Books: The Writings of John Burroughs
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Countrymen do not walk except from necessity, and country women
walk far less than their city sisters. When city people come to
the country they do not walk, because that would be conceding too
much to the country; beside, they would soil their shoes, and would
lose the awe and respect which their imposing turn-outs inspire.
Then they find the country dull; it is like water or milk after
champagne; they miss the accustomed stimulus, both mind and body
relax, and walking is too great an effort.
There are several obvious reasons why the English should be better
or more habitual walkers than we are. Taken the year round, their
climate is much more favorable to exercise in the open air. Their
roads are better, harder, and smoother, and there is a place for
the man and a place for the horse. Their country houses and
churches and villages are not strung upon the highway as ours are,
but are nestled here and there with reference to other things than
convenience in "getting out." Hence the grassy lanes and paths
through the fields.
Distances are not so great in that country; the population occupies
less space. Again, the land has been, longer occupied and is more
thoroughly subdued; it is easier to get about the fields; life has
flowed in the same channels for centuries. The English landscape is
like a park, and is so thoroughly rural and mellow and bosky that
the temptation to walk amid its scenes is ever present to one. In
comparison, nature here is rude, raw, and forbidding; has not that
maternal and beneficent look, is less mindful of man, runs to
briers and weeds or to naked sterility.
Then as a people the English are a private, domestic, homely folk:
they dislike publicity, dislike the highway, dislike noise, and
love to feel the grass under their feet. They have a genius for
lanes and footpaths; one might almost say they invented them. The
charm of them is in their books; their rural poetry is modeled upon
them. How much of Wordsworth's poetry is the poetry of
pedestrianism! A footpath is sacred in England; the king himself
cannot close one; the courts recognize them as something quite as
important and inviolable as the highway.
A footpath is of slow growth, and it is a wild, shy thing that is
easily scared away. The plow must respect it, and the fence or
hedge make way for it. It requires a settled state of things,
unchanging habits among the people, and long tenure of the land;
the rill of life that finds its way there must have a perennial
source, and flow there tomorrow and the next day and the next
century.
When I was a youth and went to school with my brothers, we had a
footpath a mile long. On going from home after leaving the highway
there was a descent through a meadow, then through a large maple
and beech wood, then through a long stretch of rather barren
pasture land which brought us to the creek in the valley, which we
crossed on a slab or a couple of rails from the near fence; then
more meadow land with a neglected orchard, and then the little gray
schoolhouse itself toeing the highway. In winter our course was a
hard, beaten path in the snow visible from afar, and in summer a
well-defined trail. In the woods it wore the roots of the trees.
It steered for the gaps or low places in the fences, and avoided
the bogs and swamps in the meadow. I can recall yet the very look,
the very physiognomy of a large birch-tree that stood beside it in
the midst of the woods; it sometimes tripped me up with a large
root it sent out like a foot. Neither do I forget the little
spring run near by, where we frequently paused to drink, and to
gather "crinkle-root" (DENTARIA) in the early summer; nor the
dilapidated log fence that was the highway of the squirrels; nor
the ledges to one side, whence in early spring the skunk and coon
sallied forth and crossed our path; nor the gray, scabby rocks in
the pasture; nor the solitary tree, nor the old weather-worn stump;
no, nor the creek in which I plunged one winter morning in
attempting to leap its swollen current. But the path served only
one generation of school-children; it faded out more than thirty
years ago, and the feet that made it are widely scattered, while
some of them have found the path that leads through the Valley of
the Shadow. Almost the last words of one of these schoolboys, then
a man grown, seemed as if he might have had this very path in mind,
and thought himself again returning to his father's house: "I must
hurry," he said; "I have a long way to go up a hill and through a
dark wood, and it will soon be night."
We are a famous people to go " 'cross lots," but we do not make a
path, or, if we do, it does not last; the scene changes, the
currents set in other directions, or cease entirely, and the path
vanishes. In the South one would find plenty of bridle-paths, for
there everybody goes horseback, and there are few passable roads;
and the hunters and lumbermen of the North have their trails
through the forest following a line of blazed trees; but in all my
acquaintance with the country,-- the rural and agricultural
sections,--I do not know a pleasant, inviting path leading from
house to house, or from settlement to settlement, by which the
pedestrian could shorten or enliven a journey, or add the charm of
the seclusion of the fields to his walk.
What a contrast England presents in this respect, according to Mr.
Jennings's pleasant book, "Field Paths and Green Lanes"! The
pedestrian may go about quite independent of the highway. Here is
a glimpse from his pages: "A path across the field, seen from the
station, leads into a road close by the lodge gate of Mr. Cubett's
house. A little beyond this gate is another and smaller one, from
which a narrow path ascends straight to the top of the hill and
comes out just opposite the post-office on Ranmore Common. The
Common at another point may be reached by a shorter cut. After
entering a path close by the lodge, open the first gate you come to
on the right hand. Cross the road, go through the gate opposite,
and either follow the road right out upon Ranmore Common, past the
beautiful deep dell or ravine, or take a path which you will see on
your left, a few yards from the gate. This winds through a very
pretty wood, with glimpses of the valley here and there on the way,
and eventually brings you out upon the carriage-drive to the house.
Turn to the right and you will soon find yourself upon the Common.
A road or path opens out in front of the upper lodge gate. Follow
that and it will take you to a small piece of water from whence a
green path strikes off to the right, and this will lead you all
across the Common in a northerly direction." Thus we may see how
the country is threaded with paths. A later writer, the author of
"The Gamekeeper at Home" and other books, says: "Those only know a
country who are acquainted with its footpaths. By the roads,
indeed, the outside may be seen; but the footpaths go through the
heart of the land. There are routes by which mile after mile may
be traveled without leaving the sward. So you may pass from
village to village; now crossing green meadows, now cornfields,
over brooks, past woods, through farmyard and rick 'barken.' "
The conditions of life in this country have not.been favorable to
the development of byways. We do not take to lanes and to the
seclusion of the fields. We love to be upon the road, and to plant
our houses there, and to appear there mounted upon a horse or
seated in a wagon. It is to be distinctly stated, however, that
our public highways, with their breadth and amplitude, their
wide grassy margins, their picturesque stone or rail fences, their
outlooks, and their general free and easy character, are far more
inviting to the pedestrian than the narrow lanes and trenches that
English highways for the most part are. The road in England is
always well kept, the roadbed is often like a rock, but the
traveler's view is shut in by high hedges, and very frequently he
seems to be passing along a deep, nicely graded ditch. The open,
broad landscape character of our highways is quite unknown in that
country.
The absence of the paths and lanes is not so great a matter, but
the decay of the simplicity of manners, and of the habits of
pedestrianism which this absence implies, is what I lament. The
devil is in the horse to make men proud and fast and ill-mannered;
only when you go afoot do you grow in the grace of gentleness and
humility. But no good can come out of this walking mania that is
now sweeping over the country, simply because it is a mania and not
a natural and wholesome impulse. It is a prostitution of the noble
pastime.
It is not the walking merely, it is keeping yourself in tune for a
walk, in the spiritual and bodily condition in which you can find
entertainment and exhilaration in so simple and natural a pastime.
You are eligible to any good fortune when you are in the condition
to enjoy a walk. When the air and the water taste sweet to you,
how much else will taste sweet! When the exercise of your limbs
affords you pleasure, and the play of your senses upon the various
objects and shows of nature quickens and stimulates your spirit,
your relation to the world and to yourself is what it should be,--
simple and direct and wholesome. The mood in which you set out on
a spring or autumn ramble or a sturdy winter walk, and your greedy
feet have to be restrained from devouring the distances too fast,
is the mood in which your best thoughts and impulses come to you,
or in which you might embark upon any noble and heroic enterprise.
Life is sweet in such moods, the universe is complete, and there is
no failure or imperfection anywhere.
VII
A BUNCH OF HERBS
FRAGRANT WILD FLOWERS
The charge that was long ago made against our wild flowers by
English travelers in this country, namely, that they are odorless,
doubtless had its origin in the fact that, whereas in England the
sweet-scented flowers are among the most common and conspicuous, in
this country they are rather shy and withdrawn, and consequently
not such as travelers would be likely to encounter. Moreover, the
British traveler, remembering the deliciously fragrant blue violets
he left at home, covering every grassy slope and meadow bank in
spring, and the wild clematis, or traveler's joy, overrunning
hedges and old walls with its white, sweet-scented blossoms, and
finding the corresponding species here equally abundant but
entirely scentless, very naturally infers that our wild flowers are
all deficient in this respect. He would be confirmed in this
opinion when, on turning to some of our most beautiful and striking
native flowers, like the laurel, the rhododendron, the columbine,
the inimitable fringed gentian, the burning cardinal-flower, or our
asters and goldenrod, dashing the roadsides with tints of purple
and gold, he found them scentless also. "Where are your fragrant
flowers?" he might well say; "I can find none." Let him look
closer and penetrate our forests, and visit our ponds and lakes.
Let him compare our matchless, rosy-lipped, honey-hearted trailing
arbutus with his own ugly ground-ivy; let him compare our
sumptuous, fragrant pond-lily with his own odorless NYMPHÆ ALBA.
In our Northern woods he will find the floors carpeted with the
delicate linnæa, its twin rose-colored, nodding flowers filling the
air with fragrance. (I am aware that the linnæa is found in some
parts of Northern Europe.) The fact is, we perhaps have as many
sweet-scented wild flowers as Europe has, only they are not quite
so prominent in our flora, nor so well known to our people or to
our poets.
Think of Wordsworth's "Golden Daffodils:"--
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and
hills,
When, all at once, I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
"Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly
dance."
No such sight could greet the poet's eye here. He might see ten
thousand marsh marigolds, or ten times ten thousand houstonias, but
they would not toss in the breeze, and they would not be sweet-
scented like the daffodils.
It is to be remembered, too, that in the moister atmosphere of
England the same amount of fragrance would be much more noticeable
than with us. Think how our sweet bay, or our pink azalea, or our
white alder, to which they have nothing that corresponds, would
perfume that heavy, vapor-laden air!
In the woods and groves in England, the wild hyacinth grows very
abundantly in spring, and in places the air is loaded with its
fragrance. In our woods a species of dicentra, commonly called
squirrel corn, has nearly the same perfume, and its racemes of
nodding whitish flowers, tinged with pink, are quite as pleasing to
the eye, but it is a shyer, less abundant plant. When our children
go to the fields in April and May, they can bring home no wild
flowers as pleasing as the sweet English violet, and cowslip, and
yellow daffodil, and wallflower; and when British children go to
the woods at the same season, they can load their hands and baskets
with nothing that compares with our trailing arbutus, or, later in
the season, with our azaleas; and, when their boys go fishing or
boating in summer, they can wreathe themselves with nothing that
approaches our pond-lily.
There are upward of thirty species of fragrant native wild flowers
and flowering shrubs and trees in New England and New York, and, no
doubt, many more in the South and West. My list is as follows:--
White violet (VIOLA BLANDA).
Canada violet (VIOLA CANADENSIS).
Hepatica (occasionally fragrant).
Trailing arbutus (EPIGÆA REPENS).
Mandrake (PODOPHYLLUM
PELTATUM).
Yellow lady's-slipper (CYPRIPEDIUM
PARVIFLORUM).
Purple lady's-slipper (CYPRIPEDIUM
ACAULE).
Squirrel corn (DICENTRA CANADENSIS).
Showy orchis (ORCHIS SPECTABILIS).
Purple fringed-orchis (HABENARIA
PSYCODES).
Arethusa (ARETHUSA BULBOSA).
Calopogon (CALOPOGON
PULCHELLUS).
Lady's-tresses (SPIRANTHES CERNUA).
Pond-lily (NYMPHÆA ODORATA).
Wild rose (ROSA NITIDA).
Twin-flower (LINNÆA BOREALIS).
Sugar maple (ACER SACCHARINUM)
Linden (TILIA AMERICANA).
Locust-tree (ROBINIA PSEUDACACIA).
White alder (CLETHRA ALNIFOLIA).
Smooth azalea (RHODODENDRON
ARBORESCENS).
White azalea (RHODODENDRON
VISCOSUM).
Pinxter-flower (RHODODENDRON
NUDIFLORUM).
Yellow azalea (RHODODENDRON
CALENDULACEUM),
Sweet bay (MAGNOLIA GLAUCA).
Mitchella vine (MITCHELLA REPENS).
Sweet coltsfoot (PETASITES PALMATA).
Pasture thistle (CNICUS PUMILUS).
False wintergreen (PYROLA
ROTUNDIFOLIA).
Spotted wintergreen (CHIMAPHILIA
MACULATA).
Prince's pine (CHIMAPHILIA
UMBELLATA).
Evening primrose (NOTHERA
BIENNIS).
Hairy loosestrife (STEIRONEMA
CILIATUM).
Dogbane (APOCYNUM).
Ground-nut (APIOS TUBEROSA).
Adder's-tongue pogonia (POGONIA
OPHIOGLOSSOIDES).
Wild grape (VITIS CORDOFOLIA).
Horned bladderwort (UTRICULARIA
CORNUTA).
The last-named, horned bladderwort, is perhaps the most fragrant
flower we have. In a warm, moist atmosphere, its odor is almost
too strong. It is a plant with a slender, leafless stalk or scape
less than a foot high, with two or more large yellow hood or helmet
shaped flowers. It is not common, and belongs pretty well north,
growing in sandy swamps and along the marshy margins of lakes and
ponds. Its perfume is sweet and spicy in an eminent degree. I
have placed in the above list several flowers that are
intermittently fragrant, like the hepatica, or liver-leaf. This
flower is the earliest, as it is certainly one of the most
beautiful, to be found in our woods, and occasionally it is
fragrant. Group after group may be inspected, ranging through
all shades of purple and blue, with some perfectly white, and no
odor be detected, when presently you will happen upon a little
brood of them that have a most delicate and delicious fragrance.
The same is true of a species of loosestrife growing along streams
and on other wet places, with tall bushy stalks, dark green leaves,
and pale axillary yellow flowers (probably European). A handful of
these flowers will sometimes exhale a sweet fragrance; at other
times, or from another locality, they are scentless. Our evening
primrose is thought to be uniformly sweet-scented, but the past
season I examined many specimens, and failed to find one that was
so. Some seasons the sugar maple yields much sweeter sap than in
others; and even individual trees, owing to the soil, moisture, and
other conditions where they stand, show a great difference in this
respect. The same is doubtless true of the sweet-scented
flowers. I had always supposed that our Canada violet--the tall,
leafy-stemmed white violet of our Northern woods--was odorless,
till a correspondent called my attention to the contrary fact. On
examination I found that, while the first ones that bloomed about
May 25 had very sweet-scented foliage, especially when crushed in
the hand, the flowers were practically without fragrance. But as
the season advanced the fragrance developed, till a single flower
had a well-marked perfume, and a handful of them was sweet indeed.
A single specimen, plucked about August 1, was quite as fragrant as
the English violet, though the perfume is not what is known as
violet, but, like that of the hepatica, comes nearer to the odor of
certain fruit trees.
It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of our sugar maple
are sweet-scented; the perfume seems to become stale after a few
days: but pass under this tree just at the right moment, say at
nightfall on the first or second day of its perfect inflorescence,
and the air is laden with its sweetness; its perfumed breath falls
upon you as its cool shadow does a few weeks later.
After the linnæa and the arbutus, the prettiest sweet-scented
flowering vine our woods hold is the common mitchella vine, called
squaw-berry and partridge-berry. It blooms in June, and its twin
flowers, light cream-color, velvety, tubular, exhale a most
agreeable fragrance.
Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the European, and many
of ours are fragrant. The first to bloom in the spring is the
showy orchis, though it is far less showy than several others. I
find it in May, not on hills, where Gray says it grows, but in low,
damp places in the woods. It has two oblong shining leaves, with
a scape four or five inches high strung with sweet-scented, pink-
purple flowers. I usually find it and the fringed polygala in
bloom at the same time; the lady's-slipper is a little later. The
purple fringed-orchis, one of the most showy and striking of all
our orchids, blooms in midsummer in swampy meadows and in marshy,
grassy openings in the woods, shooting up a tapering column or
cylinder of pink-purple fringed flowers, that one may see at quite
a distance, and the perfume of which is too rank for a close room.
This flower is, perhaps, like the English fragrant orchis, found in
pastures.
Few fragrant flowers in the shape of weeds have come to us from the
Old World, and this leads me to remark that plants with sweet-
scented flowers are, for the most part, more intensely local, more
fastidious and idiosyncratic, than those without perfume. Our
native thistle--the pasture thistle--has a marked fragrance, and it
is much more shy and limited in its range than the common Old World
thistle that grows everywhere. Our little, sweet white violet
grows only in wet places, and the Canada violet only in high, cool
woods, while the common blue violet is much more general in its
distribution. How fastidious and exclusive is the cypripedium!
You will find it in one locality in the woods, usually on high, dry
ground, and will look in vain for it elsewhere. It does not go in
herds like the commoner plants, but affects privacy and solitude.
When I come upon it in my walks, I seem to be intruding upon some
very private and exclusive company. The large yellow cypripedium
has a peculiar, heavy, oily odor.
In like manner one learns where to look for arbutus, for
pipsissewa, for the early orchis; they have their particular
haunts, and their surroundings are nearly always the same. The
yellow pond-lily is found in every sluggish stream and pond, but
NYMPHÆA ODORATA requires a nicer adjustment of conditions, and
consequently is more restricted in its range. If the mullein were
fragrant, or toadflax, or the daisy, or blue-weed, or goldenrod,
they would doubtless be far less troublesome to the agriculturist.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule I have here indicated,
but it holds in most cases. Genius is a specialty: it does not
grow in every soil; it skips the many and touches the few; and the
gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like
beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.
"Do honey and fragrance always go together in the flowers? "Not
uniformly. Of the list of fragrant wild flowers I have given, the
only ones that the bees procure nectar from, so far as I have
observed, are arbutus, dicentra, sugar maple, locust, and linden.
Non-fragrant flowers that yield honey are those of the raspberry,
clematis, sumac, white oak, bugloss, ailanthus, goldenrod, aster,
fleabane. A large number of odorless plants yield pollen to the
bee. There is nectar in the columbine, and the bumblebee sometimes
gets it by piercing the spur from the outside as she does with
dicentra. There ought to be honey in the honeysuckle, but I have
never seen the hive-bee make any attempt to get it.
WEEDS
One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are
the weeds. How they cling to man and follow him around the world,
and spring up wherever he sets his foot! How they crowd around his
barns and dwellings, and throng his garden and jostle and override
each other in their strife to be near him! Some of them are so
domestic and familiar, and so harmless withal, that one comes to
regard them with positive affection. Motherwort, catnip, plantain,
tansy, wild mustard,--what a homely human look they have! they are
an integral part of every old homestead. Your smart new place will
wait long before they draw near it. Or knot-grass, that carpets
every old dooryard, and fringes every walk, and softens every path
that knows the feet of children, or that leads to the spring, or to
the garden, or to the barn, how kindly one comes to look upon it!
Examine it with a pocket glass and see how wonderfully beautiful
and exquisite are its tiny blossoms. It loves the human foot, and
when the path or the place is long disused, other plants usurp the
ground.
The gardener and the farmer are ostensibly the greatest enemies of
the weeds, but they are in reality their best friends. Weeds, like
rats and mice, increase and spread enormously in a cultivated
country. They have better food, more sunshine, and more aids in
getting themselves disseminated. They are sent from one end of the
land to the other in seed grain of various kinds, and they take
their share, and more too, if they can get it, of the phosphates
and stable manures. How sure, also, they are to survive any war of
extermination that is waged against them! In yonder field are ten
thousand and one Canada thistles. The farmer goes resolutely to
work and destroys ten thousand and thinks the work is finished, but
he has done nothing till he has destroyed the ten thousand and one.
This one will keep up the stock and again cover his field with
thistles.
Weeds are Nature's makeshift. She rejoices in the grass and the
grain, but when these fail to cover her nakedness she resorts to
weeds. It is in her plan or a part of her economy to keep the
ground constantly covered with vegetation of some sort, and she has
layer upon layer of seeds in the soil for this purpose, and the
wonder is that each kind lies dormant until it is wanted. If I
uncover the earth in any of my fields, ragweed and pigweed spring
up; if these are destroyed, harvest grass, or quack grass, or
purslane, appears. The spade or the plow that turns these under is
sure to turn up some other variety, as chickweed, sheep-sorrel, or
goose-foot. The soil is a storehouse of seeds.
The old farmers say that wood-ashes will bring in the white clover,
and they will; the germs are in the soil wrapped in a profound
slumber, but this stimulus tickles them until they awake.
Stramonium has been known to start up on the site of an old farm
building, when it had not been seen in that locality for thirty
years. I have been told that a farmer, somewhere in New England,
in digging a well came at a great depth upon sand like that of the
seashore; it was thrown out, and in due time there sprang from it a
marine plant. I have never seen earth taken from so great a depth
that it would not before the end of the season be clothed with a
crop of weeds. Weeds are so full of expedients, and the one
engrossing purpose with them is to multiply. The wild onion
multiplies at both ends,--at the top by seed, and at the bottom by
offshoots. Toad-flax travels under ground and above ground. Never
allow a seed to ripen, and yet it will cover your field. Cut off
the head of the wild carrot, and in a week or two there are five
heads in place of this one; cut off these, and by fall there are
ten looking defiance at, you from the same root. Plant corn in
August, and it will go forward with its preparations as if it had
the whole season before it. Not so with the weeds; they have
learned better. If amaranth, or abutilon, or burdock gets a late
start, it makes great haste to develop its seed; it foregoes its
tall stalk and wide flaunting growth, and turns all its energies
into keeping up the succession of the species. Certain fields
under the plow are always infested with "blind nettles," others
with wild buckwheat, black bindweed, or cockle. The seed lies
dormant under the sward, the warmth and the moisture affect it not
until other conditions are fulfilled.
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