Part 25 (1/2)

SURYJA MANI (_Hibiscus Phoeniceus_).--A small red flower.

GOLAKA CHAMPA.--A large beautiful white tulip-shaped flower having a sweet smell. It is externally white but internally orange-colored.

TAGUR (_Tabernoemontana Coronaria_).--A white flower having a slight smell.

TARU LATA.--A beautiful creeper with small red flowers. It is used in native gardens for making hedges.

K.G.

Pliny in his Natural History alludes to the marks of time exhibited in the regular opening and closing of flowers. Linnaeus enumerates forty-six flowers that might be used for the construction of a floral time-piece. This great Swedish botanist invented a Floral horologe, ”whose wheels were the sun and earth and whose index-figures were flowers.”

Perhaps his invention, however, was not wholly original. Andrew Marvell in his ”_Thoughts in a Garden_” mentions a sort of floral dial:--

How well the skilful gardener drew Of flowers and herbs this dial new!

Where, from above, the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run: And, as it works, th'industrious bee Computes its time as well as we: How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers?

_Marvell_[106]

Milton's notation of time--”_at shut of evening flowers_,” has a beautiful simplicity, and though Shakespeare does not seem to have marked his time on a floral clock, yet, like all true poets, he has made very free use of other appearances of nature to indicate the commencement and the close of day.

The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch-- Than we will s.h.i.+p him hence.

_Hamlet_.

Fare thee well at once!

The glow-worm shows the matin to be near And gins to pale his uneffectual fire.

_Hamlet_.

But look! The morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill:-- Break we our watch up.

_Hamlet_.

_Light thickens_, and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood.

_Macbeth_.

Such picturesque notations of time as these, are in the works of Shakespeare, as thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Valombrosa. In one of his Sonnets he thus counts the years of human life by the succession of the seasons.

To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers' pride; Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned In process of the seasons have I seen; Three April's perfumes in three hot Junes burned Since first I saw you fresh which yet are green.

Grainger, a prosaic verse-writer who once commenced a paragraph of a poem with ”Now, Muse, let's sing of rats!” called upon the slave drivers in the West Indies to time their imposition of cruel tasks by the opening and closing of flowers.

Till morning dawn and Lucifer withdraw His beamy chariot, let not the loud bell Call forth thy negroes from their rushy couch: And ere the sun with mid-day fervor glow, When every broom-bush opes her yellow flower, Let thy black laborers from their toil desist: Nor till the broom her every petal lock, Let the loud bell recal them to the hoe, But when the jalap her bright tint displays, When the solanum fills her cup with dew, And crickets, snakes and lizards gin their coil, Let them find shelter in their cane-thatched huts.

_Sugar Cane_.[107]

I shall here give (_from Loudon's Encyclopaedia of Gardening_) the form of a flower dial. It may be interesting to many of my readers:--

'Twas a lovely thought to mark the hours As they floated in light away By the opening and the folding flowers That laugh to the summer day.[108]

_Mr. Hemans_.