I stopped to talk to the girl and had plenty of time to get my mental sketch of her. Speaking of the colt's-foot, so abundant at her own door, she told me that she had never heard it named anything but "weed." She also assured me that she hated it, and so did every one, and she could see nothing to admire in it.
At Penzance a gardener told me he had been fighting 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 _Blatta orientalis_, or any other of the undesirable aliens, plant or animal, which succeed in defying our best efforts to oust them.
Perhaps some of my sober-minded readers, who know the colt's-foot and have not seen its beauty, may smile at my enthusiasm even as I have smiled at my Cornish landlady's story of Billy and his enthusiasm for another species of wild flower. Billy is a youth of about twenty, son of a small farmer in one of the villages I stayed at. This, like most of the villages on this coast, receives its quota of summer visitors who come from distant inland towns, and some of these found accommodation at Billy's parents' farm. They were ladies, and Billy was greatly impressed with their beauty and affability, their dainty dresses, and the nice way in which they passed the time, strolling about, sketching, reading, lying on the turf, and sitting in picturesque attitudes on the rocks. But what perhaps interested him most was the keen pleasure they took in the common natural objects of the place, especially the wild flowers. They talked to Billy on the subject with the result that he, too, became an admirer of wild flowers, greatly to the amusement of his neighbours.