You cannot easily pull up a buttercup root, or that of
any flower of the meadows. The stems break first, for they draw their
sustenance from a deep stratum of earth. Most of the meadow flowers and
blossoms in the mowing grass belong to the beautiful, rather than to the
useful, order of plants. They are fitted to weave a garland from rather
than to distil into simples and potions. As Gerard says of the butterfly
orchis, "there is no great use of these in physicke, but they are chiefly
regarded for the pleasant and beautiful flowers wherewith Nature hath
seemed to play and disport herselfe." Herein they differ from the roadside
plants and the blossoms of waste-lands and woods, for these, especially
the former, swell the list of the medicinal plants, the garden not of
Flora, but of Aesculapius. It is these which have been gathered for
centuries by the wise men and wise women of the villages from the
Apennines to Exmoor, while, if we may infer from the story of agriculture,
the flowers of the grassfields are in a sense modern and artificial. They
owe their numbers to the discovery of the art of haymaking. Before men
learnt to cut, dry, and stack hay, which, after fermenting partly in the
stacks under pressure, becomes a manufactured food, it may be concluded
that there were no such flower-spangled fields, in this country at least,
as now form such a striking feature of rural England.
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