SOME EARLY FLOWERS 279 



At Penzance a gardener told me he had been fight- 

 ing this weed all his life and that his father before him 

 had fought with it all his life, so that it must have 

 established itself in that place a very long time ago. 



At Madron, the famous and beautiful old village 

 on the heights above Penzance, I saw a curious thing 

 in January, 1907. A great part of the extensive 

 churchyard is covered with colt's-foot, and after it had 

 come into bloom the whole of the mass of vivid 

 green leaves was killed by the great frost I have 

 described in chapter xv., but strange to say the 

 flowers were not hurt. The ground was covered 

 with the upright thick stems, crowned with their pale 

 purple fragrant flowers, and beneath them, dead and 

 brown and flat on the earth, lay the leaves that lately 

 hid them with their multitudinous green discs. 



One day, meeting some boys by the side of a hedge 

 overgrown with colt's-foot, I asked them what they 

 called the plant, and was answered by the biggest boy 

 who knew most that it was called " rat-plant." It was 

 named so, perhaps, because a rat could take shelter in 

 the leaves and run very freely about among them 

 without being seen. Or it may be that the name was 

 bestowed to express a feeling of dislike and contempt 

 the idea that it was a vegetable rat, something to be 

 warred against, dug up and if possible extirpated. It 

 is a pleasure to me to think we can no more get rid 

 of Petasites fragrans, alias " rat-plant," than we can of 

 Mus decumanus itself, or Elatta orientalis, or any other 

 of the undesirable aliens, plant or animal, which succeed 

 in defying our best efforts to oust them. 



