Field and Hedgerow

R >> Richard Jefferies >> Field and Hedgerow

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There is nothing so wearying as a long frost--the endless monotony, which
makes one think that the very fault we usually find with our climate--its
changeableness--is in reality its best quality. Rain, mist,
gales--anything; give us anything but weary, weary frost. But having once
fixed its mind, the weather will not listen to the usual signs of
alteration.

The larks sang at last high up against the grey cloud over the
frost-bound earth. They could not wait longer; love was strong in their
little hearts--stronger than the winter. After a while the
hedge-sparrows, too, began to sing on the top of the gorse-hedge about
the garden. By-and-by a chaffinch boldly raised his voice, ending with
the old story, 'Sweet, will you, will you kiss--me--dear?' Then there
came a hoar-frost, and the earth, which had been black, became white, as
its evaporated vapours began to gather and drops of rain to fall. Even
then the obstinate weather refused to quite yield, wrapping its cloak, as
it were, around it in bitter enmity. But in a day or two white clouds lit
up with sunshine appeared drifting over from the southward, and that was
the end. The old pensioner came to the door for his bread and cheese:
'The wind's in the south' he said, 'and I hopes she'll stay there' Five
dull yellow spots on the hedge--gorse bloom--that had remained unchanged
for so many weeks, took a fresh colour and became golden. By the constant
passing of the waggons and carts along the road that had been so silent
it was evident that the busy time of spring was here. There would be
rough weather, doubtless, now and again, but it would not again be
winter.

Dark patches of cloud--spots of ink on the sky, the 'messengers'--go
drifting by; and after them will follow the water-carriers, harnessed to
the south and west winds, drilling the long rows of rain like seed into
the earth. After a time there will be a rainbow. Through the bars of my
prison I can see the catkins thick and sallow-grey on the willows across
the field, visible even at that distance; so great the change in a few
days, the hand of spring grows firm and takes a strong grasp of the
hedges. My prison bars are but a sixteenth of an inch thick; I could snap
them with a fillip--only the window-pane, to me as impenetrable as the
twenty-foot wall of the Tower of London. A cart has just gone past
bearing a strange load among the carts of spring; they are talking of
poling the hops. In it there sat an old man, with the fixed stare, the
animal-like eye, of extreme age; he is over ninety. About him there were
some few chairs and articles of furniture, and he was propped against a
bed. He was being moved--literally carted--to another house, not home,
and he said he could not go without his bed; he had slept on it for
seventy-three years. Last Sunday his son--himself old--was carted to the
churchyard, as is the country custom, in an open van; to-day the father,
still living, goes to what will be to him a strange land. His home is
broken up--he will potter no more with maize for the chicken; the gorse
hedges will become solid walls of golden bloom, but there will never
again be a spring for him. It is very hard, is it not, at ninety? It is
not the tyranny of any one that has done it; it is the tyranny of
circumstance, the lot of man. The song of the Greeks is full of sorrow;
man was to them the creature of grief, yet theirs was the land of violets
and pellucid air. This has been a land of frost and snow, and here too,
it is the same. A stranger, I see, is already digging the old man's
garden.

How happy the trees must be to hear the song of birds again in their
branches! After the silence and the leaflessness, to have the birds back
once more and to feel them busy at the nest-building; how glad to give
them the moss and fibres and the crutch of the boughs to build in!
Pleasant it is now to watch the sunlit clouds sailing onwards; it is like
sitting by the sea. There is voyaging to and fro of birds; the strong
wood-pigeon goes over--a long course in the air, from hill to distant
copse; a blackbird starts from an ash, and, now inclining this way and
now that, traverses the meadows to the thick corner hedge; finches go by,
and the air is full of larks that sing without ceasing. The touch of the
wind, the moisture of the dew, the sun-stained raindrop, have in them the
magic force of life--a marvellous something that was not there before.
Under it the narrow blade of grass comes up freshly green between the old
white fibres the rook pulled; the sycamore bud swells and opens, and
takes the eye instantly in the still dark wood; the starlings go to the
hollow pollards; the lambs leap in the mead. You never know what a day
may bring forth--what new thing will come next. Yesterday I saw the
ploughman and his team, and the earth gleam smoothed behind the share;
to-day a butterfly has gone past; the farm-folk are bringing home the
fagots from the hedgerows; to-morrow there will be a merry, merry note in
the ash copse, the chiffchaffs' ringing call to arms, to arms, ye leaves!
By-and-by a bennet, a bloom of the grass; in time to come the furrow, as
it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a
broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye
next--a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in
the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead
dry heap of fagots. There is no settled succession, no fixed and formal
order--always the unexpected; and you cannot say, 'I will go and find
this or that.' The sowing of life in the spring time is not in the set
straight line of the drill, nor shall you find wild flowers by a foot
measure. There are great woods without a lily of the valley; the
nightingale does not sing everywhere. Nature has no arrangement, no plan,
nothing judicious even; the walnut trees bring forth their tender buds,
and the frost burns them--they have no mosaic of time to fit in, like a
Roman tesselated pavement; nature is like a child, who will sing and
shout though you may be never so deeply pondering in the study, and does
not wait for the hour that suits your mind. You do not know what you may
find each day; perhaps you may only pick up a fallen feather, but it is
beautiful, every filament. Always beautiful! everything beautiful! And
are these things new--the ploughman and his team, the lark's song the
green leaf? Can they be new? Surely they have been of old time! They are,
indeed, new--the only things that are so; the rest is old and grey, and a
weariness.

NATURE AND BOOKS.

What is the colour of the dandelion? There are many dandelions: that
which I mean flowers in May, when the meadow-grass has started and the
hares are busy by daylight. That which flowers very early in the year has
a thickness of hue, and is not interesting; in autumn the dandelions
quite change their colour and are pale. The right dandelion for this
question is the one that comes about May with a very broad disc, and in
such quantities as often to cover a whole meadow. I used to admire them
very much in the fields by Surbiton (strong clay soil), and also on the
towing-path of the Thames where the sward is very broad, opposite Long
Ditton; indeed, I have often walked up that towing-path on a beautiful
sunny morning, when all was quiet except the nightingales in the Palace
hedge, on purpose to admire them. I dare say they are all gone now for
evermore; still, it is a pleasure to look back on anything beautiful.
What colour is this dandelion? It is not yellow, nor orange, nor gold;
put a sovereign on it and see the difference. They say the gipsies call
it the Queen's great hairy dog-flower--a number of words to one stalk;
and so, to get a colour to it, you may call it the yellow-gold-orange
plant. In the winter, on the black mud under a dark, dripping tree, I
found a piece of orange peel, lately dropped--a bright red orange speck
in the middle of the blackness. It looked very beautiful, and instantly
recalled to my mind the great dandelion discs in the sunshine of summer.
Yet certainly they are not red-orange. Perhaps, if ten people answered
this question, they would each give different answers. Again, a bright
day or a cloudy, the presence of a slight haze, or the juxtaposition of
other colours, alters it very much; for the dandelion is not a glazed
colour, like the buttercup, but sensitive. It is like a sponge, and adds
to its own hue that which is passing, sucking it up.

The shadows of the trees in the wood, why are they blue? Ought they not
to be dark? Is it really blue, or an illusion? And what is their colour
when you see the shadow of a tall trunk aslant in the air like a leaning
pillar? The fallen brown leaves wet with dew have a different brown from
those that are dry, and the upper surface of the green growing leaf is
different from the under surface. The yellow butterfly, if you meet one
in October, has so toned down his spring yellow that you might fancy him
a pale green leaf floating along the road. There is a shining, quivering,
gleaming; there is a changing, fluttering, shifting; there is a mixing,
weaving--varnished wings, translucent wings, wings with dots and veins,
all playing over the purple heath; a very tangle of many-toned lights and
hues. Then come the apples: if you look upon them from an upper window,
so as to glance along the level plane of the fruit, delicate streaks of
scarlet, like those that lie parallel to the eastern horizon before
sunrise; golden tints under bronze, and apple-green, and some that the
wasps have hollowed, more glowingly beautiful than the rest; sober leaves
and black and white swallows: to see it you must be high up, as if the
apples were strewn on a sward of foliage. So have I gone in three steps
from May dandelion to September apple; an immense space measured by
things beautiful, so filled that ten folio volumes could not hold the
description of them, and I have left out the meadows, the brooks, and
hills. Often in writing about these things I have felt very earnestly my
own incompetence to give the least idea of their brilliancy and
many-sided colours. My gamut was so very limited in its terms, and would
not give a note to one in a thousand of those I saw. At last I said, I
will have more words; I will have more terms; I will have a book on
colour, and I will find and use the right technical name for each one of
these lovely tints. I was told that the very best book was by Chevreul,
which had tinted illustrations, chromatic scales, and all that could be
desired.

Quite true, all of it; but for me it contained nothing. There was a good
deal about assorted wools, but nothing about leaves; nothing by which I
could tell you the difference between the light scarlet of one poppy and
the deep purple-scarlet of another species. The dandelion remained
unexplained; as for the innumerable other flowers, and wings, and
sky-colours, they were not even approached. The book, in short, dealt
with the artificial and not with nature. Next I went to science--works on
optics, such a mass of them. Some I had read in old time, and turned to
again; some I read for the first time, some translated from the German,
and so on. It appeared that, experimenting with physical colour, tangible
paint, they had found out that red, yellow, and blue were the three
primary colours; and then, experimenting with light itself, with colours
not tangible, they found out that red, green, and violet were the three
primary colours; but neither of these would do for the dandelion. Once
upon a time I had taken an interest in spectrum analysis, and the theory
of the polarisation of light was fairly familiar; any number of books,
but not what I wanted to know. Next the idea occurred to me of buying all
the colours used in painting, and tinting as many pieces of paper a
separate hue, and so comparing these with petals, and wings, and grass,
and trifolium. This did not answer at all; my unskilful hands made a very
poor wash, and the yellow paper set by a yellow petal did not agree, the
scientific reason of which I cannot enter into now. Secondly, the names
attached to many of these paints are unfamiliar to general readers; it is
doubtful if bistre, Leitch's blue, oxide of chromium, and so on, would
convey an idea. They might as well be Greek symbols: no use to attempt to
describe hues of heath or hill in that way. These, too, are only distinct
colours. What was to be done with all the shades and tones? Still there
remained the language of the studio; without doubt a master of painting
could be found who would quickly supply the technical term of anything I
liked to show him; but again no use, because it would be technical. And a
still more insurmountable difficulty occurs: in so far as I have looked
at pictures, it seems as if the artists had met with the same obstacle in
paints as I have in words--that is to say, a deficiency. Either painting
is incompetent to express the extreme beauty of nature, or in some way
the canons of art forbid the attempt. Therefore I had to turn back, throw
down my books with a bang, and get me to a bit of fallen timber in the
open air to meditate.

Would it be possible to build up a fresh system of colour language by
means of natural objects? Could we say pine-wood green, larch green,
spruce green, wasp yellow, humble-bee amber? And there are fungi that
have marked tints, but the Latin names of these agarics are not pleasant.
Butterfly blue--but there are several varieties; and this plan is
interfered with by two things: first, that almost every single item of
nature, however minute, has got a distinctly different colour, so that
the dictionary of tints would be immense; and next, so very few would
know the object itself that the colour attached to it would have no
meaning. The power of language has been gradually enlarging for a great
length of time, and I venture to say that the English language at the
present time can express more, and is more subtle, flexible, and, at the
same time, vigorous, than any of which we possess a record. When people
talk to me about studying Sanscrit, or Greek, or Latin, or German, or,
still more absurd, French, I feel as if I could fell them with a mallet
happily. Study the English, and you will find everything there, I reply.
With such a language I fully anticipate, in years to come, a great
development in the power of expressing thoughts and feelings which are
now thoughts and feelings only. How many have said of the sea, 'It makes
me feel something I cannot say'! Hence it is clear there exists in the
intellect a layer, if I may so call it, of thought yet dumb--chambers
within the mind which require the key of new words to unlock. Whenever
that is done a fresh impetus is given to human progress. There are a
million books, and yet with all their aid I cannot tell you the colour of
the May dandelion. There are three greens at this moment in my mind: that
of the leaf of the flower-de-luce, that of the yellow iris leaf, and that
of the bayonet-like leaf of the common flag. With admission to a million
books, how am I to tell you the difference between these tints? So many,
many books, and such a very, very little bit of nature in them! Though we
have been so many thousand years upon the earth we do not seem to have
done any more as yet than walk along beaten footpaths, and sometimes
really it would seem as if there were something in the minds of many men
quite artificial, quite distinct from the sun and trees and
hills--altogether house people, whose gods must be set in four-cornered
buildings. There is nothing in books that touches my dandelion.

It grows, ah yes, it grows! How does it grow? Builds itself up somehow of
sugar and starch, and turns mud into bright colour and dead earth into
food for bees, and some day perhaps for you, and knows when to shut its
petals, and how to construct the brown seeds to float with the wind, and
how to please the children, and how to puzzle me. Ingenious dandelion! If
you find out that its correct botanical name is _Leontodon taraxacum_ or
_Leontodon dens-leonis_, that will bring it into botany; and there is a
place called Dandelion Castle in Kent, and a bell with the inscription--

John de Dandelion with his great dog
Brought over this bell on a mill cog

--which is about as relevant as the mere words _Leontodon taraxacum_.
Botany is the knowledge of plants according to the accepted definition;
naturally, therefore, when I began to think I would like to know a little
more of flowers than could be learned by seeing them in the fields, I
went to botany. Nothing could be more simple. You buy a book which first
of all tells you how to recognise them, how to classify them; next
instructs you in their uses, medical or economical; next tells you about
the folk-lore and curious associations; next enters into a lucid
explanation of the physiology of the plant and its relation to other
creatures; and finally, and most important, supplies you with the ethical
feeling, the ideal aspiration to be identified with each particular
flower. One moderately thick volume would probably suffice for such a
modest round as this.

Lo! now the labour of Hercules when he set about bringing up Cerberus
from below, and all the work done by Apollo in the years when he ground
corn, are but a little matter compared with the attempt to master botany.
Great minds have been at it these two thousand years, and yet we are
still only nibbling at the edge of the leaf, as the ploughboys bite the
young hawthorn in spring. The mere classification--all plant-lore was a
vast chaos till there came the man of Sweden, the great Linnaeus, till
the sexes were recognised, and everything was ruled out and set in place
again. A wonderful man! I think it would be true to say it was Linnaeus
who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and levered our
mental globe a little more perpendicular to the ecliptic. He actually
gathered the dandelion and took it to bits like a scientific child; he
touched nature with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of
window--perhaps the first man who had ever done so for seventeen hundred
years or so, since superstition blighted the progress of pagan Rome. The
work he did! But no one reads Linnaeus now; the folios, indeed, might
moulder to dust without loss, because his spirit has got into the minds
of men, and the text is of little consequence. The best book he wrote to
read now is the delightful 'Tour in Lapland,' with its quaint pen-and-ink
sketches, so realistically vivid, as if the thing sketched had been
banged on the paper and so left its impress. I have read it three times,
and I still cherish the old yellow pages; it is the best botanical book,
written by the greatest of botanists, specially sent on a botanical
expedition, and it contains nothing about botany. It tells you about the
canoes, and the hard cheese, and the Laplander's warehouse on top of a
pole, like a pigeon-house; and the innocent way in which the maiden
helped the traveller in his bath, and how the aged men ran so fast that
the devil could not catch them; and, best of all, because it gives a
smack in the face to modern pseudo-scientific medical cant about hygiene,
showing how the Laplanders break every 'law,' human and 'divine',
ventilation, bath, and diet--all the trash--and therefore enjoy the most
excellent health, and live to a great old age. Still I have not succeeded
in describing the immense labour there was in learning to distinguish
plants on the Linnaean system. Then comes in order of time the natural
system, the geographical distribution; then there is the geological
relationship, so to say, to Pliocene plants, natural selection and
evolution. Of that let us say nothing; let sleeping dogs lie, and
evolution is a very weary dog. Most charming, however, will be found the
later studies of naturalists on the interdependence of flowers and
insects; there is another work the dandelion has got to do--endless,
endless botany! Where did the plants come from at first? Did they come
creeping up out of the sea at the edge of the estuaries, and gradually
run their roots into the ground, and so make green the earth? Did Man
come out of the sea, as the Greeks thought? There are so many ideas in
plants. Flora, with a full lap, scattering knowledge and flowers
together; everything good and sweet seems to come out of flowers, up to
the very highest thoughts of the soul, and we carry them daily to the
very threshold of the other world. Next you may try the microscope and
its literature, and find the crystals in the rhubarb.

I remember taking sly glances when I was a very little boy at an old
Culpepper's Herbal, heavily bound in leather and curiously illustrated.
It was so deliciously wicked to read about the poisons; and I thought
perhaps it was a book like that, only in papyrus rolls, that was used by
the sorceress who got ready the poisoned mushrooms in old Rome. Youth's
ideas are so imaginative, and bring together things that are so widely
separated. Conscience told me I had no business to read about poisons;
but there was a fearful fascination in hemlock, and I recollect tasting a
little bit--it was very nasty. At this day, nevertheless, if any one
wishes to begin a pleasant, interesting, unscientific acquaintance with
English plants, he would do very well indeed to get a good copy of
Culpepper. Grey hairs had insisted in showing themselves in my beard
when, all those weary years afterwards, I thought I would like to buy the
still older Englishman, Gerard, who had no Linnaeus to guide him, who
walked about our English lanes centuries ago. What wonderful scenes he
must have viewed when they were all a tangle of wild flowers, and plants
that are now scarce were common, and the old ploughs, and the curious
customs, and the wild red-deer--it would make a good picture, it really
would, Gerard studying English orchids! Such a volume!--hundreds of
pages, yellow of course, close type, and marvellously well printed. The
minute care they must have taken in those early days of printing to get
up such a book--a wonderful volume both in bodily shape and contents.
Just then the only copy I could hear of was much damaged. The cunning old
bookseller said he could make it up; but I have no fancy for patched
books, they are not genuine; I would rather have them deficient; and the
price was rather long, and so I went Gerardless. Of folk-lore and
medicinal use and history and associations here you have hints. The
bottom of the sack is not yet; there are the monographs, years of study
expended upon one species of plant growing in one locality, perhaps; some
made up into thick books and some into broad quarto pamphlets, with most
beautiful plates, that, if you were to see them, would tempt you to cut
them out and steal them, all sunk and lost like dead ships under the
sand: piles of monographs. There are warehouses in London that are choked
to the beams of the roof with them, and every fresh exploration furnishes
another shelf-load. The source of the Nile was unknown a very few years
ago, and now, I have no doubt, there are dozens of monographs on the
flowers that flourish there. Indeed, there is not a thing that grows that
may not furnish a monograph. The author spends perhaps twenty years in
collecting his material, during which time he must of course come across
a great variety of amusing information, and then he spends another ten
years writing out a fair copy of his labours. Then he thinks it does not
quite do in that form, so he snips a paragraph out of the beginning and
puts it at the end; next he shifts some more matter from the middle to
the preface; then he thinks it over. It seems to him that it is too big,
it wants condensation. The scientific world will say he has made too much
of it; it ought to read very slight, and present the facts while
concealing the labour. So he sets about removing the superfluous--leaves
out all the personal observations, and all the little adventures he has
met with in his investigations; and so, having got it down to the dry
bones and stones thereof and omitted all the mortar that stuck them
together, he sends for the engraver, and the next three years are
occupied in working up the illustrations. About this time some new
discovery is made by a foreign observer, which necessitates a complete
revision of the subject; and so having shifted the contents of the book
about hither and thither till he does not know which is the end and which
is the beginning, he pitches the much-mutilated copy into a drawer and
turns the key. Farewell, no more of this; his declining days shall be
spent in peace. A few months afterwards a work is announced in Leipsic
which 'really trenches on my favourite subject, and really after spending
a lifetime I can't stand it.' By this time his handwriting has become so
shaky he can hardly read it himself, so he sends in despair for a lady
who works a type-writer, and with infinite patience she makes a clean
manuscript of the muddled mass. To the press at last, and the proofs come
rapidly. Such a relief! How joyfully easy a thing is when you set about
it! but by-and-by this won't do. Sub-section A ought to be in a
foot-note, family B is doubtful; and so the corrections grow and run over
the margin in a thin treble hand, till they approach the bulk of the
original book--a good profit for the printer; and so after about forty
years the monograph is published--the work of a life is accomplished.
Fifty copies are sent round to as many public libraries and learned
societies, and the rest of the impression lies on the shelves till dust
and time and spiders' webs have buried it. Splendid work in it too.
Looked back upon from to-day with the key of modern thought, these
monographs often contain a whole chest of treasure. And still there are
the periodicals, a century of magazines and journals and reviews and
notices that have been coming out these hundred years and dropping to the
ground like dead leaves unnoticed. And then there are the art
works--books about shape and colour and ornament, and a naturalist lately
has been trying to see how the leaves of one tree look fitted on the
boughs of another. Boundless is the wealth of Flora's lap; the ingenuity
of man has been weaving wreaths out of it for ages, and still the bottom
of the sack is not yet. Nor have we got much news of the dandelion. For I
sit on the thrown timber under the trees and meditate, and I want
something more: I want the soul of the flowers.

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