In My Vicarage Garden 



I said that the pastures showed by their colours 

 that the time for flowers was not yet over. The 

 prevailing colours were blue and pink, the blue 

 given by a campanula, and the pink by a col- 

 chicum. The campanula (C. Scheuzeri) is very 

 like our harebell, but it has rather larger flowers, 

 which are nodding and not upright, and it has not 

 the round radical leaves which give ours its specific 

 name (C. rotundifolia), and so is botanically dis- 

 tinct. The pink colchicum is slightly different 

 from our British plant, and is C. Alpinum, and it 

 is everywhere in the pastures, and its abundance 

 in them puzzles me. In England the colchicum, 

 or meadow saffron, is considered almost poisonous 

 to cattle, yet in Switzerland, where the pastures 

 are being mowed all the year round, the cattle 

 must eat it in every stage. It is a favourite 

 flower for visitors to pick ; they bring in large 

 bunches, which soon fade, and they call them 

 crocuses, but it is not a crocus, and differs in many 

 ways which I need not state particularly ; and, 

 according to the Swiss botanist, Dalla-Torre, there 

 is no native crocus in Switzerland. But in nothing 

 does the crocus more differ from the Colchicum 

 than in its medical qualities. No crocus is hurt- 

 ful, and as the producer of saffron the crocus 

 ranks among the wholesome plants ; while the 

 poisonous character of the Colchicum may be 

 gathered from the fact that its near botanical ally 

 is the black Hellebore, or Veratrum, from which 

 the strong narcotic poison, Veratrine, is extracted. 



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