Part 21

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.

I have left myself no room in which to treat of nurserymen’s tulips, and the less the pity in that they can talk of them so eloquently themselves. There is a Dutch grower who simply wallows in adjectives about them every year. He photographs his children, smiling like anything, up to the neck in tulips; he poses with his arms full of them before his wife, like an Angel of the Annunciation. As for his words, they come bubbling from him as they used from Mr. Swinburne when he saw a baby. It is true that, like the talk about them, they get taller every year. They are less flowers than portents, and the only thing to do with them is to treat them as so much colour, turning your garden for the time being into a Regent Street shop-window. Brown wallflower and _La Rêve_ look well, so do yellow wallflower and _Othello_. Last year I tried _Clara Butt_ and _Cheiranthus allionii_, and had a show like Mr. Granville Barker’s _Twelfth Night_. Rose pink and orange is not everybody’s mixture.

The finest unrehearsed effect I ever had with cottage tulips was when we had a heavy fall of snow one 30th of April, and I went out and saw the great red heads swimming in the flood like strong men. They were up to the neck, and seemed to enjoy it. But they died of the effort; for at night it froze.

SUMMER

If, like me, you are more interested in seeing things happen than in seeing them when they have happened, you will not be such an advocate of Summer as of other, any other, seasons. For Summer is the one time of year when practically nothing happens outdoors. From about the middle of May--I speak of the south parts--to the middle of September Nature sits with her hands in her lap and a pleasantly tired face. There, my children, she says, I have done my job. I hope you like it. Most of us, I own, do like it very much, and signify the same in the usual manner by vigorous ball-exercise and liquid refreshment, much of it of an explosive and delusive kind. When the Summer is over, somewhere round about Michaelmas day, Nature rolls up her sleeves and begins again. Properly speaking, there are only two seasons--Spring and Summer. The people therefore who, like me, prefer the Spring to the Summer, have more time in which to exhibit or dissemble their love--and a good deal of it, I confess, uncommonly beastly in the matter of weather.

The people who like everything are the people to envy. Children, for example, love the Winter just as much as the Summer. They whistle as they jump their feet, or flack their arms across their bodies; and whistling is one of the sure signs of contented youth. I remember that we used to think it rare sport to find the sponge a solid globe of ice, or to be able to get off cleaning our teeth on the ground that the tooth water was frozen in the bottle. I don’t believe I ever had cold feet in bed, and am sure that if I did I had something much more exciting to think about. There might be skating to-morrow, or we could finish the snow-man, or go tobogganning with the tea-tray; or it was Christmas; or we were going to the pantomime. All seasons were alike to us; each had its delights. That of Summer, undoubtedly, was going to the seaside. We always had a month of that, and then a month in some country place or other which my father did not know. That was done for his sake, because the seaside bored him so much that even his children noticed it. It was nothing to us, of course, as we lived in the country, and did not, as he did, poor man, spend most days of the year in London; but equally of course we weren’t _bored_. I never heard of a child being bored, and can imagine few things more tragic in a small way. No: it was always interesting to live in someone else’s house, learn something of their ways, chance upon a family photograph, or a discarded toy, or a dog’s grave in the shrubbery; or to read their books and guess what bits they had liked--any little things like that. And, of course, it was comfortable to know that one’s father wasn’t always smothering a gape, or trying to escape from nigger-minstrels. As for the sea--a very different thing from the seaside--I don’t believe he ever looked at it. I am certain that I never saw him on the sands. The sands are no place for you unless you had rather be barefoot than not. Now, it is a fact that I never saw my father’s feet.

At the same time, I don’t know where else one could be in August, except at the seaside. Really, there is very little to say for the country in that month. The trees are as near black as makes no matter, the hills are dust-colour, the rivers are running dry. True, the harvest is going on; but the harvest is not what it used to be. You had, indeed, “a field full of folk” (in old Langland’s words) in former days. All hands were at it, and the women following the men, building the hiles, as we call them; and the children beside them, twisting up the straw ties as fast as they could twist. And then the bread and cheese and cider--or it might be home-brewed beer--in the shade! But bless me--last year I saw the harvesting of a hundred acre field--our fields run very big down here; and the whole thing was being done by one man on a machine! The Solitary Reaper, forsooth! The man was reaper, tyer and binder all in one; you never saw so desolate a spectacle. So the harvest is not what it was. It may have attractions for the farmer, but for nobody else that I can think of. Go north for your Summer and you may do better. August is wet, generally, in Scotland, but when you are in Scotland you won’t mind rain, or had better not. You can catch trout in the rain in Scotland, and with a fly too: that is the extraordinary part of it. And the Scottish summer twilights are things to remember. They are overdone in Norway, where they go on all night; where the sun may go behind the hill for five minutes and begin the day before you have thought of going to bed. You can’t keep that up--but it is exciting enough at first. The great charm of the Norwegian Summer to me is that it includes what we call Spring. The other season in that country is Winter, which begins in September and ends with May. Then, immediately, Summer begins: the grass grows and is ready for the scythe, the cherries flower and get ripe and are eaten--all at once. You get those amazing contrasts there which you only have in mountainous countries; which I remember most vividly crossing the Cevennes from Le Puy to Alais. On the watershed I was picking daffodils, only just ready to be picked; in the valley of the Ardeche they were making hay, and roses were dusty in the hedges. I slid from March into June--in twenty minutes. You will not be so piqued in England; yet if your taste lies in the way of strawberries for instance, you can do pretty work even in England. You can begin in Cornwall, or Scilly, and have your first dish in early May, or late April, with clotted cream, of course. Then you can eat your way through the western shires to Hampshire, and make yourself very ill somewhere about Fareham, in June. When you are able to stand the journey, you can go on to the Fens and find them ready for you in early July. In August you will find them at their best in Cumberland, and in October, weather permitting, you will have them on your table in Scotland. After that, if you are alive, and really care for strawberries, you must leave this kingdom, and perhaps go to California. I don’t know.

The Summer will give you better berries than the strawberry, in my opinion. It will give you the _wild_ strawberry, which, if you can find somebody to pick them for you, and then eat them with sugar and white wine, is a dish for Olympians, ambrosial food. Then there is the bilberry, which wants cream and a great deal of tooth-brush afterwards, and the blaeberry, which grows in Cumberland above the 2,000 foot mark, just where the Stagshorn moss begins; and the wild raspberry which here is found on the tops of the hills, and in Scotland at the bottoms. I declare the wild raspberry to be one of the most delicious fruits God Almighty ever made. In Norway you will have the cranberry and the saeter-berry; but in Norway you will want nothing so long as there are cherries. I know Kent very well--but its cherries are not so good as those of Norway.

I had no intention, when I began, to talk about eating all the time. It is a bad sign when one begins that, though as a matter of fact we do think a great deal of our food in the country--because we are hungry, and it is so awfully good; and (as I daresay the Londoner thinks) because we have nothing else to think about. That is a mistake, and the Summer is the time to correct it, by spending it in the country and trying to understand us. Let me be bold enough to suggest to the Londoner who takes the prime of Summer to learn the ways of the country in it, that he would prove a more teachable disciple if he did not bring his own ways with him. He is rather apt to do that. He expects, for example, his golf, and always has his toys with him for the purpose. Well, he should not. Golf is a suburban game, handy for the townsman in his off hours. Country people don’t play golf. They have too much to do. The charabanc is another town-institution, to be used like a stagecoach. Nothing of the country can be learned by streaming over moor and mountain in one of them. The Oreads hide from them; Pan and old Sylvanus treat them as natural process, scourges to be endured, like snowstorms or foot-and-mouth disease. The country is veiled from charabancs, partly in dust, partly in disgust. For we don’t understand hunting in gangs. The herd-instinct which such things involve and imply is not a country instinct. We are self-sufficient here, still, in spite of all invitation, individuals.

THE LINGERING OF THE LIGHT

With the West wind blowing down the valley, wet and warm from the Atlantic, men go home leisurely from their work in the fields, happy in the last of the light, and enjoying, though they never say so, the delicate melancholy of the hour. It is a gift you make no account of when the East wind brings it you, for that Scythian scourge withers what it touches, and under its whip the light itself seems like a husk about the day. Old people tell us that it brings the blight, whatever they mean by that. It brought locusts into Egypt once, and brings influenza into England. Perhaps they put the two together. It brings sick thinking too, a cold which has the property of drying up the springs of the blood. There’s no escape from it. The air seems thinner that comes from the East; brickwork will not keep it out, nor glazed windows. One fancies in the black mood of it that the “channering worm” at his work in the churchyard must feel it, and dive deeper into the mould.

But now one can enjoy the sweet grave evening and turn the mind hopefully to the prime of the year that is coming. The blackbird whistles for it in the leafless elm; a belated white hen on the hillside, very much at her ease, is still heeling up the turf and inspecting the result. A cottage wife, having her fire alight and kettle on the boil, stands for a moment at her open door. To mate the gentle influence of the evening she has made herself trim in clean white blouse and blue skirt, and looks what she was intended to be, a pretty young woman with a pride in herself. A friend, going home, stops her perambulator for a minute to exchange sentiments about the nights “drawing out.” Almost as she speaks this one draws in--for at this time of year twilight is a thing of moments. It will be dark before she is home. No matter: the wind is warm and balmy; she can take her ease, and her baby be none the worse. This is the weather that opens the human buds as well as the snowdrops, and gems the gardens with aconites, and the hearths with sprawling children. We do not heed Dr. Inge down here.