334 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
surroundings under the wide sky in that lucid 
atmosphere after the rain, the pendulous cups still 
sparkling with the wet and trembling in the lightest 
wind. It would have been a joy to find a single 
blossom; here, to my surprise, they were in 
thousands, and in tens and in hundreds of thousands, 
an island of purple on the green earth, or rather 
purple flecked with white, since to every hundred 
or more dark-spotted flowers there was one of an 
ivory whiteness and unspotted. 
But it is not this profusion of blossoms, which 
may be a rare occurrence—it is the individual 
flower which has so singular an attractiveness. It 
is, I have said, a better flower than the blue colum- 
bine; in a way this tulip is better than any British 
flower. A tulip without the stiffness and appearance 
of solidity which makes the garden kinds look as 
if they had been carved out of wood and painted, 
but pendulous, like the harebell, on a tall slender 
stem, among the tall fine-leafed grasses, and 
trembling like the grasses at every breath; in 
colour unlike any other tulip or any flower, a pink 
that is like a delicate, luminous flesh-tint, minutely 
chequered with dark maroon purple. 
Our older writers on plants waxed eloquent in 
describing their “fritillaria” or ‘“ Ginny-flower,” 
and even the driest of modern botanists writes that 
it is a flower which, once seen, cannot be forgotten. 
That is because of its unlikeness to all others—its 
strangeness. In the arrangement of its colours it 
is unique, and furthermore, it is the darkest flower 
