ON RIVERSIDE BOTANY
LET us have a little talk now in this preliminary chapter on Riverside Botany. Some way or other it seems to me that my large family has grown older than it was in the previous chapter, so they will not object to reading something which is not a school book, but yet contains a little useful knowledge.
We will stray round the river and its little adjuncts, and, taking the seasons in their turn, consider some of the pretty wild flowers and plants appertaining.
Look at that gay show of bright Marsh Marigolds (Cáltha palustris) all over those wet fields and margins of the streams. How beautiful are their brilliant yellows! Then there are the Golden Irises or Water Flags (Iris pseudacorus), with their long sword-like leaves: what clumps of them there are, and how they stand out—these large yellow blooms—amidst the surrounding green!
Very soon you will see tall spikes of purple—intensely purple flowers—jutting upward between the long grasses. These are the Purple Loosestrifes (Lythrum salicária). You cannot fail to recognize them, and nearer the water's edge another tall and leafy plant, with "rosebay" or purplish flowers—the Great Hairy Willow Herb (Epilóbium hirsútis), and, beside it, a little farther from the water's edge and near a meadow if possible, your favorite plant, the Meadow Sweet (Spirœa ulmária), with its fragrant feathery plumes of a delicate creamy color.
You take your little canes playfully to knock the tops off the Black Knapweed, or Hardhead, with its bright purple tuft like a small thistle. It takes its Latin name (Centaúrea nigra) from the legend that the Centaur Chiron, in Mythology, when wounded in the foot by Hercules, cured himself by applying a root of one of these plants to the injured part.
The larger Knapweed (Centaúrea scabiósa) is a very handsome wild flower, and very showy in autumn.
Now you will find trailing along the pathways, where the townsfolk take their walk after the day's work is done, a pretty little Cinquefoil or five-parts-leaf plant with bright yellow blossoms of four and often five petals. This is the little Potentilla Repens, or Creeping Potentilla, and the color of its flowers is that of the purest gold. The Silverweed along the roadside is a cousin (Potentilla aroserína), the leaves shining underneath like silver are "pinnate" (many leaflets ranged on either side of the stalk), and its flowers are like the creeping Potentil.
There is also another little trailing plant, the Tormentilla, a frequent ornament of our pastures and moorlands. It has only four petals, otherwise its flowers are the same shape as the Potentillas.
Look at that profusion of lilac-colored Scabious (Scabiósa), they are of the Teasel family. How abundantly they grow on the borders of those fields, and where there is chalk or limestone subsoil!
Climb up higher now to the drier ground, and let us admire the pretty little Euphrasia, or "Eyebright," with its tiny blossoms of snowy white, so delicately interlaced with the softest of blue. They look like little stars on a frosty night, as they peep out through their tiny forests of green, or little sun-kissed spangles of dew. Milton, you remember, in his lines on the "Archangel's interview with. Adam," refers to the eye-strengthening qualities of this plant, accredited to it in his day, in his lines:
“Then purged with Euphrasy and Rue
The visual nerve, for he had much to see.”
These are only a few of our showy flowers by the riversides, and up farther along the banks and precincts. We need not dwell on the well-known Ragweed, or Ragwort (Senécio Jacobæa), with its exceedingly tough stems and clusters of bright yellow flowers. We call it in Ireland the "Prishach Wee" or Yellow Weed. There are also the Yarrows, tougher in stem, if possible, than the Ragwort (Archillea millefólium), with its profusion of blossoms in disc shape; "Composite" they are called in Botany: they are white, varying to pink. And there are the Thistles. The great prickly Scotch Thistle (Onopórdum acánthium,)—you cannot fail to recognize it! And the very common melancholy Thistle (Cnícus heterophyllus), so called from its drooping stems and heads which are of a very intense purple. It must be a very idle farmer, indeed, in whose pastures or lands flowering Thistles are allowed to appear, with their winged seeds flying all over the place and finding a resting-place in neighboring farms. These little airplanes of Nature are not without their object lesson. An idle thought, an idle word, some evil, some wrong, ever ready to fall, and fall so fruitfully and efficaciously on some unoccupied ground working its mischief. Howitt, the poet, sings:
“Lightly soars the thistledown
Lightly doth it float:
Lightly seeds of care are sown,
Little do we note.
Lightly floats the thistledown,
Far and wide it flies:
By the faintest zephyrs blown
Through the summit skies.
Watch life's thistles bud and blow:
Oh! ties pleasant folly!
But when all our paths they sow
Then comes melancholy!”
And now Dame Autumn comes on the scene. How richly she is clad in her mantle of crimson and russet-brown! Her Bramble Bushes (Rúbus fruticósus) (how often we have gone blackberrying!) have changed the green of their leaves for the more seasonable tints of amber and carmine and gold. The rich black fruit you have gathered, in spite of the angry wasps, has been transferred by deft hands into preserving pans mixed with other appetizing ingredients, to emerge afterward in those delicious jellies and jams with which our careful housekeepers stock their winter larders.
The well-known Ampelopsis and its sister, the larger-leaved Virginian Creeper, which we so tenderly trail round the walls of our houses and bungalows, are now one brilliant show of scarlet, and set off our dwellings with great effect.
But alas! Autumn will not continue to treat us so well. We shall soon hear the first swishes of her untamed winds sweeping down from the leafless lands to blow roughly and rudely on our gaily colored scenes, and to play havoc with the remaining foliages of summer.
“Farmer Philip," to whom Tennyson refers in his "Idyll of the Brook," has all his crops safely gathered and housed-he is an industrious farmer—is Philip! and the writer knows another Philip—industrious in his Irish estate, and equally so in that of his Lord. Our extra hour of sunlight has been shut off by Act of Parliament, and we settle down for the advent of Winter. Cold, wet and windy many a day may be, yet it is by no means a season lacking in its accompaniments and characteristics of that charm which attaches to the three other seasons.
How beautiful the whole countryside appears when it is wrapped in its mantle of snow! Softly and silently have the feathered crystals fallen all through the night upon the frosted scene; the old yew-tree in. the garden, bent by the westerly gales of successive years, seems to bend further beneath its load of snow-every surrounding bough and branch has its new covering; and all along, up the hillsides, and off into the distant mountains there is an unbroken expanse of dazzling white.
“Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow:
Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”
How many down through the long stream of time have answered in the words of the Psalmist, and may you answer too: “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be Glean, Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow,”
(Psa. 51:77Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. (Psalm 51:7)).
And so pass the seasons in their order. The Covenant of God to Noah was-while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and Summer and Winter, and day and night shall not cease “(Gen. 8:2222While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22)).
Wild flowers! Ah leave them there,
And let them grow.
They smile upon us from each nook and dell,
The bright blue speedwell and the pimpernel—
The aye bright sweet and low,
And the tall loosestrife by the reed-bound mere.
And the geranium wild,
Down in its mossy glade,
Beneath the fragrant roof of the hawthorn
That peeps to welcome the rejoicing morn
From out its verdant shade:
What lonely moments have they all beguiled!
All lovely in your life,
And fair and true,
Unsullied by these fatal storms of fatal years,
With all their wreckage and with all their tears,
Beneath your skies of blue
Sweet flowers bloom on throughout these scenes of strife.
J. W. McC. Ireland, 1921,