CHAPTER XIX

FLOWER LORE OF CHILDREN

_In childhood when with eager eyes The season-measured years I view'd All, garb'd in fairy guise Pledg'd constancy of good._

_Spring sang of heaven; the summer flowers Bade me gaze on, and did not fade; Even suns o'er autumn's bowers Heard my strong wish, and stay'd._

_They came and went, the short-lived four, Yet, as their varying dance they wove, To my young heart each bore Its own sure claim of love._

--_J. H. Card. Newman, 1874._

The records of childish flower lore contained in this chapter are those of my own childhood; but they are equally the records of the customs of colonial children, for these games and rhymes and plays about flowers have been preserved from generation to generation of New England children. The transmission of this nature lore has been as direct and unaltered in the new world as in Great Britain. Some of these customs, such as the eating of hollyhock cheeses and the blowing of dandelion clocks, came originally, as have other play usages, from England; many were varied in early years by different conditions in the new world, by local fitness and suggestion.

One chapter in Mr. Newell's book upon the _Games of American Children_ dwells upon the conservatism of children. The unquestioning reception of play formulas, which he proves, extended to the flower rhymes and lore which I have recollected and herein set down. These inherited customs are far dearer to children than modern inventions. There is a quaintness of expression, a sentiment of tradition, that the child feels without power of formulating.

[Illustration: Stella (Bradley) Bellows, 1800, _circa_]

If the paradise of the Orientals is a garden, so was a garden of old-fashioned flowers the earthly paradise for a child: the long sunny days brought into life so many delightful playthings to be made through the exercise of that keen instinct of all children, destructiveness. Each year saw the fresh retelling and teaching of child to child of happy flower customs almost intuitively, or through the "knowledge never learned at schools," that curious subtle system of transmission which everywhere exists among children who are blessed enough to spend their summer days in the woods or in a garden. The sober teachings of science in later years can never make up the loss to those who have lived their youth in great cities, and have grown up debarred from this inheritance, knowing not when

"The summer comes with flower and bee."

The dandelion was the earliest flower to stir the children's memories; in New England it is "the firstling of the year." In the days of my childhood we did not wait for the buttercup to open to learn whether we "loved butter"; the soft dimpled chin of each child was held up, as had been those of other children for past decades, to catch the yellow reflection of the first dandelion on the pinky throat.

The dandelion had other charms for the child. When the blooms had grown long-stemmed through seeking the sun from under the dense box borders, what pale green, opal-tinted curls could be made by splitting the translucent stems and immersing them in water, or by placing them in the mouth! I taste still their bitterness! What grace these curls conferred when fastened to our round combs, or hung over our straight braids!--far better than locks of corn silk. And what adorning necklaces and chains like Indian wampum could be made by stringing "dandelion beads," formed by cutting the stems into sections! This is an ancient usage; one German name of the flower is chain-flower. The making of dandelion curls is also an old-time childish custom in Germany. When the dandelion had lost her golden locks, and had grown old and gray, the children still plucked the downy heads, the "clocks" or blowballs, and holding aloft these airy seed vessels, and fortifying the strong young lungs with a deep breath, they blew upon the head "to see whether my mother wants me," or to learn the time o' day.

"Dandelion, the globe of down, The schoolboy's clock in every town, Which the truant puffs amain To conjure back long hours again."

The ox-eye daisy, the farmer's whiteweed, was brought to New England, so tradition tells, as a garden flower. Now, as Dr. Holmes says, it whitens our fields to the great disgust of our liberal shepherds. It soon followed the dandelion in bloom, and a fresh necklace could be strung from the starry blossoms, a daisy chain, just as English children string their true pink and white daisies. This daisy was also used as a medium of amatory divination, by pulling from the floret the white ray flowers, saying, "He loves me, he loves me not," or by repeating the old "apple-seed rhyme":--

[Illustration: A daisy chain surrounds most of the page]

"One I love, Two I love, Three I love, I say, Four I love with all my heart, Five I cast away," etc.

Flower oracles are mediæval, and divination by leaves of grass. Children to-day, as of old, draw grass stalks in the field and match them to see who will be "It." Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1230) did likewise:--

"A spire of grass hath made me gay-- I measured in the self-same way I have seen practised by a child. Come, look, and listen if she really does, She does, does not, she does, does not, she does."

The yellow disk, or "button," of the ox-eye daisy, which was formed by stripping off the white rays, made a pretty pumpkin pie for the dolls' table. A very effective and bilious old lady, or "daisy grandmother," was made by clipping off the rays to shape the border or ruffle of a cap, leaving two long rays for strings, and marking in a grotesque old face with pen and ink. A dusky face, called with childish plainness of speech a "nigger head," could be made in like fashion from the "black-eyed Susan" or "yellow daisy," which now rivals the ox-eye daisy as a pest of New England fields.

Though the spring violets were dearly loved, we slaughtered them ruthlessly by "fighting roosters" with them. The projecting spur under the curved stem at the base of the flower was a hook, and when the violets "clinched" we pulled till the stronger was conqueror, and the weaker head was off.

What braided "cat-ladders," and quaint, antique-shaped boats with swelling lateen sail and pennant of striped grass could be made from the flat, sword-like leaves of the "flower-de-luce!" Filled with flowers, these leafy boats could be set gayly adrift down a tiny brook in the meadow, or, with equal sentiment, in that delight of children since Froissart's day, the purling gutter of a hillside street after a heavy midsummer shower. The flowers chosen to sail in these tiny crafts were those most human of all flowers, pansies, or their smaller garden sisters, the "ladies'-delights" that turned their laughing, happy faces to us from every nook and corner of our garden. The folk names of this flower, such as "three-faces-under-a-hood," "johnny-jump-up," "jump-up-and-kiss-me," "come-tickle-me," show the universal sense of its kinship to humanity. I knew a child who insisted for years that pansies spoke to her. Another child, who had stolen a rose, and hidden it under her apron, called out pettishly (throwing the rose in a pansy bed), "Here! take your old flower"--as the pansy faces blinked and nodded knowingly to her.

The "dielytra" (bleeding-heart, or lady's-eardrops we called it) had long, gracefully drooping racemes of bright red-pink flowers, which when pulled apart and straightened out made fairy gondolas, or which might be twisted into a harp and bottle. How many scores have I carefully dissected, trying to preserve intact in skeleton shape the little heart-shaped "frame" of the delicate flower! The bleeding-heart is a flower of inexplicable charm to children; it has something of that mystery which in human nature we term fascination. Little children beg to pick it, and babies stretch out their tiny hands to it when showier blossoms are unheeded.

What black-headed puppets or dolls could be made from the great poppies, whose reflexed petals formed gay scarlet petticoats; and also from the blossoms of vari-colored double balsams, with their frills and flounces! The hollyhock, ever ready to render to the child a new pleasure, could be tied into tiny dolls with shining satin gowns, true fairies. Families--nay, tribes of patriarchal size had the little garden-mother. Mertensia, or lungwort, we termed "pink and blue ladies." The lovely blossoms, which so delighted the English naturalist Wallace, and which he called "drooping porcelain-blue bells," are shaped something like a child's straight-waisted, full-skirted frock. If pins are stuck upright in a piece of wood, the little blue silken frocks can be hung over them, and the green calyx looks like a tiny hat. A child friend forbidden to play with dolls on the solemn New England Sabbath was permitted to gather the mertensia bells on that holy day, and also to use the cherished income of a prosperous pin store. It was discovered with maternal horror that she had carefully arranged her pink and blue ladies in quadrilles and contra-dances, and was very cheerfully playing dancing party, to beguile the hours of a weary summer Sunday afternoon.

[Illustration: Playing Marbles]

Mr. Tylor, the author of _Primitive Culture_, call our attention to the fact that many of the beloved plays of children are only sportive imitations of the serious business of life. In some cases the game has outlived the serious practice of which it is a copy--such as the use of bows and arrows. Children love to produce these imitations themselves with what materials they can obtain, not to have them provided in finished perfection. Thus the elaborately fitted-up doll's house and imitation grocery store cannot keep the child contented for days and weeks as can the doll's room or shop counter furnished by the makeshifts of the garden. The child makes her cups and saucers and furniture herself. She prepares her own powders and distillations and is satisfied.

A harvest of acorn cups furnished table garniture, but not a cherished one; they were too substantial; we preferred more fragile, more perishable wares. Rose-hips were fashioned into tiny tea-sets, and would not be thought to be of great durability. A few years ago I was present at the opening of an ancient chest which had not been thoroughly searched for many years. In a tiny box within it was found some cherished belongings of a little child who had died in the year 1794. Among them was one of these tea-sets made of rose-hips, with handles of bent pins. Though shrunken and withered, the rose-hips still possessed some life color, but they soon fell into dust. There was something most tender in the thought of that loving mother, who had herself been dead over half a century, who had thus preserved the childish work of her beloved daughter.

Poppy pericarps made famous pepper-boxes, from which the seed could be shaken as pepper; dishes and cups, too, for dolls' tea-tables, and tiny handles of strong grass stems could be attached to the cups. For the child's larder, hollyhocks furnished food in their mucilaginous cheeses, and the insipid akenes of the sunflower and seeds of pumpkins swelled the feast. A daintier morsel, a drop of honey, the "clear bee-wine" of Keats, could be sucked from the curved spur of the columbine, and the scarlet-and-yellow trumpet of the beautiful coral honeysuckle, mellifluous of the name, as well as from the tubes of the heads of clover. We ate rose-leaves, also, and grass roots, and smarting peppergrass. The sorrel and oxalis (which we called "ladies' sorrel") and the curling tendrils of grape-vines gave an acid zest to our childish nibblings and browsings.

The gnarled plum trees at the end of the garden exuded beautiful crystals of gum, of which we could say proudly, like Cornelia, "These are my jewels." Translucent topaz and amber were never more beautiful, and, void of settings, these pellucid gems could be stuck directly on the fingers or on the tip of the ear. And when our vanity was sated with the bravery, or we could no longer resist our appetite, there still remained another charm: with childish opulence, like Cleopatra, we swallowed our jewels.

A low-growing mallow, wherever it chanced to run, shared with its cousin hollyhock the duty of providing cheeses. These mallow cheeses were also eaten by English children. In allusion to this the poet Clare wrote:--

"The sitting down when school was o'er Upon the threshold of the door, Picking from mallows, sport to please, The crumpled seed we call a cheese."

These flower customs never came to us through reading. All our English story-books told of making cowslip balls, of breaking the shepherd's purse, of playing lords and ladies with the arum--what we call jack-in-the-pulpit; yet we never thought of making any kindred attempts with these or similar flowers. We did gather eagerly the jack-in-the-pulpit, whose singularity of aspect seems always to attract the attention of children, and by pinching it at the base of the flower made it squeak, "made Jack preach." But like true republicans we never called our jacks lords and ladies.

The only liking we had for the portulaca was in gathering the seeds which grew in little boxes with a lid opening in a line around the middle. Oh, dear! It doesn't seem like the same thing to hear these beloved little seed-boxes described as "a pyxis, or a capsule with a circumscissile dehiscence."

From the live-for-ever, or orpine (once tenderly cherished as a garden favorite, now in many localities a hated and persistent weed), we made frogs, or purses, by gently pinching the fleshy leaves between thumb and forefinger, thus loosening the epidermis on the lower side of the leaf and making a bladder which, when blown up, would burst with a delightful pop. The New England folk-names by which this plant is called, such as frog-plant, blow-leaf, pudding-bag plant, show the wide-spread prevalence of this custom. A rival in sound could be made by popping the foxglove's fingers. English countrywomen call the foxglove a pop. The morning-glory could also be blown up and popped, and the canterbury-bell. We placed rose petals and certain tender leaves over our lips, and drew in the centres for explosion.

[Illustration: Spanish Dolls]

Noisy boys found scores of other ways to make various resounding notes in the gardens. A louder pop could be made by placing broad leaves on the extended thumb and forefinger of one hand and striking them with the other. The boys also made squawks out of birch bark and fiddles of cornstalks and trombones from the striped prickly leaf-stalks of pumpkins and squashes.

The New England chronicler in rhyme of boyhood days, Rev. John Pierpont, called this sound evoked from the last-named instrument "the deeper tone that murmurs from the pumpkin leaf trombone." It is, instead, a harsh trumpeting. These trombones were made in Germany as early as the thirteenth century.

An ear-piercing whistle could be constructed from a willow branch, and a particularly disagreeable sound could be evoked by every boy, and (I must acknowledge it) by every girl, too, by placing broad leaves of grass--preferably the pretty striped ribbon-grass, or gardener's garters--between the thumbs and blowing thereon. Other skilful and girl-envied accomplishments of the boys I will simply name: making baskets and brooches by cutting or filing the furrowed butternut or the stone of a peach; also fairy baskets, Japanesque in workmanship, of cherry stones; manufacturing old-women dolls of hickory nuts; squirt-guns and pop-guns of elderberry stems; pipes of horse-chestnuts, corn-cobs, or acorns, in which dried sweet-fern could be smoked; sweet-fern or grape-stem or corn-silk cigars.

Some child customs successfully defy the law of the survival of the useful, and ignore the lesson of reason; they simply exist. A marked example of these, of bootless toil, is the laborious hoarding of horse-chestnuts each autumn. With what eagerness and hard work do boys gather these pretty nuts; how they quarrel with one another over the possession of every one; how stingily they dole out a few to the girls who cannot climb the trees, and are not permitted to belabor the branches with clubs and stones for dislodgment of the treasures, as do their lordly brothers! How carefully the gathered store is laid away for winter, and not one thing ever done with one horse-chestnut, until all feed a grand blaze in the open fireplace! At the time of their gathering they are converted to certain uses, are made into certain toys. They are tied to the ends of strings, and two boys, holding the stringed chestnuts, play cob-nut. Two nuts are also tied together by a yard of cord, and, by a catching knack, circled in opposite directions. But these games have a very emphatic time and season,--the weeks when the horse-chestnuts ripen. The winter's store is always untouched.

From a stray burdock plant which had escaped destruction in our kitchen garden, or from a group of these pestilent weeds in a neighboring by-path, could be gathered materials for many days of pleasure. The small, tenacious burs could be easily wrought into interesting shapes. There was a romance in our neighborhood about a bur-basket. A young man conveyed a written proposal of marriage to his sweetheart reposing in one of the spiny vehicles. Like the Ahkoond of Swat, I don't know "why or which or when or what" he chose such an extraordinary medium, but the bur-basket was forever after haloed with sentiment. We made from burs more prosaic but admirable furniture for the dolls' house,--tables, chairs, and cradles: Traces of the upholstery clung long and disfiguringly to our clothing, but never deterred us from the fascinating occupation. To throw these burs upon each other's clothing was held to be the commission of the unpardonable sin in childish morals; still it was done "in holiday foolery," as in Shakespeare's day.

The milkweed, one of our few native weeds, and a determined settler on its native soil, furnished abundant playthings. The empty pods became fairy cradles, and tiny pillows could be made of the beautiful silk. The milkweed and thistle both furnish pretty, silvery balls when treated with deft fingers; and their manufacture is no modern fashion. Manasseh Cutler, writing in 1786, says:--

"I was pleased with a number of perfectly white silken balls, as they appeared to be, suspended by small threads along the frame of the looking-glass. They were made by taking off the calyx of the thistle at an early stage of blooming."

Ingenious toys of amusing shapes could be formed of the pith of the milkweed, and when weighted with a tack would always fall tack downward, as did the grotesque corn-stalk witches.

Pressed flowers were devoted to special uses. I cannot recall pressing any flower save larkspur,--the "lark-heels" of Shakespeare. Why this flower was chosen I do not know, unless for the reason that its colors were so enduring. We used to make charming wreaths of the stemless flowers by placing the spur of one in the centre of another flower, and thus forming a tiny circle. A favorite arrangement was alternating the colors pink and blue. These stiff little pressed wreaths were gummed on a sheet of paper, to be used at the proper time as a valentine,--were made for that definite purpose; yet I cannot now recall that, when February came, I ever sent one of these valentines, or indeed had any to send.

I have found these larkspur wreaths in a Pike's Arithmetic, used a century ago, and also in old Bibles, sometimes fastened in festoons on the title-page, around the name of a past owner. Did Dr. Holmes refer to one when he wrote his graceful line, "light as a loop of larkspur"? A similar wreath could be made of the columbine spurs. A friend tells me she made scores in her youth; but we never pressed any flowers but larkspur.

Many pretty wreaths were made of freshly gathered flowers. The daintiest were of lilac or phlox petals, which clung firmly together without being threaded, and the alternation of color in these wreaths--one white and two purple lilac petals, or two white phlox petals and two crimson--could easily prove the ingenuity and originality of the child who produced them. In default of better-loved flowers, the four-o'clock, or marvel-of-Peru, was made into a similar garland.

In the beautiful and cleanly needles of the pine the children had an unlimited supply for the manufacture of toys. Pretty necklaces could be made for personal adornment, resembling in miniature the fringed bark garments of the South Sea Islanders, and tiny brooms for dolls' houses. A thickly growing cluster of needles was called "a lady." When her petticoats were carefully trimmed, she could be placed upright on a sheet of paper, and by softly blowing upon it could be made to dance. A winter's amusement was furnished by gathering and storing the pitch-pine cones and hearing them snap open in the house. The cones could also be planted with grass-seeds, and form a cheerful green growing ornament.

[Illustration: Leaf Boats made from Flower-de-luce]

From birch bark gathered in long wood walks could be made cornucopias and drinking-cups, and letters could be cut thereon and thereof. There wandered through the town, harmless and happy, one of "God's fools," whose like is seen in every country community. He found his pleasure in early autu