The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespear - Henry Nicholson Ellacombe (color ebook reader txt) 📗

But the common Mallow is a dear favourite with children, who have ever loved to collect, and string, and even eat its "cheeses:" and these cheeses are a delight to others besides children. Dr. Lindley, certainly one of the most scientific of botanists, can scarcely find words to express his admiration of them. "Only compare a vegetable cheese," he says, "with all that is exquisite in marking and beautiful in arrangement in the works of man, and how poor and contemptible do the latter appear. . . . Nor is it alone externally that this inimitable beauty is to be discovered; cut the cheese across, and every slice brings to view cells and partitions, and seeds and embryos, arranged with an unvarying regularity, which would be past belief if we did not know from experience, how far beyond all that the mind can conceive, is the symmetry with which the works of Nature are constructed."

As a garden plant of course the Wild Mallow has no place, though the fine-cut leaves and faint scent of the Musk Mallow (M. moschata) might demand a place for it in those parts where it is not wild, and especially the white variety, which is of the purest white, and very ornamental. But our common Mallow is closely allied to some of the handsomest plants known. The Hollyhock is one very near relation, the beautiful Hibiscus is another, and the very handsome Fremontia Californica is a third that has only been added to our gardens during the last few years. Nor is it only allied to beauty, for it also claims as a very near relation a plant which to many would be considered the most commercially useful plant in the world, the Cotton-plant.

There is, perhaps, no plant on which so many books and treatises (containing for the most part much sad nonsense) have been written as the Mandrake, and there is certainly no plant round which so much superstition has gathered, all of which is more or less silly and foolish, and a great deal that is worse than silly. This, no doubt, arose from its first mention in connection with Leah and Rachel, and then in the Canticles, which, perhaps, shows that even in those days some strange qualities were attributed to the plant; but how from that beginning such, and such wide-spread, superstitions could have arisen, it is hard to say. I can scarcely tell these superstitious fables in better words than Gerard described them: "There hath been many ridiculous tales brought up of this plant, whether of old wives or some runagate surgeons or physicke-mongers I know not. . . . They adde that it is never or very seldome to be found growing naturally but under a gallowes, where the matter that has fallen from a dead body hath given it the shape of a man, and the matter of a woman the substance of a female plant, with many other such doltish dreams. They fable further and affirme that he who would take up a plant thereof must tie a dog thereunto to pull it up, which will give a great shreeke at the digging up, otherwise, if a man should do it, he should surely die in a short space after." This, with the addition that the plant is decidedly narcotic, will sufficiently explain all Shakespeare's references. Gerard, however, omits to notice one thing which, in justice to our forefathers, should not be omitted. These fables on the Mandrake are by no means English mediæval fables, but they were of foreign extraction, and of very ancient date. Josephus tells the same story as held by the Jews in his time and before his time. Columella even spoke of the plant as "semi-homo;" and Pythagoras called it "Anthropomorphus;" and Dr. Daubeny has published in his "Roman Husbandry" a most curious drawing from the Vienna MS. of Dioscorides in the fifth century, "representing the Goddess of Discovery presenting to Dioscorides the root of this Mandrake" (of thoroughly human shape) "which she had just pulled up, while the unfortunate dog which had been employed for that purpose is depicted in the agonies of death."[154:1] All these beliefs have long, I should hope, been extinct among us; yet even now artists who draw the plant are tempted to fancy a resemblance to the human figure, and in the "Flora Græca," where, for the most part, the figures of the plants are most beautifully accurate, the figure of the Mandrake is painfully human.[154:2]

As a garden plant, the Mandrake is often grown, but more for its curiosity than its beauty; the leaves appear early in the spring, followed very soon by its dull and almost inconspicuous flowers, and then by its Apple-like fruit. This is the Spring Mandrake (Mandragora vernalis), but the Autumn Mandrake (M. autumnalis or microcarpa) may be grown as an ornamental plant. The leaves appear in the autumn, and are succeeded by a multitude of pale-blue flowers about the size of and very much resembling the Anemone pulsatilla (see Sweet's "Flower Garden," vol. vii. No. 325). These remain in flower a long time. In my own garden they have been in flower from the beginning of November till May. I need only add that the Mandrake is a native of the South of Europe and other countries bordering on the Mediterranean, but it was very early introduced into England. It is named in Archbishop Ælfric's "Vocabulary" in the tenth century with the very expressive name of "Earth-apple;" it is again named in an Anglo-Saxon Vocabulary of the eleventh century (in the British Museum), but without any English equivalent; and Gerard cultivated both sorts in his garden.