Flowers and gardens

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Preface

The following papers have been written during a last illness^ which has often made it impossible to examine the specimens I could have wished. In the Primrose, for example, I have only been able to make out satisfactorily the drooping aspect of the leaf: how this combines itself with the more rigid character in the different 'y-stages of the leaf I do not fully understand. ^For the same reason many of the illustrations, ^ especially in the chapters on Gardening, have ^ been selected as being the most ready to hand rather than as the best. In my remarks on . Gardening I have no wish at all to disparage the modern systems. My aim chiefly was to point out the faults of modern gardening, be- ■ cause its merits are such as it is impossible to overlook. Lastly, in many instances my 5 remarks bear more or less reference to the ■ works of Ruskin, the greatest and best of

Preface

art-teachers ; but where I have consciously borrowed from him, I have said so. 'These papers are left in charge of a friend for publication.

FORBES WATSON.

The pen fell from the hand of my friend when he had written the foregoing lines. Within two days he was taken “ home ” to his “ Father's house." This short interval was filled with intense suffering, save only during a brief sleep, when the fiowers of which he had been writing, and which loving hands brought to blossom near his bed, haunted with their beauty and perfume the unsleeping sense of the imagination, and lured him through enchanted fields, where in his dream he saw vision after vision of an unutterable glory of floral splendour. The ecstasy of his delight in that dream abode with him, and lifted a bright light over the few hours of agony that intervened ere he slept again in the peace of Death. He believed a foretaste had been given him of “ that which remaineth for them that love God" — that He whose dying lips were touched with gall had given him a sweeter anodyne in his brief agony. vi

Preface

The papers published in this little volume were written to solace the languor of the last months of life, when a malady, which had crept by slow approaches upon him, broke down his strength, and arrested a professional career which had begun but recently. They betoken a mind gifted with quick, clear, and delicate perception, independency of judgment, and unsparing truthfulness. These were my friend's characteristic gifts. They are dimly mirrored in these pages, but more clearly in the memory of those who knew him well. To them this little volume will be welcome, because of him : to others, perchance, it may be welcome for the worth it has, because it tells of the beauty there is in God's fairest frailest handiwork in flowers, and bears some trace of the rarer amaranthine beauty of a soul which wore “ the white flower of a blameless life."

vn

J. B. BATON.

Nearly thirty years have passed since this hook was published. At its first appearance it was fully appreciated by a few persons^ among whom Mr. Bright, the author of a A Year in a Lancashire Garden," may be specially mentioned ; but it has long been out of print and is now very scarce, so that the time for a second edition seems to have fully come.

For it is not a book that should be buried or forgotten. In many respects it stands quite alone among the numberless books on gardening and flowers, for it takes a special line of its own, in which it really remains supreme ; a few authors have touched upon the same line, but only in a slight sketchy way as a small part of the larger subjects on which they were writing, and a few have attempted some feeble imitations of the book and have failed signally.

IX

'The particular line is this — Forbes Watson had been from his early years a lover of flowers and a student of botany^ and he knew a great deal of the scientiflc structure of plants. He knew that there was nothing wasted in plant life, and that each stem and leaf and flower had its separate functions in building up the life of the plant. But to his artistic mind there was something in stem and leaf and flower over and above their functions in the growth of the plant; there was beauty, a thing which some of his books noticed, but of which they gave no account. He could not stop there, he was a deeply religious man, and he felt that nothing was made in vain, and that the beauty of leaf and flower had its functions, and was as necessary to the life of the plant as any other fart of it. So he set himself to learn what the flowers could tell him of this beauty which gladdened his eyes, but which he felt sure could be made to teach him more, 'Then he did as Job advised his friends to do if they wanted to know “ how the hand of the Lord hath wrought all this." Job said, “ Ask the beasts and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee ; speak to

X the earth and it shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea and they shall declare to thee." 'This is exactly what he seems to have done ; he went straight to the fiowers — -for the most part the commonest every-day fiowers — and asked them to tell him the secret of their beauty, and he got his answer, and the answer was, that there was not a line of colour in any part, not an outline in any petal, not a curve in any leaf, that could be spared or altered ; every such line of colour, outline, and curve had its work to do and did it, not only in the best, but in the only possible way. He must have worked long, and steadily and patiently, but he had his reward; when he found out the secret of beauty in one plant, he found in it also the key to the beauty in another ; the study of the Purple Crocus in his Nottingham meadows, or of the Golden Crocus in his garden, helped him to find analogies of beauty in the Snowdrop, Snowfiake, Lily, and Hafiodil; and he had his further reward in the pleasant memories of the beauties he had studied, which enabled him to enjoy them, and to write of them even in his sick-room and on his death - bed, from which he wrote the xi last lines of his preface^ for in his knowledge of the secret of their beauty he had found real joy and thankfulness for himself

But Forbes Watson was not only a student of Plant-life and Plant-beauty ; he was also a gardener^ and the second half of the book On Gar dens f was the most powerful ally that natural gardening had at that time, and the one that gave the most important help in the destruction of the tyranny of bedding-out gardening. If it did not give the actual death-blow, it certainly gave the first of the death-blows and the one that had most effect. What that tyranny was at the time the book was published few can nowadays realise: to have hinted a doubt that bedding-out gardening was the perfection of artistic taste was to be ranked as a Philistine heretic, and to have suggested its destruction, and the substitution of any other style, would have been considered only worthy of a lunatic. Even such scientific books as the Botanical Magazine, when describing hardy plants, gauged their beauty and usefulness by their fitness or otherwise for carpet beds. Against this

system Forbes Watson raised his voice, and xii he did so with power^ because he was able to point out one special but very large blot in the system. He showed that it led to an utter ignorance of., and an almost wicked contempt for, the beauty of individual flowers. The flower in itself had become nothing, it was but one small spot in a large mass of colour, and had no value except in so far as it helped the mass. His words were : “ Our flower beds are mere masses of colour, instead of an assemblage of living beings : the plant is never old, never young, it degenerates from a plant into a coloured ornament!' The trumpet gave no uncertain sound, and it did its work against the most determined opposition — especially from gardeners and nurserymen — and one thing that helped to the final victory was his often-repeated advice to study and love the wild flowers. With the advocates of bedding-out these could have no place, but Forbes Watson showed that the study of plant life and plant beauty could be carried on without the help of grand exotics or Museum Herbaria ; that the plant lover vjould find all he wanted in the fields and hedgerows of his own land; and that

the more he studied them there, the more he xiii would love the plants in his garaen ; and so would become a better gardener.

I said that Forbes Watson was a deeply religious man : his religion permeates the whole book., and indeed is the key to a great deal of what he says. It was the feeling that God had made everything very good that made him love His works, not only for their usefulness, but for their beauty. Fhere were a few instances in which he could not see the beauty, but he was quite sure that it was there. And it was this same religious feeling that made him see a great deal which others would not look for. It has been said that the book is too fanciful and sentimental, especially in attributing to flowers such characters as purity, passion, innocence, sensuousness, ^c., but it is the bare fact that Forbes Watson saw these things, and because he saw them, and thought it almost the moral duty of others to see the same, that he recorded his feelings ; the flowers had been real teachers of good things to him, and he felt it a religious duty to hand on the lessons to others.

Something must be said about the literary style of the book. Had his life been spared

and he had given himself to authorship, he xiv

‘Would surely have taken a high rank among English authors. ’The language is everywhere clear and concise., so that there is never any mistaking his meaning ; ^ and though he was evidently both a traveller and a great reader., there is no -padding, no display of book learning, and a very marked absence of technical scientific language. It is quite delightful to read a book on Flowers and Gardens so entirely free from the numberless hackneyed quotations which generally overburden such books; and he must have put much restraint upon himself in keeping clear of such additions. This is very marked in his references' to Ruskin, whom he reverenced as “ the greatest and best of art teachers," yet though we may see Ruskin's infiuence there is not a single passage from his works. It is this that makes the book so fresh and original: it is all his own; he wrote, not to make a pretty book, but to help others to find the same delights that had brightened his life; and his object has been gained, though he did not live to know of it.

^ The beauty of his language is in every page^ but I would specially call attention to his fine description of the s corner ^p, 162; and of the real beauty of decay ^p. 199.

XV b

I must add a few lines on my share in this new edition. The book has been exactly reprinted from the first edition., verbatim and literatim, with the exception of printers' errors, so that no alteration has been made in the text; but I have thought it well to add a few short footnotes here and there, mostly in confirmation of what Forbes Watson had written, and in a very few cases in correction.

H. N. E.

Bitton, March 25, 1901.

For the facts and dates in the following short biography I am indebted to the kindness of Forbes Watson’s brother, Watson Fothergill, Esq., of Nottingham, to whom I return my best thanks.

Forbes Watson was born at Mansfield, Notts, on February 7, 1840. He was educated at a private school at Clapham, and was articled to Dr. Regworth, of Birmingham. He then entered at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, and after a brilliant career as a student there,^ he was unanimously elected, though only

1 In 1859, at St. Thomas’s, scholar in Physics and Natural History; in 1859, at Apothecary’s Hall, Silver Medal for Botany; in i860, at London University, the Gold Medal and Scholarship in Materia Medica and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and the Gold Medal in Botany ; and in 1861 he was admitted Licentiate of Apothecaries and M.R.C.S.

xvii twenty-one, and from a large number of older candidates, as surgeon to the Nottingham Union, a post which he held till a short time before his death. He died at Nottingham, August 28, 1869.

He was a born artist and a born naturalist. As an artist he made a special study of the old masters of the Italian and Dutch schools, and he was known from his early youth as a very clever draughtsman ; and his later botanical drawings were so exact, and yet so artistic, that they won the warm appreciation of Ruskin.

As a naturalist he was noted for his close observation and patience in research, and for his accuracy in the minutest particulars, to which he attached a value which casual observers overlooked. His love of flowers and botany was indeed hereditary, for on his mother’s side he was descended from Dr. John Fothergill, F.R.S. (1712-1780), who was in his day one of the most noted English botanists ; he had a garden at Upton, West Ham, which had a European reputation, and

was a correspondent of Linnaeus. On xviii his father’s side he was descended from James Forbes, F.R.S. (1749-1819), of Stanmore, who was a well-known student in Indian botany. This hereditary taste in botany was strengthened by his own deep study, and by his occasional holidays in Wales, Scotland, Switzerland, and the Pyrenees.

Among his friends and acquaintances he was known as a man of unblemished character and pure life ; an intense lover of truth, wherever he could find it, and a hater of shams and falsehoods of every sort ; a warm friend, especially to the poor, to whom he was most liberal, even with limited means, and a labourer among them, teaching the boys, and sparing no labour to help them in leading good lives ; a deeply religious man, to whom his religion was a part of his life, and a very strong Nonconformist.

As an author he did not leave as much behind him as his friends, who knew his high literary ability, would have wished. He wrote some magazine articles and many religious tracts, and one article in the British Quarterly on

Mrs. Browning’s “ Aurora Leigh ” ; but the only book published with his name was the “ Flowers and Gardens,” which was published nearly three years after his death.

H. N. E.

XX

THE

DAFFODIL

XXI

Contents

Part II Gardens

I. FAULTS IN GARDENING . . . -97 II. ON gardeners’ flowers . . *138

PART in VEGETATION

I. SPRING AND SUMMER VEGETATION . . 187

II. ON THE WITHERING OF PLANTS . .198

PARTC I FLOWERS

A

I

IF we examine our garden borders a little after Christmas, we are generally pretty sure of discovering the first signal of returning spring in the green points of the Snowdrop clusters just peeping through the ground. Looking rather more closely, we find that each plant has put forth two leaves, which cohere so as to form at the summit a short conical beak, tipped with a blunt, protective, callous point. This green beak is all that is visible at this early stage of growth, and is admirably fitted by its wedge-like character for thrusting through the soil. The flower lies at present deep sunk between the leaves, and undeveloped, waiting till they have cleared its way to light and air. Then the leaves separate and expand, the flower rapidly outgrows them, and before they have attained full size it has withered.

But what I wish more particularly to notice now is the white callous tip of the beak to which I have just alluded as fitting it for piercing the ground. This is not a mere temporary provision. It persists in the full-grown leaf, and is common to many of the Endogenous ^ plants, being particularly well seen in the Snowdrop, Daffodil, and Hyacinth, in all of which it resembles a little waxen point. And how wonderfully it adds to the beauty of these plants ! Every artist knows what a striking effect can be given by a few well-placed dots to a broken line. And just so is it here. Their sparkling, dotty appearance makes the Snowdrop clusters look interesting and animated from the first moment that their tips pierce the ground. And in every later stage the leaves of both Snowdrop and Daffodil would seem tame and meaningless without it. But this is only a very small part of the matter. The dot has a much higher purpose than that of merely giving pleasure to the eye by contrast, like dewdrops scattered over grass. It is most essential for the thorough enjoyment of beauty that we should get at it

^ Endogenous plants are those whose leaves have parallel veins like grasses, as distinguished from Exogenous plants, like Foxglove, &c., whose leaves are netveined.

as rapidly and with as little effort as possible, for some of the most delightful sensuous impressions are very transient, and remain but for an instant in their full intensity. Look, for example, at a bright scarlet Ranunculus in the sunlight. You see the scarlet for a second, and then it changes into brown. You must turn your eyes away before you can renew the impression. And what is true of colourbeauty is to some extent true also of every other kind. This does not at all interfere with the fact that the longer we look the more we shall discover, and that some of the deepest impressions come latest. I only mean that no impression can last unimpaired. Every moment we may be gaining something fresh, but we are also losing hold of something which we had the moment before. There is a good illustration of this in the difference between childhood and maturity. The man in most respects may see deeper than the child, but he has lost the freshness and vividness of childhood’s first perceptions. The eye then needs to get at beauty rapidly, and also needs something to assist it in holding the main bearings in view as it passes from part to part, or in recovering them when it has lost them.

S

Now all this the dot helps to accomplish. It emphasises just that point which should catch the eye at once, guiding it straight to the outlines or leading lines, and rescuing the whole plant from what might otherwise appear but a confused patch of green. This plan of leading the eye is continually adopted by painters. There is a good example of it in Leonardo da Vinci’s “ Last Supper,” where the radiating beams of the roof and main lines of the bodies of the disciples converge towards the head of Christ, thus carrying us at once to the grand point of the picture. The means which are used in different kinds of leaves to make the outlines more noticeable are often well worth examining. Sometimes it is by thickening, as in the case we have already mentioned, sometimes by means exactly opposite. Very frequently, as in the Lily of the Valley, a thin line of cuticle surrounds the leaf, and gleams in the light by its transparency. In the common purple Iris of the gardens, where the leaf is like a broad sharp swordblade, there is a gradual thinning from the centre towards the edges, as well as a translucent margin. So that, look at what distance you will, the large broad surfaces are easily distinguishable from 6 each other by mere differences of light and shade.

We now pass on to the flower of the Snowdrop. This, as every one knows, droops from the end of a slender stalk, which arises at the top of the stem from a sheath-like bract or spathe. Now look at that slender stalk, and notice particularly the character of the bend it makes. This is not, as it is sometimes represented in drawings, a gradual, arching curve. The stalk would then look weak, as if bent by the weight of the flower, and such a condition can never naturally be found, except in a sickly Snowdrop, or else in double blossoms, where it is extremely common. And notice, if you have met with any such specimen, how completely all its beauty is destroyed. In a healthy Snowdrop this stalk is for the most part nearly straight, bending slightly, and only slightly, to the weight of the flower.^ Slender though it be, it seems to assert its own freedom and perfect ability to stand as upright as it pleases. But just at the end it makes a sudden

^ If the flower be young, there will be hardly any perceptible bend in the slender flower-stalk ; it will bend just slightly in an older specimen. [In the older specimen the weight is increased by the swelling seed-vessel, — H. N. E.]

hook downwards, and this little hook permits the drooping. And how exquisite is the result ! We have said that the little flower-stalk is nearly straight. But it must be saved from an appearance of over-straightness, and this is effected by the investing sheath-like bract, which curves over it like a pruning-hook. Cut away the bract, and notice how you spoil the arch. Now take up the blossom, and hold it upside downwards, with the cup erect, the contrary position to that in which it was meant to be seen. How completely its loveliness has vanished ! What an insipid flower it would be if that were its natural posture, the petals wanting in breadth, the whole aspect destitute of character! Everything is right if seen just as was originally intended, and wrong otherwise.

But here a difficulty presents itself. I notice that the three inner petals are carefully ribbed on their internal surface with bright green parallel veins, evidently for the purpose of ornament, and that Nature has furthermore taken the trouble to colour the stamens orange, so as to complete the harmony. Now, in the ordinary position of the flower, the only position in which it can appear beautiful as a whole, these 8 green lines and stamens are scarcely to be seen. Where was the necessity for troubling about them if the flower was never intended to be looked at upside downwards ? The answer, I think, must be this. We make the acquaintance of any individual existence under an immense number of different aspects, and it is the sum of all these aspects which constitutes that existence to us. A Snowdrop, for instance, is not to me merely such a figure as a painter might give me by copying the flower when placed so that its loveliness shall be best apparent, but a curious mental combination or selection from the figures which the flower may present when placed in every possible position, and in every aspect which it has worn from birth to grave, and coloured by all the associations which have chanced to cling around it. To the bodily eye which beholds it for the first time, it might be of no consequence what lay within the petals, though even then the imagination would be whispering some solution of the secret ; but to the eye of mind, when the flower has been often seen, that hidden green and yellow which is necessary to complete the harmony becomes distinctly visible — visible, that is, in that strange, indefinite way in which all things, however apparently incompatible, seem present and blended together when the imaginative faculty is at work. The common Star of Bethlehem {Ornithogalum umbellatum) is a good illustration of the working of this principle. When I look at the beautiful silver white of the inner surface of the petals, my mind is always dwelling upon and rejoicing in the fact that their outer side is green, though of that green outside I cannot see a hair’s-breadth. Again, we find the same principle at work in the feeling which compelled the old sculptors to finish the hidden side of the statue. They said, “For the gods are everywhere.”^ They meant that when they looked upon their labours the imagination would necessarily carry away their thoughts to that hidden side, and that, if not finished like the rest, it would have pained them by its incompleteness. Of course, when Snowdrops are placed together in a bunch, we see in some the full beauty of the interior, whilst the defects of that position are covered by the presence of the surrounding flowers.

1 [Tmv decov €V€Ka was the reason, and it was the rule with the workmen of the Middle Ages : the inner hidden side of arches, as of sedilia, was as carefully carved as the conspicuous outside. — H. N. E.]

We next come to the name, and in the whole vocabulary of plants it will be difficult to find another which goes so straight to its mark, and renders so perfectly the distinctive character and expression. Even the generic name of Linnaeus, though designed like all such for the purposes rather of science than of poetry, is beautiful both in meaning and in form. Galanthus — that is to say, “ Milk Flower,” from FdAa avOos — perhaps comes nearer to the actual colour than even our native Saxon, and expresses the softness and purity of the blossom, as well as the glaucous milky aspect of leaf and stem. We have all the delicious clearness and purity of sound so usual in Greek words ; and the termination “anthus,” or “Ian thus,” seems peculiarly well fitted to render the character of many Endogens with a sharp, tapering, lance-life form of leaf.^ This is not from any accidental association with the word “lance,” but rather from both these words being to a certain extent alike in expression.^

^ More especially adapted, if my feeling be correct, to plants with lance-shaped leaves and a leafy stem, like some of the garden Fritillarias.

2 [A fanciful derivation, for which there is no authority. There is no such word as “lanthus.” — H. N. E.]

But what is this scientific name when compared with the “Snowdrop” of our native tongue ? How insignificant is that nearer rendering of sensuous character and colour, deeply capable as these are of expressing soul — of conveying the spiritual meaning and essence, when placed beside that which sets forth not form and aspect merely, but the relation of these to what we know of the plant, to the history of its life and struggle, and all that most endears it to our affections ! Such a name as Galanthus only gives what we might easily discern if the flower were a perfect stranger, and even here it would be far inferior to Snowdrop. But this is a very small part of what we ought to see in the flower. It is not the clustering associations merely — a word which we hate, on their own principles, from its connection with the school of Alison and Jeffrey — but the exquisite manner in which it symbolises the changes of the season which gives it birth. This will best be shown by closely studying the expression. Look at the flower as it first appears at the end of January, when winter is closed, or at least its main strength 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 branches of the trees are naked and dripping, the stoutest plants have hid their blossoms ; yet this fair one, apparently as tender as a maiden, through some unseen strength can brave the rigour of the time. We hail it as the herald of deliverance, the foremost of our long-lost friends. The Master of the great earth-ark has sent out His dove to stay with us, and it tells us that the rest will quickly follow. In this solitary coming forth, which is far more beautiful when we chance to see it thus amidst the melting snow, rather than on the dark bare earth, the kind little flower, however it may gladden us, seems itself to wear an aspect almost of sorrow. Yet wait another day or two till the clouds have broken, and its brave hope is accomplished, and the solitary one has become a troop, and all down the garden amongst the shrubs the little white bunches are dancing gaily in the breeze. Few flowers undergo such striking change of aspect, so mourn- 13 ful in its early drooping, so gladsome when full-blown and dancing in the sunshine.^