Ruskin Bond's Book of Nature

by Ruskin Bond

  Another sorrel, though vastly different, grows in our hills. Unlike the modest oxalis, the sheep sorrel is a tough weed, growing from rocks, the walls of old houses, and in soils which refuse to support any other plant life. The flowers, which come out in spring and autumn, are pink flaky things, rather like confetti. They, too, are acidic (in fact, sorrel means sour), and though sheep sorrel may have been thought fit only for sheep, its near-relative, sorrel dock, was once eaten along with mutton.

  John Ruskin in one of his bad moods said that plants were named, some from diseases, some from vermin, some from blockheads (meaning botanists), and the rest anyhow. Certainly names can be confusing. The cherry used to be called the merry. Merry is a false singular from the French merise (wild cherry), as cherry is from cerise. The gooseberry is known in India as the rusberry, which is likely to be confused with raspberries.

  A plant may deceive us by its name, even its botanical name. If it is something which has montana or mountain in its name, the chances are it grows in a low valley. (Or perhaps mountains have grown in size since Christian, in the Pilgrim’s Progress, saw ‘a wide field, full of dark mountains’.) The winter jasmine flowers in the Himalayas in spring. The ‘basant’ or spring flower, is more common in the depths of winter. There must be some twenty kinds of daisies, and ten varieties of dandelions, and in trying to tell one from the other, the amateur botanist is tempted to cry, ‘A plague on both your houses!’

  Some flowers are easily recognized. The dog rose is unmistakable, growing wild on the hills in spring. Why so unlovely a name? Because it is the translation of the flower’s Greek name which means a cure for hydrophobia. Our forebears studied and gathered wild flowers and plants not so much for their beauty as for their medicinal or food value. Such plants were known as ‘simples’—that existed before the physician devised ‘compounds’. The plants themselves often indicated their usefulness: a walnut, having a hard shell like a skull and a kernel configured like a brain, signified that it was a cure for all troubles of the head!’

  Some plants are still better known by their usefulness (or harmfulness) than by their appearance. When we speak of tobacco, we do not think of its lovely flower. Nor can we visualize the onion as a lily. But it belongs to the lily family, as does the leek.

  ‘What lovely flowers!’ I exclaimed, pointing to a corner of a friend’s garden. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Potatoes,’ was the reply. And potatoes do have lovely flowers. They also belong to the poisonous nightshade family!

  It is so easy for the flower enthusiast to blunder when it comes to distinguishing types and families of flowers. Botanists have certainly done their best to confuse the nature lover. But we should not allow ourselves to be discouraged; we have as much right to the enjoyment of wild flowers as they.

  What’s in a name? Forget-me-not is more expressive than Myosotis. Lady’s bedstraw has more charm than Galium verum, and dandelion is far sweeter than Taraxacum officinale. I do not know what the Pahari names are for these flowers, but they grow in our hills and are there to be enjoyed. (And dandelion flowers make excellent wine!) Let not their names blind us to their beauty and mystery; but let us wonder, like Tennyson, at their miraculous presence:

  Flower in the crannied wall,

  I pluck you out of the crannies,

  I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

  Little flower—but if I could understand

  What you are, root and all, and all in all,

  I should know what God and man are.

  Flowers Wild and Tame

  The cosmos has all the genius of simplicity. The plant stands tall and erect; its foliage is uncomplicated; its inflorescences are bold, fresh, cheerful. Any flower, from a rose to a rhododendron, can be complicated. The cosmos is splendidly simple.

  No wonder it takes its name from the Greek cosmos, meaning the universe as an ordered whole—the sum total of experience! For this unpretentious flower does seem to sum it all up: perfection without apparent striving for it, the artistry of the South American footballer! Needless to say, it came from tropical America.

  And growing it is no trouble. A handful of seeds thrown in a waste patch or on a grassy hill slope, and a few months later there they are, en masse, doing their samba in the sunshine. They are almost wild, but not quite. They need very little attention, but if you take them too much for granted they will go away the following year. Simple they may be, but not insensitive. They need plenty of space. And as my own small apartment cannot accommodate them, they definitely belong to my dream garden.

  My respect for the cosmos goes back to my childhood when I wandered into what seemed like a forest of these flowers, all twice my height (I must have been five at the time) but looking down on me in the friendliest way, their fine feathery foliage giving off a faint aroma. Now when I find them flowering on the hillsides in mellow October sunshine, they are like old friends and I greet them accordingly, pressing my face to their petals.

  Not everyone likes the cosmos. I have met some upper-class ladies (golf-club members) who complain that it gives them hay fever, and they use this as an excuse to root out all cosmos from their gardens. I expect they are just being snobbish. There are other flowers which give off just as much pollen dust.

  I have noticed the same snobbishness in regard to marigolds, especially the smaller Indian variety. ‘Cultivated’ people won’t cultivate these humble but attractive flowers. Is it because they are used for making garlands? Or because they are not delicately scented? Or because they are so easily grown in the backyards of humble homes?

  My grandparents once went to war with each other over the marigold. Grandfather had grown a few in one corner of the garden. Just as they began flowering, they vanished—Granny had removed them overnight! There was a row, and my grandparents did not speak to each other for several days. Then, by calling them ‘French’ marigolds, Grandfather managed to reintroduce them to the garden. Granny liked the idea of having something ‘French’ in her garden. Such is human nature!

  Sometimes a wild flower can put its more spectacular garden cousins to shame. I am thinking now of the commelina, which I discover in secret places after the rains have passed. Its bright skyblue flowers take my breath away. It has a sort of unguarded innocence that is beyond corruption.

  Wild roses give me more pleasure than the sophisticated domestic variety. On a walk in the Himalayan foothills I have encountered a number of these shrubs and climbers—the ineptly named dog rose, sparkling white in summer; the sweet briar with its deep pink petals and bright red rose hips; the trailing rose, found in shady places; and the wild raspberry (the fruit more attractive than the flower) which belongs to the same family.

  A sun lover, I like plenty of yellow on the hillsides and in gardens—sunflowers, Californian poppies, winter jasmine, St John’s wort, buttercups, wild strawberries, mustard in bloom . . . But if you live in a hot place, you might prefer cooling blues and soft purples—forget-me-nots, bluebells, cornflowers, lavender.

  I’d go far for a sprig of sweetly-scented lavender. This tame-looking, blue-green, stiff, sticky, and immovable shrub holds as much poetry and romance in its wiry arms as would fill a large book. Most cultivated flowers were originally wild and many take their names from the botanists who first ‘tamed’ them. Thus, the dahlia is named after Mr Dahl, a Swede; the rudbeckia after Rudbeck, a Dutchman; the zinnia after Dr Zinn, a German; and the lobelia after Monsieur Lobel, a Flemish physician. They and others brought to Europe many of the flowers they found growing wild in tropical America, Asia and Africa.

  But I am no botanist. I prefer to be the butterfly, perfectly happy in going from flower to flower in search of nectar.

  Some Plants Becomes Friends

  The little rose begonia: it has a glossy chocolate leaf, a pretty rose-pink flower, and it grows and flowers in my bedroom—almost all the year round. What more can one ask for?

  Some plants become friends. Most garden flowers are fair-weather friends; g
one in the winter when times are difficult up here in the mountains. Those who stand by you in adversity—plant or human—are your true friends; there aren’t many around, so cherish them and take care of them in all seasons.

  A loyal plant friend is the variegated ivy that has spread all over my bedroom wall. My small bedroom-cum-study gets plenty of light and sun, and when the windows are open, cool breeze from the mountains floats in, rustling the leaves of the ivy. (This breeze can turn into a raging blizzard in winter—on one occasion, even blowing the roof away—but right now, it’s just a zephyr, gentle and balmy.) Ivy plants seem to like my room, and this one, which I brought up from Dehra, took an instant liking to my desk and walls, so that I now have difficulty keeping it from trailing over my typewriter when I am at work.

  I like to take in other people’s sick or discarded plants and nurse or cajole them back to health. This has given me a bit of a reputation as a plant doctor. Actually, all I do is give an ailing plant a quiet corner where it can rest and recuperate from whatever ails it—they have usually been ill-treated in some way. Plant abuse, no less! And it’s wonderful how quickly a small tree or plant will recover if given a little encouragement.

  I rescued a dying asparagus fern from the portals of the Savoy Hotel, and now, six months later, its strong feathery fronds have taken over most of one window, so that I have no need of curtains. Nandu, the owner of Savoy, now wants his fern back.

  Maya Banerjee’s sick geranium, never allowed to settle in one place—hence its stunted appearance—has, within a fortnight of being admitted to my plant ward, burst forth in such an array of new leaf and flower that I’m afraid it might pull a muscle or strain a ligament from too much activity.

  Should I return these and other plants when they have fully recovered? I don’t think they want to go back. And I should hate to see them suffering relapses on being returned to their former abodes. So I tell the owners that their plants need monitoring for a while . . . Perhaps, if I sent in doctor’s bills, the demands for their return would not be so strident?

  Loyalty in plants, as in friends, must be respected and rewarded. If dandelions show a tendency to do well on the steps of the house, then that is where they shall be encouraged to grow. If a sorrel is happier on the window sill than on the hillside, then I shall let it stay, even if it means the window won’t close properly. And if the hydrangea does better in my neighbour’s garden than mine, then my neighbour shall be given the hydrangea. Among flower lovers, there must be no double standards: generosity, not greed; sugar, not spite.

  And what of the rewards for me, apart from the soothing effect of fresh fronds and leaves at my place of work and rest? Well, the other evening I came home to find my room vibrating to the full-throated chorus of several crickets who had found the ivy to their liking. I thought they would keep me up all night with their music; but when I switched the light off, they immediately fell silent. So, crickets don’t sing in the dark, I surmised, and switched the light on again. Once more, I was treated to symphonic variations on a theme by Tchaikovsky.

  This reminded me that I hadn’t listened to Tchaikovsky for some time, so I played a tape of ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ from the Nutcracker Suite. The crickets maintained a respectful silence, even with the lights on.

  My Flower of the Month

  The dandelion growing on my retaining wall must be my flower of the month. It asserts its right to be there, where practically nothing else will flourish. Without any care or nourishment, it survives and grows strong and upright. Pluck it if you will, but there’s no uprooting it from that space between two stones where it is so firmly embedded.

  The dandelion opens its petals to the first rays of the sun and closes when the sunlight fades. And it is called love’s oracle because of the custom of blowing on its puffball of seeds to discover whether ‘she loves me’ or ‘she loves me not’. I have always been able to regulate my breath so as to obtain the answer I wanted!

  My flower of the month, when the dandelion is not in bloom, is the poppy, while it lasts. A classic flower, it is extravagantly beautiful. The scarlet poppy is the most showy but I like the plain white one as it makes for such a pleasing contrast, a pattern of poppies.

  The unseasonal showers we have been having give today’s poppies a rather bedraggled look, but there will be fresh blooms tomorrow.

  There’s an old saying: ‘Pluck poppies, make thunder.’

  A wild species of geranium (the round-leafed cranesbill, to give its English name) with a tiny lilac flower, has responded to my overtures, making a great display in a tub where I encouraged it to spread. Never one to spurn a gesture of friendship, I have given it the freedom of the shady back veranda. Let it be my flower of the month, this rainy August.

  The Scent of the Snapdragon

  I would be the last person to belittle a flower because of its colour or appearance, but it does happen that my favourites are those with their own distinctive fragrance.

  The rose, of course, is a joy to all—even to my baby granddaughter, who enjoys taking one apart, petal by petal—but there are other less-spectacular blooms, which have a lovely and sometimes elusive fragrance all their own.

  I have a special fondness for snapdragons. If I sniff hard at them, I don’t catch any scent at all. They seem to hold it back from me. But if I walk past a bed of these flowers, or even a single plant, the gentlest of fragrances is wafted to me, zephyr-like. And if I stop to try and take it all in, it goes again! I find this quite tantalizing, but it has given me a special regard for this modest flower.

  The bees love the snapdragon—the antirrhinum—as much as I do. I have seen honeybees push their way through the pursed lips of the antirrhinum and disappear completely. A few minutes later they stagger out again, bottoms first.

  Carnations, with their strong scent of cloves, are great show-offs. And here, in India, the jasmine can be rather heady and overpowering. The honeysuckle, too, insists on making its presence known. There is a honeysuckle creeper outside the study window of my cottage in the hills, and all through the summer its sweet, rather cloying fragrance drifts in through the open window. It is delightful at times; but at other times I have to close the window so that I can give my attention to other, less intrusive, smells—like the soft scent of petunias (another of my favourites) near the doorstep, and pine needles on the hillside, and great bunches of sweet peas placed on my table.

  Some flowers can be quite tricky. One would think that the calendula had no scent at all. Certainly the flower gives nothing away. But run your fingers gently over the leaves and then bring them to your face, and you will be touched, just briefly, by the most delicate of aromas.

  Sometimes leaves outdo their blooms. The lemon geranium, for instance, is valued more for its fragrant leaves than for its rather indeterminate flowers. It is the same with verbena. And I cannot truthfully say what ordinary mint looks like in flower. The refreshing aroma of its leaves, when crushed, makes up for any absence of floral display.

  Not all plants are fragrant. Some, like the asafoetida, will keep strong men at bay. Of course, one man’s fragrance might well turn out to be another creature’s bad smell. Geraniums, my grandmother insisted, kept snakes away because they couldn’t stand the smell of these flowers. She surrounded her north Indian bungalow with pots of geraniums. It’s true we never found a snake in the house, so she may have been right!

  But snakes must like some smells, close to the ground, or by now they’d have taken to living in more elevated places; but I am told their sense of smell is rather dull. When I lie on summer grass in the Himalayas, I am conscious of the many good smells around me—the grass itself, redolent of the morning’s dew; bruised clover; wild violets; tiny buttercups and golden stars and strawberry flowers and many I shall never know the names of . . .

  And here are some flower haikus (well, almost!) I wrote last summer:

  Blossom Time

  Poinsettia

  Bright red

&nbs
p; The poinsettia flames

  As autumn and the old year wanes.

  Ferns

  Shaded in a deep ravine

  The ferns are upright, dark and green.

  Jasmine Time

  Jasmine flowers in her hair,

  Jasmine scents are everywhere.

  Languid summer days are here;

  There’s sweet longing in the air.

  Geranium

  Red geranium

  Gleaming against the polished floor:

  Memory, hold the door!

  Rose of Harsil

  Her beauty brought her fame.

  But only the wild rose growing beside her grave

  Was there to hear that whispered name:

  Gulabi.

  Begonia

  There’s a begonia in her cheeks,

  Pink as the flush of early dawn

  On Sikkim’s peaks.

  Snapdragon

  Antirrhinums line the wall,

  Sturdy little dragons all!

  Petunias

  Petunias I must praise—

  Their soft perfume

  Takes me by surprise!