Notes From the Wild Garden

I.

THE latest word in botany will have it that flowers are but modified leaves ; that their colors, markings, and even honey-sweets are but so many lures to obtain the service of insects as pollen distributers. Be it so. Still unimpaired is the lovely mystery of flowers. Their household economies the poet will not despise, their diplomacies towards the insect world the poet will not arraign. Their value to the imagination and the heart is not lessened, that they know and pursue their own affairs unaware of our delectation. Recently a lady told me of her wonder, and how she of her “ wonder made religion,” in finding among the grass of a city park a flower so small (speedwell ?) that its perfect symmetry and purple pansy-like beauty were fully revealed only by the microscope. The sum of her wonder seemed to be: What was this flower doing there in the grass, invisible, or so minute as to contribute nothing to the human observer at large ? What was it doing ? Leading its own life, a world of pleasure and enterprise within itself; incidentally a joy to the chance discoverer.

The last time I saw our earliest and commonest of violets blooming in the grass, its flowers were touched with a strange ethereality, to my eye suggesting so many gleams of purple light shot from a prism into the more earthly and opaque greenness of the surrounding grass. Contemplation of this appearance (subjective and of mood as it may have been) caught back a subtle half memory, half-visionary effect, treasured, doubtless, in farthest childhood : a plot of tender April grass, seen as through a moist depth of various colors, — ineffable blue, violet, mauve, and green, — such as would have been produced bad a rainbow been wrecked, and there poured out in aerial liquid suffusion ! Violets amid the grass, and all blended in a spring rain, may have been the genesis of this dream-memory. Indeed, if there is any flower dear to Mnemosyne and suitable for her emblem, the violet would plead to be her first choice. So much, at least, did my seasonable thoughts unconsciously turn in its direction, one springtime when I was a city dweller, that, in walking by a dear ragged purlieu of Washington Square, where the plantain had been allowed to grow, and where its broad leaves caught bluish half lights under the shadowing trees, I seemed to see an indefinite bloom of violets in the mass ; yet there were no violets save those of fancy s wistful cultivation.

Is it merely through association that the flowers of the young year affect us as being childlike ? Does not this impression arise rather from their delicacy of coloring, their fragility and evanescence ? They are the flowers, too, that are especially dear to childhood. Year by year their little lovers come with full hands bringing them from their chosen places. The generations of children change, but these vernal blossoms might be the selfsame ones that appealed to our own lost childhood. Yet the glad juvenescence of wood and field, and the return of these juvenile flowers, give ns who are far gone in the prose of our unrelenting years a sense of something miraculous and even anachronistic in nature. Two poets, in opposite mood, drop a word of testimony regarding the ministration which the natural world, through the medium of reminiscence, offers to the heart of man : —

So might comfort have reached the shepherd Endymion, had he but lifted his eyes from that “ hazel cirque of shedded leaves ” whereon they dwelt. But nature volunteers no such anaesthetic through memory, if we listen to the witness embodied in these lines : —

Very lately, borne rapidly past a rich woodland, as I looked from the car window I beheld along the fence border and ditches a waving and fleeting mosaic of bloom. By sympathetic intuition, rather than of visual certainty, I knew the component parts of that mosaic, — sea-shell tints of the anemone and cress, violets white and blue, pale mystical azure of the wild phlox, wan purplepink of cranesbill, — all so many flakes of fading memory and elusive sentiment. It, was enough to know that they were faithful to their try sting places and hours. I did not wish to stand among those darlings of the spring, or to take them in my hands, being so sure that each had acquired the poignant magic of the “flower of silken leaf.”I cannot learn that the flowers of the riper season make a like pathetic appeal, though a fellow-rambler testifies that the hillside golden rod, in the long series of autumns, has come to seem the reflected sunshine of years far past, and that all places under its sway are invested with a kind of luminous melancholy. So the language of this flower interpreted might, be “ the-pleasure-of-being-sad.

Every flower has its day, when it sits in state in the fields and receives the homage of the heedful and patient courtier. It may be but a brief day, and the small flower sovereign may be attended by no great pomp and circumstance ; but for the time being no congener disputes its right to the favors of our eye. There is one minim of June time when even so insignificant a blossom as the sorrel lords it in dry upland meadows, during which time its burntsienna flame asserts itself over the snow of the daisies and the rosy purple of the clover. I shall not forget how, one summer morning, as I went through the fields, among other various and more conspicuous blooms the small vivid star of the blue-eyed grass, for its multiplied numbers, held ascendency in the flowery perspective. Besides, it is to he noticed that each year, in any given spot, nature insists upon some special bloom which in another season would have a qualitative rather than a. quantitative value. Sometimes the zeal and partiality of the rambler’s eye for a particular plant will lead to the idea that the plant is ubiquitous and abundant above other growths of the place and season. Of one autumn’s apparent extravagance in “purple grasses " Thoreau observes: “I may say that I never saw them before, though, when I came to look them face to face, there did come down to me a purple gleam from previous years. Now, wherever I go, I see hardly anything else.”To me it happened, after bringing home from a distance roots of the flower by some called innocence, by others bluets, that I found it less than a mile away, in a thriftless poor pasture, blooming in such grasslike luxuriance there was no standing-room left in the whole field for any other flowering stalk. A word in praise of the trooping legions of

INNOCENCE.

Other days brought other flowers, which, as they also demanded recognition from their lover, accordingly received some brief ascription.

COLUMBINE.

CLEMATIS.

MILKWEED (SUMMER).

SILTCWKED (AUTUMN).

HAT.

In popular acceptation, the soul of the flower resides in its perfume. But certain loveliest flower-souls sometimes exercise singular repellences for individuals of the human family. There have been those, even, who could not endure the fragrance of the rose. To my knowledge, one observer finds in the scent of lilacs an unpleasant reminder of the odor of escaping gas. Another makes no distinction between the breath of mignonette and the smell of fresh corn meal. To me the scent of the thistle is identical with that of the bumble-bee sprawling luxuriously among its purple filaments ; and the first time the delicate, feathery flowers of the beach plum were brought me, surely their odor was the same I had noted in downy chicks and nestling birds !

Beside the gratification which flowers provide for the sense of sight and the sense of smell, there is another and quite distinct pleasure, — that which is conveyed in the contact, of a flower; as in a subtle spray of lilacs brushing against your face, the dabbling touches of the snowball, the tender coolness of apple blossoms dashed with rain, the refined sleekness of the lily, which gave an oldtime poet countenance in describing his lady’s hand : so smooth, so white, so soft it was, “ as it had worn a lily for a glove.” Further tactile differentiation is to be found in the warm, vital, and airy touch of the rose (so unlike the quality of the lily petal), in the viscid sultriness of the poppy and the petunia, in the tissuey thinness and dryness of the larkspur blossom.

If flowers might but speak, — as the intent and listening looks of certain flowers almost suggest they might, — or if one might but speak to a flower, calling it by name, and it would recognize the voice, like a pet bird, how such a touch of conscious intelligence would further endear the precious vanishers! Yet I sympathize with the lady who told me that she left a metropolitan orchid show somewhat abruptly because too closely followed by the elfin eyes and mischievous innuendoes of these curious lovely exotics. Nor is it difficult to understand the haunted feeling of reproach experienced by my little neighbor, a child who had stolen some roguish pansies, and who was heard to cry out as she threw them away, “ There ! will you stop calling me ‘thief’?” Some plants are born sorcerers, and require no Medea to release their potencies. Such, to my fancy, is the bloodroot, with its innocent-faced milk-white blossom and its red-bleeding root. Such is the Indian pipe (monotmpaever a moonlight spirit, with not a drop of green blood in its veins. Also of this necromantic order is the mandrake, and I have spent many a fascinated quarter of an hour over a woodside knoll where this plant appeared in all stages of vernal development : first, pale green waxen cones just pushing through the mould ; next, with the appearing of the round flowerbud, little musing acolytes, with bowed shaven heads and mantles drawn tightly over their shoulders ; and last, the deeply notched leaf now loosened from the stem about which it had been folded, diminutive mandarins, with their umbrellas half or fully spread to the warm sun. I have, however, at times known the most familiar, homely, and serviceaide plants to exercise spells of the enchanter. One summer, having my study in an old house through whose broken window entered a weak, pallid, yard-long spray of grapevine, it seemed to me, as I sat by my little table at work, that this branch strove with all its feeble powers to reach me and petition for support, I even fancied a slight oscillation moved it (when there was no stir of the air), and that if I would patiently hold out to it my little finger the vine-branch might in a few hours clasp it with grateful tendrils. Had it done so, who knows whether its spell might ever have been reversed, and I released from durance?

II.

How certain plants, affording as they do a link between regions widely separated, take the fancy voyaging to distant lands! Inevitably, one standing among ranks of luxuriant fern is flattered into a vision of tropic palm groves. When I learned that a variety of beach pea common along the margins of the Great Lakes thrived also in the more ancient sea sands, my interest in the little straggler was very greatly enhanced, for it seemed eloquent with the tales of a traveler. After reading Dr. Kane’s account of meeting in north Greenland the “ white star of the chickweed,” I could not but pay homage to Stellavia when I again saw its blossom in our cold fields, drowsily peeping out at the uncertain sun on a late autumn day. Scandinavia and Odin sent runic messages in the sighings of a grove of seaeoast pines; or they appeared to me as so many bearded Charons, jam senior, yet green with the immortal youth of the gods, as they stood stanchly together, clothed along their stems with fluttering thready mosses.

Coming from the midland and its usually ranker growth of plants common to the interior and the coast, and observing that such plants, though dwarfed as they approached the sea, had there a tougher fibre, I was impressed that their flower-tints were of a deeper dye and that their fragrance was increased. This impression may he due merely to the mind’s impulse to ascribe equivalence, — deeper color for less luxuriant growth : yet it has been asserted that, the flowers met along the path in the ascent of mountains are ever smaller and brighter with the increase of altitude. May not exposure to the rigor of sea winds produce relative effects similar to those resulting from increased altitude ?

It was once a besetting temptation (which, however, was resisted) to traffic in a novel way between the tame and the wild garden ; not merely to bring home wood and field plants to naturalize with familiar horticultural citizens, hut to open the garden gate and call to the home-staying ones to follow me out into the waste places. I did not desire to sow tares in my neighbor’s wheat, but I should have been glad to prove whether the poppy of the English cornfields would flourish under the American Ceres. It would have been so easy to blow a little papaverous dust here and there over the emerald plain, and to ascribe the next year’s crimson riot to the pranks of the Wild Sower. I did not do this ; but I continued to dream of lily-of-thevalley plots, oases of daffodils, and troops of larkspur, which, through a little vagrant and eccentric industry, might arise in unusual places, to the mystery and delight of rambling children, and perhaps to the confusion of amateur botanists.

In botanical descriptions, certain plants not actually indigenous, but gradually becoming wayside and field acquisitions, are designated “ Escaped from gardens.” I venture upon a parody, “Escaped from the wild garden,” and under this designation select and bring together from the notebook of several summers sundry specimens from the wild garden of my rambles, — this free tract one tvay touching the fresh lips of Erie, and another way running down to meet the salt kisses of the Atlantic. If, in this gathering, a certain grotesquely in flowers, rather than their loveliness, seems to be given emphasis, I can only say that, beside those flowers first notable for their beauty, there are others more conspicuously suggesting pathos, dignity or flippancy of character, shyness, audacity, hauteur, curiosity, humility, and vainglory. Why not also amiable loquacity and lively comradely ? Most of the flowers I met in the wild garden were willing to talk to me, or at least to allow me to record the communications that passed among themselves, conveyed by such pantomime and subtle intimations as only flowers know how fo use, and sometimes, indeed, by mere facial expression. First in my notebook I find this souvenir of a wild violet, perhaps more common in Ohio than elsewhere; I believe the botanies call it Viola rostrata, but J called it

THE WORRIED VIOLET.

Some leaves of the book being turned, and some seasons come and gone, I find myself taking the testimony of a curious floral albino, whose descendants may be this very summer blooming where I found it, along the sea road leading from New London town.

A WHITE THISTLE.

It was in this very neighborhood of the white thistle that a famous contest was witnessed between the goddess Feronia and one who had no love for the wild garden. This contest. I am glad to say, resulted in

THE RESURRECTION OF THE WILD ROSES.

On the other hand, Cultivation, once smiled upon by the Lares and. Penates, holds its own, how tenaciously, how lovingly ! I did not have to go far for an illustration of this truth, for I found it in the green and living text that encircled an empty and decaying farmhouse, whose hollow window-eyes looked unspeakable desolation.

THE OLD GARDEN.

Any rambler who has observed the still writhings of a Laocoon group of plants entwined by a certain wily serpent of tlie fields will justify the moral of the subjoined fable.

DODDER.

A PROTEST FROM MAX Y CITIZENS OF THE winn HARDEN.

From a swamp in Cotuit (Cape Cod) came the truculent, creature — plant though it he — whose unsparing reprisal I knew not how to meet; but listen !

THE SUNDEW SPEAKS.

WHITE AZALEAS IX THE WINDOW.

Wild indeed are those we call wild flowers, utterly refusing to let us bring them away from their haunts alive. Most true is this of the wood flowers, that most palely resent the touch of the hand. Their generic name might well be

ELUSION.

But most elusive of all was the flower I espied, hastily coming through the ivory gate. Within I learned its name only, hut since I have ventured upon its interpretation.

HONEYTROPE.

Edith M. Thomas.