by Grant Allen
Finally, it may, perhaps, at first hearing, sound absurd to say that the daisy group, including these other composites with tinted rays, forms the very head and crown of the vegetable creation, as man does in the animal creation: and yet it is none the less true. We are so accustomed to look upon a daisy as a humble, commonplace, almost insignificant little flower, that it seems queer to hear it described as a higher type of plant life than the tall pine-tree or the spreading oak. But, as a matter of fact, the pine is a very low type indeed, as is also the giant tree of California, both of them belonging to the earliest and simplest surviving family of flowering plants, the conifers, which are no better, comparatively speaking, among plants, than the monstrous saurians and fish-like reptiles of the secondary age were among animals. If size were any criterion of relative development, then the whale would take precedence of all other mammals, and man would rank somewhere below the gorilla and the grizzly bear. But if we take complexity and perfection in the adaptation of the organism to its surroundings as our gauge of comparative evolution, then the daisies must rank in the very first line of plant economy. For if we follow down their pedigree in the inverse order, we shall see that, inasmuch as they have coloured rays, they are superior to all their yellow-rayed allies (for example, the sunflower); and inasmuch as these have rays, they are superior to all rayless composites (for example, the eupatory); and inasmuch as composites generally have clustered heads, they are superior to all other flowers with separate tubular corollas (for example, the heathers); while all these, again, are superior to those with separate petals (for example, the roses); and all petalled flowers are superior to all petalless kinds (for example, the pines and oaks). Thus, from the strict biological point of view, it becomes quite clear that the daisies, asters, chrysanthemums, and other rayed composites with coloured outer florets, really stand to other plants in the same relation as man stands towards other animals. That is what gives such a special and exceptional interest to the daisy’s pedigree.
II. THE ROMANCE OF A WAYSIDE WEED.
Fig. 13. — Hairy Wood-spurge (Euphorbia pilosa).
You will not find many pleasanter or breezier walks in England than this open stretch of Claverton Down: certainly you will find very few with more varied interest of every conceivable sort for every cultivated mind. The air is fresh and laden from the brine of the Atlantic and the Gulf Stream; the clear wind is blowing straight from seaward, not keen and dry from the Eastern plains, but soft and pure from a thousand leagues of uninterrupted ocean; and the view over the broken dale of Avon, where it cuts its way in a veritable gorge through the high barrier of the Bath oolite, stretches for miles over one of the loveliest and greenest valleys in all our lovely green England. More than that — the whole history of Britain is visibly unfolded before my very eyes. That bald roundish hill to the right, with its smooth summit artificially levelled, and its sides planed down into a long glacis, is Little Solisbury; and Little Solisbury, as its name clearly shows, is the very oldest Bath of all. For it is the bury or hill-fort of Solis, the ancient fortified town of the Keltic and Euskarian natives; and when, long ages afterwards, the Romans planted their station in the valley below, they naturally called the hot springs which they found there by the name of Aquæ Solis; and equally naturally misinterpreted the second word (really a native term, Sulis) as the genitive of Sol, and accordingly dedicated their great temple on the spot to Apollo. Those straight white lines and green-grown ridges on the flanks of Banagh Down and the eastern heights are the vestiges of the old Roman causeways — the Fosse and its branches — now totally disused or else degraded into modern cart-roads; and the Institution Buildings in the valley below cover or contain all the remaining memorials of the stately Roman town. Back of me again, on Hampton Down, stand the earthworks of Caer Badon, the later British village, planted there when fear of the heathen West Saxon invaders had driven back the Christian Welshman to the hills which he had deserted for the fruitful valley during the security of the Pax Romana; and this long mound, on whose summit I am standing to catch the view, actually forms part of Wansdyke, the great boundary barrier behind which the Welshmen of the Somersetshire principality entrenched themselves, after the pagan English pirates had taken possession of the Avon dale and of Bath itself. The decisive battle which settled the fate of the city was fought at Dyrham Park, among those blue downs on the northern horizon; and the tiny village of Englishcombe, nestling below the solitary beacon of High Barrow Hill on my left, marks in its very name the furthest westward extension of the Teutonic settlers towards the ever-unconquered recesses of Mendip. As to later associations, they are too endless for review. In the foreground lies the town, and from its midst towers the abbey, the last flickering effort of English architecture before the Reformation choked out its life for ever; a tall and stately but very cold specimen of good late perpendicular work. It rises above the ancient temple of Minerva, and covers fragments of the older minsters — that which Osric, king of the Worcester men, gave to a nunnery in 671; that which Offa of Mercia raised in 775; that where Eadgar, first king of all England, was crowned in 973: and that which the Angevin John of Tours erected in 1160. There to the right is Lansdown, where the Parliament’s men under Waller all but wiped out the stout Cornishmen who ‘stood up for their king’ under Sir Bevil Grenville in a fruitless victory; and the big tower on the top is Beckford’s Folly, built in a fit of Oriental recklessness by ‘Vathek’ Beckford, and now the landmark of the cemetery which spreads over his vanished domain. In the combe to the left, again, that huge pseudo-classical manor-house is Prior Park, the vast rambling home of Ralph Allen; and Ralph Allen was the original of Squire Allworthy, whose grounds, as minutely described in ‘Tom Jones,’ are here actually realised. But if I went on talking all day I should never have finished; for the history of the Bath valley, as seen from Claverton Down, is, as I said before, the history of all England, visibly epitomised in tangible realities before one’s very eyes.
However, I have not come out to-day to hunt for old relics among the works of Caer Badon, or to trace the curious bends and angles of Wansdyke. A far older and stranger chapter of our history than any of these is unfolded by the little wayside weed which I have here in my botanical case; and it was to find this very commonplace and uninteresting-looking plant that I have come out this morning. For the weed is the hairy wood-spurge, and Claverton Down is the only place in Great Britain where that particular kind of spurge still lingers on. I have got my British Flora safe here in my satchel; and now I am going to sit down on the slope of Wansdyke and make quite sure that my plant really tallies exactly with Dr. Bentham’s description; for if it actually does, then I shall have the pleasure of knowing that I hold in my hand one of the few genuine links which yet unite us with a very distant past — a past compared with which the days when Wansdyke was built, or even when Little Solisbury was fortified, seem comparatively recent. If this is in fact the hairy wood-spurge, it and its ancestors have been growing here on Claverton Down ever since the end of the last glacial epoch; and it is a relic of the flora which once bloomed among the lowlands that connected England and Ireland with Brittany, Spain, and the Pyrenees. It dates back, in short, to the time when Britain was still an integral part of the European continent.
A few minutes’ examination with my pocket-lens is quite enough to assure me that the flower I have picked is truly the wood-spurge of which I am in search. It is a queer, insignificant little plant, with funny cup-like green flowers, and odd jelly-bag glands, very much like most other English spurges; but I see at once on a closer examination that it has all the distinguishing marks of the hairy species — the woolly underside to the leaves, the dotted seed-capsules, the loose umbels of blossom, and the long branched rays supporting the straggling flower-heads. I regard it, therefore, as a decided find; for the lane that bounds the Prior Park estate, and this bit of woodland on the summit of Claverton Down, are the only spots in England where this particular plant is now found. But that is not all.
In itself, the fact of its rarity would not be enough to arouse any special interest; for there are many other wild flowers found in only one spot in Britain — sometimes garden kinds escaped from cultivation in a suitable climate, sometimes American straylings, and sometimes high Alpine species requiring a particular granite, basalt, or limestone soil — a soil perhaps to be met with in our islands only on one or two scattered Welsh or Scottish hills of the requisite height. The case of the hairy spurge, however, is very different from any of these. It is a southern European and Western Asiatic plant, and it spreads along the Mediterranean basin from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees; but it nowhere comes any nearer to Britain than the valley of the Loire. This is what gives it such a special interest in my eyes. It is not found in Brittany, it is not found in Normandy, it is not found on the opposite coast of Picardy, it is not found in Kent or Essex; but it suddenly reappears here, out of all reckoning, on Claverton Down.
If the case of the wood-spurge were a solitary one, it would be easy enough to give a ready explanation. The neighbourhood of Bath is known to be one of the warmest spots in England, having, in fact, its own hot-water supply always laid on. This is a plant of warm countries. A bird, let us say, once brought over a single seed, clinging to its feet or feathers; an exotic flower, imported for the shrubberies of Prior Park, was packed in earth containing young spurges; a sailor introduced it by some chance; a botanist sowed it here for an experiment. Nay, perhaps a Roman settler at Aquæ Solis brought it over with the plants for his Italian garden. In such or the like casual manner it got a footing on Claverton Down; and, as the climate suited it, it has gone on flourishing ever since. Here, I say, would be an easy explanation if the case of the hairy spurge were a solitary one; but, as a matter of fact, there are hundreds of cases exactly like it. It is quite a common occurrence to find a plant extend all through Europe from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees, then stop suddenly short, and turn up again once more incontinently in Devon, Cornwall, Kerry, and Connemara. This is such a curious fact that it really seems to call for some adequate explanation.
Fig. 14. — Flowers of common Monkshood.
Let me begin by noting a few of the most striking instances. There is in the Bristol Channel a solitary rocky islet known by the old Scandinavian title of the Steep Holme — a name given to it, no doubt, by the wickings of the ninth century, who made it their headquarters for plundering the chapmen and slave-mongers of wealthy Brycgstow. Now the rocky clefts of the Steep Holme are still crimson in May and June with the brilliant red blossoms of the wild pæony, a flower which does not elsewhere appear nearer to England than the Pyrenees. Not far from Axminster in Devon, again, there is a warm sheltered nook in which nestles the little village of Kilmington. Well, Kilmington Common is a place famous to botanists, because it is the one single station in Britain for a small purplish lobelia, which ranges elsewhere only from Andalusia to central France. Dozens of like cases may be noted in the south-western peninsula of England and the similarly situated corner of Wales about Pembrokeshire. Thus, to lump a long list briefly, the common blue monkshood is found wild in South Wales and the Cornish district only; the yellow draba is confined to old walls about Pennard Castle, near Swansea; the spotted rock-cistus occurs only in the Channel Islands and at Holyhead; the white rock-cistus is peculiar in Britain to Brent Downs in Somerset, together with Torquay and Babbicombe in Devon; the Cheddar pink, a volcanic plant of southern Europe, clings to the crannies of the Cheddar cliffs near Wells, and to no other crag in England; the soapwort is wild only in Cornwall and Devon; the flax-leaved St. John’s wort grows nowhere but at Cape Cornwall and on the banks of the Teign; the crimson clover and Boccone’s clover are entirely restricted to the peninsula of the Lizard; so also is the upright clover, save that it is likewise found in the Channel Islands; the sand bird’s foot remains only at Scilly; the Bithynian vetch extends through Europe as far north as Bordeaux, and then disappears again till after a sudden leap it is gathered once more in Devon and Cornwall; the white sedum occurs in the Malvern Hills and in Somersetshire; and the narrow buplever flowers only at Torquay and in Jersey and Guernsey. In almost all, if not in all, these cases the plant is a southern one, which extends usually from the Caspian to Spain, is perhaps found as far north as the Gironde or even the Loire, and then disappears again till it turns up suddenly in some exceptionally sheltered nook of Devon, Cornwall, or South Wales. This is a phenomenon which cannot surely be due to chance alone. Indeed, I might greatly increase the list, but I refrain only because I am afraid of being wearisome.
When we turn to the similarly placed south-western corner of Ireland, the peculiarities we meet are even more remarkable. I shall never forget my surprise when once, after my first visit to Nice and Mentone, I began describing the beautiful Provençal flowers to an Irish botanist, and was quietly answered, ‘Ah, yes; we have them all at Killarney.’ But it is really true none the less. The thick-leaved sedum, after skipping all England and Wales, shows itself suddenly in the Cove of Cork. The pretty Mediterranean heath, which every winterer at Pau has gathered by handfuls on the hills about Eaux Chaudes or Cauterets, jumps at a bound to the coast of Kerry. The arbutus, with its clustering white blossoms and beautiful red berries, is similarly found in Provence and again at Glengariff. London Pride grows wild in Portugal, western Spain, and the higher Pyrenees, and reappears in south-western Ireland. Another pretty little saxifrage jumps in like manner from the Asturias to Killarney. St. Dabeoc’s heath has the same range. The spiked orchid takes a great bound from Bordeaux to a single station in County Galway. To sum it up shortly, ‘Crete, Auvergne, the Pyrenees, S.-W. Ireland,’ is a common technical description of the distribution of many beautiful south European plants.
Fig. 15. — Flower and fruit of Arbutus.
Now, these peculiarities of distribution lead me up pretty surely to the romance of the hairy wood-spurge. They show that it did not get here by accident. Like the elephant-headed god of the Mexicans, like the debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion, they raise an immediate curiosity as to their origin. What we may call the natural range of British plants is of this sort: they have entered the country from the Continent, viâ Kent, Sussex, East Anglia, or Scotland; and they fall for the most part under three great divisions. The first division consists of central European plants, which seem as if they had come in from the east: and of these a few get no farther than the eastern counties; a great many spread over the whole country; and the remainder have reached to the west and to Ireland. The second division is that of the Scandinavian plants, which seem as if they had come in from the north; and of these a few stop short in Shetland, Orkney, or the Highlands; others get as far as the midland counties; and a good many straggle on into Kent or Cornwall. The third division comprises the mountain plants, which have come in from various quarters, and which grow wherever the elevation and the mountain air suit their constitutions. But my wood-spurge agrees with none of these, and it clearly belongs to another southern class, which cannot have entered Britain by any of the customary routes viâ Dover, Harwich, or Southampton. It seems to have taken a route of its own, and to have attacked England by way of Bristol and Bordeaux. Otherwise, we should find it and the other peculiar west-country species in the warmer parts of Kent, Surrey, and the Isle of Wight, which, as a matter of fact, we never do. If climate were the only agent at work, Ventnor certainly has as good claims as any place in England.
Perhaps it seems a useless question to inquire how they came there at all. ‘Were they not always there?’ somebody may ask me. And the answer is, No, undoubtedly not. You might as well explain the presence of an English-speaking colony on Pitcairn Island by the hypothesis that Englishmen were originally created in two separate centres — Great Britain and the South Pacific. Only some 80,000 years since — a mere single swing of the cosmical pendulum — every inch of Great Britain and Ireland, save only an insignificant southern fringe, was wholly covered by the ice of the last glacial period. We know the date with mathemat
ical certainty, because the astronomical conditions upon which glacial periods have been shown almost beyond doubt to depend, began 200,000 years ago, and ended 80,000 years ago. During the interval between those two dates, the condition of each hemisphere alternated between long cold periods and long hot periods, of some 10,500 years each. During the last cold spell, all England and Ireland were in the condition of Greenland at the present day. The ice had planed every living thing clean off the face of the country, and we may still trace its scratches on the smooth granite bosses of Wales and Scotland, or find its till and its moraines on the plains and valleys of East Anglia and Derbyshire. Consequently the ancestors of every plant and every animal now living in Britain must have come into it after the end of the last long cold spell — that is to say, roughly speaking, some 80,000 years since.
