No More Learning

Nature thus keeps use and beauty distinct. I know many such
localities, where it does not fail to present itself annually, and
paint the earth with its blush. It grows on the gentle slopes, either
in a continuous patch or in scattered and rounded tufts a foot in
diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by the first smart frosts.

In most plants the corolla or calyx is the part which attains the
highest color, and is the most attractive; in many it is the
seed-vessel or fruit; in others, as the red maple, the leaves; and in
others still it is the very culm itself which is the principal flower
or blooming part.

The last is especially the case with the poke or garget (_Phytolacca
decandra_). Some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with
their purple stems now and early in September. They are as interesting
to me as most flowers, and one of the most important fruits of our
autumn. Every part is flower (or fruit), such is its superfluity of
color,--stem, branch, peduncle, pedicel, petiole, and even the at
length yellowish, purple-veined leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of
berries of various hues, from green to dark purple, six or seven
inches long, are gracefully drooping on all sides, offering repasts to
the birds; and even the sepals from which the birds have picked the
berries are a brilliant lake red, with crimson flame-like reflections,
equal to anything of the kind,--all on fire with ripeness. Hence the
_lacca_, from _lac_, lake. There are at the same time flower-buds,
flowers, green berries, dark-purple or ripe ones, and these
flower-like sepals, all on the same plant.

We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It
is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a
bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be
seen at this season of the year.
On warm hillsides its stems are ripe
by the twenty-third of August. At that date I walked through a
beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, on the side of one of
our cliffs, where they ripen early. Quite to the ground they were a
deep, brilliant purple, with a bloom contrasting with the still clear
green leaves. It appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and
perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer. What a
perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life
concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature.
What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in
the midst of our decay, like the poke! I confess that it excites me to
behold them. I cut one for a cane, for I would fain handle and lean on
it. I love to press the berries between my fingers, and see their
juice staining my hand. To walk amid these upright, branching casks of
purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one
with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a
privilege! For Nature's vintage is not confined to the vine. Our poets
have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they
never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the
singers. Indeed, this has been called by some the American grape, and,
though a native of America, its juices are used in some foreign
countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may
be celebrating the virtues of the poke without knowing it. Here are
berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal
with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make,
to be used in such a dance!