A Lane In The Cotswolds

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Title:     A Lane In The Cotswolds
Author: Francis Darwin [More Titles by Darwin]

Early in May I walked up from the valley to the extreme rim of the Cotswolds, just above our house. The lower country is all pasture, where we can wander at will, and delight in the many beautiful trees: the fresh green elms, the vernal yellow of the oak (which lingers in varying degrees behind some of its companions, but does not deserve Tolstoy's epithet 'maussade'), and the grey anatomy of the timid ash, whose black buds are still getting up their courage. We do not owe the trees in the meadows to landowners with a taste for natural beauty, but to the cattle that must have shade.

The buttercups are beginning their golden show, and there is not much else to decorate the fields, except daisies and the cheerful dandelions. These last are still growing obliquely, and not yet staring boldly up at the sky, as in later life. There is also an occasional patch of bugle—sturdy little blue sentinels, and a few purple orchids. In the upper meadows where the wind is cold the daisies bend their stalk and lay their heads on the ground (as they do at night), and their little noses look red like poor Marian's in Shakespeare's winter song. In the daisy it is the pink-tipped petals {56} huddling together that make this chilly symbol a contrast to the happy star that sunshine shows.

Near the top of the hill is a bare pasture covered with cowslips, all pointing their pretty heads one way. At first it seemed that they were simply yielding to the fresh wind, but on picking them it was made clear that they bent their stalks wilfully, not on compulsion. On the whole it seemed that they were nodding towards the brighter light, but I could not perceive that the quarter to which they turned had any advantage in luminosity.

Close to the top of the hill is a little wood of nut-trees, and I looked down into it over the hedge with a shock of pleasure at the chequer-work of white and blue, a conspiracy of wild garlick and blue-bells. In this land I have not seen the blue haze covering acres of cleared woodland such as we have in Kent. But this colour-dance of the two plants is beautiful in its own way. Now we have reached the rim of the valley, and look over into a new country, with many red patches of ploughed land, and sheep in the treeless fields instead of cattle. Here the skylark sings, who is something of a stranger to us dwellers in the valley. The same is true of the yellow-hammer, whose hot and dusty voice is less familiar there. To one inland bred the seagulls feeding in the ploughed lands are a delight. They seem an echo from the salt sea, or a variation (in a musical sense) on the far away silver strip which is the Severn shining down to the Bristol Channel.

We now come to a little wandering road, called for reasons unknown to me Seven Leases Lane, and after a time end our wanderings at a point whence we can look down on misty Gloucester and its cathedral; and this is a historic spot if the rumour is to be trusted, that from here King Charles watched the siege. The lane is pleasant with its plashed hedges beset with traveller's joy (clematis) and bryony. Clematis likes to climb up trees, but it seems quite happy ramping over the hedges. It is now in its freshest youth, and the careless way in which the young stems toss themselves hither and thither gives an impression of endless living things dancing with complete abandon on the hedge as on an airy floor. The traveller's joy climbs by seizing hold of the branches of plants more solid than itself. It grips them with its leaf-stalks, which serve as tendrils and support the weakling stem aloft in the clear air. But as yet they have hardly begun to fix themselves; though some I saw which had caught each other, giving themselves a gay aspect by seeming to dance hand in hand.

The white bryony is there also, and its tendrils have fastened on to the hazel, beech and dog-wood, which make up the mass of the hedge. Their tendrils are but delicate ropes, and when they have seized a twig they would break away in the first fresh breeze. But this is prevented by the fact that the tendrils contract into spiral springs, and by the give-and-take of its elastic coils the cable becomes almost unbreakable and the ship rides out the stiffest gale. {58a}

Two other types of climbing plants are common in our lane, which have neither the grasping leafstalks of clematis nor the delicate tendrils of white bryony. Black bryony is a twining plant, and can travel spirally up the hazel stems, just as a hop ascends its pole. But here in our lane there is but little to climb up, and its livid pink stems, often twisted with one or more brother-strands, lie along the hedge or sway in the air like discontented snakes. Just now they hardly show any leaves, but later in the spring they will have finely polished ones, and later still bunches of red berries, which do not seem to be popular with birds, and hang on their branches till winter comes. Another type of climber which shows itself early is the goose-grass. {58b} This is a humble personage, probably looked down on by the superior climbers above described, as able neither to swarm spirally nor to ascend by the aid of tendrils or other gripping apparatus. The goose-grass depends on the possession of delicate little hooks covering stem and leaves. These can be perceived by stroking the plant from the base upwards, but not in the other direction. The hooks being directed downwards do not hinder the upward push of the growing plant, but they prevent it from slipping downwards. If one disentangles a goose-grass from its position it will fall weakly over and lie along the ground. In its simple way it gains the object aspired to by all climbers, namely the possession of a satisfactory position in the world without going to the expense of building a stem stiff enough to stand alone. To children goose-grass is valuable as the ideal material for the making of sham birds' nests, since the hooked prickles hold the stems in position and make the art of nest-building a singularly easy one.

The great revolution that breaks out in the spring, when the store-houses of the plant pour nutriment into the numberless awakening buds is a miracle annually repeated in the endless procession of life. We know something of the mechanism by which mobilisation is effected. We know for instance that the starch-grains guarded by the dormant plant during the idle days of winter are liquified, or rather, that the starch is converted into sugar, and being soluble in water can flow from the magazines of the plant to where growth, implying the creation of millions of newly born cells, demands material. We are gradually learning to understand something of that seething cauldron of life which we can dimly watch in living things. The ferment diastase is one of the tools with which plants perform their miracles of chemical activity. This diastase and its brother-ferments have qualities resembling those of living creatures. They may, like seeds, be dried and kept in a bottle until they are awakened by giving them water. Perhaps this is talking in a circle, and that ferments only resemble living things because organisms contain so many of these mysterious bodies. I like to fancy that there is something more than this, and that a ferment is an automaton which the plant compels to labour for it—a Frankenstein monster having semi-living qualities, being no more than a parody of life. But I am getting beyond the questions that are in tune with a spring day.

NOTES:

{56} Strictly speaking—florets.

{58a} C. Darwin. Climbing Plants.

{58b} Galium aparine.

[The end]
Francis Darwin's essay: Lane In The Cotswolds

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