The Romance of Plant Life

Rydberg, speaking of the Big Bad Lands in South Dakota, says that there are in some places great stretches of land consisting of cañons separated by small ridges, in which not a speck of green is visible over several sections.62 (A section is more than a square mile.)

But though Aden looks exactly like "a barrack stove that no one's lit for years and years," plants grow there. Even in Egypt, when one has left the Nile inundation limit, a botanical eye very seldom fails to detect plants of one sort or another even in a dangerous and thorough-going desert.

Plants are almost as hardy as men; they can adapt themselves to almost any climate.

In some curious and inexplicable way the very dangers of the climate seem to produce automatically a means of resisting it. The chief peril, of course, is a loss of the precious water through the leaves. When the skin or epidermis of a plant is being formed, the walls of its cells are laid down, layer by layer, one inside the other, by the secretion of the living matter inside. In a dry desert the loss of water by evaporation will be so rapid that these layers of cell-wall are much thicker than in ordinary plants. The very fact that they are thicker and less penetrable tends to prevent any further loss of water.63

So that plants in a dry climate have the power of altering themselves to resist its dangers.

Another author found that, in Scandinavia, plants of the same species can acclimatize themselves if necessary. Sheep's Sorrel which had grown on dry, droughty gravel banks only lost 10 per cent. of its water in the first two days, when it was artificially dried. Other Sheep's Sorrels, which had been luxuriating in meadows where they had no lack of moisture, lost no less than one third (33 per cent.) of their water when dried in the same way.

That is interesting, because very likely our readers might in crossing a desert be perishing of thirst when a Bedouin Arab would be perfectly happy. The plants have learnt to do without water just in the same way as the Arab has done.

Of the many interesting desert plants, the Succulents, Cacti, Euphorbias, and others of the same extraordinary, fleshy, dropsical appearance, come first.

When a Cereus plant (one of the American Giant Cacti) was dried, it did not lose the whole of its water for 576 days. That is probably the longest time "between drinks" on record. A Houseleek (Sempervivum), which has to grow on dry rocks where it has no water for days together, remained quite fresh for 165 days.

There are several reasons why these plants took so long to dry up. To begin with, they have inside their stems and leaves certain substances which hold water and delay its escape. Moreover their extraordinary shapes are of very great assistance. They prefer globular, round, circular, pear-shaped, or cylindrical forms.

Suppose you were to cut such a round mass into thin slices and lay them out flat, it is quite clear that they would cover a much greater surface. Thin leaves also, if squashed up into a round ball, would have a very much smaller surface.

The water can only escape from the surface exposed, so that these condensed round balls and fleshy columns have far less water-losing surface than ordinary leaves.

As a matter of fact, it was found by calculation that the surface of an Echinocactus was 300 times less for the same amount of stuff as that of an Aristolochia leaf. If the actual loss of water from the Echinocactus, as found by experiment, was reckoned as one unit per square inch, then the amount of water lost from a square inch of the Aristolochia was no less than 5000 units!

This shows that these odd, outrageous shapes of Prickly Pears, Cacti, and other succulents are an extraordinary help to them. We have already pointed out in a previous chapter how necessary their spines and prickles are if they must resist rats, mice, camels, and other enemies.

What we may call the "hedgehog" type of plant is also very common in desert countries. There are many woody little, much branched, twiggy shrublets, which bristle all over with thorns and spines. They are not at all fleshy, but do with the least conceivable amount of water.

Another striking characteristic of the desert flora is noticed by every one. Almost every plant is clothed either in white cottonwool, like the Lammie's Lug of our gardens, or else in grey hairs. The general tint of the landscape is not green, but it is rather the colour of the soil silvered over by these grey-haired plants.

The reason of this is, of course, quite easy to understand. We put on a thick overcoat if we are going to walk in a Scotch mist, to keep out the moisture. These plants cover themselves with hairs or cottonwool to keep the moisture inside. It does not escape easily through the woolly hairs on the skin.

One very strange plant should be noticed here. This is the Iceplant (Mesembryanthemum cristallinum). Every part of it is covered with little glittering swellings which shine in the sun like minute ice crystals. The swellings contain a store of water, or rather of colourless sap, which makes it able to exist in dry places. Dr. Ludwig says that a torn-off branch remained quite fresh for months on his study table. It is probable that these peculiar pearl or ice-like swellings also focus the sunlight, acting like lenses, upon the inner part of the leaf, but that is not as yet fully understood.

There are two grasses, growing in the desert, which are of some value; both are called Esparto or Halfa. They are very dry, woody, or rather wiry grasses, especially common in Algeria, Tripoli, and also found in Spain. One of them, Stipa tenacissima, grows in rocky soil in Morocco, Algeria, and Tripoli. The Arabs search for it in the hills, and dig it up by the roots; they then load their camels with the grass and bring it to the ports whence it is sent to London or other places. A very good and durable paper is made from it, and ropes, mats, and even shoes are also produced from the fibre. Part of the "esparto" is, however, furnished by another grass (Lygeum sparteum). The natives sometimes tie a knot in a halfa leaf, which, according to them, cures a strain of the back. The Stipa is also used as fodder, but it is not nutritious and is indeed sometimes dangerous. In one year Britain imported 187,000 tons of esparto, worth nearly £800,000. The yield is said to be about ten tons per acre.

Another very interesting plant at Tripoli and in the North African Desert generally, is a sort of broom, the Retama (Retama Raetam). It is not very unlike the common broom, but has long, leafless, whip-like branches covered by bright pink-and-white flowers. It can often be seen half submerged in waves of sand, and struggling nevertheless to hold its own. As it has no leaves its loss of water is very much kept down. This is the Juniper of the Bible, and it is still used for making coals.

The length of the roots is very great in most of the broom-like, "hedgehog," and other plants. A quite small plant not more than six or eight inches high will have a root as thick as one's thumb. Even at a depth of four or five feet below the surface its root will be as thick as the little finger, so that the root-length is at least twenty times the height of the visible part above ground. These thirsty roots explore the ground in every direction, and go very deep downwards in their search for water.

Another very interesting plant in the Egyptian Desert is Citrullus Colocynth, from which the drug colocynth is prepared. The great round yellow-green fruit and finely divided bright green leaves may be seen lying on the sand. It remains green all the summer, but appears not to have any particular protection against loss of water. It is always supplied by its roots with underground water. If a stem is cut through it withers away in a few minutes. This is found also in Asia Minor, Greece, and Spain. The pulp of the fruit contains a strong medicinal substance; it is a drastic purgative, and in overdoses is an irritant poison. This was probably the Wild Vine or gourd which the young prophet gathered, and which produced "death in the pot." He probably mistook it for a water melon. It is still plentiful near Gilgal (2 Kings xiv. 38-41).64

Below the surface of the earth, of course, there is not nearly the same dryness or danger of losing water, so that there are often a great number of bulbs, tubers, and the like hidden in the soil. There they wait patiently, sometimes for a whole year or even for a longer period. So soon as a shower of rain falls they start to life, push out their leaves, and live at very high pressure for a few days. After a shower of rain, the Karoo in South Africa, for instance, is an extraordinarily beautiful country. There are bulbous Pelargoniums, a very curious leafless cucurbitaceous plant (Acanthosicyos), hundreds and thousands of Lilies, Irids, and Amaryllids. A single scarlet flower of a Brunsvigia can be seen more than a mile away!

These tender and delicate, exquisitely beautiful bulbs flourish amongst the succulent Euphorbias and Mesembryanthemums, between the hedgehog-like thorny plants and the woody little densely-branched mats of the permanent flora. The rain stimulates even these last to put out green leaves and flowers, but their time comes later on, when by the return of the usual drought every leaf and flower and the fruit of every bulb has been shrivelled up, turned into powder, and scattered in dust by the wind.65

Then the Karoo becomes unlovely, desolate, and barren-looking, with only its inconspicuous permanent plants visible.

The above description applies to bulbs and perennial plants with underground stores of food. Yet these are by no means the only plants which manage to exist in the Egyptian and Arabian desert. After a shower of rain a whole crowd of tiny annuals suddenly develop from seed; they come into full flower and have set their seed before they are killed off by a return of the desert conditions, when the effects of the rain have died away. These plants are not really desert plants at all, for they only grow during the short time that it is not a desert. They are like the Ephemerid insects which live for a summer day only.

Nor is it only in Egypt that we find such ephemerals. Mr. Coville found them in the Colorado desert in North America. The plants are quite different, but similar conditions have brought about an entirely similar mode of life on the other side of the globe! In Colorado they seem to be much influenced by the quantity of rain. Mr. Orcutt, after the great rain of February, 1891, found plants of Amaranthus (allied to our Love-Lies-Bleeding), which were ten feet in height, but in 1892 he found specimens of the same in the same place only nine inches high, though they were perfect plants and in full flower; in this last year there was only the usual very scanty rainfall.

It is, however, in deserts when man has set to work and supplies water and strenuous labour, that the most wonderful results appear. The whole of lower Egypt, Babylon, Nineveh, Damascus, Baghdad, Palmyra, and other historic cities, show what the desert can be made to produce.

As one slowly steams up the Nile from Philae or Shellal towards Wady Halfa, there are places where the brown, regular layers of the Nubian Sandstone form cliffs which advance almost to the water's edge. Yet there is a narrow strip of green which fringes the water.

It is upon the actual bank itself, which is a gentle slope of ten to fifteen feet, that Lupines, Lubia beans, and other plants are regularly cultivated. This narrow green ribbon remains almost always on each bank. Where the cliffs recede, one notices a line of tall, graceful date palms, mixed occasionally with the branched Dôm palm (the nut of which yields vegetable ivory).66 Tamarisks, conspicuous for their confused, silvery-green foliage, can be noticed here and there. The Acacias are common enough, and sometimes one of them is used as a hedge. It is a spreading, intricately-branched little shrub, with very white branches and stout curved thorns.

If one lands and strolls along the banks below the palm trees or amongst plantations of barley, wheat, or lentils, one sees the native women in their dark green robes gathering fruits or digging. Goats and donkeys are tethered here and there. There are sure to be castor-oil bushes. Small but neat pigeons, with a chestnut-coloured breast and bluish-banded tails are perching on the palms or acacias, and utter their weak little coo. The air is suffering from the horrible creaking and groaning of a "sakkieh" water-wheel. This is made entirely of acacia wood, and is watering the plantations. Sometimes it seems like a crying child, then, perhaps, one is reminded of the bagpipes, but its most marked peculiarity is the wearisome iteration. It never stops. One of them is said to supply about 1-1/2 acres daily at a cost of seven shillings per diem. Exactly the same instrument can be seen pictured on the monuments of Egypt 4000 to 5000 years ago. The "shadouf" is of still older date. This is a long pole bearing at one end a pot or paraffin tin and balanced by a mass of dried mud or a stone. All day long a man can be seen scooping up the coffee-coloured water of the Nile and pouring it on the land for the magnificent sum of one piastre a day.

Where not irrigated, the soil is dry and parched and can only carry a few miserable little thorny bushes. The entire absence of grass on the brick-like soil has a very strange effect to English eyes.

The Date Palm, however, requires a little respectful consideration. If one enters a thick grove and looks upwards, the idea of Egyptian architecture as distinguished from Gothic and others is at once visible. It has quite the same effect as the great hall of columns near Luxor. The numerous stems ending in the crown at the top where the leaves spring off was quite clearly in the minds of the architect at Karnak and other temples. It goes on bearing its fruits for some two hundred years, and begins to yield when only seven years old. It revels in a hot, dry climate with its roots in water, and seems to require scarcely any care in cultivation. Yet during the first few years of its life it is necessary to water the seedling. A single tree may give eight to ten bunches of dates worth about six shillings. Generally it is reproduced by the suckers which spring out from the base of the tree.

Dates make a very excellent food, not merely pleasant but both wholesome and nutritious. Sometimes toddy is made by fermenting the sap, but this is a very wasteful process, as it is apt to kill the tree.

The stones are often ground up to make food for camels. The feathery leaves are exceedingly graceful. When quite young they are not divided, but they split down to the main stalk along the folds, so that a full-grown leaf affords but little hold to the wind.

In some parts of Egypt, as for instance at Mariout, which is some fifteen miles from Alexandria, the wild flowers are probably more beautiful than anywhere else in the world. Amongst the corn and barley, which can be there grown without irrigation, masses of scarlet Poppies and Ranunculus are mingled with golden-yellow Composites, bright purple Asphodels, and hundreds of other Eastern flowers. The result is a rich feast of colour indescribable and satisfying to the soul.

So that these deserts under the hand of man rejoice and blossom as the rose.

Why is it that, as Disraeli has pointed out, civilization, culture, science, and religion had their origins in the desert? The answer is not difficult to see: for there is a dry, healthy climate; the severe strain of a long day's journey is varied by enforced leisure, when, resting at his tent-door, the Arab is irresistibly compelled to study the stars and to contemplate the infinite beauty of the night. It seems also to have been in the desert of the old world that man first learnt to cultivate the soil. In fact, it was only by irrigation on great tracts of alluvium, such as were furnished by the Nile and Euphrates, that the enormous populations of Egypt, Babylon, Nineveh, and the other great monarchies could be maintained. So that city life on a big scale first developed there.

CHAPTER XI

THE STORY OF THE FIELDS

What was Ancient Britain? – Marshes and bittern – Oak forest – Pines – Savage country – Cornfield – Fire – Ice – Forest – Worms – Paleolithic family – The first farmers – Alfred the Great's first Government agricultural leaflet – Dr. Johnson – Prince Charlie's time – Misery of our forefathers – Oatmeal, milk, and cabbages – Patrick Miller – Tennyson's Northern Farmer– Flourishing days of 1830 to 1870 – Derelict farmhouses and abandoned crofts – Where have the people gone? – Will they come back?

WHEN the eyes of man first beheld Britain, what sort of country was this of ours? It is very interesting to try to imagine what it was like, but of course it is a very difficult task. Still it is worth the attempt, for we ought to know something of what has been done by our forefathers.

Where the great rivers Thames, Humber, Tyne, Forth, Clyde, Mersey, and Severn, approached the seashore they lost themselves in wildernesses of desolate, dreary fenlands. Here a small scrubby wood of willow, birch, and alder; there a miles-wide stretch of reeds and undrained marsh intersected by sluggish, lazy rivers, or varied by stagnant pools. The bittern boomed in those marshes. Herons, geese, swans, ducks, and aquatic birds of all sorts found what is now Chelsea a paradise, only disturbed by the eagle, harrier-hawk, vulture, and the like.

Neither at the mouth nor even much higher up in its valley-course, was a river a steady stream in a defined bed. Such beds as it had were probably four or five times their present width; they would be quite irregular, meandering about, changing at every flood, full of islands, loops, backwaters, and continually interrupted by snags of trees.

The rolling hills of the lowlands would be an almost unbroken forest of oak, except where perhaps level land and the absence of drainage produced a marsh or horrible peat-moss. But when we say forest, we do not mean a glorified Richmond Park.

In good soil there might indeed be tall and magnificent trees. But it would be quite impossible to see them! The giants of the forest would be concealed in an inextricable tangle of young trees, brushwood, fallen logs, creepers, and undergrowth. Where the soil was sandy or stony, it might be a scrub rather than a forest, of gnarled, twisted, and stunted oaks, or possibly thickets of sloe, birch, rowan, hawthorn, brambles, and briers.

Every stream would be "wild water" leaping down waterfalls and cutting out irregular, little woody ravines. Here and there boulders and escarpments of rock would break through the forest soil, which would be mossy, thick with undergrowth, and entangled with rotting fallen trunks and branches, crossing at every conceivable angle. The higher hills were covered by a dreary, sombre pine forest. It was of a monotonous, desolate character. Greenish-grey tufts of Old Man's Beard lichen hung from the branches. The ground, treacherous, and broken by boulders, peaty hollows, and dead logs, would be shrouded in a soft, thick cushion of feathery Mosses, with Blaeberry, Ferns, Trientalis, Linnea, Dwarf Cornel, and other rare plants. Through it descended raging and destructive torrents which here might be checked and foamed over dead logs, whilst in another place they cut out bare earth-escarpments or started new waterfalls which ate back into the hills behind.

At the summit of the higher hills, bare rock crags projected out of occasional alpine grassy slopes, or irregular terraces, ravines, and gullies. Below, these alpine ravines ended in a peat-moss, which scattered, dwarfed, distorted, and miserable-looking Scotch Firs and Birches painfully endeavoured to colonize. Here and there on very steep hillsides, wiry, tussocky grass might be growing instead of forest or peat.

A horrible, forbidding, and desolate land, where Deer, Irish elk, bison, bear, wolf, boar, wolverine, badger, and fox, alone enjoyed themselves.

Now consider our country to-day. Mark the "trim little fields"; "that hedge there must have been clipt about eighty years"; "The lifting day showed the stucco villas on the green and the awful orderliness of England – line upon line, wall upon wall, solid stone dock and monolithic pier."67 The road, carefully macadamized, sweeps on correct and straight or gracefully curving from neat village to countrytown. In the heart of the country the roadsides are scraped bare to produce that hideous tidiness which is dear to the soul of the County Council roadman. That is if an individual whose life is spent in stubbing up roses, briers, and every visible wild flower, can possibly possess a soul! Those fields without a rock, or even a projecting stone, have been drained, dug over, and levelled with the greatest possible care. The very rivers have been straightened and embanked; the rows of pollarded willows have been planted; they may, when in flood, overflow, but the results are very soon no longer visible. Even on the moors and in the depths of the Highlands, black-faced sheep, draining, and the regular burning of the heather, have quite transformed our country.

The original woods have long since vanished: those which now exist are mostly quite artificial plantations, and the very trees are often strangers to Britain.

The story of the Herculean labour by which our country, once as wild and as savage as its early inhabitants the Icenians and Catieuchlanians (and probably with lineaments as barbarous as those of the Coritanian and Trinobant), has been changed to peaceful, fertile meadowlands or tidy arable, is one long romance. To tell it properly would require a book to itself. In this chapter we shall only try to sketch what may have happened on one particular cornfield which exists on the trap-rocks of Kilbarchan, near Glasgow.68 The reader must bear in mind that even this is a very ambitious attempt! It is an exceedingly difficult undertaking.

The subsoil in this particular cornfield (on Pennell Brae) lies upon the trap-rock formed by one of those gigantic lava-flows which cover that part of Renfrewshire. The whole district at that time must have been exactly like Vesuvius during the late eruption. Its scenery in this early miocene period consisted of glowing molten rock, accompanied by flames of fire, electrical storms, clouds of gas, dust, ashes, and superheated steam.

Every plant and every animal must have been exterminated. That was unfortunate, for, at that time, Pines, Oaks, Guelder Rose, Willows, as well as Sequoias allied to the Mammoth tree and Sassafras, may have lived in Scotland along with tapirs, opossums, marsupials, and other extraordinary beasts.

When the lava cooled and became trap-rock, it was at once attacked by frost, by wind, and by rain. Then by a very slow process of colonization, vegetation slowly and gradually crept over the trap-rock and rich mould and plant remains accumulated. At a much later date, there was another wholesale destruction. This time, it was the great Ice Sheet coming down from the Highland hills. Probably it drove heavily over the top of Pennell Brae and worked up into fine mud and powder every vestige of the miocene vegetation.

The very rocks themselves would be scratched, polished, and rounded off. When the glaciers melted away and left the surface free, it would consist of these rounded rocks alternating with clay-filled hollows. The trap-rock below would be covered by a subsoil due to particles of trap, of Highland and other mud, with remains of the miocene vegetation. Upon this surface, frost, wind, sunshine, and rain would again begin to perform their work.

But the subsoil, thus wonderfully formed by fire in the miocene, by frost in the glacial, and by weather in our own geological period, very soon felt the protecting and sheltering effect of a plant-covering.

First a green herb rooted itself every here and there amidst the desolate boulder-clay or perhaps in a crevice where good earth had accumulated. Then the scattered colonists began to form groups; soon patches of green moss united them. Then a continuous green carpet could be traced over a few yards here and perhaps on a few feet somewhere else. But when things had got as far as this, progress became much more rapid, and soon the whole site of the future cornfield was covered over by a continuous green carpet. Only, every here and there, hard stones and uncompromising trap-rocks remained still protruding from the green covering.