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    How to Enjoy Flowers - The New "Flora Historica"
    How to Enjoy Flowers - The New "Flora Historica"
    How to Enjoy Flowers - The New "Flora Historica"
    Ebook150 pages1 hour

    How to Enjoy Flowers - The New "Flora Historica"

    By Marcus Woodward

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    About this ebook

    “How to Enjoy Garden Flowers” is a vintage guide to the flowers that can be found in an English garden, exploring their history, popularity, identification, culture, and maintenance. Interwoven with interesting information, beautiful descriptions and even poetry, this guide constitutes a must-have green-fingered gardeners. Contents include: “The Herald Flowers”, “Tulipomania”, “Nosegays”, “Old-Fashioned Favourites”, “A Flower of To-Morrow”, “The Historic Iris”, “Jove's Flower”, “The Rose's Rival”, “Naiad of the Stream”, “Flowers of Night”, “Window Flower”, “Autumn's Glories”, “The Last Flower”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new introduction on the history of gardening.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Thousand Fields
    Release dateJan 31, 2018
    ISBN9781528784207
    How to Enjoy Flowers - The New "Flora Historica"

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      Book preview

      How to Enjoy Flowers - The New "Flora Historica" - Marcus Woodward

      Fresh Spring, the herald of love’s mighty king,

      In whose cote-armour richly are display’d

      All sorts of flowres, the which on earth do spring,

      In goodly colours gloriously array’d.

      SPENSER.

      THE first garden flower to grace the new year may be winter aconite, with its cup of gold set on a saucer of jade. It has a rustic love-name, New-Year’s-gift. Eranthis signifies earth-flower, a just name, so close are the cups to the ground. As in Italian woods it grows wild and makes a joyous flower-picture, so it seems in its happiest element when illuminating some woodland bank of the garden. It is like a star of hope, since, as Gerard says, It bloweth in January. There may be a weary time of waiting for a new sign, until, lo! through soil or snow appears the green point of the first snowdrop—the dove sent forth from the ark to learn if the waters be abated.

      In one legend the snowdrop was the first flower seen by Adam and Eve when driven from Eden. The snow fell fast; and an angel in compassion of their misery caught some of the flakes, and transformed them to the flowers, as earnest that the earth should blossom anew.

      Superstitions cling to the flower; in Scotland, he who finds it before New Year’s Day will have good fortune through the year, but an English notion is that it brings death to the house wherein it is carried; while it is fatal to one who brings a bride to his house if he should carry home a snowdrop before St. Valentine’s Day.

      The delicate blooms are the fitting emblems of virgins, to virgins sacred as a poet sings, and this is sometimes given as the reason of the presence of the flowers in the grounds of old buildings haunted by the ghosts of nuns. Snowdrops are rarely found in woods and wilds except in places known to have been the site of ancient gardens. Worthy John Gerard says in his Herball (1597) that they grow wild in Italy, and had long been known in his time in London: Our London gardens have taken possession of them, many yeeres past. Though so marvellously fragile, the very delicacy with which the flower is attached to the stalk allows it to dance out the north winds without fear of snapping, and its modest, pendent pose throws off the rain and snow.

      Linnæus’s name seems a peculiarly happy one, it flows smoothly—Galanthus, the milky flower, expressing the softness and purity of the colour, which lacks the cold glitter of snow, and matches the glaucous and milk-like hue of leaf and stem. The Germans name it naked maiden and snow-bell; the French, prosaically, perce neige; the Italians more prettily, pianterella. Snowdrop signifies a snowy and pendent jewel, like an ear-ring. Mrs. Barbauld explained the name in the lines,

      Flora’s breath, by some transforming power,

      Had changed an icicle into a flower;

      Its name and hue the scentless plant retains,

      And winter lingers in its icy veins.

      But this seems to stress unduly the idea of coldness, of snow and ice, for the snowdrop is undismayed by the snow:

      Look at the flower as it first appears at the end of January, when winter is closed, or at least its main strength is broken. The snow is thawing, the sky overcast, not a single cheering sunbeam; yet one Snowdrop has ventured forth, and there it stands, alone in its purity, with drooping head, and petals not unfolded, modest, patient, unobtrusive, yet calm and serene, as if assured of victory over storm and cloud.

      The quotation is from Dr. Forbes Watson’s work, Flowers and Gardens, published three years after his death (1869), and it is a pleasure to recall his thoughts, which dwelt especially on the herald flowers of the year, for the book should not be forgotten. He was a brilliant botanist, as a brilliant medico and artist. He probed to the heart of flowers. But more than all it was their gift of beauty which touched him, and here his slender book of essays teaches many a lesson on the true enjoyment of flowers. Deeply religious, it was his aim to learn what the flowers could teach, and to find the secret of their beauty. The one answer was, that not a line of colour in any part, not a shade or a curve of petal or leaf could be spared. . . . These thoughts he set on paper on his death-bed.

      Pondering on the miracle of the snowdrop’s loveliness, he noticed how the three inner petals are carefully ribbed on their insides with bright green parallel veins. (He did not recall Tennyson’s lines on the point,

      Pure as lines of green that streak the white

      Of the first Snowdrop’s inner leaves.)

      Furthermore, Nature has taken the trouble to colour the stamens orange, to complete the harmony, though in a pendent position these decorations are scarcely visible. Where was the necessity of this careful, secret art? Evidently for the purpose of ornament. (Yet we must note how some botanists teach that the green lines are guides to a mysteriously hidden nectary.) And the idea develops that although to our bodily eye it is of no moment as to what lies within the petals, to the eye of the mind, when the snowdrop has often been seen, those hidden hues of green and yellow have their value, and become visible as is necessary to complete the harmony.

      So with the star of Bethlehem: the eye sees the silver white of the inner surface of the petals—the mind dwells on and rejoices in the fact that their outer sides are green, though not a hair’s breadth of it is visible. Here was the principle which inspired the sculptors of the Middle Ages to carve the hidden sides of statues. They said, For the Gods are everywhere.

      Here blushing Flora paints th’enamell’d ground

      Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves.

      POPE.

      Hepatica and anemone soon follow on the snowdrop. The charming little hepatica, called of old, noble liverwort, came to us from the woods and shady mountains of Italy and other countries, offering its blossoms with those of the snowdrop to make our earliest garland. The name, from the Greek, signifies, belonging to the liver, in accordance with the shape of the leaf, but as the leaves appear also as a trinity a happier name was Trinity-herb. Gerard knew single flowers, but states that double ones were strangers to England. In red, white and blue the flowers look very pretty among their ivy-shaped leaves; and we recall that they are the first flowers of the Canadian spring, appearing in various delicate shades of blue as soon as the snow melts, hence their name, snow-flowers.

      The wood-anemone has its brief day, but the garden anemone will bloom in all months of the year, in all brilliant hues, and gives of its best in winter and spring.

      Pliny relates how the magicians and wise men in old times attributed healing virtues to the anemone, ordaining that every person should gather the first anemone he saw in the year, repeating at the same time the charm, I gather thee as a remedy against disease. It was then to be devoutly placed in scarlet cloth and preserved against the day of illness, when it was to be tied around the neck of the patient. It was the emblem of sickness, in view of the fate of Adonis, changed by Venus into a flower when he had been killed by the boar. Some mythologists give the story a happy sequel in the restoration of Adonis to life by Proserpine, on condition that he spent one half of the year with her, the other with Venus: excuse enough for festivals beginning with lamentations and ending with rejoicings.

      The lines come to mind,

      By this, the boy that by her side lay killed

      Was melted like a vapour from her sight,

      And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled,

      A purple flower sprang up chequered with white.

      It was the Adonis flower in Shakespeare’s day. Of old it was the flower of the wind, as Pliny says, the flower that hath the propertie to open but when the wind doth blow: but we must note Dr. Prior’s suggestion that the classical anemone was a cistus.

      In Wiltshire, the wood-anemone is Our Lady’s Petticoat. An old name for this wind-flower was Flaw-Flower, from the Saxon word, flaw, a blast, still used in Scotland in the phrase, a flaw o’ snaw.

      The mountains of southern Europe are carpeted in early spring with the glorious anemones of our gardens, what time our wood-anemones, Dyed in winter’s snow and rain, as the poet Clare thought, turn woods into flower-gardens. The garland wind-flower, Coronaria, is perhaps most highly valued of them all. A mass of the Japanese anemone makes a lovesome bed, and may be a decorative feature of the herbaceous border, as it grows from two to four feet high, producing its rose-coloured flowers in autumn. Our wood-anemone, as it

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