Field and Hedgerow | Page 9

the towing-path of the Thames where the sward is very broad,
opposite Long Ditton; indeed, I have often walked up that towing-path
on a beautiful sunny morning, when all was quiet except the
nightingales in the Palace hedge, on purpose to admire them. I dare say
they are all gone now for evermore; still, it is a pleasure to look back on
anything beautiful. What colour is this dandelion? It is not yellow, nor
orange, nor gold; put a sovereign on it and see the difference. They say
the gipsies call it the Queen's great hairy dog-flower--a number of
words to one stalk; and so, to get a colour to it, you may call it the
yellow-gold-orange plant. In the winter, on the black mud under a dark,
dripping tree, I found a piece of orange peel, lately dropped--a bright
red orange speck in the middle of the blackness. It looked very
beautiful, and instantly recalled to my mind the great dandelion discs in
the sunshine of summer. Yet certainly they are not red-orange. Perhaps,

if ten people answered this question, they would each give different
answers. Again, a bright day or a cloudy, the presence of a slight haze,
or the juxtaposition of other colours, alters it very much; for the
dandelion is not a glazed colour, like the buttercup, but sensitive. It is
like a sponge, and adds to its own hue that which is passing, sucking it
up.
The shadows of the trees in the wood, why are they blue? Ought they
not to be dark? Is it really blue, or an illusion? And what is their colour
when you see the shadow of a tall trunk aslant in the air like a leaning
pillar? The fallen brown leaves wet with dew have a different brown
from those that are dry, and the upper surface of the green growing leaf
is different from the under surface. The yellow butterfly, if you meet
one in October, has so toned down his spring yellow that you might
fancy him a pale green leaf floating along the road. There is a shining,
quivering, gleaming; there is a changing, fluttering, shifting; there is a
mixing, weaving--varnished wings, translucent wings, wings with dots
and veins, all playing over the purple heath; a very tangle of
many-toned lights and hues. Then come the apples: if you look upon
them from an upper window, so as to glance along the level plane of
the fruit, delicate streaks of scarlet, like those that lie parallel to the
eastern horizon before sunrise; golden tints under bronze, and
apple-green, and some that the wasps have hollowed, more glowingly
beautiful than the rest; sober leaves and black and white swallows: to
see it you must be high up, as if the apples were strewn on a sward of
foliage. So have I gone in three steps from May dandelion to
September apple; an immense space measured by things beautiful, so
filled that ten folio volumes could not hold the description of them, and
I have left out the meadows, the brooks, and hills. Often in writing
about these things I have felt very earnestly my own incompetence to
give the least idea of their brilliancy and many-sided colours. My
gamut was so very limited in its terms, and would not give a note to
one in a thousand of those I saw. At last I said, I will have more words;
I will have more terms; I will have a book on colour, and I will find and
use the right technical name for each one of these lovely tints. I was
told that the very best book was by Chevreul, which had tinted
illustrations, chromatic scales, and all that could be desired.
Quite true, all of it; but for me it contained nothing. There was a good

deal about assorted wools, but nothing about leaves; nothing by which I
could tell you the difference between the light scarlet of one poppy and
the deep purple-scarlet of another species. The dandelion remained
unexplained; as for the innumerable other flowers, and wings, and
sky-colours, they were not even approached. The book, in short, dealt
with the artificial and not with nature. Next I went to science--works on
optics, such a mass of them. Some I had read in old time, and turned to
again; some I read for the first time, some translated from the German,
and so on. It appeared that, experimenting with physical colour,
tangible paint, they had found out that red, yellow, and blue were the
three primary colours; and then, experimenting with light itself, with
colours not tangible, they found out that red, green, and violet were the
three primary colours; but neither of these would do for the dandelion.
Once upon a time I had taken