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Updated: May 20, 2025
When those blocks of cyclopæan masonry should be tufted with the golden wallflower and the perfumed wild geranium, and starred with the delicate blossom of the lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the little blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the big whisky-flask should come into use.
But the general effect was pale, or rather silvery, for Wiltshire is not a county of heavy tints. Beneath these colours lurked the unconquerable chalk, and wherever the soil was poor it emerged. The grassy track, so gay with scabious and bedstraw, was snow-white at the bottom of its ruts. A dazzling amphitheatre gleamed in the flank of a distant hill, cut for some Olympian audience.
As soon as I was placed on a pallet, and covered with blankets, I ordered a drink to be prepared of the inner bark of an ash-tree, green walnuts, scabious vervain, and saffron, boiled in two quarts of the strongest vinegar. Of this mixture I drank plentifully, and it soon produced a plentiful perspiration. I next had a hen a live one, of course stripped of the feathers, and brought to me.
And Albine led Serge straight on to a spot that seemed to be the graveyard of the flower-garden. There the scabious mourned, and processions of poppies stretched out in line, with deathly odour, unfolding heavy blooms of feverish brilliance. Sad anemones clustered in weary throngs, pallid as if infected by some epidemic.
She climbs up the wire gauze and proceeds to graze among her companions on the bindweed or scabious, without troubling herself further about her eggs, whose hiding-place is only half-filled. A second mother, whom I move only one inch, is no longer able to return to her task, or rather does not think of doing so.
The only Melodiæ in my part of the country which, though their habits are still unknown, might correspond in size with either the larva or the pseudochrysalis in question are the Twelve-pointed Mylabris and Schaeffer's Cerocoma. I find the first in July on the flowers of the sea scabious; I find the second at the end of May and in June on the heads of the Îles d'Hyères everlasting.
The road led first through beautiful beechwoods, out into the open country where low banks, bright with wild flowers scabious, willow-herb and yellow ragwort divided the corn-fields, now golden and ready for harvest; up on to a wide heath where the bell heather flooded the landscape with glowing purple light through pine-woods dim and fragrant and so on until the carriage turned through a gateway, past a low lodge of mellow ancient brickwork, and entered a well-kept carriage drive.
Take Rosemary, Thyme, Sweet-bryar, Peny-royal, Bays, Water-cresses, Agrimony, Marshmallow leaves, Liver-wort, Maiden-hair, Betony, Eye-bright, Scabious, the bark of the Ash-tree, Eringo-roots, Green-wild-Angelica, Ribwort, Sanicle, Roman-worm-wood, Tamarisk, Mother-thyme, Sassafras, Philipendula, of each of these herbs a like proportion; or of as many of them as you please to put in.
There was a pot of flowers on the table purple scabious, and tall cow-parsley, gathered from the orchard, where no one had yet had time to cut the ragged hay beneath the trees. The scene was typical of a new England. Women governing and women serving they were all alike making their way through new paths to new ends. It was no household in the ordinary sense. The man was wanting.
Some plants, which had put forth all their blossoms in July, began to look yellow and dying, and the violet scabious by the wayside bloomed for the second time, smaller now, and longer-stalked; the last days of August drew nigh, and the first return-ship from Iceland hove in sight one evening at the cape of Pors-Even. The feast of the returners began.
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