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COLIN CLOUT’S CALENDAR.

I.
PRIMROSE TIME.

Table of Contents

Yesterday, April showers chased one another across the meadows all day long, coming and going between interludes of fathomless blue sky and vivid sunshine, the fleecy clouds being driven like sheep before a collie by the brisk south-westerly breezes. To-day, the Fore Acre is smiling accordingly with lusher grass, and the bustling bees are busier among fresher and sweeter primroses. For the Fore Acre is not a level field, like most others on the farm: it slopes down in broken terraces from the barton to the banks of Venlake, as we call our little streamlet in the valley below; and it is the slope that makes it the best spot near the homestead for primroses to grow on. These pet fancies and predilections of the flowers, indeed, are not without full and satisfactory reasons of their own. The plant chooses its proper haunt with due regard to its special needs and functions. It seeks warmth and shelter in some cases; bracing moorland air in others; moisture and shade, or sun and open space, according to the peculiar tastes and habits it has inherited from its remotest ancestors. We lordly human beings are, perhaps, too apt to overlook the essential community of life and constitution between ourselves and the plants. We under-estimate their unconscious intelligence and their guileless cunning; we forget that in their insentient fashion they plot and plan and outwit one another with almost human semblance of intentional strategy. Yet those of us who live much in their society learn at last to recognise that there is a meaning and a purpose in everything they do—a use for every little unnoticed point of structure or habit in their divinely ordered economy. Even the very date of their flowering has a settled purpose of its own, and bears some definite reference to the insect that brings the pollen, or to the time needed for ripening and setting the seed. To watch the succession of these little members of the floral commonwealth, to learn the connection in which they stand to one another, and to interpret the purpose that they severally have in view—these are the great problems and the self-sufficing rewards of those who slowly spell out for themselves from living hieroglyphics the emblems of the country calendar.

See from the edge of the hillside here how the primroses cling, as it were on purpose, to the tumbled slopes and banks of the Fore Acre, leaving almost flowerless the level platforms of terrace between them. Each little bank or escarpment is a perfect natural flower-bed, thickly covered from top to bottom with beautiful masses of tufted yellow bloom. But in between, on the intermediate grassy bits, there are no primroses: or, to speak more correctly, all the primroses there are cowslips, their tall scapes not yet much more than just raised above the level of the greensward. For at bottom primroses and cowslips are really identical: even the old-fashioned botanists have freely allowed that much, and have reunited the two varieties as a single species under a common name. The leaves are absolutely indistinguishable, as you observe when you look closely at them; the structure of the individual flowers is the same in all important points: they only differ in the arrangement of the blossoms on the stem; and even in that the two forms are connected by every intermediate stage in the third dubious variety known as the oxlip. Why, then, do cowslips differ from primroses at all? For a very simple yet ingenious reason.

The true primrose almost always grows on a bank or slope, where its blossoms can readily be seen by the bees and other fertilising insects without the need for any tall common flower-stalk. Hence its stalk is undeveloped, as the scientific folk put it—in other words, it never produces one at all to speak of. Each separate primrose springs by a distinct stem from a very stumpy and dwarfish thick little stock, which represents the same organ as the long and graceful stalk of the cowslip. This stock is so short that it is quite hidden by the close rosette of downy wrinkled leaves; but if you examine it carefully you will see that the flowers are arranged upon it in an umbel or circular group, exactly like that of its taller and slenderer nodding relative. Each primrose blossom is also larger, so as more easily to secure the attention of the passing bee. In the cowslip, on the other hand, growing as it usually does on level ground, the common stalk has acquired a habit of lengthening out prodigiously, so as to raise its clustered bunch of flowers well above the ground and the surrounding grasses, and thus catch the eye of some roaming insect, who could never have perceived its buried blossoms if they were laid as close to the grass-clad earth as in the case of the neighbour primroses. The two varieties have now become practically almost distinct, because each naturally sticks to its own best-adapted haunts, and is usually crossed only by pollen of its own kind. But the oxlip is a sort of undecided tertium quid, an undifferentiated relic of the old undivided ancestral form, which grows in intermediate situations, and crosses now with one plant and now with the other, so preventing either from finally taking its stand as a truly separate species.

The reason why the thorough-going primroses do not cross with the thorough-going cowslips is easy enough to understand: they are seldom both in blossom together. This, again, naturally results from the form and habit of the two flowers. In both, the head of bloom is produced from material laid by during the past year in the perennial rootstock; and in both, the buds begin to sprout as soon as the weather grows warm enough for them to venture forth with safety. But the ‘rathe primrose’ bursts into blossom first, because it has only to produce short subsidiary stalks for each separate flower; the cowslip lingers somewhat later, because it has to send up a stout common stem, besides forming the minor pedicels for the individual cups. Their other differences are all of similar small kinds. The primrose, standing straight up from the earth, receives the fertilising bee or butterfly on the face of its wide open corolla; the cowslip, a little pendulous by nature, receives its guest from below, or from one side, and so has its blossom more bell-shaped as well as less widely expanded. The primrose is pale to suit its own special insect visitors; the cowslip is a deeper yellow, melting almost into orange, to meet the tastes of a somewhat different and perhaps more daintily æsthetic circle. At bottom, however, both flowers are very nearly the same, and their peculiarities are all specially intended to insure a very high type of cross-fertilisation.

Observe that in both flowers the corolla, though deeply divided into five notched lobes or sections, is yet not really composed of separate petals, but tapers beneath into a very long and narrow tube. Cowslips and primroses belong by origin to the great division of five-petalled flowers; for all blossoms originally had their parts arranged either in sets of threes or in sets of fives; and this distinction, though often obscured, is still the most fundamental one between all flowering species. But in the primrose, as in many other advanced types, the five primitive petals have coalesced at their bases into a single tube, so as to make the honey accessible only to bees, butterflies, and other insects with a long proboscis, who could benefit the plant by duly effecting the transfer of pollen from the stamens of one flower to the sensitive surface of another. In blossoms with open petals many thieving little creatures come in sideways and steal the honey without going near the pollen at all: in a better adapted flower like the primrose such a mischance is rendered impossible.

Notice, too, that in both varieties the eye or centre of the corolla is deep orange, while the outside is lighter in tone. This difference in colour acts as a honey-guide, and directs the bee straight to the mouth of the tube at whose base the nectar is stored. And now again, let us cut open one or two flowers of each variety, so as to lay bare the interior of the tube. See, they have each two separate and corresponding forms, known long ago to village children as the thrum-eyed and the pin-eyed primroses or cowslips. In the pin-eyed form the long head of the pistil, looking for all the world like an old-fashioned round-headed pin, reaches just to the top of the tube, and forms the prominent object in the centre, while the five stamens are fastened to the side of the tube about half-way down. In the thrum-eyed form, on the contrary, the stamens make a little ring at the top of the tube, while the pin-headed summit of the pistil only reaches just half-way up the tube, exactly opposite the same spot where the stamens are fixed in the other sort. When the bee begins by visiting a thrum-eyed blossom, she collects a quantity of pollen on the hairs at the top of her proboscis. If she then visits a second flower of the same type, she does not fertilise its pistil, but only gathers a little more pollen. As soon, however, as she reaches a pin-eyed blossom she unconsciously deposits some of this store of pollen on the sensitive surface or pin of its pistil; while at the same time some more pollen, half-way down the tube, clings to her proboscis, and is similarly rubbed off against the pistil of the next thrum-eyed blossom she chances to visit. The exact correspondence in position of the various parts in the two diverse forms admirably insures their due impregnation. Thus each blossom is not only fertilised from another flower, but even from a flower of an alternative type, which is a peculiarly high modification of the ordinary method.