Lovely, Ordinary,
Strange
I find I like some
plants because they are rare, some because they are peculiar, some
because they combine an exceptional loveliness of colour and form.
All, or some, of the reasons may be combined. And the loveliness of
a plant is not always an individual loveliness, but a loveliness of
a few, or many, plants of the same kind growing together in their
natural scene. The single plant illustrated on a page in a flower
book is an ideal abstraction, and partly a surviving habit from the
older days when the expert's job was only to find plants, and
divide them up into orders, families, genera and species. We
cannot, emotionally, separate a flower from the place, or the
conditions in which we usually find it.
Only a few plants
are part of the common language of English emotions. The daffodil,
or the primrose, or the ivy, or the yew tree, for example. And they
are not always the most beautiful. Daffodils, in their right place,
are captivating enough–straggling up a slope and just showing
their heads in a tangle of brambles and grass, or under the trees
and between the rocks along the bank of a stream. But analyse a
daffodil, and it turns out to be a flower that owes as much to the
daffodil tradition and to its way of appearing early in the spring
and in mass, as it does to its own beauty. Many excellent plants
which come out at a crowded time of the year have hardly even the
small recognition of a common name.
I am not sure,
either, that primroses deserve, in themselves, all the honour they
are given. The primrose smells of a new year, its leaves have an
endearing crimple, but taken as an individual, it cannot really
claim exceptional loveliness of form or colour. It is a plant
homely and ordinary in detail beside a yellow-centred, elegant
stitchwort. The way it grows, its relation to the ground, to the
brown debris of a previous year, its scattered abundance, its
earliness, its candour and eye-openness, are its
virtues.
We should be all for
every possible mixture of virtue in any plant. The formal beauty of
an individual specimen is only the first requirement. Ruskin, who
is responsible for a good many of our likings to-day and our
notions of preserving ancient buildings and protecting rural
England, wanted in flowers the 'right' placing of the leaves, and
flower, and bud, and stem, combined with pure colour and rich
surface, and still further associated with moral
lessons. He did not approve of peculiarity, or
believe as Samuel Palmer did, "that all the very finest original
pictures, and the topping things in nature, have a certain
quaintness by which they partly affect us ; not the
quaintness of bungling–the queer doings of a common thought;
but a curiousness in their beauty, a salt on their tails, by which
the imagination catches hold on them."
I prefer Palmer's
view. I would go along with Ruskin's belief that "the
flower exists for its own sake –not for the fruit's sake . .
. the flower is the end of the seed–not the seed of the
flower." But no flower need be admired simply for its
loveliness, or for the traditional feeling about
it. It is human to prefer what is interesting in
appearance, in behaviour, and in history. It is
human to make symbols out of dry ground or clear water, and
everything associated with them. If Professor Salisbury tells me
that some of the southern rarer species came into England possibly
with the Megalith builders or if Clement Reid provides evidence
that fumitory–Erdrauch, earth-smoke, to the
Germans–which is anyway one of the loveliest of plants, came
in with the Neolithic farmers about 4000 B.C., then I find
fumitory, and those southern flowers, all the more
attractive.
Ruskin was very much
repelled by ideas, still fresh in his life-time, about the relation
of colour in flowers to insects and natural selection.
Science didn't allow the flowers to be the end of the seed (a
fiction, if you like, but one that every botanist accepts in his
own flower garden).
All the same, the
attraction of any plant is increased, and ought to be increased, by
any curious fact about it. I prefer facts about history and
distribution and adaptability, the facts of the plant
itself. Nettles are more interesting to me
because they like the nitrogen of decay, and because they can
sting. When the Linnaean collections were being
photographed at the beginning of the war, the photographer was
stung by a nettle which Linnaeus had dried two hundred years
ago. I like a particular frail catchfly, which
occurs in several English counties, because it is lovely,
yes–and also because the purple spot on each one of its five
white petals seemed to Linnaeus like one of the five wounds of
Christ. So it was called Silene
quinquevulnera. But I'm afraid that is a
reason outside the plant.
Bogbean I like for
the lacy exquisiteness of its white beauty and pink buds rising out
of black bog water, and also because I know it to be an ancient
hardy plant which was here before the Ice Ages, and which grows in
the Arctic, in Greenland, and Iceland, as well as alongside the
snipe's nest which I found one year in Pembrokeshire. Forget-me-not
I think of not only beside a slow river like the Mole or the
Cherwell, but rooted in slime, just below the point where a hot
spring trickled out of a black volcanic slag heap, and steamed up
into, the cold of the Icelandic air, opening its eyes like the blue
flower of Novalis. And so on.
A poor,
exclusive reason for liking a plant is certainly because it
splashes a big area with its own uniform colour; and in this way,
in the last hundred years or so, several plants have pushed
themselves into an emotional prominence that I do not think they
deserve. Heather and bluebell, for example. I doubt if a wide area
of purple was much felt to be beautiful before 1850 or
1860.
Geoffrey
Grigson, Nature in Britain, (1950); Country Book
Club