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Call of the Wildflower

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<h2>XVI</h2> <h3>LIMESTONE COASTS AND CLIFFS</h3> Where the most beautiful wildflowers grow, there man's spirit is fed.—Thoreau. A limestone soil is everywhere rich in flowers—we have seen what the midland dales can produce—but it is especially so in the close neighbourhood of the sea. Two instances suggest themselves; one from a Carnarvonshire promontory, the Orme's Head; the other from Arnside Knott, in Westmorland. Fifty years ago the Great Orme was a wild and picturesque headland, girdled by a footpath which made a circuit of the beetling cliffs, and crossed by a few other tracks leading to the telegraph station at the summit, St. Tudno's Church, and elsewhere; but in most respects still in a primitive and unimpaired condition. I knew almost every yard of it as a boy; and I remember, among other attractions, a hermit who lived in a cave, and better still a wild cat—probably a fugitive from some Llandudno lodging-house—who had her home in a stack of rocks on the western side of the Head. On the western shore of the isthmus there was at that time[Pg 122] only one house; it belonged to Dean Liddell, famous as joint author of the Greek dictionary distressfully known to generations of students as Liddell and Scott. But now, owing to the "development" of Llandudno, this once beautiful foreland has become a place almost of horror, vulgarized by trams, motor-roads, golf-links, and all the appurtenances of "civilization;" and were it not for the wildflowers, it might well be shunned by those who knew it in old days. Flowers, however, are very tenacious of their established haunts, and the remark made in Mr. J. E. Griffith's Flora of Carnarvonshire still holds good, that "the flora of this district is quite unique, in consequence of the number of species found here, and the rarity of many of them." The luxuriance of the flowers is indeed a sight which can almost make one forget the "improvements" that have ruined the scenery. Among the plants inhabiting the rocky banks above the shore are the blue vernal squill, the sea stork's-bill, sweet alyssum, hound's-tongue, hemlock, henbane, mullein, and tree-mallow: to these may be added what constitutes a herb-garden readymade—fennel, wormwood, vervain, white horehound, wild sage, succory, and Alexanders. On the higher cliffs are the curious samphire, pink thrift, white scurvy-grass, and great tufts of sea-cabbage, now rarer and more local than formerly, but here waving its pale yellow pennons in abundance. Most charm[Pg 123]ing of all, the brilliant blood-red crane's-bill, together with two kinds of rock-rose (the hoary dwarf species as well as the common one), makes rich splashes of colour on the grey limestone ledges. A little back from the sea, among the bluffs that overhang the town, you may light upon the sleepy-looking catch-fly (silene nutans); the tiny Hutchinsia; and in one or two places the shrub cotoneaster, which is said to be native only upon the Great Orme. I have, however, seen it growing apparently wild at Capel Curig, and at a greater distance from houses than in its Llandudno station. Nor is it only the Great Orme that shows this floral wealth: the Little Orme has the rare Welsh stonecrop (sedum Forsterianum); and on another height in the same district, the small circular hill known as Deganwy Rocks, there is a profusion of flowers. When I revisited it a few years ago, not having set foot on it for nearly half a century, I found that the villas of Deganwy had crept up almost to the base of the rocks, and on another side there was—still worse—a camp of German prisoners, with armed sentries supervising their labours; yet even there, close above such scenes, were growing plants which might mark a memorable day in the annals of a flower-lover, notably the maiden pink and the milk-thistle—the "holy" thistle, as it is not inaptly called. The pinks, a lovely band, were sprinkled along the turf at the foot of the rocks; the thistles were almost at the top; between them[Pg 124] on a stony ledge nestled a quantity of viper's bugloss, and with it some borage, two kindred plants which I had never before seen in company. Nearly all the members of the Borage group are interesting—lungwort, alkanet, forget-me-not, hound's-tongue, and bugloss—but the borage itself, a roadside weed in South Europe, and in this country merely an immigrant and "casual," is to me the most precious of all. My earliest recollections of it, I must own, are as an ingredient of claret-cup at Cambridge, its silver-grey stems floating in the wine with a pleasant roughness to the lip; but in those unregenerate days we did not know the real virtue of the herb, famous from old time, as Gerarde says, for its power "to exhilarate and make the mind glad, to comfort the heart, and for driving away of sorrow." And certainly, in another and better use, it does comfort the heart and drive sorrow away; for its "gallant blew flowers" are of all blues the loveliest, and the black anthers give it a peculiarly poignant look which reminds one somehow of the wistfulness of a Gainsborough portrait. In the list of my best-beloved flowers it ranks among the highest. Looking north-east from the Orme's Head, one may see on a clear day, across some sixty miles of water, the limestone hills of Westmorland, reckoned as part of Lakeland, but geologically, botanically, and in general character a quite separate district. Arnside Knott, a bluff overlooking the estuary of[Pg 125] the river Kent where it widens into Morecambe Bay, is the presiding genius of a tract of shore and forest to which the name of "Lily-land" has been given by Mr. J. A. Barnes in a sketch of Arnside, and which he describes as "a perfect paradise of wildflowers." Let us suppose ourselves transported thither, and see how the claim holds good. The lily of the valley is one of those favoured plants which are everywhere highly esteemed; even the man who in general cares but little for wildflowers takes this one to his heart, or, what is worse, to his garden. I have already quoted Mr. C. A. Johns's queer appreciation of this native British wildflower as "a universally admired garden plant." On the wooded hill known as Arnside Park the "May lily," as it used to be called (and here it is certainly not "of the valley"), covers many acres of ground, and justifies the title "Lily-land" as applied to the Arnside neighbourhood. What I found still more interesting was an almost equal abundance of the stone bramble (rubus saxatilis), which grows intermixed with the lilies over a large portion of the wood. On these Westmorland Cliffs, as in those of Carnarvonshire, the blood-red crane's-bill is conspicuous, but it is much less plentiful, nor are the outstanding flowers of the two localities the same. One of the commonest at Arnside is the tall ploughman's spikenard, known locally as "frankincense": and on the lawns that skirt the Knott one often[Pg 126] sees the mountain-cudweed or "cat's-foot," the gromwell or "grey millet," and the beautiful little dwarf orchis. The district is rather rich in orchids; among others, I found the rare narrow-leaved helleborine (cephalanthera ensifolia) in the Arnside woods. The deadly nightshade is frequent; so, too, is the four-leaved herb-Paris, which a resident described to me as being here "almost a weed." But there are two other flowers that demand more special mention. In a lane near Arnside Tower, a ruin that lies below the Knott on its inland side, there is a considerable growth of green hellebore, apparently at the very spot where its presence was recorded two centuries ago. Though not a very rare plant, it is extremely local; and owing to its strongly marked features, the large palmate leaves and pale green flowers, is not likely to go unnoticed. But the rarest of Arnside flowers is, or was, another poisonous plant of the ranunculus order, the baneberry, for which the writer of "Lily-land," as he tells us, "hunted for years without success; till its exact locality was at last revealed to me by one who knew, in a situation so obvious that I felt like a man who has hunted through every room in the house for the spectacles on his own nose." Years later, on my certifying that I was not a knight of the trowel, Mr. Barnes was so kind as to confide to me this same secret that had been kept hidden from the uninitiate; but I found that the small[Pg 127] plantation which had been the home of the baneberry, almost within Arnside itself, had recently been cut down, and though a few of the plants were still growing along the side of the field, they had ceased to flower, and possibly by this time they have ceased to exist. Even as it was, I felt myself fortunate to have seen the baneberry in one of its few native haunts. The pale green deeply cut leaves are much handsomer than those of its relatives the hellebore and the monk's-hood. Its raceme of white flowers and its black berries are also known to me; but alas, only in a garden. Where flowers are concerned, there is little truth in the saying that "comparisons are odious"; on the contrary it is both pleasant and profitable to compare not only plant with plant, but the flora of one fertile district with that of another. The natural scenery of Arnside is yet unspoilt, and for that reason it now offers greater attractions to the nature-lover than the ruined charms of Llandudno; but if he were asked, for botanical reasons only, to choose between a visit to the Orme and a visit to the Knott, the decision might be a less easy one. "How happy could I be with either!" would probably be his thought.[Pg 128] <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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