LEAFLESSNESS AND FLOWER.
FLOWERS, like jewels, have the separate settings which suit them best, and the setting of outgoing February is distinct from all the other months of the year. It is a little greener than January's, and cannot be quite so bright as the setting of late March, but the colour which belongs to the early spring of February and March's opening days is brown,—the brown of garden-beds and ploughland, of buds and tree-stems, of broad stretches of woodland, of dead heather-bells and moor bracken. That is the background which belongs to the season, before green has come into the year. And the gardener is right in recognising the proper colour against which to set the season's flowers, instead of searching all ways to provide the green which they do not need, and which, in fact, it would be wrong to give them. Flowers provide them4 selves all the greenery which belongs to their own individual wants, and you cannot give them more or less without spoiling the effect they know they ought to produce. That ought not to be a heresy; but there are those to whom it may not be said without the most unhappy consequences. To some, indeed, nothing in the way of green comes amiss when there are flowers to be gathered for the house. They will mix daffodils with myrtle, tulips with ivy, ferns with snowdrops,— ferns, for that matter, with anything. They may even be able to give a vase of flowers that indefinable air of having been "arranged," instead of formally stuck in or bunched together, but on one point to do with flowers they are adamant,—there must be some green with them. Sometimes, of course, they are right; lilies-of-the-valley, for instance, have a fragile and deserted look about them if they are separated from their protecting leaves. But also they are sometimes very wrong, as when they try to add extra greenery to the flowers of February and March.
The pure colour and form of flowers, indeed, are never better seen than when the leaf follows the flower, or when it is of so insignificant a size when the flower is at its full as hardly to be noticeable. Take, for instance, the crocuses. "The ground-flame of the crocus breaks the mould" is as accurate as are all Tennyson's descriptions of flowers, for the way in which a day's sunshine will light that saffron flame along brown borders is one of the wonders of the spring; but the crocus begins, of course, by thrusting a bunch of leaves rolled tight into sharp spikes through the surface earth, and the flower follows in a sheath. But when once the crocus has broken its sheath, and has opened its glorious cups to the suns you can see no leaves at all. The flowers stand in groups, wide to the hot light, chalices of purple and white and gold for humming bees to dive into and brush their dusty legs about the glowing stigmata. But the leaves are unseen. They will grow on when the flower falls, flattening and lengthening to six inches, even to twelve, to drink in food for the bulb below ; but they were never used as a background or a setting for the open bloom. Or take another very different kind of flower,—the purple rock-cress or aubrietia. That is a plant which makes up its mind to be one thing or the other. Unlike the violet, which half hides its head even when it is crowding its blossoms thickest among its cupped and shining leaves, and more downright even than the great blue hepatica, which brings hardly any of its leaves with its flower, the rock- cress bursts into full bloom and keeps there as if it had no leaves to show whatever. No flowers cluster more closely than the white and purple rock-cresses ; but it is the purple rock-cress, with its cushions and curtains glowing from lilac to crimson on rock and bank and wall, which lights one of the brightest and most separate pictures of the early year.
But the most distinct and most decorative of all natural arrangements of flowers without leaves, or with very little green to set as a contrast to the colour of the blossom, is to 'be found, perhaps, among the flowering shrubs and trees. Earliest of all, the witch-hazel sets about her twigs the twisted yellow petals and crimson calyx of her odd little flowers, but she adds a curiosity rather than a beauty to the garden. But her companion in the January sunshine, the yellow jasmine, though too common to be curious, is one of the most lovely of climbing shrubs, with its pale stars lighting the dark winter afternoon, or clustered like live basketwork about a cottage door. There are few brighter spots of colour in early spring than the brick-crimson and yellow buds of the jasmine, thrusting its straight thin shoots into the wind and rain. Sweeter-scented, and stiffer in form, but with an unequalled charm of tightly packed blossom, is the daphne mezerenm; and of all garden backgrounds for winter flowers, none, certainly, better suits the warm, pink, fragrant branches of the daphne than the wet mould of the brown bed, which is not quite the nearest approach we can have to its proper surroundings, but is the right colour. For the daphne, although so much more familiar in the garden, is a native of our English woods, and its rosy twigs should be set against the sober stems and rain-rotten leaves of woodland glades; it has a certain stiff, reluctant air near brick and mortar. But there is one neighbour of the house which is less diffident. That is the Pirus Japonica or Japanese crab- apple, the most friendly of all shrubs which are guests in England, but allow any kind of liberties to be taken with them without resenting it in the least. There is really nothing that you can do to a Japanese crab-apple, short of denying it light and water, which will prevent it from trying its best to stud its branches with buds and flowers of the lightest crimson-red, the sunniest of all climbers on brick and woodwork. For the crab-apple is, of course, a shrub, and likes best to grow as a shrub; but if you insist that it is to climb a wall, or a wooden paling, or trellis-work, or an arbour, it will allow you to prune it, nail it, and bend it as you please, and next year will bloom as redly and profusely as ever. Perhaps it would like to choose its background; but it does not object to the choice being made for it, and, oddly . enough, although the colours of blossom and baked clay might be thought likely to fight, is one of the best climbers to nail against a brick wall, unless, of course, the bricks are of an impossibly aggressive and embracing redness. One shrub chooses its own setting, and cannot be set in any other way in the garden than the way of its own choice. The almond-tree, which covers its bare branches with blossom before its neigh- bours have begun to swell their buds, sets itself always against blue air. No other background is thinkable. If there is a single picture which is instinct with the spirit of early spring in an English garden, it is the almond-tree with the drone of bees about its branches, pink with the pinkness of seashell and pearl against the thrush-egg blue of a March sky.
The change from bare bough to flower, from blossom to green leaf, suits the month and the time. For early March holds some of the sharpest contrasts of the year's weather, of growth of plant and song of mating birds. On a sunny morning, with the chaffinch reeling off his impetuous little madrigal six times a minute, and the hedge-sparrow quietly and carefully finishing his song on the paling before dropping down to the seed or the crumb, the crocuses may never have opened wider to the bees, or the almond shone pinker in the wind. Before noon the crocuses have closed to the pelting of bail, and the colour has died out of the tree. The contrast would have been less with the steady green of incoming summer to keep the picture unchanging and unchanged. But early March can show little green beyond her pointing daffodils. Her own flowers, that mark her dustier footprints and heightened sun, belong to bare earth and leafless boughs.
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