Wild Martagon
There is a wood on the wolds where the martagon-lily grows wild. ' The founder of this illustrious line (for the flowers have been there for years) must have been a garden escape, but it is as unaccountable how they reached the wood as how Magellan the Pacific. They continue to flourish, glowing from the green shade of the coppice, their aristocratic petals rolled back from the sultry orange stamens, and the plebeian bracken spreading through the wood gives them a wide berth. They are even beginning to colonise the border of an adjacent and large woodland, for this year a majestic specimen is to be seen in the new quarters, bearing no fewer than seventeen flowers. The less shadowed environment no doubt accounts for a deeper colouring and greater size and numbers in the flowers. There is a fresco by Pinturicchio (it is reproduced in Burckhardt's folio) in which Prince Dcshem, the brother of the Sultan Bajazet II and the prisoner of the Borgia, is seen in a setting of the Vatican. So these Oriental-looking flowers appear on the stage of an English woodland. May their fate be a very different one from his! This is a much more surprising visitation than the thorough settlement on the banks of the Wye and elsewhere by the Himalayan balsam.
Previous page
