Part 8

She o'er the prince entrancing slumber strows, And, fondling in her bosom, far away Bears him aloft to high Idalian bowers, Where banks of marjoram sweet, in soft repose, Enfold him, propped on beds of fragrant flowers.

Who could wish for a diviner couch?

Along this range of hills the chalk-pits, used or disused, are frequent at intervals, some of such size as to form landmarks visible at the distance of twenty or thirty miles. For a botanist, these amphitheatres, large or small, have always an attraction; for though they vary much in the quality of their flowers, and some have little to show beyond the commoner plants of a calcareous soil, there are a few which present a surprising array of the choicer kinds; and to light upon one of these treasure-troves is a joy indeed. I have in mind a large semicircular disused pit, lying high among the Downs, and bordered with abrupt grassy banks and coppices of beech, hazel, and fir, where during the past thirty years I have spent many long summer days, sometimes writing under the shade of the trees, at other times idling among the flowers, or watching the snakes that lie basking in the sun, or the kestrels that may often be seen hovering over the adjacent slopes. For all their unrivalled openness and sense of space, the Sussex Downs have no such "sun-trap" to show.

One has heard of "the music of wild flowers." I used to call the floor of this chalk-pit "the orchistra," so numerous are the orchids that adorn it. The spotted orchis, the fragrant orchis, the pyramidal orchis, the bee orchis, the butterfly orchis, and the twayblade--these six are stationed there within a small compass. The marsh orchis grows below; the fly orchis is in the neighbouring thickets; in the beech-woods are the bird's-nest orchis, the broad-leaved helleborine, with its rare purple variety (epipactis purpurata), and the large white helleborine or egg orchis. A dozen of the family within the circuit of a short walk! The man orchis seems to be absent, though it grows in some plenty in similar places on the same line of hills.

Another feature of the chalk-pit is the viper's bugloss. If, as Thoreau says, there is a flower for every mood of the mind, the viper's bugloss must surely belong to that mood which is associated with the pomps and splendours of the high summer noontide. Gorgeous and tropical in its colouring beyond all other British flowers, as it rears its bristly green spikes, studded profusely with the pink buds that are turning to an equally vivid blue, it seems instinct with the spirit of a fiery summer day. Like other members of the Borage group, it has the warm southern temperament; its name, too, suits it well; for there is something viperish in the almost fierce beauty of the plant, as if some passionate-hearted exotic had sprung up among the more staid and sober representatives of our native flora. Its richness never palls on us; we no more tire of its brilliance than of the summer itself.

Akin to the bugloss, though less striking and less abundant, is the hound's-tongue, with its long downy leaves and numerous purple-red buds of a sombre and sullen hue that is not often to be matched. It has the misfortune, so we are told, to smell of mice; were it not for this hindrance to its career, it might justly be held in high esteem. Among the larger plants prominent on ledges of the chalk, or in near neighbourhood, are the mullein, the teazle, the ploughman's-spikenard, and the deadly nightshade or dwale. The buckthorn is frequent in the hedges and thickets; and the traveller's-joy is climbing wherever it can get a hold.

But it is on the shelving banks that skirt the margin of the pit that the comeliest flowers are to be found; the most beautiful of all, perhaps, is the rock-rose, a plant so delicate that its small golden petals will scarcely survive a journey in the vasculum, yet so hardy that it will flower to the very latest autumn days. The wild strawberry is creeping everywhere; and the crimson of the grass vetchling may occasionally be seen among the ranker herbage, to which the stalk seems to belong; on the shorter turf is the small squinancy-wort, lovely cousin of the woodruff, its pink and white petals chiselled like the finest ivory.

The elegant yellow-wort, glaucous and perfoliate, and the handsome pink centaury, are common on the Downs; so, too, in the late summer, will be their less showy but always welcome relative, the autumnal gentian: all three have the firm and erect habit that is a property of the Gentian tribe. It is one of the many merits of these chalk hills that their flower-season is a prolonged one. Not the gentians only, with yellow-wort and centaury, are still vigorous in the autumn, but also the blue fleabane, clustered bell-flower, vervain, marjoram, basil, and many labiate herbs. Even in October, when the glory has long departed from the lowlands of the weald, there remains a brave show of blossom on these delectable hills.

The Pilgrim's Way, often no more than a grassy track, runs eastward along the base of the Downs, interrupted here and there by the encroachment of parks and private estates, which now block the ancient route to Canterbury; but where Nature has provided so many shrines and cathedrals of her own, there is no need of any others; certainly I never lacked a holy place wherein to make my vows, many as were the pilgrimages on which I started.

On one occasion that I recall, I was joined in my quest by a rather strange fellow-traveller, a man who met me, coming from the opposite direction, and eagerly asked whether I had seen anyone on the hillside. When I assured him that nobody had passed that way, he turned and walked in my company, and presently confided to me that he was an attendant at a lunatic asylum, and was in pursuit of an inmate who had escaped an hour or two before. We went a short distance together, he peering into the coombes and bushy hollows, as incongruous a pair as could be imagined; yet it occurred to me that his mission, too, might be considered a botanical one, since there is a plant named the madwort--nay, worse, the "German madwort," a title which, in those feverish war-days, would of itself have justified incarceration. Nevertheless, as I always sympathize with escaped prisoners (provided, of course, that it is not my bed under which they conceal themselves), I was secretly glad that my companion's search was unavailing.

To return to my chalk-pit: I have mentioned but a few of the many flowers that belong there; within a mile, or less, others and quite different ones are flourishing. The rampion, though very local in Surrey, is found in places along these Downs; so, too, is the strange yellow bugle, or "ground pine," which is much more like a diminutive pine than a bugle; also the still stranger fir-rape (monotropa), which lurks in the thickest shade of the beech-woods. That interesting shrub, the butcher's-broom, or "knee holly," as it is more agreeably called, is another native: it wears its small flower daintily, like a button-hole, on the centre of the rigid leaves of deepest green.

A few miles east there is another chalk-pit which, though inferior in the number of its flowers, has a sprinkling of the man orchis, whose shape, if there is any likeness at all, seems to suggest a toy man dangling from a string; a simile which I prefer to that of a dead man dangling from the gallows. In the woods that crown this pit there is a profusion of the deadly nightshade; and I noticed that during the war-summers, when there was a scarcity of belladonna, these plants were regularly harvested by some enterprising herbalist.

Such are a few of the delights of the Surrey undercliff; but alas! they are vanishing delights, for the proximity to London has rendered all this district peculiarly liable to change. How could it be otherwise, when from the top of the ridge the dome of "smoky Paul's" is visible on a clear day, and a view of the Crystal Palace, "that dreadful C.P." as one has heard it called, can seldom be avoided. What havoc has been wrought in the Surrey hills by the advance of "civilization," may be learnt by anyone who studies the district with a sixty-year-old Flora of Surrey for guide. Between Merstham and Godstone, for instance, the hillsides, which were then free, open ground, have become in the saddest sense "residential," and the wildflowers have suffered in proportion. One may still find there the narrow-leaved everlasting pea, "hanging in festoons on thickets and copses," but other equally valued plants have disappeared or are disappearing. The marsh helleborine was once plentiful, it seems, in a swampy situation near Merstham; but when, by dint of careful trespassing and circumnavigation of barbed wire, I reached a place which corresponded exactly with that indicated in the Flora, not a single flower was to be seen. Probably some conscientious gardener had "transplanted" them.

It is impossible to doubt that this process will be continued, and that every year more wild land will be broken up in the building of villas and in the making of gardens, with the inevitable shrubberies, gravel walks, flower-borders, and lawn-tennis courts. The trim parterre with its "detested calceolarias," as a great nature-lover has described them, will more and more be substituted for the rough banks that are the favourite haunts of marjoram and rock-rose. How can the owners of such a fairyland have the heart to sell it for such a purpose? In Omar's words:

I often wonder what the vintners buy One half so precious as the stuff they sell.

A SANDY COMMON

The common, overgrown with fern, . . . Yields no unpleasing ramble; there the turf Smells fresh, and rich in odoriferous herbs And fungus fruits of earth, regales the sense With luxury of unexpected sweets.

COWPER.

STRETCHED between the North Downs and the weald, through the west part of Kent and the length of Surrey, runs the parallel range of greensand, which in a few places, as at Toys Hill and Leith Hill, equals or overtops its rival, but is elsewhere content to keep a lower level, as a region of high open commons and heaths. The light soil of this district shows a flora as different from that of the chalk hills on its north as of the wealden clays on its south; so that a botanist has here the choice of three kingdoms to explore.

In natural beauty, these hills can hardly compare with the Downs. "For my part," wrote Gilbert White, "I think there is something peculiarly sweet and amusing in the shapely figured aspect of chalk hills, in preference to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and shapeless." The same opinion was held by William Morris, who once declined to visit a friend of his (from whom I had the story) because he was living on just such a sandy common in west Surrey, where the formless and lumpish outline of the land was a pain to the artistic eye. For hygienic reasons, however, a sandy soil is reputed best to dwell upon; and I have heard a tale--told as a warning to those who are over-fastidious in their choice of a site--of a pious old gentleman who, being determined to settle only where he could be assured of two conditions, "a sandy soil and the pure gospel," finally died without either in a Bloomsbury hotel.

The gorse and broom in spring, and in autumn the heather, are the marked features of the sandy Common: the foxglove, too, which has a strong distaste for lime, here often thrives in vast abundance, and makes a great splash of purple at the edge of the woods. But even apart from these more conspicuous plants, the "barren heath," as it is sometimes called, is well able to hold its own in a flower-lover's affection; though the absence of the finer orchids, and of some other flowers that pertain to the chalk, makes it perhaps less exciting as a field of adventure. In Crabbe's words:

And then how fine the herbage! Men may say A heath is barren: nothing is so gay.

From May to September the Common is sprinkled with a bright succession of flowers--the slender moenchia, akin to the campions and chickweeds, dove's-foot, crane's-bill; tormentil; heath bedstraw; speedwells of several species; autumnal harebell, and golden rod--each in turn playing its part. Among the aristocracy of this small people are the bird's-foot, an elfin creature, with tiny pinnate leaves and creamy crimson-veined blossoms; the modest milkwort, itself far from a rarity, yet so lovely that it shames us in our desire for the rare; and the trailing St. John's-wort, which we hail as the beauty of the family, until presently, meeting with its "upright" sister of the smooth heart-shaped leaves and the golden red-stained buds, we are forced to own that to her the name of hypericum pulcrum most rightly belongs.

But the chief prize of the sandy heath is the Deptford pink, a rare annual of uncertain appearance, which bears the unmistakable stamp of nobility: it is a red-letter day for the flower-lover when he finds a small colony of these comely plants on some dry grassy margin. It was on a bank in Westerham Park that I first met with them; and there they reappeared, though in lessening numbers, in the two succeeding seasons. There was also a solitary flower, growing unpicked, strange to say, close beside one of the most frequented tracks that skirt the neighbouring Common.

In the woods of beech and fir with which the hill is fringed there are more fungi than flowers; and here too the "call of the wild" is felt, though to a feast of a less ethereal order. Fungus hunting is one of the best of sports, and a joy unknown to those who imagine that the orthodox "mushroom" of the market is the only wholesome species; and it is worthy of note that, whereas the true meadow mushroom is procurable during only a few weeks of the year, the fungus-eater can pursue his quarry during six or seven months, so great is the variety at his disposal. Among the delicacies that these woods produce are the red-fleshed mushroom, a brown-topped warty plant which becomes rufous when bruised; the gold-coloured chantarelle, often found growing in profusion along bushy paths and dingles; the big edible boletus, ignored in this country, but well appreciated on the Continent; and best of all, deserving indeed of its Latin name, the agaricus deliciosus, or orange-milk agaric, so called because its flesh, when broken, exudes an orange-coloured juice. It is easy to identify these and many other species with the help of a handbook, and it therefore seems strange that Englishmen, as compared with other races, should be prejudiced against the use of this valuable form of food. As for the country-folk who live within easy reach of such dainties, yet would rather starve than eat a "toadstool," what can one say of them?

O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint!

From the south side of these fir-woods one formerly emerged, almost at a step, on to the escarpment that overlooks the weald, and at one of the finest viewpoints in Kent or Surrey; but the trees were felled during the war by Portuguese woodmen imported for that lamentable purpose. The spot is remembered by me for another reason; for there, in the years before the madness of Europe, used to sit almost daily a very aged man, whose home was on the hillside close by, and who was brought out, by his own wish, that he might spend his declining days not in moping by a kitchen fire, but in gazing across the wide expanse of weald, where all the landmarks were familiar to him, and of which he seemed never to weary. No more truly devout old age could have been desired; for there was no mistaking his genuine love for what Richard Jefferies called "the pageant of summer," the open-air panorama of the seasons, as observed from that heathery watch-tower. The only cloud on his horizon, so to speak, was the flock of aeroplanes which even then were beginning to mar the sky's calmness: of these he would sagely remark that "if man had been intended to fly, the Almighty would have given him wings." Had the old philosopher known to what hellish uses those engines were presently to be put, he might have wondered still more at such thwarting of the divine intent.

Of sandpits there are several on the Common, and their disused borders are favourite haunts for wildflowers. The "least" cudweed, a slender wisp of a plant, is native there; the small-flowered crane's-bill, which is liable to be confounded with the dove's-foot; also one or two curious aliens, such as the Canadian fleabane, and the Norwegian potentilla, which resembles the common cinquefoil but has smaller flowers.