Moorland Idylls

XII.

IVY IN THE COPSE

See what a beautiful creeping spray of ivy – dark green, with russet veins – from the ground beneath the copse here! How close it keeps to the earth! how exquisitely the leaves fit in with one another, like a living mosaic! That is why the ivy-leaf is shaped as we know it, with re-entrant angles, very abrupt and deep-lobed. The plant, as a whole, crawls snake-like over the ground in shady spots, or climbs up the face of stony cliffs, or mantles walls and ruins, or clambers boldly over the trunks of trees – which last, though its most conspicuous, is not by any means its commonest or most natural situation. It is a haunter of the shade; therefore it wants to utilize to the uttermost every inch of space and every ray of sunlight. So it clings close to the soil or to its upright support, and lays its leaves out flat, each occupying its own chosen spot of earth without encroaching on its neighbour’s demesne, and none ever standing in the light of another. That shows one at once the secret reason for the angular foliage: it is exactly adapted to the ivy’s habitat. All plants which grow in the same way, half trailing, half climbing, have leaves of similar shape. Three well-known examples, each bearing witness to the resemblance in their very names, are the ivy-leaved veronica, the ivy-leaved campanula, and the ivy-leaved toad-flax. Or look once more at the pretty climbing ivy-leaved geranium or pelargonium, so commonly grown in windows. Contrast all these angular leaves of prostrate creepers with the heart-shaped or arrow-headed foliage of the upright twining or tendril-making climbers, such as convolvulus, black bindweed, black bryony, and bittersweet, and you will recognize at once how different modes of life almost necessarily beget different types of leaf-arrangement.

Nay, more. If you watch the ivy itself in its various stages, you will see how the self-same plant adapts its different parts from time to time to every variation in the surrounding conditions. Here in the copse, left to itself, as nature made it, it spreads vaguely along the ground at first with its lower branches, developing small leaves as it goes, narrow-lobed and angular, which are pressed flat against the soil in such a way as to utilize all possible air and sunshine. They cover the ground without mutual interference. And they are evergreen, too, so as to make the best of the scanty light that struggles through the trees in early spring and late autumn, while the oaks and ashes are all bare and leafless. But the main stem, prying about, soon finds out for itself some upright bank or trunk, up which it climbs, adhering to its host by the aid of its innumerable short root-like excrescences. Here its foliage assumes still the same type as on the ground, but is not quite so closely appressed to the support, nor yet so sharply angular. The mode of the mosaic, too, has altered a little to suit the altered circumstances; the leaves now stand out more freely from the stem, yet in such a way as not to interfere with or overshadow each other. By-and-by, however, the ivy, as it grows, reaches the top of the bank, or some convenient flowering place on the friendly trunk; and then it begins to send up quite different blossoming branches. These rise straight into the air, without support on any side; unlike the creeping stems, they are stout enough and strong enough to stand alone – to bear their own weight and that of the prospective flowers and berries. Besides, they wish to be seen from all sides at once, so as to attract from far and near a whole circle of amicable birds and insects. And now observe that on these upright flowering branches the shape of the leaves changes entirely, so that you would hardly recognize them at first sight for ivy. They stand round the branch on all sides equally, and therefore have no longer any need to fit in and dovetail with one another. Each leaf is now somewhat oval in form, though sharply pointed; there are no more lobes or angles; and the outline as a whole is far fuller and usually unbroken. Yet they still avoid standing in one another’s light, and are so arranged in spirals round the stem as to interfere as little as possible with one another’s freehold.

The little yellowish-green flowers which top these branches appear in late autumn. They are not particularly conspicuous, and their petals are insignificant; yet they distil abundant honey on a disk in the centre, and they breathe forth a curious half-putrescent scent, which seems highly attractive to many carrion flies and other foul feeders. Hence you will find that butterflies seldom or never visit them; but they are frequented and fertilized by hundreds of smaller insects, for whose sake the copious honey is stored on the open disk, where it is easily accessible to even the stumpiest proboscis. Ivy, in short, is a democratic flower: it lays by no rich store of secret nectar in hidden recesses, like the honeysuckle or the nasturtium, where none but the Norman-nosed aristocrats of the insect world can reach it; it is all for the common plebs. “A fair field and no favour” is the motto it acts upon. When the berries have been thus fertilized, they lie by over winter, slowly ripening and swelling, to blacken at last in the succeeding summer. The ripe fruit is then eaten by birds, such as hawfinches and certain of the thrush tribe, which disperse the hard nut-like seeds undigested. Black or dark blue are rare colours for flowers, but common for fruits; partly perhaps because birds are less fond of bright reds and yellows than the æsthetic insects; but partly also because such dusky hues are readily seen on a tree or bush against the snows of winter, the grey brown of late autumn, or the delicate wan green of early spring foliage.

XIII.

A DESPERATE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE

Alas, alas! most of the pretty white foxgloves we planted out by the boggy hollow just below the tennis-lawn have come to nothing. The heather and bracken of the moor have outgrown them and throttled them. They made a hard fight for life, in their petty Thermopylæ – one or two of them, indeed, are still battling with inexhaustible courage against the countless hordes of sturdy natives that choke and overshadow them; but die they must in the end, unless I step in betimes as earthly providence to thin out the furze and enrich the niggard soil for the struggling strangers. They remind me of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts. Foxgloves, you know, cannot compete with ling or Scotch heather on its native heath. They are denizens of a deeper and richer mould, growing generally on fat wayside banks or in the ditches by hedgerows – always the wealthiest and most luxuriantly manured of any wild places, because there birds perch, and wild animals take refuge, and snails and beetles die, and robins perish, that hedgerow weeds may batten on their decaying bodies. The hedge, in point of fact, is the main shelter and asylum for beasties great and small in our workaday England. There the hedgehog skulks, and the field-mouse hides, and the sparrow builds her nest, and the slow-worm suns himself; there the rabbit burrows, and the thrush sits mocking, and the dormouse dreams, and the lizard lies in wait for the dancing midges. All the waste richness of the field finds its rest at last by the roots of the whitethorn, to reappear in due time as red campion and herb-robert, as faint-scented may and tall military spikes of purple foxglove.

But when you sow or transplant these lush herbs of the hedgerow on to the bare and open heath, they come into competition at once with other and far hardier upland bushes. The plants of the moor are indeed unlike such pampered odalisques of the deep banks and rich lowlands. Stern children of the heights, their stems are hard and wiry, their leaves small and dry; their flowers feel like tissue-paper; their growing shoots have none of that luxuriant tenderness, that translucent delicacy, which characterizes the long sprays of hedgerow dog-rose and hedgerow bramble. All is arid and parsimonious, as in some Highland cottage. Our daintily bred foxgloves, decayed gentlewomen, stunted and dwarfed in that inhospitable soil, can scarce find nutriment in the thirsty sand to send up a feeble parody of their purple spikes; in long droughts they droop and fail for lack of a drop of water. You must make a deep pocket of garden mould in the midst of the heath if you want them to thrive; and even then, unless you keep constantly cutting down the heather and gorse about them, they are overtopped and outlived by the native vegetation.

To dwellers in towns, that mere phrase, “the struggle for life among plants,” seems a quaint exaggeration. They cannot believe that creatures so rooted and so passive as plants can struggle at all for anything. The pitched battles of the animals they can understand, because they can see the kestrel swooping down upon the linnet, the weasel scenting the spoor of the rabbit to his burrow. But the pitched battle of the plants sounds to them but a violent metaphor, a poetical trick of language, a notion falsely pressed into the service of the naturalist by some mistaken analogy. In reality, those few of us who have fully read ourselves into the confidence and intimacy of the beautiful green things, know well that nowhere on earth is the struggle for life so real, so intense, so continuous, so merciless as among the herbs and flowers. Every weed in the meadows, every creeper in the woodland, is battling for its own hand each day and all day long against a crushing competition. It is battling for food and drink, for air and sunlight, for a place to stand in, for a right to existence. Its rivals around are striving hard with their roots to deprive it of its fair share of water and of manure; are striving hard with their leaves to forestall it in access to carbonic acid and sunshine; are striving hard with their flowers to entice away the friendly bee and the fertilizing beetle; are striving hard with their winged or protected seeds to anticipate the vacant spots on which it fain would cast its own feeble offspring. A struggle for the Hinterland goes on without ceasing. The very fact that plants can hardly move at all from the spot where they grow makes the competition in the end all the fiercer. They are perpetually intriguing among stones and crannies to insinuate their roots here, and to get beforehand on their rivals with their seedlings there; they fight for drops of water after summer showers, like the victims shut up in the Black Hole of Calcutta; they spread their leaves close in rosettes along the ground, so as to monopolize space and kill down competition; they press upward toward the sun so as to catch the first glance of the bountiful rays, and to grasp before their neighbours at every floating speck of carbonic acid.

This is no poetic fancy. It is sober and literal biological truth. The green fields around us are one vast field of battle. And you can realize it at once if you only think what we mean by a flower-garden. We want to induce peonies and hollyhocks and geraniums and roses to smile around our houses, and what do we do for them? We “make a bed,” as we say; in other words, we begin by clearing away all the stouter and better-adapted native competitors. Go, dock and thistle; go, grass and nettle! We will have pansies here, and sweet-peas, and gilly-flowers! So we root them all up, turn and break the stiff clods, put in rich leaf-mould, manure it from the farmyard, and plant at measured distances the components of our nosegay. Tall white garden lilies take the place of knotweed; the larkspur mocks the sky where the dandelion spread before its golden constellations. Yet even so, we have not permanently secured our end. Original sin reappears as ragwort and hawkweed. Every day or two we must go round and “weed the beds,” as we say; the very familiarity of phrase and act blinds our minds to the truth that what we are really doing is to limit the struggle, to check the competition. We pull up here a shepherd’s-purse and there a chickweed, that the Iceland poppies may have room to raise their black-capped buds, and that the groundsel may not steal all the light and air from our shrinking nemophilas. Relax your care for a week or two, and what then do you find? The goosefoots and couch-grasses have lived down the mignonette; the russet docks are overshadowing your white Japanese anemones. Abandon the garden for a year, and the native vegetation has avenged itself on the intruders in a war of extermination. The thistles have cut off the lilies-of-the-valley, as Israel cut off the Canaanites; not a spike remains of your sky-blue monkshood before the purple standard of the victorious burdocks. Here and there, it is true, some hardy perennial, some stout iris or sweet-william, armed with its sword-shaped foliage, will continue the unequal strife for a miserable year or two of guerrilla warfare, like Hereward Wake in the Isle of Ely; but sooner or later the stronger will win, and your garden will become a mere nursery of weeds, whose flying thistle-down will invade and usurp the neighbouring meadows.

Plants, in point of fact, have more needs than animals; therefore, perforce, they struggle harder. The beasts require but food and drink; the herbs require from the soil water and nitrogenous matter for their roots; they require from the air, carbon, which is their true solid food, for their leaves; they need sunlight, which is the motive power, for their growth and assimilation; insects to fertilize them, birds or breezes to disperse their seeds. For all these they struggle ceaselessly among themselves; and the struggle is all the deadlier because it is carried on at such very close quarters.

XIV.

COLTSFOOT FLOWERS

Down by the streamlet in the Frying Pan, in the heavy clay soil of the bank, I see this morning the flower-scapes of the coltsfoot are lifting betimes their curious bent heads. Two days more, and they will star the bare earth with their golden blossoms. That is a sure sign that winter is over, the labourers will tell you, weatherwise in their ancestral lore; and, indeed, the coltsfoot is a prudent and a wary herb, which I have seldom known go wrong in its calculation of probabilities. It makes its own weather forecast, independently of the Meteorological Office, and it backs its opinion. As long as it thinks frost is likely to recur, it “lies low,” like Br’er Rabbit; but as soon as it feels pretty confident the worst is past, and no more hard weather will come to nip it in the bud, it boldly sends up its leafless flower-stem, looking more like a shoot of asparagus than anything else, with which most people are familiar. I have never seen it make a serious mistake, even in the sunniest and most treacherous English spring weather.

Who gave it its wisdom? – to parody Mr. Swinburne. How did it come so well to time itself as the earliest among our conspicuous spring flowers? Well, coltsfoot is a composite, belonging to the same minor group as the common ragworts – its very leaf, indeed, being a good deal like some of the larger ragworts in type, especially those handsome exotics of the race, so much cultivated in greenhouses under the name of cinerarias. But living in cold northern climates, on the banks of streams, in deep clay soil, where it spreads most vigorously, it has learned by experience to accommodate itself to its environment. It did so, in fact, many thousand years before Mr. Herbert Spencer taught poor recent humanity that latter-day catchword. Growing in thickset places, by running water, where its own large leaves and those of its neighbours would overshadow and hide its dainty blossoms in the height of summer, it has acquired the odd trick of sending them up naked, on the naked clay, in very early spring, when they court and easily attract the attention of the first spring insects to visit and fertilize them. In order to do this it must lay by material the summer before, and that material the prudent plants bury deep out of harm’s way, in their creeping underground rootstock. Owing to the dampness and chilliness of the clay, which suits its constitution best, coltsfoot hides its rootstock exceptionally deep in the earth, and this precaution affords it, on the whole, a safe protection alike against cold and against burrowing enemies. As long as the frozen earth remains chilly underneath, the buds make no stir; but as soon as the subsoil begins to rise in temperature to a very modest point the flower-heads grow apace from the buried material, exactly as hyacinths do from a bulb when placed in water in a slightly warm atmosphere. And such a raising of temperature in the subsoil is one of the surest signs that winter has spent itself.

The flower-stem of coltsfoot rises bare and leafless, save for a few small scales, such as one sees on asparagus; but it is thickly covered with a warm cottony wool, to keep out winter, and the buds are bent down so as to protect them at once from chill and from injury. Each stem terminates in a single pretty fluffy yellow flower-head, composed of innumerable golden florets of two kinds – those of the ray very narrow and ragged, giving the entire head its characteristic tasselled appearance; while those of the central disk are much larger, and bell-shaped. The entire blossom looks like a dandelion at first sight to a careless observer; but when you come to examine it closely, it is a far more dignified and beautiful flower. The tone of its yellow is richer, yet mellower, and its fluffy little ray-florets have a Japanesque charm in their flowing looseness.

So long as the flowers continue to bloom, you see no leaves; whence it comes about that many people know well the blossoms of coltsfoot in spring, and the foliage in summer, without having the faintest idea that they belong to one another. But if you keep your eye on the place where the yellow stars arose, after the flowers have withered and the white heads have blown away in copious flights, their wee feathery fruitlets, you will see by-and-by some big broad angular leaves, very thick and noticeable, rising high into the air from the same buried rootstock in the self-same position. Few leaves are more remarkable, with their heart-shaped bases and their obtrusive angles; while the under side is thickly covered throughout with a cottony wool, loose, white, and abundant. They are big, because they overtop the other leaves about, and so gain free access to the air and sunshine. They have elbow-room to spread in. Their business (like that of all leaves) is to catch and eat carbonic acid, which the sunlight assimilates for them. For this reason they are green above, with a transparent skin, which skin forms a water-layer for absorbing the gas and conducting it to the living green tissue beneath, where it is duly digested and assimilated. But why the cotton below? Well, the upper and under surfaces of leaves perform in nature quite different functions. The upper side, which is thick and firm, eats carbonic acid and receives the incident sunlight to digest it; but the under side, which is looser and spongier, gives off vapour of water – transpires, as we say – by innumerable little mouths, which are its outward breathing-pores. Now, these pores must not be allowed to get clogged with dew; so in wet meadows and by river-banks, where everything reeks with dew from sunset till late in the succeeding morning, almost all the plants protect the breathing-pores on their under side by such an unwettable felt of thickly matted cotton. Meadow-sweet is a familiar English example, and so is a close relation of our coltsfoot, the butterbur.

XV.

A HEATHER EPISODE

I flung myself on the heath outside the house just now, with my friend the Editor. He edits a London literary journal, and disbelieves in everything. He is critical and sceptical. When he inherits glory (as he surely must do in time, for his is the noblest and purest and best of souls at bottom, in spite of its gruffness), I believe he will gaze about him at the golden floor and the walls of chrysoprase, and murmur to himself, “Humph! Not all it’s cracked up to be!” Yet he is as tender as a woman, and as simple as a child; though he has found out the fact that the world is hollow, and that the human doll is stuffed with sawdust.

We lay beside a clump of tall flaming rose-bay – fire-weed, as they call it over yonder in America. There, in the great woodlands, on whose lap I was nursed, a wandering child of the primeval forest, you may see whole vast sheets of that flamboyant willow-herb covering the ground for miles on bare glades in the pinewood. Most visitors fancy it gets its common American name from its blaze of colour; and, indeed, it often spreads like a sea of flame over acres and acres of hillside together. But the prosaic backwoodsman gave it its beautiful title for a more practical reason: because it grows apace wherever a forest fire has killed out and laid waste the native vegetation. Like most of the willow-herbs, it has a floating seed winged with cottony threads, which waft it through the air on pinions of gossamer; and thus it alights on the newly burnt soil, and springs up amain after the first cool shower. Within twelve months it has almost obliterated the signs of devastation on the ground under foot; only the great charred stems and gaunt blackened branches rise above its smiling mass of green leaves and bright blossoms, to tell anew the half-forgotten tale of ruin and disaster.

Here in England the rose-bay is a less frequent denizen, for it loves the wilds, and feels most at home in deep rich meadow bottoms unoccupied by tillage. Now, in Britain these conditions do not often occur since the Norman conquest; still, I have seen vast sheets of its tall pink pyramids of bloom at John Evelyn’s Wootton; while even up here, on our heathery uplands, it fights hard for life among the gorse and bracken. Its beautiful spikes of irregular flowers, wide open below and tapering at the top into tiny knobs of bud, are among the loveliest elements in the natural flora of my poor three acres.

We were lying beside them, then, out of the eye of the sun, under the shadow of one bare and weather-beaten pine-tree, when talk fell by chance on the small brown lizards that skulk among the sandy soil of our hilltop. I said, and I believe, that the lizard population of the British Isles must outnumber the human by many, many millions. For every sandy heath is just a London of lizards. They pullulate in the ling like slum-children in Whitechapel. They were about us, I remarked, as thick as Hyde Park demonstrators; only, instead of demonstrating, they prefer to lie low and conceal their identity. The policeman hawks and the owls on night duty have taught them that wisdom – stern Draconian officers of nature’s executive, who know no gentler punishment than the death penalty for the slightest misdemeanour.

The Editor smiled that sceptical smile which is the terror of young contributors of Notes on Novels. He rejected the lizards like unsuitable copy. He didn’t believe in them. He doubted there were any on the heath at all. He had walked over square miles of English moorland, but never a lizard had he seen, out of all their millions. Imagination, he observed, was an invaluable property to poets and naturalists. It was part of their stock-in-trade. He didn’t seek to deprive them of it. As Falstaff says, a man may surely labour at his vocation.

I was put on my mettle. For once in my life, I did a rash thing; I ventured to prophesy. “If you wish,” I cried, “I’ll catch a lizard, and show you.” The Editor’s face was a study to behold. Phil May would have paid him ten guineas for the copyright. “As you like,” he answered grimly. “Produce your lizards.”

Fortune favours the brave. But I confess I trembled. Never before had I bragged; and now I wondered whether Fortune or Nemesis would carry it. ’Twas two to one on Nemesis. Yet the gods, as Swinburne tells us in “Les Noyades,” are sometimes kindly. We lay still on the heather – still as mice – and waited. Presently, to my great and unexpected joy, a sound as of life! – a rustling among the bilberry bushes! One sharp brown head, and then another, with beady black eyes as keen as a beagle’s, peeped forth from the miniature jungle of brake and cross-leaved heath in the bank beside us. I raised my lids, and looked mutely at the Editor. He followed my glance, and saw the tiny lithe creatures glide slowly from their covert, and crawl with heads held slyly on one side, and then on the other, into the open patch, on which we lay like statues. How they listened and looked! How they raised their quaint small heads, on the alert against the first faint breath of danger! I sat still as a mouse again, holding my breath in suspense, and waiting anxiously for developments. Then a miracle happened. Miracles do happen now and again, as once at Bolsena, to convince the sceptical. My hand lay motionless on the ground at my side. I would not have moved it just then for a sovereign. One wee brown lizard, gazing cautiously around, crept over it with sly care, and, finding it all right, walked up my sleeve as far as the elbow. I checked my heart and watched him. Never in my life before had such a thing happened to me – but I did not say so to the sceptical Editor; on the contrary, I looked as totally unconcerned as if I had been accustomed to lizards taking tours on me daily from my childhood upward. “Are you convinced?” I asked, with a bland smile of triumph. Even the Editor admitted, with a grudging sniff, that seeing is believing.