Читать книгу Colin Clout's Calendar: The Record of a Summer, April-October - Allen Grant - Страница 6

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The path through the Fore Acre leads right across Venlake by tortuous windings to the tangled covert and bosky marshland of Sedgewood Copse. There is something to my mind very sweet and melodious about these dear old-world English names. Most of them go back even beyond the Norman conquest. The Fore Acre, for example, is so-called, not because it once contained four acres, as the labourers will tell you, but because it is the acre or field lying just in front of the old immemorial homestead. In early English acre simply means field; its later use as a definite measure of area, instead of the hide, is a mere modern innovation. As a matter of fact, the size of any particular Fore Acre depends usually upon the purest chance—our own here is a very small croft indeed—and the Six Acres or Ten Acres of latter-day farms are simply the results of false analogy on the part of countrymen who have misinterpreted the good old English phraseology of their forefathers. For ten centuries, in all probability, the farmhouse and barton of Shapwick Farm, for the time being, have stood on the selfsame site that the modern stone buildings now occupy; and the ancient name of the Fore Acre sufficiently vouches for the fact.

So, too, in the word Venlake we have another curious old verbal relic: for lake in our country dialect hereabouts means brook or river. As to Sedgewood Copse, that clearly derives its name from its marshy nature: for all the lower part of the wood along the banks of Venlake is a deep morass of spongy bog, thickly and treacherously carpeted now in spring with an exquisite green pile of glossy liverworts, pond-weed, and brooklime. But in the upper part, on the slope close by, great masses of wild hyacinths are out in blossom, dyeing the whole side of the copse a brilliant blue with their dainty drooping heads of clustered flowers. Blue-bells we call them here in the south; but in the north that pretty name belongs rather to the hare-bell or heather-bell, which is the true blue-bell of Scotland and of northern poets, growing abundantly on all the bleak heather-clad hillsides of the Highlands. Few flowers more distinctly mark an epoch in the country calendar than these same tall and nodding English wild hyacinths.

They blossom early, do the hyacinths, because they have got a good stock of material in their bulb to go on upon. Grub one up with your stick from the soft black mould of the copse—they are not deeply buried, while the mould is anything but stiff—and you will see that the white bulb is large and well filled, especially in the younger budding specimens. Cut it in two with a jack-knife, and a clammy white juice exudes from its concentric layers, rich in starches and gums for the supply of the large thick-petalled flowers. These first spring blossoms are almost all bulbous; otherwise they would not be able to bloom so early in the year. Black Dog Mead is now all full of buttercups which a townsman would never know from the summer kind; for the flowers are just the same, and townsmen seldom trouble their heads about stems, or roots, or foliage. But the countryman knows the two weeds apart right well, for one is a much more troublesome intruder in a meadow than the other. This early form is the bulbous buttercup, and it flowers first just because of its bulb. After it has withered and set its seed, the regular meadow buttercups begin to blossom, having had time to collect enough material for their flowers meanwhile. The leaves and root are quite different, and so is the calyx; and these minor peculiarities are, no doubt, correlated in some curious way with the various needs of the two plants, though no one can yet tell us how.

It is just the same with the hyacinth. Its long blade-like leaves laid by materials for growth last summer, and stored them up in the bulb; and that enables them now to steal a march upon the annuals or thriftless perennials, and to entice the spring insects long before their loitering rivals have got out of their buds. It is the early bell that catches the bee. Only, both flowers and insects need to follow one another in a fixed succession throughout the year, or else there would not be food and visitors for both. The bees, too, have their calendar. Their year begins with gorse and willow catkins; goes on to primroses and hyacinths; continues with mint, thyme, rampion, and heather; and finishes up at last with hawkweed, hemp-nettle, and meadow-saffron. Where all the bulbs, roots, and tubers can find room in the ground, however, is a mystery; for one and the same field will be thick with flowers all the year round, from the celandines of spring, with their little clustered pill-like nodules, through the tuberous orchids and thick white-rooted dandelions of summer, to the bulbous squills and lady’s-tresses of late autumn. When one thinks of them all packed away side by side in the interstices of the stones and grasses, one begins to understand what is meant by the struggle for life in the world of plants.

The wild hyacinth is very essentially a bee-flower, one of the kinds which have specially adapted themselves to that one peculiar mode of insect fertilisation. Its colour alone might give one a hint of its nature; for blue is the special hue affected by bees, and developed for the most part by their selective agency. All the simplest and most primitive flowers are yellow; those a little above them in the scale have usually become white; those rather more evolved are generally red or pink; and the highest grade of all, the blossoms peculiarly modified for bees and butterflies, are almost always blue or purple. Now, one cannot look closely at a wild hyacinth without perceiving that it has undergone a good deal of modification. It is, in fact, a very high type of its own class. It belongs to that great family of flowers whose parts were originally arranged in rows of threes: but this original arrangement it almost seems at first sight to have doubled. Count the parts, and you will find that it has now six blue petals, with six stamens, one stamen being gummed on, as it were, to each petal; while in the middle there is a single unripe pale-blue seed-vessel. But in the primitive ancestor of all these trinary flowers—one-half of all flowering plants—there were three calyx pieces, three petals, three outer stamens, three inner stamens, and three seed-vessels. How, then, are we to account for these divergences in the modern wild hyacinth?

Why, if one looks closely it does not require much imagination to see the threefold arrangement still in full force, very little masked by small modifications. A pocket-knife will often clear up a great many of these difficulties; and if the unripe seed-vessel of the wild hyacinth be cut in two, the section at once shows that it consists of three cells, united at their edges, and each full of seeds. As Mrs. Malaprop would say, it is really three distinct seed-vessels rolled into one. Such union of the carpels (as they are called technically) is always a common concomitant of high development, and goes together with improved means of fertilisation. In simpler allied forms, such as the water-plantain, the three carpels remain always distinct; but in the more advanced lily family, to which the wild hyacinth belongs, they have universally coalesced into a single three-celled capsule. In autumn, however, when the capsule is ripe, it splits into three parts to shed the little shiny black seeds, and then clearly manifests its original character.

Outside this triple fruit we get six stamens; but if you look close you can see that they are in two alternate rows of three each, one set being a good deal longer than the other. The stamens have grown almost into one piece with the blue petals; yet the inner set have coalesced less thoroughly than the outer, for you can pull the three shorter ones off, but not the three longer ones. Their coalescence is another device to ensure more perfect fertilisation, and to make the pollen adhere more certainly to the visiting bees than in other flowers. Outside all we get the six blue petals, three of which are really calyx pieces, indistinguishable in colour and shape from the true petals, but recognisable as to their real nature by two signs—first, that they slightly overlap the others, and secondly that they have the long stamens of the outer row opposite to them and combined with them. In all the lilies the calyx pieces and petals are very much alike and similarly coloured; but in the wild hyacinth the similarity is even closer than elsewhere. This is doubtless due to the shape of the flower, which, in order to accommodate its favourite bees, closely simulates a true tubular blossom, like the Canterbury bell. At first sight, indeed, one might almost take it for such a perfect tube; but when you pull it to pieces, you see that the six apparent petals are really distinct, though they converge so as practically to form a bell-flower, with a tiny drop of honey glistening at its base. In the true hyacinths of our gardens the six pieces have actually coalesced into a solid and well-soldered tube, which marks a still higher level of adaptation to insect visits: and even our own wild species shows a slight tendency in the same direction, for its pieces are often very shortly united together at the bottom. It is from such small beginnings as this that selective agency slowly produces the greatest changes; and perhaps after the lapse of many ages our own wild hyacinths may become really tubular too, under the modifying influence of insect selection. But at present the frequent recurrence of white varieties—a probable reversion to some earlier type—proves that our native plant is still far from having completely adapted itself even to its present level of insect fertilisation. Thoroughly well-established and ancient species do not throw back so easily or so often to less-advanced ancestral forms.