Proserpina, Volume 1 | Page 5

But how do they die, or how stop growing, then?--it is the first thing I
want to know about them. And from all the books in the house, I can't
as yet find out this. Meanwhile I will look at the leaves themselves.
4. Going out to the garden, I bring in a bit of old brick, emerald green
on its rugged surface,[6] and a thick piece of mossy turf.
First, for the old brick: To think of the quantity of pleasure one has had
in one's life from that emerald green velvet,--and yet that for the first
time to-day I am verily going to look at it! Doing so, through a pocket
{14} lens of no great power, I find the velvet to be composed of small
star-like groups of smooth, strong, oval leaves,--intensely green, and
much like the young leaves of any other plant, except in this;--they all
have a long brown spike, like a sting, at their ends.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
5. Fastening on that, I take the Flora Danica,[7] and look through its
plates of mosses, for their leaves only; and I find, first, that this spike,
or strong central rib, is characteristic;--secondly, that the said leaves are
apt to be not only spiked, but serrated, and otherwise angry-looking at
the points;--thirdly, that they have a tendency to fold together in the
centre (Fig. 1[8]); and at last, after an hour's work at them, it strikes me
suddenly that they are more like pineapple leaves than anything else.
And it occurs to me, very unpleasantly, at the same time, that I don't
know what a pineapple is!
Stopping to ascertain that, I am told that a pineapple belongs to the
'Bromeliaceæ'--(can't stop to find out what that means)--nay, that of
these plants "the pineapple is the representative" (Loudon); "their habit

is acid, their leaves rigid, and toothed with spines, their {15} bracteas
often coloured with scarlet, and their flowers either white or
blue"--(what are their flowers like?) But the two sentences that most
interest me, are, that in the damp forests of Carolina, the Tillandsia,
which is an 'epiphyte' (i.e., a plant growing on other plants,) "forms
dense festoons among the branches of the trees, vegetating among the
black mould that collects upon the bark of trees in hot damp countries;
other species are inhabitants of deep and gloomy forests, and others
form, with their spring leaves, an impenetrable herbage in the Pampas
of Brazil." So they really seem to be a kind of moss, on a vast scale.
6. Next, I find in Gray,[9] Bromeliaceæ, and--the very thing I
want--"Tillandsia, the black moss, or long moss, which, like most
Bromelias, grows on the branches of trees." So the pineapple is really a
moss; only it is a moss that flowers but 'imperfectly.' "The fine fruit is
caused by the consolidation of the imperfect flowers." (I wish we could
consolidate some imperfect English moss-flowers into little pineapples
then,--though they were only as big as filberts.) But we cannot follow
that farther now; nor consider when a flower is perfect, and when it is
not, or we should get into morals, and I don't know where else; we will
go back to the moss I have gathered, for I begin to see my way, a little,
to understanding it.
{16}
7. The second piece I have on the table is a cluster--an inch or two
deep--of the moss that grows everywhere, and that the birds use for
nest-building, and we for packing, and the like. It is dry, since
yesterday, and its fibres define themselves against the dark ground in
warm green, touched with a glittering light. Note that burnished lustre
of the minute leaves; they are necessarily always relieved against dark
hollows, and this lustre makes them much clearer and brighter than if
they were of dead green. In that lustre--and it is characteristic of
them--they differ wholly from the dead, aloe-like texture of the
pineapple leaf; and remind me, as I look at them closely, a little of
some conditions of chaff, as on heads of wheat after being threshed. I
will hunt down that clue presently; meantime there is something else to

be noticed on the old brick.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
8. Out of its emerald green cushions of minute leaves, there rise, here
and there, thin red threads, each with a little brown cap, or something
like a cap, at the top of it. These red threads shooting up out of the
green tufts, are, I believe, the fructification of the moss; fringing its
surface in the woods, and on the rocks, with the small forests of brown
stems, each carrying its pointed cap or crest--of infinitely varied 'mode,'
as we shall see presently; and, which is one of their most blessed
functions, carrying high