Flowers of Switzerland

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

ESSAYISTS young and old, known and unknown, are invited to compete for the Club. A prize of $250 will be posted each month for the most distinctive essay of a thousand words. It gives us great pleasure to confer the December award on Llewelyn Powys, who sends us his contribution from Clavadel, Switzerland.

WHEN I came to Clavadel as a young man it was in the late autumn, and for several months I looked out upon nothing but snow and sunshine, so much so, indeed, that for a short while I came to be possessed by a restless nostalgia for the winter greenness of England, for the soft opulence of its island summers, with the small birds merrily singing in every thicket and hedgerow.

On my coming down from Cambridge in the year 1907, I got work as a schoolmaster at Bromsgrove. It was not a happy period of my life, and if anything redeems it in retrospect it is the interest that I learned to take in wild flowers. I discovered that the finding of these seely weeds, and the learning of their names, offered me a sure escape from my spiritual imprisonments. Issuing one afternoon from ‘the Steps,’ — a fine old eighteenthcentury house where I dwelt in dolorous unease with my ‘colleagues,’ — I happened to notice in a damp ditch a little yellow flower that was obviously neither a hawkweed nor a dandelion. I enclosed it in my Sunday letter to my mother and soon received an answer: ‘Your dear father says that the flower you have found is a very common one and that its name is “coltsfoot.” The ancients used to call coltsfoot Filius ante Patrem ‘ — and in after years a chance sight of this flower never failed to bring back the discomfiture I experienced over my father’s casual comment.

Dr. Martha Egli, in an excellent little book, tells of an odd play that children have with gentians, with this matchless mountain flower that borrows its hue from the sea, from the sapphire, from the sky — Herrgottsblume, ‘God’s flower,’ as it is called. Holding the gentian between finger and thumb, the little girls boldly chant the words ‘Dead, dead, come out,’ and at the same instant squeeze and twist at the flower until its pistil — a little pale corpse — is propelled from the bell. By this ritual they actually think to surprise and exorcise death himself, curiously couched for the nonce in the orifice of these triumphant trumpets.

The gentians are in their glory when goat boys first begin to bring down from the high mountains bunches of Alpine roses, still only in bud. The fragrance of these tough immature nosegays is as dear to a true Swiss as is the first sight of an edelweiss. The odor that these wild rough bunches emit is feral beyond all conception. They smell of mountain winds, of mountain rains, of moss, of bark, of lichens cold to the touch, of the fells of chamois, and of the breath of eagles.

The Alpine roses are still in full blossom when the dandelions begin to gladden the valleys on every side with their fairy gold. Not a footpath way, not a lane, not a gray fence or swart stable, but is fringed with the gaudy discs of these life-affirming, sunscented flowers.

Then when the dandelion clocks are all ‘telling the time,’ and the Alpine roses are past their blossoming, the valley meadows lie ready for the first swathe to be cut. Often it happens that the butterflies and faltering moths that, hour after hour, wander and waver above the clustering flower heads hold their frivolous surveillance over fields of separate color patches.

The second mowing sees the valley sadly scanted of its flowers. The grass is luxuriant enough, but the scythes are sharpened before ungarnished slopes. As at the earlier time the implements glitter and glance like swords at the hour before dawn, but the honor of the fields has departed. It is essentially an emerald aftermath. This is not yet the case on the mountain tops. On the very crest of the Jacob’s Horn above Clavadel there grows a pasture patch of the yellow flower called villous hawkweed. It is a favorite food of the chamois, a golden food that dances and nods against the airy margin of a dizzy cosmos.

Gone now and forgotten in the dales is the soldanella, with its fringed edges, gone the water avens, gone the grass of Parnassus, the white dryas, and the ‘heaven keys’ (Primula auricula), A few white clovers only remain — God’s flesh, or heaven’s bread, as they are called. Then follows the idle season of Martinmas, when every hour the rowan-tree berries ripen and redden, and the days grow shorter and the nights grow longer, and the spirits of men and women are troubled by vague misgivings. It is a time of recollections, and, suitable enough, there is suddenly to be seen everywhere the last lonely flower of the year. This flower is the autumn crocus, the saffron crocus. In all directions it opens its frail petals with solicitude, decorating the lifeless faded fields before the winter whiteness envelops all — Colchicum autumnale, or Herbstzeitlose, as the Germans have named it — a flower wistful as a solitary street cry heard at Michaelmas by a weeping child.

Its appearance is a sure sign of the nearness of the dark solstice. In the old days it was the custom of women to pick the first autumn crocus that they saw and to cover their hands with the juice of it, hoping that some occult virtue in it would preserve the suppleness of their fingers through the long ‘spinning evenings.’

To a poet’s eye the smockless nakedness of these flowers is a delight, and yet the mere look of them has provoked cruelty. If a girl’s chastity is suspected it is an ancient usage to straw the path that leads from her father’s house to the family washing well with handfuls of these flowers. A happier association may be found in the name Chilteblume, or the flower that shows itself at that time of the year when young men, after the evening milking is over, are drawn to the houses of their sweethearts, the windows, because of the thickening autumn twilight, being already lamplit.

LLEWELYN POWYS