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And now, finding it here, the fable revived with added truth and conviction, the legend of the persicaria was as true to her as that other of the Lord's resurrection from death.
The boys made another appeal to the great fellow to come; but he was staunch. Still he uttered a sigh of relief as he gave the punt a tremendous thrust from the bank into deep water, where it went rustling by the willow boughs and over the wild growth where the pink-blossomed persicaria sent up its pretty heads. "If we had pressed Hicky a little more, I believe he would have come," said Dick.
Several plants are said to owe their dark-stained blossoms to the blood-drops which trickled from the cross; amongst these being the wood-sorrel, the spotted persicaria, the arum, the purple orchis, which is known in Cheshire as "Gethsemane," and the red anemone, which has been termed the "blood-drops of Christ."
Peter is another island, considerably less than the former, wild and uncultivated, which appears to have been detached from the greater island by storms: its gravelly soil produces nothing but willows and persicaria, but there is in it a high hill well covered with greensward and very pleasant. The form of the lake is an almost regular oval.
The ruddy glow of the heath-flower, contrasting, on the one hand, with the golden-blossomed furze on the other, with a patch of buck-wheat, of which the bloom is not past, although the grain be ripening, the beautiful buck-wheat, whose transparent leaves and stalks are so brightly tinged with vermilion, while the delicate pink-white of the flower, a paler persicaria, has a feathery fall, at once so rich and so graceful, and a fresh and reviving odour, like that of birch trees in the dew of a May evening.
Peter is another island, considerably less than the former, wild and uncultivated, which appears to have been detached from the greater island by storms: its gravelly soil produces nothing but willows and persicaria, but there is in it a high hill well covered with greensward and very pleasant. The form of the lake is an almost regular oval.
I passed a bank large enough to be called an island. The water had not covered it for months, and it was all thickly overgrown with persicaria, which the late summer had stained a carmine red, so that the island was all aflame.
By the stream through Tolworth Common spotted persicaria is rising thickly, but even this strong-growing plant is backward and checked on the verge of the shrunken stream. The showers that have since fallen have not made up for the lack of the April rains, which in the most literal sense cause the flowers of May and June.
Other herbs and plants there are which retain the names of the countries from whence they were transported, as the Median apples from Media, where they first grew; Punic apples from Punicia, that is to say, Carthage; Ligusticum, which we call lovage, from Liguria, the coast of Genoa; Rhubarb from a flood in Barbary, as Ammianus attesteth, called Ru; Santonica from a region of that name; Fenugreek from Greece; Gastanes from a country so called; Persicaria from Persia; Sabine from a territory of that appellation; Staechas from the Staechad Islands; Spica Celtica from the land of the Celtic Gauls, and so throughout a great many other, which were tedious to enumerate.
But this glow of many tints was a sure sign of approaching autumn; so, too, were the reddened stalks of persicaria, filling the dry ditches by the wayside. The valley narrowed, and upon its rocky sides was many a patch of purple heather little gardens for the wild bees, but not for man. Neither peasant nor local Nimrod ever sets his foot there.
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