_ CHAPTER V. BRUNELLA
1. It ought to have been added to the statements of general law in irregular flowers, in Chapter I. of this volume, Sec. 6, that if the petals, while brought into relations of inequality, still retain their perfect petal form,--and whether broad or narrow, extended or reduced, remain clearly _leaves_, as in the pansy, pea, or azalea, and assume no grotesque or obscure outline,--the flower, though injured, is not to be thought of as corrupted or misled. But if any of the petals lose their definite character as such, and become swollen, solidified, stiffened, or strained into any other form or function than that of petals, the flower is to be looked upon as affected by some kind of constant evil influence; and, so far as we conceive of any spiritual power being concerned in the protection or affliction of the inferior orders of creatures, it will be felt to bear the aspect of possession by, or pollution by, a more or less degraded Spirit.[30]
2. I have already enough spoken of the special manifestation of this character in the orders Contorta and Satyrium, vol. i., p. 91, and the reader will find the parallel aspects of the Draconidae dwelt upon at length in the 86th and 87th paragraphs of the 'Queen of the Air,' where also their relation to the labiate group is touched upon. But I am far more embarrassed by the symbolism of that group which I called 'Vestales,' from their especially domestic character and their serviceable purity; but which may be, with more convenience perhaps, simply recognizable as 'Menthae.'
3. These are, to our northern countries, what the spice-bearing trees are in the tropics;--our thyme, lavender, mint, marjoram, and their like, separating themselves not less in the health giving or strengthening character of their scent from the flowers more or less enervating in perfume, as the rose, orange, and violet,--than in their humble colours and forms from the grace and splendour of those higher tribes; thus allowing themselves to be summed under the general word 'balm' more truly than the balsams from which the word is derived. Giving the most pure and healing powers to the air around them; with a comfort of warmth also, being mostly in dry places, and forming sweet carpets and close turf; but only to be rightly enjoyed in the open air, or indoors when dried; not tempting any one to luxury, nor expressive of any kind of exultation. Brides do not deck themselves with thyme, nor do we wreathe triumphal arches with mint.
4. It is most notable, also, farther, that none of these flowers have any extreme beauty in colour. The blue sage is the only one of vivid hue at all; and we never think of it as for a moment comparable to the violet or bluebell: thyme is unnoticed beside heath, and many of the other purple varieties of the group are almost dark and sad coloured among the flowers of summer; while, so far from gaining beauty on closer looking, there is scarcely a blossom of them which is not more or less grotesque, even to ugliness, in outline; and so hooded or lappeted as to look at first like some imperfect form of snapdragon for the most part spotted also, wrinkled as if by old age or decay, cleft or torn, as if by violence, and springing out of calices which, in their clustering spines, embody the general roughness of the plant.
5. I take at once for example, lest the reader should think me unkind or intemperate in my description, a flower very dear and precious to me; and at this time my chief comfort in field walks. For, now, the reign of all the sweet reginas of the spring is over--the reign of the silvia and anemone, of viola and veronica; and at last, and this year abdicated under tyrannous storm,[31] the reign of the rose. And the last foxglove-bells are nearly fallen; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are coming up the burdock, and the coarse and vainly white aster, and the black knapweeds; and there is only one flower left to be loved among the grass,--the soft, warm-scented Brunelle.
6. _P_runell, _or_ Brunell--Gerarde calls it; and Brunella, rightly and authoritatively, Tournefort; Prunella, carelessly, Linnaeus, and idly following him, the moderns, casting out all the meaning and help of its name--of which presently. Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, in English--meaning that who has this plant needs no physician.
7. As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it would reprove me for what I have just said of the poverty of colour in its tribe; for the most glowing of violets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of its hooded blossoms. But their flush is broken and oppressed by the dark calices out of which they spring, and their utmost power in the field is only of a saddened amethystine lustre, subdued with furry brown. And what is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the scattered blossoms;--of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain, and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of the cluster broken short away altogether.
8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes. But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind. I take my lens, therefore--to the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with blue-winged wasps in it,--and perceive therewith the following particulars.
9. First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into a kind of fringe.
Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cluster of stiff white hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the hood; for no imaginable purpose of use or decoration--any more than a hearth-brush put for a helmet-crest,--and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or shark-like jaw, edged with ghastly teeth,--and yet more, that the hollow within begins to suggest a resemblance to an open throat in which there are two projections where the lower petal joins the lateral ones, almost exactly like swollen glands.
I believe it was this resemblance, inevitable to any careful and close observer, which first suggested the use of the plant in throat diseases to physicians; guided, as in those first days of pharmacy, chiefly by imagination. Then the German name for one of the most fatal of throat affections, Braune, extended itself into the first name of the plant, Brunelle.
10. The truth of all popular traditions as to the healing power of herbs will be tried impartially as soon as men again desire to lead healthy lives; but I shall not in 'Proserpina' retain any of the names of their gathered and dead or distilled substance, but name them always from the characters of their life. I retain, however, for this plant its name Brunella, Fr. Brunelle, because we may ourselves understand it as a derivation from Brune; and I bring it here before the reader's attention as giving him a perfectly instructive general type of the kind of degradation which takes place in the forms of flowers under more or less malefic influence, causing distortion and disguise of their floral structure. Thus it is not the normal character of a flower petal to have a cluster of bristles growing out of the middle of it, nor to be jagged at the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish's jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into the likeness of a diseased gland in an animal's throat. A really uncorrupted flower suggests none but delightful images, and is like nothing but itself.
11. I find that in the year 1719, Tournefort defined, with exactitude which has rendered the definition authoritative for all time, the tribe to which this Brownie flower belongs, constituting them his fourth class, and describing them in terms even more depreciatingly imaginative than any I have ventured to use myself. I translate the passage (vol. i., p. 177):--
12. "The name of Labiate flower is given to a single-petaled flower which, beneath, is attenuated into a tube, and above is expanded into a lip, which is either single or double. It is proper to a labiate flower,--first, that it has a one-leaved calyx (ut calycem habeat _unifolium_), for the most part tubulated, or reminding one of a paper hood (cucullum papyraceum); and, secondly, that its pistil ripens into a fruit consisting of four seeds, which ripen in the calyx itself, as if in their own seed-vessel, by which a labiate flower is distinguished from a personate one, whose pistil becomes a capsule far divided from the calyx (a calyce longo divisam). And a labiate flower differs from rotate, or bell-shaped flowers, which have four seeds, in that the lips of a labiate flower have a gape like the face of a goblin, or ludicrous mask, emulous of animal form."
13. This class is then divided into four sections.
In the first, the upper lip is helmeted, or hooked--"galeatum est, vel falcatum."
In the second, the upper lip is excavated like a spoon--"cochlearis instar est excavatum."
In the third the upper lip is erect.
And in the fourth there is no upper lip at all.
The reader will, I hope, forgive me for at once rejecting a classification of lipped plants into three classes that have lips, and one that has none, and in which the lips of those that have got any, are like helmets and spoons.
Linnaeus, in 1758, grouped the family into two divisions, by the form of the calyx, (five-fold or two-fold), and then went into the wildest confusion in distinction of species,--sometimes by the form of corolla, sometimes by that of calyx, sometimes by that of the filaments, sometimes by that of the stigma, and sometimes by that of the seed. As, for instance, thyme is to be identified by the calyx having hairs in its throat, dead nettle by having bristles in its mouth, lion's tail by having bones in its anthers (antherae punctis osseis adspersae), and teucrium by having its upper lip cut in two!
14. St. Hilaire, in 1805, divides again into four sections, but as three of these depend on form of corolla, and the fourth on abortion of stamens, the reader may conclude practically, that logical division of the family is impossible, and that all he can do, or that there is the smallest occasion for his doing, is first to understand the typical structure thoroughly, and then to know a certain number of forms accurately, grouping the others round them at convenient distances; and, finally, to attach to their known forms such simple names as may be utterable by children, and memorable by old people, with more ease and benefit than the 'Galeopsis Eu-te-trahit,' 'Lamium Galeobdalon,' or 'Scutellaria Galericulata,'and the like, of modern botany. But to do this rightly, I must review and amplify some of my former classification, which it will be advisable to do in a separate chapter. _