Читать книгу Colin Clout's Calendar: The Record of a Summer, April-October - Allen Grant - Страница 8

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In spite of the renewal of winter weather, the trees and flowers are still pushing on amain. Snow has fallen again, but there has been a time of sunshine since; and though the air is keen, the leaves and bursting buds seem to be drinking in the sunlight at all their pores. Animals have felt the brusque change more than plants. A blackbird’s nest had already two eggs in it a week ago; but I fear the after frosts destroyed them. The early lambs look woe-begone as they straggle aimlessly across the damp fields, too cold to lie down and too tired to keep themselves warm by frisking about; and many of the younger ones will suffer sorely. Farmers say, in their matter-of-fact way, that the lambing will turn out a failure; and what a world of misery to the poor beasts themselves those hard business words cover with their cold phraseology. On the other hand, the plants and trees for the most part seem none the worse for the change. The wind has cut off the crocuses in a body; but the lilacs are unfolding their leaves faster than ever, the hedges are green in a mass on sheltered southern aspects, and the flowering almonds have their naked boughs covered with clustering branches of delicate pinky-white blossom, standing out in true Japanesque relief against the bold background of the deep-blue sky.

They are hardly pretty, these flowering almonds and other masses of spring bloom on leafless trees; they sadly lack the natural accompaniment of green foliage, to which our eyes are so accustomed that the two together form for us what Mr. Whistler would doubtless call a native symphony in pink and green. Each individual blossom is beautiful in itself—I mean in the graceful and undistorted single almond; for the double-flowering monstrosity, with its simple natural symmetry lost in a bunchy rosette of indistinguishable tags, is unlovely to the botanical eye. Each single five-petalled blossom is beautiful in itself, I say; and even a tall spray of them deftly displayed in a vase against a contrasting background is effective enough, as those same cunning Japanese artists long ago found out, with their usual quick eye for colour-harmonies; but on the tree, growing all together, they have a certain bare and poverty-stricken appearance as they cling tightly to their naked stems, which always suggests the notion that they are pitiably cold and want a few leaves to keep them warm. So, bright and spring-like as they are, they cannot be considered exactly pretty—at least from a little distance, or unless one stands close beneath the branches so as to isolate a few sprays in bold relief against the retiring sky.

This habit, in which so many spring plants and trees indulge—the habit of sending up their flower-stalks or opening their blossom before they put out any of their leaves—is a curious and interesting one. It is, indeed, far more common than casual observers would be inclined to imagine: for the majority of spring-flowering trees have their blossoms in those large yet inconspicuous masses which we call catkins; while others, like the elms, have them in dense clusters, so closely seated on the boughs that comparatively few passers-by notice them. Almost all our larger native trees are catkin-bearers—oaks, alders, birches, hazel, beech, sallow, osier, poplar, and aspen; but only a few of them have catkins which attract much attention, the silvery white knobs of the willow family and a few others being the only ones which most people pick in spring among the woods. None of our own English trees has such a brilliant spring blossom as the flowering-almond, but among southern plants similar masses of early bloom are not uncommon.

In every case the reason for the flower preceding the leaves seems to be the same. It is in principle a chapter of natural economy, and it illustrates very well the way in which all nature is necessarily compelled to piece in with itself in every part. The catkin-bearing plants are chiefly, if not always, wind-fertilised; and they have their stamens on one tree and their pistils on another, thus ensuring the highest possible degree of cross-fertilisation. They produce enormous quantities of pollen, which they require, owing to the distance that often intervenes between one tree and another, and the wasteful nature of the wind as a carrier; and this pollen falls from them as a copious yellow powder when they are placed in a vase on a table, while it can be shaken in great quantities from the trees themselves. If the catkins did not come out till the branches were all covered with foliage, their chance of fertilisation would be very slight; for the leaves would interfere with the passage of the pollen. But by coming out in early spring, before the foliage has begun to burst its buds, and when the winds are strongest, the catkins stand the best possible chance of fulfilling their special functions. A March nor’-easter whistling through the naked boughs is almost sure to carry a grain or two at least of the golden dust from one tree to the other, and so enable the alders, beeches, and hornbeams to set their seed in safety.

With the crocuses and almonds the case is somewhat different, yet alike in ultimate principle. These are insect-fertilised flowers, and by flowering so early they catch the bees in the beginning of spring. For, on the one hand, the bees must have a succession of blossoms all the year round (except in mid-winter), or they could never get on at all; and the very existence of insect-fertilised flowers as a body depends upon a tacit agreement between them—so to speak—not to interfere with one another, but to keep a continual supply for the bees and butterflies from month to month: while, on the other hand, the flowers themselves need each a time when they can depend upon receiving their fair share in the attentions of the insects or else they might never set their seeds at all. Some few of these early blossoms, like crocuses and primroses, have leaves which can stand the frosts of March; but others, like the elm and the almond, have more delicate foliage, which consequently comes out much later in the season. All these spring-flowering plants lay by material somehow or other the summer before for their next year’s blossoms. The primrose has its store of foodstuff in its thick and fleshy rootstock; the crocus and the autumn-saffron in their bulbs; the catkin-bearing trees, the elm and the almond, in their inner bark and woody tissues. Trees, indeed, have an immense advantage in their huge perennial trunks; for, before the foliage falls in autumn, they withdraw all the useful material from the dying leaves, storing it away in their permanent tissues; and so almost all of them are enabled to flower vigorously in spring before any other plants, except the hoarders which possess bulbs, have been able to anticipate them.