And I Will Add, Probably To The
Disgust Of Some Rigidly Orthodox Reader, That These Are Childish
Things Which I Have No Desire To Put Away.
The first intimations of the feeling are beyond recall; I only know
that my memory takes me back to a time when I was unconscious of any
such element in nature, when the delight I experienced in all natural
things was purely physical.
I rejoiced in colours, scents, sounds, in
taste and touch: the blue of the sky, the verdure of earth, the
sparkle of sunlight on water, the taste of milk, of fruit, of honey,
the smell of dry or moist soil, of wind and rain, of herbs and
flowers; the mere feel of a blade of grass made me happy; and there
were certain sounds and perfumes, and above all certain colours in
flowers, and in the plumage and eggs of birds, such as the purple
polished shell of the tinamou's egg, which intoxicated me with
delight. When, riding on the plain, I discovered a patch of scarlet
verbenas in full bloom, the creeping plants covering an area of
several yards, with a moist, green sward sprinkled abundantly with the
shining flower-bosses, I would throw myself from my pony with a cry of
joy to lie on the turf among them and feast my sight on their
brilliant colour.
It was not, I think, till my eighth year that I began to be distinctly
conscious of something more than this mere childish delight in nature.
It may have been there all the time from infancy - I don't know; but
when I began to know it consciously it was as if some hand had
surreptitiously dropped something into the honeyed cup which gave it
at certain times a new flavour. It gave me little thrills, often
purely pleasurable, at other times startling, and there were occasions
when it became so poignant as to frighten me. The sight of a
magnificent sunset was sometimes almost more than I could endure and
made me wish to hide myself away. But when the feeling was roused by
the sight of a small and beautiful or singular object, such as a
flower, its sole effect was to intensify the object's loveliness.
There were many flowers which produced this effect in but a slight
degree, and as I grew up and the animistic sense lost its intensity,
these too lost their magic and were almost like other flowers which
had never had it. There were others which never lost what for want of
a better word I have just called their magic, and of these I will give
an account of one.
I was about nine years old, perhaps a month or two more, when during
one of my rambles on horseback I found at a distance of two or three
miles from home, a flower that was new to me. The plant, a little over
a foot in height, was growing in the shelter of some large cardoon
thistle, or wild artichoke, bushes. It had three stalks clothed with
long, narrow, sharply-pointed leaves, which were downy, soft to the
feel like the leaves of our great mullein, and pale green in colour.
All three stems were crowned with clusters of flowers, the single
flower a little larger than that of the red valerian, of a pale red
hue and a peculiar shape, as each small pointed petal had a fold or
twist at the end. Altogether it was slightly singular in appearance
and pretty, though not to be compared with scores of other flowers of
the plains for beauty. Nevertheless it had an extraordinary
fascination for me, and from the moment of its discovery it became one
of my sacred flowers. From that time onwards, when riding on the
plain, I was always on the look-out for it, and as a rule I found
three or four plants in a season, but never more than one at any spot.
They were usually miles apart.
On first discovering it I took a spray to show to my mother, and was
strangely disappointed that she admired it merely because it was a
pretty flower, seen for the first time. I had actually hoped to hear
from her some word which would have revealed to me why I thought so
much of it: now it appeared as if it was no more to her than any other
pretty flower and even less than some she was peculiarly fond of, such
as the fragrant little lily called Virgin's Tears, the scented pure
white and the rose-coloured verbenas, and several others. Strange that
she who alone seemed always to know what was in my mind and who loved
all beautiful things, especially flowers, should have failed to see
what I had found in it!
Years later, when she had left us and when I had grown almost to
manhood and we were living in another place, I found that we had as
neighbour a Belgian gentleman who was a botanist. I could not find a
specimen of my plant to show him, but gave him a minute description of
it as an annual, with very large, tough, permanent roots, also that it
exuded a thick milky juice when the stem was broken, and produced its
yellow seeds in a long, cylindrical, sharply-pointed pod full of
bright silvery down, and I gave him sketches of flower and leaf. He
succeeded in finding it in his books: the species had been known
upwards of thirty years, and the discoverer, who happened to be an
Englishman, had sent seed and roots to the Botanical Societies abroad
he corresponded with; the species had been named after him, and it was
to be found now growing in some of the Botanical Gardens of Europe.
All this information was not enough to satisfy me; there was nothing
about the man in his books. So I went to my father to ask him if he
had ever known or heard of an Englishman of that name in the country.
Yes, he said, he had known him well; he was a merchant in Buenos
Ayres, a nice gentle-mannered man, a bachelor and something of a
recluse in his private house, where he lived alone and spent all his
week-ends and holidays roaming about the plains with his vasculum in
search of rare plants.
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