Country Rambles, and Manchester Walks and Wild Flowers. Leo H. Grindon
delicate and reduced measure which, while it gives us the type of nature universally, enables us to see the whole at one view.
To get to the Ashley meadows, go by the railway to Bowdon, then along the “Ashley Road” for about a mile, and then down the lane on the left hand, which leads to Mr. Nield’s model farm. After passing through the field by the farm, there is seen a small wood upon the right, in which are many beautiful treasures, and descending a little, we are in the meadows, the Bollin flowing at the farther edge, and the mill, with its weir and water–wheel, at the extremity. The very earliest spring flowers to be gathered here are those of the hazel–nut, the willow, the alder, and the poplar. People unacquainted with botany often suppose that the latter and other timber–trees belong to the flowerless class of plants. They fancy that flowers occur only upon fruit–trees, and upon ornamental shrubs, such as the lilac and laburnum. The mistake is a perfectly natural and excusable one, seeing that the established idea of a flower is of something brilliant and highly coloured. A visit to the Ashley meadows in the month of April soon shows that there are other flowers than these. The hazel is by that time overblown, being in perfection about February; but the other trees mentioned above are covered with their curious blossoms, which in every case come out before the leaves. Those of the alder and poplar resemble pendent caterpillars, of a fine brownish red; the willow–blooms are in dense clusters, green or lively yellow, according to their sex. For plants, like animals, have sex, and though in most cases male and female co–exist in the same flower, it happens with some, especially with the timber–trees of northern latitudes, that the flowers are of only one sex, some of them being male and others female. Occasionally the entire tree is male only or female only—the condition of the willow and the poplar, the yellow flowers of the former of which are the male, and the greenish ones the female. On the hedge–banks below these trees may be gathered the dogs’ mercury, an herbaceous plant of distinct sexes, readily recognised by its dark green, oval, pointed leaves. Soon after the appearance of these, the banks and open sunny spots become decked with the glossy yellow blossoms of the celandine, a flower resembling a butter–cup, but with eight or nine long and narrow petals, instead of five rounded ones. Mingled with it here and there is the musk–root, a singular but unpretending little plant, green in every part, and with its blossoms collected into a cube–shaped cluster, a flower turned to each of the four points of the compass, and one looking right up to the zenith. The roots, as implied in the name, have the odour of musk. On the moister banks, such as those at the lower edge of the wood, grows also the golden saxifrage, a pretty little plant, with flat tufts of minute yellowish bloom. Yellow, in different shades, prevails to a remarkable extent among English wild–flowers, and especially those of spring. The rich living yellow of the coltsfoot is a conspicuous example. The coltsfoot flowers, like those of the poplar tree, open before the leaves, enlivening the bare waysides in the most beautiful manner, or at least when the sun shines; for so dependent are they upon the light, that it is only when the sun falls warm and animating that they expand their delicate rays, slender as the finest needle, and reminding us, in their elegant circle and luminous colour, of the aureola round the head of a saint in Catholic pictures. At first sight, the coltsfoot might be mistaken for a small dandelion. It is easily distinguishable from that despised, but useful plant, by the scales upon its stem, the stalk of the dandelion being perfectly smooth. The leaves and flowers of the dandelion open, moreover, simultaneously. The coltsfoot, like the flower it imitates, holds high repute among the “yarb–doctors,” who know more of the genuine properties of our native plants than it is common to give them credit for.
On the banks of the Bollin and its little tributaries grows also that curious plant, the butter–bur. Appearing first as an egg–shaped purple bud, by degrees a beautiful cone or pyramid of lilac blossoms is opened out, bearing no slight resemblance to a hyacinth. Here, again, as happens with many spring flowers, and, strange to say, with two or three autumnal ones, the blossoms are ready before the leaves, which do not attain their full size till after midsummer. Then they hide the river–banks everywhere about Manchester with a thick and deceitful jungle, often lifted on stalks a yard high, and in their vast circumference reminding one of rhubarb leaves. After these earlier visitants come the furze, the purple dead–nettle, and the primrose; and in the hedges, again without leaves, the sloe or black–thorn, its milk–white bloom conspicuous from a long distance. The name black–thorn, so oddly at variance with the pure white of the flowers, refers to the leaflessness of the plant when in bloom, the white–thorn, or “May,” being at the corresponding period covered with verdure. But it must not be imagined that these plants follow just in the order we have named them. To a certain extent, no doubt there is a sequence. Every one of the four seasons, whether spring, summer, autumn, or winter, resembles the total of the year as to the regularity in the order of its events. The glowing apple and the juicy pear follow the lily and the rose, and are followed in their turn, by the aster and the ivy–bloom. Similarly, in smaller compass, the crocus retires before the daffodil, and the daffodil before the auricula; to expect, however, that every particular kind of flower should open at some precise and undeviating point of time, even relative, would be to look for the very opposite of the delightful sportiveness so characteristic of the ever–youthful life of nature, which is as charming—not to say as great and glorious, in its play and freedom, as in its laws and inviolable order. The spring flowers arrive, not in single file, but in troops and companies, so that of these latter only can succession be rightly predicated, and even here it is greatly affected by differences of shelter, soil, and aspect. Nor are those we have enumerated the whole of what may be found. At least a dozen other species arrive with the earliest breath of spring, and with every week afterwards, up to midsummer, the beautiful stream quickens unabatingly. Thoroughly to master the botany even of so limited an area as that of Ashley, requires that it be made our almost daily haunt. It is proper to add, that none of the flowers named are rare about Manchester, or anywhere in England. Almost all our first comers are universally diffused.
The phenomena of spring, as regards the vegetable world, must not be viewed as beginning with the season in question. Spring, while the harbinger and preparation of the ensuing seasons, is itself the consummation of a long series of wonderful processes, wrought in the silence and darkness of winter, and largely beneath the surface of the earth. We never see the actual beginning of anything. Covered up though they be, by the cold snow, the artizans of leaf and flower are diligently at work even from the close of the preceding summer, and only wait the vernal sunbeam to unfold the delicate product of their labours. This is strikingly exemplified in “bulbous roots,” such as those of the tulip and crocus, in which the future flower may easily be made out by careful dissection with a penknife. The hazel puts forth its infant catkins as early as September, while the rich brown clusters of the same season are but ripening, and the autumn yellow of the leaves is in the distance. Soon after this it is quite easy to find the incipient female alder–bloom of the season to come, and the rudimentary golden catkins of the next year’s sallow. Thus is the history of the flower beautifully in keeping with that of its winged image—the butterfly, which, like the flower in the bud, has been forming all along, in the grub and chrysalis, the bud–state of the perfect insect.
The river approaches the Ashley meadows by an exceedingly pleasant route, generally known as the lower Bollin valley. The whole course of the stream, from beyond Macclesfield downwards, is interesting, and at Norcliffe it begins to meander through the prettiest rural scenery near Manchester. The gentle rise and fall of the ground on either side, the plentiful and comely trees, the innumerable windings and turnings that bring with every successive field a new and pretty prospect, the sound of the rushing water, the birds saturating every grove and little wood with their cheerful poor man’s music, the flowers no longer ambitious, for every bank and meadow is brimful and overflowing—really it almost makes one fancy, when down in this beautiful valley, that we have got into those happy regions old Homer tells of, where the nepenthe grows, and the lotus—that wonderful fruit which, when people had once tasted, they forgot their cares and troubles, and desired to remain there always, and ceased to remember even home. The difference is here, that after going thither, we love home all the better for our visit, since the heart, though it may be unconsciously, always grows into a resemblance of what it contemplates with interest and affection. No senseless fiction is it after all, about the lotus–fruit. Every man has his lotus–country somewhere;