John Ruskin

“ It is most notable, also, farther, that none of these flowers have any extreme beauty in colour. The blue sage is the only one of vivid hue at all; and we never think of it as for a moment comparable to the violet or bluebell: thyme is unnoticed beside heath, and many of the other purple varieties of the group are almost dark and sad coloured among the flowers of summer; while, so far from gaining beauty on closer looking, there is scarcely a blossom of them which is not more or less grotesque, even to ugliness, in outline ”

“ One can say, comfortably, of a strawberry, that it is a creeper, without expecting at the next moment to see a steeple of strawberry blossoms rise to contradict us;—we can venture to say of a foxglove that it grows in a spire, without any danger of finding, farther on, a carpet of prostrate and entangling digitalis; and we may pronounce of a buttercup that it grows mostly in meadows, without fear of finding ourselves, at the edge of the next thicket, under the shadow of a buttercup-bush growing into valuable timber. ”

“ What the colours of flowers, or of birds, or of precious stones, or of the sea and air, and the blue mountains, and the evening and the morning, and the clouds of Heaven, were given for—they only know who can see them and can feel, and who pray that the sight and the love of them may be prolonged, where cheeks will not fade, nor sunsets die. ”

“ The wild heart's-ease of Europe; its proper colour an exquisitely clear purple in the upper petals, gradated into deep blue in the lower ones; the centre, gold. Not larger than a violet, but perfectly formed, and firmly set in all its petals. Able to live in the driest ground; beautiful in the coast sand-hills of Cumberland, following the wild geranium and burnet rose: and distinguished thus by its power of life, in waste and dry places, from the violet, which needs kindly earth and shelter. ”

“ And what is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the scattered blossoms;—of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain, and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of the cluster broken short away altogether.
8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes. ”

“ But that a violet, who has her little stalk to herself, and might grow straight up, if she pleased, should be pleased to do nothing of the sort, but quite gratuitously bend her stalk down at the top, and fasten herself to it by her waist, as it were,—this is so much more like a girl of the period's fancy than a violet's, that I never gather one separately but with renewed astonishment at it. ”

“ In all the varieties of Pinguicula, each blossom has one stalk only, growing from the ground and you may pull all the leaves away from the base of it, and keep the flower only, with its bunch of short fibrous roots, half an inch long; looking as if bitten at the ends. Two flowers, characteristically,—three and four very often,—spring from the same root, in places where it grows luxuriantly; and luxuriant growth means that clusters of some twenty or thirty stars may be seen on the surface of a square yard of boggy ground, quite to its mind ”

“ For while, the older I grow, very thankfully I recognize more and more the number of pleasures granted to human eyes in this fair world, I recognize also an increasing sensitiveness in my temper to anything that interferes with them; and a grievous readiness to find fault—always of course submissively, but very articulately—with whatever Nature seems to me not to have managed to the best of her power;—as, for extreme instance, her late arrangements of frost this spring, destroying all the beauty of the wood sorrels ”

“ I turn to another scientific gentleman—more scientific in form indeed, Mr. Grindon,—and find, for another interesting phenomenon in the violet, that it sometimes produces flowers without any petals! and in the pansy, that "the flowers turn towards the sun, and when many are open at once, present a droll appearance, looking like a number of faces all on the 'qui vive.'" But nothing of the difference between them, except something about 'stipules,' of which "it is important to observe that the leaves should be taken from the middle of the stem—those above and below being variable." ”

“ The Greeks, and Milton, alike speak of violets as growing in meadows (or dales) . But the Greeks did so because they could not fancy any delight except in meadows; and Milton, because he wanted a rhyme to nightingale—and, after all, was London bred. But Viola's beloved knew where violets grew in Illyria,—and grow everywhere else also, when they can,—on a bank, facing the south.
Just as distinctly as the daisy and buttercup are meadow flowers, the violet is a bank flower, and would fain grow always on a steep slope, towards the sun. ”

“ If indeed true, or in any degree true, the flower has the best right of all [98] to be classed with the Cytherides, and we might have as much of it for beauty and for service as we choose, if we only took half the pains to garnish our summer gardens with living and life-giving blossom, that we do to garnish our winter gluttonies with dying and useless ones. ”

“ Hilaire, tells us, of the creepers in primitive forests,—"Some of them resemble waving ribands, others coil themselves and describe vast spirals; they droop in festoons, they wind hither and thither among the trees, they fling themselves from one to another, and form masses of leaves and flowers in which the observer is often at a loss to discover on which plant each several blossom grows." ”

“ The reader will do well, as much as may be possible to him, to associate his study of botany, as indeed all other studies of visible things, with that of painting: but he must remember that he cannot know what violet colour really is, unless he watch the flower in its early growth. It becomes dim in age, and dark when it is gathered—at least, when it is tied in bunches;—but I am under the impression that the colour actually deadens also,—at all events, no other single flower of the same quiet colour lights up the ground near it as a violet will. ”

“ A strawberry creeps, with a flexible stem, but requires certainly no less pure air than a wood-fungus, which stands up straight. And in our own hedges and woods, are the wild rose and honeysuckle signs of unwholesome air? ”

“ I close the present one with one more protest against the entirely absurd terms 'par-enchyma,' for common cellular tissue, 'pros-enchyma,' for cellular tissue with longer cells;—'cambium' for an early state of both, and 'diachyma' for a peculiar position of one! [46] while the chemistry of all these substances is wholly neglected, and we have no idea given us of any difference in pith, wood, and bark, than that they are made of short or long—young or old—cells! ”

“ Practically, in daily life, one often sees married women as good as saints; but rarely, I think, unless they have a good deal to bear from their husbands. Sometimes also, no doubt, the husbands have some trouble in managing St. Cecilia or St. Elizabeth; of which questions I shall be obliged to speak more seriously in another place: content, at present, if English maids know better, by Proserpina's help, what Shakspeare meant by the dim, and Milton by the glowing, violet. ”

“ Since, in my present writings, I hope to bring into one focus the pieces of study fragmentarily given during past life, I may refer my readers to the first chapter of the 'Queen of the Air' for the explanation of the way in which all great myths are founded, partly on physical, partly on moral fact,—so that it is not possible for persons who neither know the aspect of nature, nor the constitution of the human soul, to understand a word of them. ”

“ June 7th.—The cultivated meadows now grow only dandelions—in frightful quantity too; but, for wild ones, primula, bell gentian, golden pansy, and anemone,—Primula farinosa in mass, the pansy pointing and vivifying in a petulant sweet way, and the bell gentian here and there deepening all,—as if indeed the sound of a deep bell among lighter music. ”

“ Whether hairs which he can't see are glandular or bristly,—whether the green knobs, which are left when the purple bells are gone, are divided into two lobes or two hundred,—and whether the style is split, like a snake's tongue, into two lobes, or like a rogue's, into any number—are merely matters of vulgar curiosity, which he needs a microscope to discover, and will lose a day of his life in discovering. ”

“ Giving the most pure and healing powers to the air around them; with a comfort of warmth also, being mostly in dry places, and forming sweet carpets and close turf; but only to be rightly enjoyed in the open air, or indoors when dried; not tempting any one to luxury, nor expressive of any kind of exultation. Brides do not deck themselves with thyme, nor do we wreathe triumphal arches with mint. ”

“ Two of the petals, indeed, as a rule, are different from the other two, except in the heaths; and thus a distinctly crosslet form obtained, but always an equally balanced one: while in the Veronica, as in the Violet, the blossom always refers itself to a supposed place on the stalk with respect to the ground; and the upper petal is always the largest.
The supposed place is often very suppositious indeed—for clusters of the common veronicas, if luxuriant, throw their blossoms about anywhere. But the idea of an upper and lower petal is always kept in the flower's little mind. ”

“ In the third place, open and flat though the flower be, it is monopetalous; all the four arms of the cross strictly becoming one in the centre; so that, though the blue foils look no less sharply separate than those of a buttercup or a cistus; and are so delicate that one expects them to fall from their stalk if we breathe too [66] near,—do but lay hold of one,—and, at the touch, the entire blossom is lifted from its stalk, and may be laid, in perfect shape, on our paper before us, as easily as if it had been a nicely made-up blue bonnet, lifted off its stand by the milliner. ”

“ What any flower wants with a spur, is indeed the simplest and hitherto to me unanswerablest form of the question; nevertheless, when blossoms grow in spires, and are crowded together, and have to grow partly downwards, in order to win their share of light and breeze, one can see some reason for the effort of the petals to expand upwards and backwards also. ”

“ On the whole, a plant entirely mismanaging itself,—reprehensible and awkward, with taints of worse than awkwardness; and clearly, no true 'species,' but only a link. [2] And it really is, as you will find presently, a link in two directions; it is half violet, half pansy, a 'cur' among the Dogs, and a thoughtless thing among the thoughtful. And being so, it is also a link between the entire violet tribe and the Runners—pease, strawberries, and the like, whose glory is in their speed ”

“ Nay, even the quite natural and simple conditions of inferior vegetable do not in the least suggest, to the unbitten or unblighted human intellect, the notion of development into anything other than their like: one does not expect a mushroom to translate itself into a pineapple, nor a betony to moralize itself into a lily, nor a snapdragon to soften himself into a lilac. ”

“ But you will not, in the entire article, find the least attempt to tell you the difference between a violet and a pansy!—except in one statement—and that false! "The sweet violet will have no rival among flowers, if we merely seek for delicate fragrance; but her sister, the heartsease, who is destitute of all sweetness, far surpasses her in rich dresses and gaudy!!! colours." The heartsease is not without sweetness. There are sweet pansies scented, and dog pansies unscented—as there are sweet violets scented, and dog violets unscented. ”

“ The tige is the part of plants which, directed into the air, supports, and gives growing power to, the branches, the twigs, the leaves, and the flowers. The form, strength, and direction of the tige depend on the [126] part that each plant has to play among the vast vegetable population of our globe. Plants which need for their life a pure and often-renewed air, are borne by a straight tige, robust and tall. When they have need only of a moist air, more condensed, and more rarely renewed, when they have to creep on the ground or glide in thickets, the tiges are long, flexible, and dragging. ”

“ A white violet is to black ones what a black man is to white ones; and the yellow varieties are, I believe, properly pansies, and belong also to wild districts for the most part; but the true violet, which I have just now called 'black,' with Gerarde, "the blacke or purple violet, hath a great prerogative above others," and all the nobler species of the pansy itself are of full purple, inclining, however, in the ordinary wild violet to [8] blue. ”

“ And if, at the time you read this, you can run out and gather a true violet, and its leaf, you will find that the flower grows from the very ground, out of a cluster of heart-shaped leaves, becoming here a little rounder, there a little sharper, but on the whole heart-shaped, and that is the proper and essential form of the violet leaf. You will find also that the flower has five petals; and being held down by the bent stalk, two of them bend back and up, as if resisting it; two expand at the sides; and one, the principal, grows downwards, with its attached spur behind. ”

“ But, so soon as true servants of Heaven shall enter these Edens, and the Spirit of God enter with them, another spirit will also be breathed into the physical air; and the stinging insect, and venomous snake, and poisonous tree, pass away before the power of the regenerate human soul. ”

“ Allen with more than his usual care in the frontispiece to this number of 'Proserpina,' was one of many executed during the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and later French) , which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but with a consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is connected in a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier forms of Catholic asceticism. ”

“ Very notably the Grape hyacinth and Jura hyacinth, and some of the Vestals, empurpling all their green leaves even to the ground: a quite distinct nature in the flower, observe, this possession of a power to kindle the leaf and stem with its own passion, from that of the heaths, roses, or lilies, where the determined bracts or calicos assert themselves in opposition to the blossom, as little pine-leaves, or mosses, or brown paper packages, and the like. ”

“ A feeble little quatrefoil—growing one on the stem, like a Parnassia, and looking like a Parnassia that had dropped a leaf. I think it drops one of its own four, mostly, and lives as three-fourths of itself, for most of its time. Stamens pale gold. Root-leaves, three or four, grass-like; growing among the moist moss chiefly. ”