Part 16

If your garden be upon the slope of a hill, there is one human instinct which you will surely, if you watch them carefully, recognize in your plants. They are so ambitious. Those among them which have creeping roots or rhizomes will almost invariably travel uphill. They are as fain to climb as Sir Walter Raleigh himself. Take the rhizomatous bamboos, such species among the arundonarias as Somoni, Japonica Layœkerd, Spathiflora and others, Phyllostachys fastuosa, Bambusa Palmata. Rarely, indeed, will you find a new culm below the parent plant; all the growth is upwards. And so it is with many other genera. I think the reason of it is pretty plain. You need but to mark the trees above a railway cutting or on the high banks of a deep lane, to see how shallow in proportion to their height are the roots even of the greatest of them. There are exceptions—the vine and the laburnum, to wit—but the oak itself loses its so-called tap-root, which withers and rots away as soon as it has fulfilled its duty of tying the tree in its place. The roots seem to remain as near as possible to the plane of the bottom of the main stem. The same rule applies to plants of lesser stature. Now if the roots of a hillside plant were to move down-hill in the same plane as the axis of the stem, it is manifest that they must very soon peer out into the open and be deprived of all those foods which are necessary to plant life. So they choose the wise course of journeying upwards, where they are sure, on the contrary, of an increasingly richer diet. If on its travels the growing point of a bamboo rhizome encounters a stone or other obstacle, it will not dive down to avoid it, but will take a direction upwards and then down again into the earth, forming one of those hoops, like croquet hoops, which are such a snare to trip up wayfarers in bamboo forests. Sometimes the ambitions of plants, like those of men, are fatal. The root-stock, originally set in the best conditions, must needs climb higher and higher, until it may perhaps reach some uncongenial place in which it is starved or choked. Then farewell, a long farewell, to all its greatness! By degrees the parent plant becomes exhausted and dwindles away, while the scions which should have carried on the dynasty are hoped for in vain, and so some precious treasure is lost for ever.

If plants have ambition, there is one vice closely allied to it which they do not possess. Jealousy is confined to animals. Men, dogs, cats and horses are jealous. There is no evidence to lead us to suppose that plants are afflicted with that horror of horrors. They may have their loves and their hatreds; they will, as we have seen, help one another, and they will strangle and murder one another. They will even rob one another; but the torture of jealousy seems to be unknown to them. They will attack their neighbours with the pitiless savagery of the old Rhineland robber knights. No vampire could with more ruthless cruelty suck the blood of a fair maiden than certain malignant fungi, which fasten upon great trees and shrubs, and draw out the sap of their noble lives in order to nourish their own ignominious bodies. Then there are the saprophytes, plants as unlovely as their name, vegetable horrors, which, like the ghouls of the “Arabian Nights,” are found feasting upon death and decay. _Non ragionam di lor! Ma guarda e passa._

In the part of the world where I live the old thorn trees are, with the oaks, the glory of the countryside. One year, to my dismay, I saw that all my thorns in which I took so much pride were apparently dying. In the middle of summer their leaves withered and wilted, and they presented a piteous sight. I wrote to Kew for advice. Kew is a never-failing help in trouble. The answer came back: Have you any savin juniper bushes? If so, examine them. You will probably find them covered with a yellow slimy sort of jelly, which is the first stage of a fungus which, in its second stage, fastens upon the thorn. The letter went on to advise a merciless destruction and holocaust of the savin bushes, and prophesied that the fungus on the thorns would die and not renew itself, so that no permanent harm would ensue. Sure enough, in my ignorance, I had planted a number of bushes of savin, which I found, as Kew prophesied, to be covered with an ugly yellow mucilaginous substance. My inquisition was followed by an _auto da fé_ of the junipers; when their enemies were burnt, the thorns recovered and I had no more trouble.

How most other plants hate the beech and the ash! How resolutely they refuse to grow under their shade! And yet even the best hated men have their friends, who will smile to them and seek their company. Lords of beech woods wanting covert for their game should try planting Laurus Colchica and Laurus rotundifolia. The pheasants love their shelter, and they are quite happy even under old-established beeches.

There are plants of prey just as there are beasts of prey and birds of prey. These are plants which live upon animal food just as we do, setting traps and snares for them with all the cunning shown by one of Richard Jefferies’ phenomenal gamekeepers or poachers. What, by the by, is the exact dividing line which separates the poacher from the keeper? Does the one develop into the other as does the chrysalis into the butterfly? I remember a little old Highland stalker, a veteran of the “hull,” as brown and rugged as a russet apple; we had been watching deer a long way off all the morning—the wind wrong for a stalk—and he confided to me all those secrets of deer life which seemed as familiar to him as if, like the Buddha, he had been himself a stag in some previous stage of existence. “How long have you been a stalker, Hughie?” I asked. “Maybe twenty years,” he answered; but then, looking up, his eyes twinkling with a craft worthy of Autolycus, he added, “but I was a shepherd for many years before that.”

There was a whole folio volume of predatory but illicit sport in the words. Some plants, like the various pitchers of Nepenthe and others, remain still and are content to rely upon the beauty of their colours to tempt the game to its doom. Caught in the trap, the victims are held tight by some glue like birdlime, or kept from finding their way out by fingers of sharp teeth like the knives of the Iron Virgin of Nürnberg. Others, innocent, humble little creatures, look “as if they would not hurt a fly.” But let the fly beware, and keep out of their grip—“foxes in stealth, wolves in greediness,” they are armed like the butterwort (_pinguicula_) with glands which become active at the touch, and secure the prisoner, or as the sundew (_drosera_), equipped with tentacles which close in upon him like a horror in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. How these creatures feed and how they digest their meat is told in Darwin’s “Insectivorous Plants” and elsewhere. These are facts, not fancies. But what gastronome could take offence if he were accused of being as greedy as sundew!

There is one human quality, the power of enjoyment, which, above all others, we seem to recognize in our plants. It is impossible to look upon the daffodils in a field dancing in the sunlight of an early April day, without feeling that here is the very embodiment of gladness—of the _joie de vivre_; and as the months speed on and flower after flower bursts into life, meeting the renewed glories of the sun, we have before us a roundelay of gaiety and happiness which only quite ceases when the first grip of winter comes to choke and kill the melancholy glory of autumn. Then, when the dahlias hang their stricken heads, and the blue clouds of the Michaelmas daisies fade and shed their seed, we are conscious of the fact that they, too, have their sorrows, though the tragedy of so many has passed unnoticed when rivals, each one more beautiful than the last, have been springing up to take their place. A greater than I am has noticed the pleasure that plants take in the act of living. A friend sends me these lines of Wordsworth’s:

“The budding twigs spread out their fan To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there.”

And so we linger on in our Veluvana until the sun is setting in the west. There is an end of light and heat for this day, and the plants, like the birds, must sleep and even dream, if Keats be right.[18] Theirs is perhaps not the sleep which we know, but nothing is more certain than the change which they undergo in darkness. In some plants the leaflets curl downwards, in others upwards; in many the flowers close altogether, and are folded almost as they were when buds. But all green plants show one phenomenon. Whereas under light the leaves take up the air in the little mouths on the underside of their leaves, and after working up the carbonic-acid gas into carbon for the building of their stems and branches, return the rest in the shape of pure oxygen, purifying and sweetening the air; when night comes the process is reversed. Then they retain the oxygen and exhale carbonic-acid gas only, and that is why careful nurses, though they may not know the reason, turn plants out of a sick-room when the night comes on. It has been calculated that of those little stomates on the underside of a beech leaf, little kitchens or laboratories in which the tree prepares its food, there are no fewer than a million. Yes, the plants must sleep—all save certain disreputable night-blooms, which, like owls and bats and witches, hate the light and haunt the darkness. In a few hours the first glimmer of dawn will break; the rosy-fingered goddess will rouse her choir of birds, and they, with their morning hymn, will awaken the trees and the flowers; the blessed dew will fall, distilling the sweet scents of woodland and gardenland, and the joy of the world and of the plants will spring into the birth of a day.

If I were able to accept, as do the pious Buddhists, the doctrine of rebirth and the transmigration of souls, I, noting what I have called the purposeful movements of plant-life, should be inclined to go a step further than they do. If a man may have been in a previous state of existence a stag, a monkey, or a snake, why should he not equally have been a tree, a shrub, or a poisonous creeper? The stately dignity of the oak, the sweet virtues of the rose, the venomous juice of the deadly nightshade, are qualities which might be traced in many a reincarnation. The image, at any rate, is found in Ezekiel: “Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches and with a shadowing shroud and of an high stature, and his top was among the thick boughs” (Ezekiel xxxi. 3).

When all is said and done, is it so very foolish, as we sit wool-gathering and drinking in the sweetness of a summer’s evening amid the fragrance of our Veluvana, to let our thoughts run riot among the many-coloured clouds of fancy, tracing some faint signs of kinship between the moods of men and the moods of plants? And if, in the indulgence of these whimsies, treating the search for knowledge, not as we English are supposed to take our pleasures—_moult tristement_—we should chance to strike some tiny spark of truth hitherto hidden from us, may we not call in Horace as counsel for the defence and ask:

“——ridentem dicere verum Quid vetat?”

Enshrined, as it were, in a temple of secular oaks, and other grave and reverend trees, there stands a small mulberry tree, very humble and inconspicuous, having hardly as yet reached the dignity of a shrub. In the late spring and early summer it is surrounded by flaming azaleas, white and deep purple lilacs, and other flowering Japanese maples, with their coral buds bursting into crimson leaves—all the “embroidery” of the Japanese forests, which look as if they had been planted to do honour to the little waif, the radiance of whose pedigree, indeed, outshines all their glory. It is like the beggar-maid at the African King Cophetua’s court, but, like that humble maiden, worthy of royal favour above all the flaunting beauties who surrounded that “magnanimous and illustrate” monarch’s throne; for that little tree, or tree that, by the grace of Pomona, shall yet be, is an undoubted scion of the tree which Shakespeare planted in the garden of the new home which he built for his prosperous retirement at Stratford-on-Avon. The story is complete in all its details. It has been told by Malone in his life, and recently by Sir Sidney Lee in the admirable new edition of his life of the poet, and is confirmed by what Dr. Johnson told Boswell when they visited Mrs. Gastrell.

In the year 1597 Shakespeare, minded to end his days in his native town, as should become an Armiger of good means, bought New Place, which had been the most considerable house in Stratford; but the buildings were in ruins, and the poet built himself a new house with three gables, the centre of which carried a shield with the spear, which he adopted as his coat-of-arms. “Shakespeare paid for it,” writes Sir Sidney Lee, “with two gardens, the then substantial sum of sixty pounds. A curious incident postponed legal possession. The vendor of the Stratford Manor House, William Underhill, died suddenly of poison at another residence in the county—Fillongley, near Coventry—and the legal transfer to the dramatist was left at the time incomplete. Underhill’s eldest son Fulk died a minor at Warwick next year, and after his death he was proved to have murdered his father. The family estates were thus in danger of forfeiture, but they were suffered to pass to the felon’s next brother Hercules, who, on coming of age in 1602, completed in a new deed the transfer of New Place to Shakespeare.” Sir Sidney goes on to say that the poet does not appear to have permanently settled at New Place until 1611. In the meantime, he had been busy rebuilding the house and planning his garden. And now for the history of the famous mulberry tree.

Soon after his accession to the throne King James the First appears to have been fascinated by the idea of establishing the cultivation of silk in this country. There was a Frenchman, a native of Picardy, of the name of Forest, who, in the year 1608, “kept greate store of English silk-worms at Greenwich, the which the King, with great pleasure, came often to see them worke; and of their silke he caused a piece of taffeta to be made” (Malone’s “Life of Shakespeare”). This led to the King’s planting many hundred thousand mulberry trees in this country, those destined for the Midland Counties being distributed by a Frenchman named Véron. But the King also planted a number of trees south of Hyde Park, at the western end of what now are Buckingham Palace Gardens. These trees gave the name to the famous “Mulberry Gardens,” of which I shall say a word later.

It seems that on his return from one of his annual excursions to London, Shakespeare brought back with him a young mulberry tree, and with his own hands planted it in his garden, in which tradition says that he loved to work. What more natural than that the courtier-actor, who was as much petted by King James as he had been in the previous reign, should wish to enrich his Eden with a specimen of the latest botanical craze? After passing through various hands, the house passed back to Sir Hugh Clopton, whose family had formerly possessed it. Sir Hugh pulled down Shakespeare’s three-gabled and ugly house, and built one more suitable to his position, where, in May, 1742, Malone tells us that he hospitably entertained Garrick, Macklin and Delane under the poet’s own mulberry tree. In 1790 the father of Mr. Davenport’s clerk, then ninety-five years old, told Malone that as a boy he lived in the next house to New Place, and that he had often eaten of the fruit of the tree, some branches of which overhung his father’s garden; that it was planted by the poet, and the first mulberry tree to be seen in the neighbourhood.

In 1752 Henry Talbot, son-in-law and executor of Sir Hugh Clopton, sold New Place to a clergyman of the name of Gastrell, a man of fortune and Vicar of Frodsham in Cheshire, apparently an ill-conditioned, quarrelsome man, who was soon in hot water with his neighbours. He had a dispute with the town over assessments, in which, by the by, he was utterly in the wrong, and he so resented the desire of sightseers to be admitted to view the famous mulberry tree, that to spite them and the townsfolk he, in 1758, cut down the tree, his wife urging him to the impious act, as Dr. Johnson told Boswell. She, the Lady Macbeth of this “withered murder,” was a daughter of Sir Thomas Aston and sister to Mrs. Walmesley, the wife of Johnson’s first patron, and to the lovely Molly Aston, whose beauty so stirred the inflammable Dr. Johnson that the groves and woods of Staffordshire and Derbyshire rang with its praises sung by an elderly Tityrus in a bush-wig. The grand old amorist never wearied of celebrating the charms of his lovely ladies. Even the Island of Skye was forced to resound with the perfections of his Thralia Dulcis in one of the worst Sapphic odes that ever brought wrath upon a fifth-form boy.

At last the vandal parson, irritated beyond measure by his own bilious spite, declared that the house should pay no more assessments, so he pulled it down and broke it up for sale of the building materials. As Shakespeare’s own house had been long since destroyed by Sir Hugh Clopton, that did not signify so much, but the murder of the sacred tree was another matter. We may be sure that when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth finally turned their backs upon Stratford, their departure was not bemoaned by their neighbours.

Blessed are the enthusiasts. It is true that they are sometimes egregious bores, but they are never so bad as the iconoclasts, and they do much good in the world. Before the murder of the famous mulberry tree Edward Capell, the Shakespearian commentator, whose work rather fell under the cruel lash of Dr. Johnson, had managed to secure a cutting of it, which he carried to Troston Hall, his place in Suffolk, and planted in his garden. There is no easier tree to propagate than the mulberry; in that respect, it is like the willow. Cut a branch of it and stick it in the ground, and when the spring comes it will begin to show signs of life. Lurking in mysterious hiding-places in the bark are myriads of tiny unsuspected buds, full of life and vigour, which in due season will send down little slender fibres till they reach the soil, whence they derive nourishment; in time the buds will burst their prison of bark, and before many years are past a new tree will bear fruit. So Mr. Capell’s cutting throve amazingly and gave birth to a little colony of offshoots. How or when I know not, Troston passed into the possession of Mr. Lofft, and he, when about to let the place and disperse his collection of plants, wrote to Sir William Thiselton Dyer, October 6th, 1896, offering “some scions of Shakespeare’s tree” to Kew. I at once wrote, begging for one of these scions, that it might be planted in Buckingham Palace Gardens—the site of the old mulberry plantation of King James. What more appropriate home could be found for it? There still stands, by the by, in the Palace grounds a venerable mulberry tree which must be the one last relic of King James’s attempt at silk-worm cultivation.

The mulberry gardens were soon converted into a pleasure resort after the manner of the Vauxhall and Cremorne of my youth. Both Evelyn and Pepys mention them and give them the worst of characters. Evelyn calls them (May 10th, 1654) “the only place of refreshment about the town for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at, Cromwell and his partisans having shut up and seized on Spring Gardens, which till now had been the usual rendezvous for ladies and gallants at this season.” Pepys, in his outspoken way, went further in his condemnation some years later. His spades were always spades—yet the sly old dog confessed to having amused himself greatly there. There is in especial a very characteristic account of a dinner there, given by Mr. Sheres, at which Pepys was introduced to a Spanish Olio, “a very noble dish, such as I never saw better or any more of. This and the discourse he did give us of Spain, and description of the Escuriall, was a fine treat.” The entertainment seems to have been managed with an eye to economy, for after dinner they all went off to Brentford, ordering the waiter to set on one side what had not been eaten, and they would come back and have it for supper. What would the head waiter at the “Ritz” or the “Carlton” say to such an order as that? But the evening was spoilt by the sudden indisposition of poor Mr. Sheres, the amphitryon of the Olio, probably the cause of the trouble—to which Pepys appears to have returned to the “noble dish” with appetite, issuing unscathed from the temptation.

Sir Charles Sedley, the profligate wit and brilliant writer, of whom Charles the Second said that “Nature had given him a patent as Apollo’s viceroy,” and that “his style, whether in writing or discourse, would be the standard of the English tongue,” wrote a play called the _Mulberry Garden_, which Pepys, a great playgoer and probably a good judge, damned with faint praise. The “Tribullus of his age,” as Dryden dubbed him in his dedication to “The Assignation,” for once had failed to score.

The story of Shakespeare’s mulberry has led me far astray, and when we get to Evelyn and Pepys it is difficult not to wander on. But I must curb my prolixity. I think I have said enough to show that the Troston plants have a pedigree which it would defy all the sagacity and learning of the College of Heralds to demolish. Kew, always generous, has continued to propagate from them, and as Sir David Prain, the present director, writes to Sir Sidney Lee: “We have sent plants to places where there are memorials of Shakespeare, and to people interested in matters relating to him.” It is to the kindness of Sir William Thiselton Dyer that I owe my special treasure.

I do not know upon what authority is based the statement that the tree now growing in New Place is a scion of the old tree—probably it is. But, in any case, there are offshoots enough propagated by the pious care of Kew from the Troston stock to do away with any fear lest the dynasty should die out.

RUSSIA