Flowers and Their Pedigrees

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,[3] 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...