big blue quaint flower that looked at you from its shelter of rough furze and thorn bushes; and for the first time in my life I admired it, since in the garden, where as a rule its peculiar beauty is dimmed by other garden blooms, it has an inharmonious setting. But I must say of the colour that albeit a true floral blue it is a blue of the earth, the material world we inhabit, not the divine (or human) blue of the blue geranium nor the more ethereal blue of the vernal squill on the sea-cliffs, and of the wild hyacinth seen in sheets of colour under the woodland trees. These are the floral blues that bring heaven down to us.

It is not strange perhaps that this flower should be known by bird names, but it is odd that the names should be of birds so wide apart in our minds as eagle and dove. _Aquilegia_, because the inverted tubes at the base of the flower are like the curved claws of an eagle; and columbine from its dove-like appearance, each blossom forming a cluster of fine dark blue fairy fan-tails, with beaks that meet at the stem, wings open, and tails outspread.

This great find made me think that I had come into a columbine country, and I set out to look for it, but failed to find or even hear of it anywhere in that district except at one spot on the border of Wilts and Dorset. This was a tiny rustic village hidden among high downs, one of the smallest, loveliest, most out-of-the-world villages in England. In the small ancient church I found a mural tablet to the memory of the poet Browning’s grandfather, whose humble life had been spent in that neighbourhood. So rare was it for a stranger to appear in this lost village that half of the population, all the forty schoolchildren included, were eager to talk to me all the time I spent in it, and they all knew all about the columbine. It had been abundant half a mile from the village by the hedges and among the furze bushes, and every summer the children were accustomed to go out and gather the flowers, and they were seen in every cottage; and as a result of this misuse the flower had been extirpated.

They wished it would come again!

If comparatively few persons have seen the blue native columbine, just as few perhaps have found, growing wild, that more enchanting flower, the snake’s-head or fritillary. Guinea-flower and bastard narcissus and turkey-caps are some of its old English names, the last still in common use; but the name by which all educated persons now call it is also very old. Two centuries and a half ago a writer on plants spoke of it as “a certaine strange flower which is called by some Fritillaria.” Another very old name, which I like best, is chequered daffodil. As a garden flower we know it, and we also know the wild flower bought in shops or sent as a gift from friends at a distance. In most instances the flowers I have seen in houses were from the Christchurch Meadows at Oxford.

I know what white, what purple fritillaries The grassy harvest of the river-fields Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields,

says Matthew Arnold in his beautiful monody; the wonder is that it should yield so many. But to see the flower in its native river-fields is the main thing; in a vase on a table in a dim room it is no better than a blushing briar-rose or any other lovely wild bloom removed from its proper atmosphere and surroundings.

It was but a twelvemonth before first finding wild columbine that I had the happiness of seeing this better flower in its green home, a spot where it is, perhaps, more abundant than anywhere in England; but the spot I will not name, nor even the county; the locality is not given in the books I have consulted, yet it is, alas! too well known to many whose only pleasure in wild flowers is to gather them greedily to see them die indoors. For we live indoors and reck not that Nature is deflowered, so that we return with hands or arms full of some new brightness to add to the decorations of our interiors.

Coming one May Day to a small rustic village, I passed the schoolhouse just when the children were trooping back in the afternoon, and noticed that many of them were carrying bunches of fritillaries. They told me where they had got them, in a meadow by the neighbouring river; then one little girl stepped forward and asked me very prettily to accept her bunch. I took it and gave her two or three pence, whereupon the other children, disregarding the imperious calls of their schoolmistress, who was standing outside, all flocked round and eagerly pressed their nosegays on me. But I had as many as I wanted; my desire was to see the flower growing, so I went my way and returned another day to look for the favoured spot. I found it a mile from the village, at a place where the lovely little river divides into three or four, with long strips of greenest meadowland between the currents, with ancient pollard willows growing on the banks. These were the biggest pollards I have ever seen, and were like huge rudely shaped pillars with brushwood and ivy for capitals, some still upright, others leaning over the water, and many of them quite hollow with great gaps where the rind had perished. I saw no chequered daffodils, but it was a beautiful scene, a green, peaceful place, with but one blot on it--a dull, dark brown patch where ground had been recently ploughed in the middle of the largest and fairest meadow in sight. A sudden storm of rain drove me to seek shelter at one of the old crumbling pollards, where, by cramming myself into the hollow trunk, I managed to keep dry. In half-an-hour it was over and the sky blue again; then, coming out, that brown piece of ground in the distance looked darker than ever amidst the wet sun-lit verdure, and I marvelled at the folly of ploughing up a green meadow in spring; for what better or more profitable crop than grass could be grown in such a spot?

Presently, as I walked on and got nearer, the unsightly brown changed to dark purple; then I discovered that it was no ploughed ground before me, but a vast patch of flowers--of fritillaries growing so close that they darkened the earth over an area of about three acres! It was a marvellous sight, and a pleasure indescribable to walk about among them; to stand still in that garden with its flowers, thick as spikes in a ripe wheat-field, on a level with my knees; to see them in such surroundings under the wide sky in that lucid atmosphere after the rain, the pendulous cups still sparkling with the wet and trembling in the lightest wind. It would have been a joy to find a single blossom; here, to my surprise, they were in thousands, and in tens and in hundreds of thousands, an island of purple on the green earth, or rather purple flecked with white, since to every hundred or more dark-spotted flowers there was one of an ivory whiteness and unspotted.

But it is not this profusion of blossoms, which may be a rare occurrence--it is the individual flower which has so singular an attractiveness. It is, I have said, a better flower than the blue columbine; in a way this tulip is better than any British flower. A tulip without the stiffness and appearance of solidity which makes the garden kinds look as if they had been carved out of wood and painted, but pendulous, like the harebell, on a tall slender stem, among the tall fine-leafed grasses, and trembling like the grasses at every breath; in colour unlike any other tulip or any flower, a pink that is like a delicate, luminous flesh-tint, minutely chequered with dark maroon purple.

Our older writers on plants waxed eloquent in describing their “fritillaria” or “Ginny-flower,” and even the driest of modern botanists writes that it is a flower which, once seen, cannot be forgotten. That is because of its unlikeness to all others--its strangeness. In the arrangement of its colours it is unique, and furthermore, it is the darkest flower we have. This effect is due to the smallness of the tessellated squares, since at a distance of a few feet the dark violet maroon kills or absorbs the bright delicate pink colour, and makes the entire blossom appear uniformly dark.

The flower which, combining strangeness with beauty, comes nearest to the chequered daffodil is the henbane, with an exceedingly dark purple centre and petals a pale clouded amber yellow delicately veined with purple brown. But in the henbane the dark and pale hues are seen contrasted. In flowers like these, but chiefly in the chequered daffodil, we see that the quality of strangeness, which is not in itself an element of beauty, has yet the effect of intensifying the beauty it is associated with. Thus, if we consider other admired species--briar-rose, pink convolvulus, rock-rose, sea-poppy, yellow flag, bugloss, blue geranium, water forget-me-not, flowering rush, and grass of Parnassus, for example--and many more might be named--we see that in beauty, pure and simple, these equal and exceed the fritillary; yet this impresses us more than the others, and surprises us into thinking it more beautiful because its beauty strikes us more sharply. It is not sufficient to say that the sharper impression is due merely to the unusual appearance. I rather incline to believe that the source of the vivid interest excited is that faculty of the mind supposed to be obsolete, but which still faintly lives in all of us, though we may be unconscious of it--a faculty which sees a hidden meaning or spirit in all strange appearances in the natural world. It is the “sense of mystery,” and is with us in sight of a magnificent and strange sunset, and of any unusual atmospheric strangeness, down to the smallest objects that engage our attention--an insect, a flower, even our chequered daffodil of the river-fields.