THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
THE JOY OF GARDENS
By
LENA MAY McCAULEY
"7n Paradise a garden lies"
RAND McNALLY AND COMPANY
CHICAGO NEW YORK
Copyright, IQII, BY RAND. MCNAI.LY & COMPANY
455
FOREWORD
ANY book about gardens, written for the pleasure of writing, must have its sources in dreams. The visions of gardens beautiful and retired hover before the imagination, and no real garden, however humble, but is invested in celestial light of cherished hopes of what it may become in fragrant flowers or what it might have been had fortune been kind.
The facts and the fancies of this book were discovered in various gardens, some centuries old, fruitful of memories of those whose hands have long since turned to dust, others in the joyous public gardens with parterres, and the most precious of all in the quiet gardens of my friends.
"Gardening," said a wise writer, "is among the purest of pleasures," and one tossed on the fretful world knows that there is no purer delight than that which comes to the human heart with friends in gardens. To many friends, far and wide, I owe whatever inspiration lives in these pages.
The illustration of the book was an afterthought carried out in the desire to suggest the art of landscape gardening. Credit is gratefully recorded to those who aided with the pictures, and especially to Jens Jensen, Jessie T. Beals, Mary H. -Northend, J. Horace McFarland, W. H. Rau, Henry Fuhrman, E. L. Fowler, Alice Enk, and Mode Wineman.
vi FOREWORD
The gardens enhanced by landscape art are beautifying our country, but the most joyful gardens are the little planta- tions of flowers about homes everywhere and beyond the reach of the camera.
L. M. McC.
CONTENTS
PAGE
List of Illustrations ix
ON WINGS OF HOPE i
A PRELUDE OF HEAVEN'S HARMONY. "..... 10
THE DELIGHTS OF FAITH 20
WHEN SPRING AWAKES 28
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 37
THE USES OF ADVERSITY 47
WHEN SOUL HELPS FLESH 56
As FANCY FLIES 65
THE HIGH TIDE OF JOY 74
THE ODORS OF ARABY 83
ET [IN ARCADIA FUISTI 94
WHEN BEES COURT THE CLOVER . 104
IN MIDSUMMER FIELDS 113
A CARNIVAL OF GOLD 122
THE FRIENDSHIP OF FLOWERS 131
HERBS o' GRACE 141
WHEN AUTUMN LINGERS 151
MY LADY DAHLIA TAKES THE AIR 160
IN ELYSIAN FIELDS 170
ESCAPED FROM GARDENS 182
OF DRIFTWOOD AND DREAMS 193
IN GOD'S ACRE 203
Appendix 211
vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A Water Garden at Altadena, California . . Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
A Bit of Formal Garden, "Wychwood," Lake Geneva,
Wisconsin i
A Garden on Long Island, New York 4
A Garden at Manchester, Massachusetts .... 8
A Garden at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 12
Rose Gardens near New Rochelle, New York ... 16
A Garden at Winnetka, Illinois •. . 20
A Rose Garden at Thomasville, Georgia 28
A Water Landscape Garden at Glencoe, Illinois . . 32
A Garden on Long Island, New York 37
Purple Phlox, West Parks, Chicago ... . . 44 Rose Gardens of Madame Modjeska, Los Angeles,
California 48
A Garden at Bar Harbor, Maine 52
A Formal Garden at Prides Crossing, Massachusetts . 56
A Garden at Stockbridge, Massachusetts .... 60 A Water Garden at Tulane University, New Orleans,
Louisiana 65
Garden at the Longfellow Home, Cambridge, Massa.
chusetts 68
A Garden at Manchester, Massachusetts .... 76
Villa Tasca, Palermo, Italy 80
A Garden at Altadena, California 84
In the Boboli Gardens, Florence, Italy 92
A Japanese Garden at Wynnewood, Pennsylvania . . 96
A Formal Garden at New Haven, Connecticut . . . 100
A Garden at Katonah, New York . . . . . . 104
Garden at "Egandale," Highland Park, Illinois . . 106
x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
A Pergola in a Los Angeles Garden 113
Garden of Mabel Osgood Wright 1 1 6
House and Garden at Bar Harbor, Maine .... 124
Water Garden and Pergola at Ellenville, New York . 128
A Garden at Winnetka, Illinois 132
Peacock Garden of Ernest Thompson Seton, Cos Cob,
Connecticut 136
A Garden at Ardmore, Pennsylvania 141
A Garden near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . . . 144
A Formal Garden at Brookline, Massachusetts . . 148
Approach to a Water Garden, Lake Como, Italy . . 152 Autumn Garden, Garfield Park, Chicago ... .156
A Formal Garden at Beverley Cove, Massachusetts . 160
A Terrace Garden at Lake Forest, Illinois . . . 164 Terrace Walk, Home of Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett,
Kent, England 172
Home of John D. Rockefeller, near Tarry town,
New York 176
Water Garden at Lincoln Park, Chicago 181
Court of the Sultana, Generalife Palace, Granada, Spain 184
A Formal Garden on Long Island, New York . . . 188 Scoinford Old Manor, the Home and Garden of Alfred
Austin, Kent, England 193
A Garden near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . . . 196 An Old-fashioned Garden near Philadelphia, Penn- sylvania 200
A Garden at Winnetka, Illinois 204
A Terrace Garden at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin . . 208
Garden Plans 240-246
Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 't is her privilege Through all the years of this owr life, to lead From joy to joy : for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.
— WORDSWORTH.
THE JOY OF GARDENS
ON WINGS OF HOPE
WINTER has fled. What matter if skies are gray and lawns hidden deep beneath the driven snow, for at dawn the sparrows sang of the coming of spring and let out the secret that St. Valentine's Day is here. The mist curtains parted before sunrise. The east, long veiled in somber vapors of smoked amethyst, which only on rare winter mornings flashed with the light of the slumbering fires, blazed with roseate flames as if to assure the ice- bound lands that the sun still wheeled in the heavens at his appointed time and all 's right with the world.
Strike open the rusty lock of the garden gate ; the hour has sounded for conquest. The upper air is as bright as at Eastertide, silver wreaths of fog trail fairy-veils on the tops of the pine trees, and the sun shines resplendently, diffusing a gentle warmth through the atmosphere as he rises higher and higher to the full splendor of midday.
The blanket of snow covering the lily beds is melting,
2 THE JOY OF GARDENS
and tiny rills are coursing down the paths. The doves have come out to sun themselves, cooing sweetly as they patter to the eaves of the bam roof, and take short flights to try their wings. We can almost hear the seeds stirring in the earth where the full tide of sunshine falls upon it, and the whole garden seems to bloom with the spirits of flowers of other years. Then falls the afternoon; the vision passes, and dull-cloaked February awaits in the twilight.
Yet we have lived through hours that have been glad, and we shall not forget that spring has given the sign and will burn her signal fires stolen from the sun faring north- ward. Winter is over, and the making of gardens is at hand. The miracle of grass and flowers will repeat itself, for the promise of a new world is in the air, the mysteri- ous vibration that quickens the pulses and awakens the hopes that fell by the way with the autumn of yesteryear.
The February days are golden opportunities to the practical gardener, who counts them the appointed time for making ready for the fetes of summer. By being forehanded while frost is in the ground it is possible to gain from two to four weeks in the following season. Columbus saw the spice-laden islands of the East in his dreams and steered for them, and the gardener makes his charts and paints rosy pictures while gathering his tools to launch on his undertaking. His course is bent accord- ing to his desires, and his discovery flies their colors.
ON WINGS OF HOPE 3
As day follows day we realize every whim of the weather is a blessing in disguise, once the mind is made up to think of gardens. From the window the landscape is hidden by driving rain and sleet ; the walks are impass- able. Nature has ruled that we stay at home and forget, under the magic of the florist's catalogue, the theater in town.
The calendar warns that March is but a fortnight away, when spring is due, and the skunk cabbage will be up in the woods on a sunny bank, and hepaticas hang their pale bloom on a sheltered southern slope. The sleet may rattle against the windowpane and the wind howl down the chimney; nevertheless it is time to begin gar- dening, and to do it now — as the legends say.
We open the florist's gay booklet and mark the shrubs and the trees we had planned to set out. A crimson rambler should adorn the side window ; and small though the lot is, it was decided at the last cold snap that a wind- break of evergreens would be worth while to turn away Boreas from the perennials and the exposed porches of the dining room.
Nature inspires the garden lover how to order a little paradise on paper, and as for wisdom, there are abroad wisacres aplenty only too glad to recite their experi- ences. We can say to ourselves in perfect faith that "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her," and go our ways in adventures in gardening. If one seed is
4 THE JOY OF GARDENS
discouraged and refuses to send forth its plant, there are many more just waiting the chance to get a foothold and to make greenery and color above the earth we have scratched. With garden books all around, and so much other advice, we should be able to put what we ought to have with what we really want, in good taste.
Then comes another night of blustery weather to keep every one at home and the neighbors fast behind their own doors, and we declare in exultation that fortune has sent it to be the hour of planning. Accordingly we clear away the books of fiction and the tempting magazines from the table, and prepare for a serious campaign in formal lists. It looks to be dull work; but if you would not be sorry later on, drive out the lurking distrust of summer success and play that all will go as gayly as a fairy tale, for beauty still abides among old-fashioned posies.
Flowers are fed by faith, like all the homely virtues, and faith is the first essential in getting bloom. It is united to some hard work, it is true ; but who ever minded the drudgery of a mountain climb after he had gained the heights?
Long ago the garden plan had its serpentine paths or was laid off in parallelograms, but to-day the waste ground given to paths is used for planting, and turf is trained over the lawns and close to the beds. The gravel path appears only as the practical marching ground to
ON WINGS OF HOPE 5
the f nt door and for the comfort of milkman and grocery boy who approach the kitchen. ' It is not neces- sary to use compass or rule and waste ground in walking measures among the flower beds. The clover turf is pleasanter to the foot in summer, and is a refreshing backgrc d for clumps of hardy phlox, peonies, giant larkspui and other perennials which, once invited in, remain always.
For a pastime let us draw the first plan on sketch paper and wash in the colors of the scheme for the beds. Blooming posies are amicable folk, and I never knew their colors to fight — figuratively speaking — except in California, where purple bougainvilleas keep up a fierce warfare with scarlet geraniums, causing chills to creep down the spines of nervous artists.
It is safe to mix the homely flowers, always using many white blossoms, while much pleasure is to be gained in massing plants of a single variety and color; as many petunias with a border of sweet alyssum, or scarlet gera- niums with white feverfew to make a contrast; and beds of pansies, stocks, begonias, or ageratum look well with dwarf geraniums of the silver-leaf variety or candytuft or dusty miller.
The choice being made, write the names of the flowers in the places they are to occupy in the beds and, if your imagination is not vivid, wash in the colors with paint. In thinking of annuals one should not overlook the
6 THE JOY OF GARDENS
faithful perennials and spring bulbs — though the latter were, of course, set in the autumn — and daffodils and iris are at home in their own corners. Bleeding hearts and peonies are the earliest joy-bringers, and, however little your plot, keep a place for them.
After all, a rainy February will have its brighter side if the orders for seeds and shrubs have been mailed and the garden plans made in the evenings. An inclement half-holiday gives time to search for tools in the cellar and to hunt for dahlia roots, cannas, and gladioli put away in November; and the first sunny day will send us looking after the hotbed — but that is another story.
By and by the hands of the clock hint that the lamp will soon burn low. If we are to have our nightly com- pany of an old book it is high time to take one from the shelves. What better than the master of the Utopian Garden — Francis Bacon ?
"And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes, like the warbling of music) than in the land, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air. Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smells, so that you may walk by a whole row of them and find nothing of their sweetness; yea, though it be in a morning's dew. Bays, likewise, yield no smell as they grow, rosemary little, nor sweet marjoram. That which above all others yields the
ON WINGS OF HOPE 7
sweetest smell in the air is the violet, especially the white double violet which comes twice a year, about the middle of April and about Bartholomewtide.
"Next to that is the musk rose; then the strawberry leaves dying, with a most excellent cordial smell; then the flower of the vines — it is a little like the dust of a grass which grows upon the cluster in the first coming forth; then sweetbriar; then wallflowers, which are very delightful to be set upon a parlor or lower chamber window ; then pinks and gillyflowers, especially the mat- ted pink and clove gillyflower; then the flowers of the lime tree; then the honeysuckle — so they be somewhat afar off. Of bean flowers I speak not, because they are field flowers. But those which perfume the air most de- lightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three; that is, burnet, wild thyme, and water mints; therefore you are to set whole alleys of them to have pleasure when you walk or tread."
As he considers still further man's making of gardens, to which God Almighty first pointed the way in Eden, he looks adown the year in the long procession of months and writes, "I doe hold it, in the Royall Ordering of Gardens, that there ought to be gardens for all months of the year; in which severally things of beauty may be there in season." What sensible advice this is — posies to greet the swallow, others for grasshopper and harvest time, others to abide with the cricket.
8 THE JOY OF GARDENS
A torrent of spring rain is dashing upon the window- panes, and the icicles tinkle like silver bells as they fall from the balcony above and are shattered on the stone sill. How they glittered, outdoing crystal balls in sun- shine this morning, reflecting in their shining depths the flowers soon to parade in the garden below! Here is magic that we can make without wand or incantation; we have dreamed the color scheme, invited many to the tableau, and if to-morrow's day is fair the earthen beds shall be turned with a spade.
Though inefficient and feeble in many things, poor blind mortals that we are, here is a certainty, and we can actually steal a march on nature and defy the weather by going about our gardening betimes. So often our best- laid plans have fallen to rack and ruin that it is no wonder we cast a thought in the direction of adverse demons.
Does the wind howling through the trees, shaking the doors with ghostly hands — does the wind know that we have tried to get ahead of nature and have packed the oak leaves thickly above the snowdrops and first hyacinths? Does the Nemesis of a late spring spy the plantlets that were struggling to light in the hotbeds a week ago, just waiting for the melting of the last snow*?
The answer is here in the flower basket of leaf mold lifted from the sunny slope of the ravine. The brown matted covering is broken, and in the warmth and the
ON WINGS OF HOPE 9
sunshine that flooded the south window life began stir- ring in the seedlings blanketed under the oak leaves. A white, furry crosier is uplifted by the hepatica, a fern holds out a coil of green, and an acorn has turned over on its side to reach toward the light the tender pink sprout of a young tree. The joy of gardens is in the air, and when clouds have blown away and the sun is shining again, we shall bid defiance to the vagaries of willful spring and go planting on our own account.
A PRELUDE OF HEAVEN'S HARMONY
AT midnight March came in like a lion bent on ven- geance, announced by all the trumpets of the sky and a roar in the tree tops. The first peep of day showed whirling rings of mist taking the shapes of ghostly spirits which seemed to moan :
"The wind blows out of the gates of day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away — "
The tones died in the distance as the dense fog swept on before the blast as fierce and chill as if it had been the breath of the Northland, from the far-away Hebrides and the hills where the dream-maiden Fiona MacLeod wove her verses.
When it was light the gardener looked out on the frowning clouds and turned a cold shoulder to weather simulating pranks of the artistic temperament. Was this spring masquerading for a day in blustering March? So it is by the calendar, and experiences of old shall not deceive us. Could we paint the weather god of this season, what else should he be but a combination of Jove 10
HEAVEN'S HARMONY 11
the sportive, of Saturn the threatening, together touched with the mischief of volatile Mercury !
When March gets into the human circle and stirs up the imagination and the emotions, the association is dis- turbing. The cheerful window garden of fragrant prim- roses fails to awaken gentle reflections; neither Francis Bacon nor Gilbert White nor John Parkinson rises to the wild spirits of March. While "wind and rain and changing skies" play overhead the Gaelic muse and Chopin's preludes make music within doors, where the fire burns brightly on the hearth.
Such is March — variable as the winds that blow, as the gardener knows who learns to be weatherwise. Weather knowledge is a by-product of gardening gleaned on occasions as he watches for the south wind and, dread- ing the north, welcomes the east, and puts by his hose at the sign of a rain-laden cloud. No one scans the skies more anxiously than the gardener in a dry spell ; no one is quicker to spy the sulphurous yellow vapor laden with hail, nor is there a professional weather man more accu- rate in counting the sunny days.
But, for all this, who knows March*? Some writer on birds and flowers accepts the situation with resignation and would divide the year into four seasons — and March. This is as it should be. Let March roar like the lion and be gentle as the lamb, sleet the garden and then thaw it, invite the covers off the beds and send the thermometer
12 THE JOY OF GARDENS
to the depths, and yet, while doing its freakish worst, we would count the year a desert without it.
Weather wisdom, like Dogberry's scholarship, comes by nature. Its first intuitions may be instilled in the child who finds the sky a field for his observations as ex- citing as the back yard or the neighbor's lot which makes up his play world. He looks from his little garden to the sky, and somewhere in his wondering mind grows a rever- ence for the omnipotent power hidden behind the blue firmament.
If puffed with conceit that man is the master of his fate, uncover the hotbeds on a sunny March day when the changed skies are soft and warm, and note what happens before dusk. March is on the lookout for human planters, and he who "bides a wee" is safe. He is cautious about lifting the frames and raking off the bulb beds, or taking shelter from the perennials; and, when the season permits, employs the waiting hour making the rounds of the lawn and grounds with a notebook, to think of the things that ought to be done and the things he would like to do, and to write them down.
Where the lawn sweeps to the road, an expanse of green may be depended upon to frame an aristocratic set- ting to the house. It is no light matter to keep a lawn in order, to banish the weeds and coarse grass, shut off the explorations of moles, and keep the sod shaven and even. However charming grass may be, the presence of flowers
HEAVEN'S HARMONY 13
adds a personal touch to the surroundings. Any one among us can recall places set in immaculately kept lawns, with perchance a single foliage bed laid with mathematical precision. Day after day for years we may pass the gate without any conception of who dwells within or what manner of man he is.
Drawing rooms of this type are familiar, and whole houses whose interiors keep the secrets of the tastes of their masters and mistresses. Far more lovable are the pretty, disorderly rooms with books and papers, pictures hung here and there, bric-a-brac treasured from child- hood, reflecting moods and every holiday of the year. True, the art decorator frowns on this. "Away with it all !" he cries. "Look to simplicity !" And should you heed him and visit that room devoid of its nonsense, you would discover to your sorrow that its soul had fled.
Nowhere could be found the suggestive lures to book and to picture worlds; gone the memory of happy occa- sions amid the distraction of matching colors and simple forgetfulness — a day without friends, a future that stretches like a desert to the far horizon. Yes, you are saved dusting; but imagine being imprisoned in this coldly correct and conventional chamber, and compare it with what might have been had you but the foolish orna- ments of childhood, the old dictionary, the prints, and the stack of torn music heaped on a convenient chair, and the bookcases about. Who lives in this tastes of the
14 THE JOY OF GARDENS
whirl of life and its myriad colors — and loves even March in his garden.
There lies a happy medium between soulless conven- tions and riotous disorder. Crocuses that smile from the first grass blades on the lawn, the wee, modest, crimson- tipped daisies that wash their faces in morning dews all summer long, give character to the proper expanse before the door. Every passing neighbor gets a message of cheer, and, is his horizon dark, you have given him a smile. If no altruistic sentiment of this order stirs you, imagine how artistic purple and yellow crocuses look in April, daisies in June, and scarlet salvia in autumn in a sea of green.
Now the storm clouds have vanished, and March, lamblike, lends a charm to all pastoral scenes. The wind blows from the south, the weather vane tilts uncertainly, and the windows are thrown open to admit the spring; the fancy presents the most hopeful undertakings that we have thought of in many a day. A troop of nesting spar- rows is scouring the gardens for straws and foraging for seeds at the very spot where the spade will turn over the earth when the pools have dried away.
At this stage of action the summer border is of that unsubstantial fabric that dreams are made of. Do not scoff at it, unbeliever who never scratched the earth or tasted the joys of creation by planting a seed. Consider but a little, and discover that more than half the joys of
HEAVEN'S HARMONY 15
life are visions created by our longing selves in anticipa- tion of something beautiful which we would have for our own.
Winged by hopes, we step lightly over the quagmires of everyday to live in inspiring atmospheres and gather posies in fairy gardens. To be able to do this counts one among those blessed with a safe haven at hand when February rains flood the air, the melting snowdrifts have lost their purity, and the garden lies drowned, with the trees standing dully in a forbidding atmosphere.
The immortal artist knows that we need the grays to throw the skies into brighter contrast ; and if we bid dull care be gone and put spur to the imagination, lo! the garden blooms with the firstlings of Easter, and no Hindu magician has been at hand to wave his wand to make it so.
It has been whispered that many florists' catalogues and railway time-tables go to those who never plant and to those who never travel. The little woman in her one room, when work is done, yields to the luxury of plan- ning a garden which perchance some turn in the wheel of fortune may give her in the unread future. No down- town playhouse could transport her as does the thin- leafed picture book in the twinkling of an eye. And when she has settled her perennials and sweet herbs she puts the pamphlet tenderly away for another dream hour.
One who has tested the magic of it does not need our
16 THE JOY OF GARDENS
pity, even if the garden is confined to a single pot on the window sill, or is no real garden at all. Few magazines equal the florists' catalogues for variety of lore ; and what a wealth of gardens, whole country estates, one can plan with a single pamphlet ! A child who has not learned to seek out his catalogue, with its gay pictures of flowers, has missed something in life, for it is a clew to a liberal education. Had he a garden of his own he could not learn the names and habits of so many flowers, nor become so familiar with them.
To-day we are interested in vines, and out come pencil and paper, and we decide where the trumpet creeper would do best, where a purple clematis Jackmanii, where the morning-glories should unfurl to the morning, and where we dare experiment with these new things that we have never met. By investing a few dollars the kitchen door may become a bower, the old tree draped in beauty, the screen fence before the ash heap hidden behind a cur- tain of bloom. When enthusiasm burns high, the order is written out that very night, and may send us out in the rain to a letter box, and to bed we go with visions of flowering vines rambling about eaves and making the old house the prettiest in the neighborhood.
Many men and women are gifted with a passion for planting and planning artistic homes. Their whole energy is spent in making, and when the task is accom- plished they are willing to move to another home in its
HEAVEN'S HARMONY 17
beginnings to go over the task again. They are born promoters of gardening on whom the fact of possession bears heavily, as their temperament bids them be up and doing. The stuff of the pioneer is in their fancy, blazing trails and conquering wildernesses, and living by the temptations of the florists' catalogues.
We whose hearts cling to places cannot understand their building and leaving, and would pity them. But they do not need our pity in the least, as theirs has been the delight of creating, and in going to pastures new they will taste it again. The indoor garden is a pleasure for the year around, which dwellers of old houses have culti- vated with great success. The latter-day architect seems to have conspired against plants and pictures. It argues ill for his breadth of view, for however artistic in an architectural way a house may be, it will never be a home unless it is prepared to foster human graces.
It must be more than a noncommittal work of art, more than a shell devoid of worry and distractions, more than a scheme of lines and a color harmony. It should have invitations to draw out gentleness and loveliness, and to lead the mind to pleasant places. Thus wall spaces for pictures and convenient nooks for flowers should be provided, so as freely to exercise their mission of beauty.
The flower for the window, like the child in the house, is a wellspring of joy. In March it is the preacher of
i8 THE JOY OF GARDENS
springtide. Every week of the winter should have its blooming visitants in the garden under glass, and when spring comes nature gives the best of all to welcome the returning sun, whether indoors or out of doors. As early as Ash Wednesday — mid-February or the fortnight there- abouts— the cinerarias unfold their daisy-shaped flowers of rich purples, reds, blues, and whites about a tropical leafage.
What a charming companion a single pot of these may be in a sunny window ! And if one has coaxed a Chinese primrose with delicate frilled pink bloom, and encouraged a pot of broom to shake its yellow honey bells and a bunch of heather to make gay, the indoors is as fragrant as the out of doors will be a month later. The calceolaria is another curious flower coming at this time, and because of its strangeness and orchid reminders it is most appro- priate in a pot, and better at home on a window sill than if it were out of doors by and by among the familiar denizens of the borders.
Contentment in life, after all, is built upon our indus- try in learning to see things and to store the fancy with riches for times and seasons. The wealth gained from cloud-gazing, weather lore, wild flowers, the migrating birds — and, not least, the treasures of florists' windows and catalogues — cannot be stolen from us.
Spring is knocking at the door. The wind and sleet are false prophets. All nature tells of the flight of
HEAVEN'S HARMONY 19
winter; even that book for stormy evenings — Paracelsus — fell open at the touch, and we read :
"Then all is still : earth is a wintry clod ; But spring wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes Over its breast to waken it ; rare verdure Buds tenderly on rough banks, between The withered tree roots and the crack of frost, Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face ;
Savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain — and God renews His ancient rapture."
These lines alone should give the poet immortality.
THE DELIGHTS OF FAITH
WOMAN first saw the light of day in a garden, and could she cherish the faith that "in paradise a gar- den lies" what comfort could be hers! The suburban bride, settled in her new home, goes to town at the first sign that spring is on the way, bent upon investing in gar- den tools. The last snowbank has not retreated before the March sunshine, and you may see her going forth one of these fair mornings equipped with garden gloves, a hoe, and a rake.
The turf is still soggy, and the piles of leaves heaped in the corners near the porch and at the roots of trees are water-soaked masses. It is too early to dig, and the rake has uncovered no ambitious green sprouts. Even lilac buds are backward and, while swollen, show the wisdom of waiting a little longer. Each hour the sky changes, and the weather vane tilts uncertainly.
So the bride leans on her rake, enjoying the sunlight that warms the brisk little breeze blowing from the south, and looks abroad up and down the road to find what the rest of the world is about. A moment before she had been lost in a day-dream of a hedge of goldenglow, of 20
THE DELIGHTS OF FAITH 21
Japanese morning-glories climbing the porch, of young crimson ramblers, and of an old-fashioned garden bed with a big clump of the new yellow snapdragons attended by an orchestra of bumblebees drilling the nectarines for feasts of honey.
Far down the road a cock crows lustily. His triumph- ant note is that of a true trumpeter of spring hailing good tidings. Led by his call, the woman looks in the distance. What is it that hides the grove since last she looked that way, and what the caricature of chanticleer; what ani- mals, strange and grotesque, parade the painted barri- cade ? The woman sighs ; she might have known that the billboard fiend had made his plans and stolen a march on suburban beauty.
Little tragedies such as these make a plea for walled gardens — from which the world may be shut out. As much as we Americans like open lawns upon which the houses stand looking toward neighbors with hospitable intent, the only way to gain privacy and the restful seclu- sion of a garden out of sight of suggestions of billboards and posters that tear the mind here and there with a thousand inconsequential distractions, is to erect screens for vines, plant shrubs, or to make a concerted attack on the billboards for spoiling rural beauty.
A corner in the library devoted to books of magic may be counted among the things needful to get in tune with gardens. Sketching plans on paper, marking off beds with
22 THE JOY OF GARDENS
pegs and string, deciding on shrubbery clumps, ordering seeds, digging, planting, cultivating, and gathering flow- ers— all these are only a small part of gardening when you have thoroughly entered into the spirit of it.
On gray days discouragement haunts the paths, upon which one turns his back and hunts the shelf with the books of magic. Here is one that never failed. It is Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne. If it is a stranger, don't seek introduction through the edition de luxe in your library, but buy a little book, and it will be handy to slip in your pocket; and if by chance it is left on a garden seat, and the dews drench it, you will not sor- row for money lost, but will take it up tenderly, dry it, and read again.
From Gilbert White one learns contentment and the riches of life in nature. What a rare man he would have been in the midst of a family of children ! But had it been so the world would have lost a magic book. At the glimpse of a page billboards, soggy earth, cutworms, or whatever has bothered the mind, take flight, and our little lot is a small world with vast possibilities.
The poorest neighbor can plant crown imperials for the pleasure of watching for the little bird that runs up the stems to poke its head into the bells of the flowers to sip the sweets standing in the nectarium of each petal. He may set snapdragons for bumblebees, and seek honeyed blossoms loved by insects that invite the redstart to make
THE DELIGHTS OF FAITH 23
its nest on your premises. Through the eyes of Gilbert White the keeper ol trie tiniest inclosure has his vision en- larged beyond the lew beds and struggling bloom that he calls his own. The insect kingdom, the bird world, the passing clouds, are all part of the flower garden, with the sun that daily stays "leaning on his staff, and looking back over the world as a man might do at the last of his journey."
A few days of stiff winds dry off flooded places with marvelous rapidity. One may venture to predict that, following a fierce February and stormy early March, mild weather will come apace. The head of the house, who drives a nail straight, has probably finished making a cold frame ; namely, a box with a window-frame top and no bottom. The cold frame is set over a bed on the south side, where the sun strikes it all day.
The bulbs that have been kept away for Easter will pick up under the glass. Bits of old matting and carpet furnish a protection from the chill of stormy nights ; and if the covers have been propped up during the day to let in the fresh air and sunshine, the props should be taken out before the penetrating chill of twilight comes and the last sunshine has stolen away from the tree tops. While earth sleeps outside, violets and narcissi will bloom under the shelter.
Awaking in the morning at the warble of early rising birds, and hearing a distant bell toll six, while the
24 THE JOY OF GARDENS
crimson blush of dawn was reflected on the chamber wall, there came to mind a book on tfhe Delights of Faith. It was written by a Cambridge fellow whose life interests were bounded by a tiny room and a single window look- ing out upon an old garden on the banks of the peaceful Cam. The scholar, enamored of bookish seclusion in his youth, had given all his years to The Delights of Faith and the care of his garden, and then had gone to rest con- tent that he had finished his book.
Those who came later and rested on the moss-grown bench under the yew tree he had planted, listening to the hum of bees from his hives near the clump of splendid foxglove, and scenting the pungent odor from the box hedge that he had trimmed, felt the garden of beauty renewing its promises with returning springs was his true legacy to posterity and the eloquent volume on the de- lights of faith.
The time-stained pages were turned one by one to catch a vital spark of an ardent soul, and the mellow sun- shine of the English afternoon grew golden in the full tide of spring's glory. The linnets sang in the fragrant bower of laburnum, and heaven seemed surely to have come down to earth. It needed no argument of priest or creed to write the delights of faith.
Biding our time in wayward March in this western world, which has yet to make its gardens for posterity, the almanacs and fashion-mongers tell us that spring is here.
THE DELIGHTS OF FAITH 25
Every noon the sunshine marks a line farther north on the leaf-covered hepaticas and the brown bulb beds, showing a daring spear or two of green. In the confined garden spaces our careless eyes overlook the daily progress of the northward coming of sunshine. If one* would see it in its mystery and beauty, let him take a flight from the Gulf to the Lakes and behold how spring is marked on the countryside as plainly as if the Almighty Artist dipped his brush in green every morning and spread it across the face of nature, scattering flowers in its trail, each day a little nearer to the arctic snows.
It does seem rather far-fetched to imagine that the tree tops feel the sunshine before our duller senses are awake, because they are that much nearer heaven. Yet this must be true, else why are the topmost twigs on the elm, maple, poplar, ash, willow, and cottonwood decorated with swelling buds'?
Look and look again at them, for it will not be long before their graceful shapes will be hidden with draperies of foliage.
The drooping disposition of the elm and the elegance of the birch and maple are never more evident than when outlined against the twilight of a March sky. It has taken long to become acquainted with the bare catalpa and linden, and if you have not known the silver-leaf poplar, hunt out a few in the neighborhood. Hereafter it will be listed among the wayward friends of testy temper, twisted
26 THE JOY OF GARDENS
by every influence, gnarled and knotted and picturesque when leafless or in fine fettle, and, though not claiming honors of grace, an interesting friend.
This is digressing from our original flower hunt in the tree tops. The true lover of trees peers about for them whenever he takes his walks abroad, knowing that their time is short. Of course the short-sighted must take a field glass, but bird hunting or flower hunting under these conditions does not bring the happy intimacy that comes from bird society on your own lawn, or studying tree flowers overhanging the porch.
Trees play a part in the joy of gardens; and, were mine the privilege to plant this spring, I should choose for flowers, as well as for shade, a Judas tree, a locust, a flowering crab, catalpas, and lindens — if I had space for all. The birds should have their share of fragrant bou- quets from budding time until June slips into summer, when the air hums with bees. Nor should a March pass forgetting the blossoming elms, maples, willows, and their companions.
Gather a bunch of tree twigs anywhere, and wait for surprises in the vase of water in the sunny window where you have set them.
It is true it is a crime to injure a tree, but in this single instance the lesson is worth the sacrifice, and all will be forgiven if you have learned to know the powdered gold that is shed from the ash, the tassels of the willow, the
THE DELIGHTS OF FAITH 27
fairy flowers of elm and maple, and the tropical luxu- riance that pushes its way from the rosin-tipped, sweet- scented buds of the cottonwoods. Never again will you pass a tree without its cycle of beauty unrolling before you.
The serious crowds gathered before the seedsmen's shops remind us that many things should have been done in the suburban garden before the equinox. Wind-blown weeds and grass lodged in the shrubbery have been raked out and burned, and every shrub inspected to dislodge cocoons and suspicious insect nests.
Never mind what is said of the deceit of catalogues, and keep away from friends who have fads without a real love for flowers, holding fast to your delights of faith. The first item for a successful garden is to want one. With the desire comes intuition, and laying in a goodly store of garden books and talking to an old-timer who has a garden puts one on a long way toward experience. Flower culture is like child raising — you are dealing with life in which sunshine and love are essentials.
WHEN SPRING AWAKES
YELLOW jonquils guilty of gold stolen from the sun- shine, and the violets breathing odors sweet in every florist's shop, assure us that spring is here, with the chariot of Apollo north of the equator and lengthening days that are wresting more minutes and hours from the night. An inheritance of the immortal spirit of the Greeks has given to our own times the association of daffodils and swallows, thyme and the hum of bees, and charming sug- gestive touches of poetry, without which life would be a dull pageant. How sweet the memory of the flowery steps of flying Proserpine !
If the jonquils peeping from flower baskets and nod- ding in the hands of passers-by could speak, we might learn of a land where spring is come. We should hear of acres of bloom far to the south, of billows of gold that we may see with that "inward eye that is the bliss of solitude"; and then, still in the spirit of Words- worth, "the heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils."
But why not have daffodils of our own4? Their time of life is brief, it is true, but what a moment of concentrated 28
WHEN SPRING AWAKES 29
joy it is! How does it happen that we have forgotten jonquils, daffodils, narcissus poeticus*? Out with the garden plan, and put them down along by the lilacs in the turf at the fence corner, and set out a hundred and more bulbs at the proper time. Underline it well, and swear to yourself not to forget.
If we had time to mourn we would put on sackcloth and strew ashes and berate ourselves for our forgetful- ness, which lets moments of purest delight flit by.
How many jonquils we have neglected to plant through life, to our own sorrow ! But delay no longer. Look ahead to next spring, and the merry frilled cap of the sunny flower will nod to you through the darkness of wakeful nights and the gloom of heavy days, and you can say, "I have something to hope for — there is that bed of jonquils, my company of daffodils, and the narcissus poeticus that blooms in May."
To begin with, buy a pot of budding jonquils now, es- pecially if you fear the fickleness of your resolution. A dollar spent on enough to fill a window brings royal re- turns; and note the wisdom of this, for, when the flower's brief span of life has run, you can gather up the bulbs and plant them where you wish to meet them again next spring. The lawn mower will run over them during the summer, the clovers will not whisper where they are in the grass, but next March a bunch of flat spikes will push through the brown mold. By trie first of April there will
30 THE JOY OF GARDENS
be yellow-tinged buds, and some fair morning, when you awake to hear the robin in the trees, there will be golden trumpets swaying to and fro, keeping time to his matin song.
Perennials are the crown jewels of gardens. It is a foolish procedure to uproot and change every year. The demon of novelty may beset us, and the magazines fill pages with advice of this or that in good taste. It is our privilege, however, to keep character in our garden, to seek the bloom time has tested, and to make it all a place of loveliness to keep cheer in our thoughts as time flies by.
A little plat back of the house is an opportunity, though from fence to fence it is but twenty-five feet. If an unwilling city dweller looking for beauty in a resi- dence locality, you probably have discovered a neighbor- ing lot of this size, and have gone out of your way sometimes to look through a knot hole in a high board fence to find out if the dielytra is hanging out its sprays of bleeding hearts at the same time the snowball bush which you can see from the street is in bloom, and if the peonies are still as thrifty, and if there are enough May pinks along the sidewalk to give you a few for the asking.
Next to entering into the pleasure of gardens set by flower lovers gone before, is the keen satisfaction of plan- ning one about a new home. Perhaps the order should be reversed — the new before the old — or maybe there is no choice at all when returns have been weighed. The
WHEN SPRING AWAKES 31
altruistic spirit is more largely exercised in planting for those who come after, and it should be tempered with a serious responsibility.
Some have been heard to say, "Decorate to-day, for to-morrow you move," and they expend all their fancy on potted geraniums, palms, and hastily sown annuals. To the winds with them ! They well deserve to move often, and a concerted plan should forbid their ever having a posy from any of our fragrant borders. Flower growing may seem a trifling thing, but if heaven has blessed you with a bit of ground, remember the parable of the man with the talents and turn to the page in your conscience that considers gardens for yourself, your neighbors, and to-morrow.
Why should we be chosen from thousands — we blessed and they denied? Perhaps they long for a spade and pruning hook more than we do. Fate, sharing her bounties, has given us this — maybe a garden to plant in common with the bride of Twelfthnight who has just found her nest beyond the city's roar.
An unconquered suburban lot on a gloomy March day has an unlovely aspect, but it is an opportunity. Sitting on the sunny corner of the porch with the garden plat on a book, a catalogue, and a box of water colors, one can look abroad and in the mind's eye see the perennials blooming. Of course they are massed where they will be sheltered and out of the way of the beds of annuals.
32 THE JOY OF GARDENS
Dip your brush in pink and wash in a tall clump of foxgloves; the many colored hollyhocks would look well hard by; the blue larkspurs must make a group by them- selves; and there should be a clump of white phlox — the queens of the meadow.
Fancy a long row of goldenglow following the paths for autumn ; and to this side, where it may be seen, paint a bleeding heart as the sign of the clump of dielytra, and, where space is to spare, the peonies.
For the sake of romance let there be a little violet bed and a congenial place for lilies of the valley. The pro- cession of perennials should keep pace with the sun, "the daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty," and snowdrops celebrat- ing Easter, the bleeding hearts at Whitsuntide, the peonies and foxgloves for June, and the larkspur, holly- hocks, and phlox abiding with sweet William all summer until autumn glory brings down its own.
To catch pleasure as it flies is a rare accomplishment. The main thing is to grasp the opportunity, thanking the stars that it is yours; and to make the best of it with a cheerful heart, not questioning if it is great or small.
A thrill of music on the air announces that April is here, whispering in the tones of flutes and violins on the three waxed cords of an eolian harp strung in the east window. In a moment of vexation we turned to an irri- tating draft that rebelliously defied the March blast, and
WHEN SPRING AWAKES 33
to thwart all naughty spirits of the air had waxed a bit of string, stretched it in the crevice, and lo ! upon the listen- ing ear came the musical trumpet of winds. Now the song without words has faded in the distance to give place to the long-drawn sweetness of the fairy waldhorn of April and an orchestra of tremulous music. Innocent delight has been wrested from the midst of besetting annoyance, and pleasure caught as she flies.
The April atmosphere throbs with promises — the strange odors of blossoming tree tops, of opening lilac buds, hint of lily bells and the first shy hepatica above ground. The scimitars of skunk cabbage and blades of iris announce a transformation. April skies and April rains make the background and fitting accompaniment to the stir of awakening nature out of doors.
"There's as much in the nature as in the culture of the soil," sang Cowper of the intellectual gardens, which, unfortunately, cannot be made over with wood ashes, though in the mental garden fencing plays its part in shutting out evils and in making it ready to bear the right and agreeable blossom.
As April really marks the beginning of gardening in the North, when frost is out of the ground, it behooves us to look into the nature of the soil, and perchance to scour the neighborhood for "the man who knows" and can tell what is actually needed. Then the garden can be spaded, raked, and worked over, both the nature and the culture
34 THE JOY OF GARDENS
of the soil preparing the way for the seeds to put in their best growing. Plants are the most grateful things on earth, and abundantly repay a cultivating hand, which should be kept busy until frost comes.
Have you ever thought how uninteresting those things are that have no past and seem to live only in the present? These are the new towns set up on speculation, the groups of suburban villas, the rows of semi-detached tenements in which every man tries to fancy he is under his own rooftree, and packs his belongings in the spring to try another house, vainly imagining that he is home-hunting.
Foolish man and foolish town ! Had they but planted roots that would strike deep for permanency, twined a vine, set a tree, before they were aware they would have had a leafy background and would be making history. For it is history — record of things done to weave into the fabric of time — that envelops houses and towns in human interest and really makes them homes.
If perchance yours is one of a score of little houses in a made-to-order subdivision, make the vow secretly to step out of the class, though you are in the midst of it. Plant a syringa, a flowering almond, and a tree honey- suckle in your lot, with peonies, bleeding hearts, phlox and goldenglow and, if there is room, a hardy climbing rose, a Baltimore belle or rambler, beside your front door. Before spring is gone this modest garden will be the cen- ter of neighborhood attraction. If you have decided to
WHEN SPRING AWAKES 35
put in a cherry tree, the migrating birds will have told it all along the skies; and for a few dollars a rented house has become a residence with a history.
Catching pleasure as it flies is not a feat demanding money or social standing; it is doing easy and pretty tasks and not waiting until to-morrow. Some one of these days there will be a new prophet, who will carve on his temples "To-day," and straightway every one will make the best of his passing hours and will not put off happi- ness and leisure and kindliness until a ghostly to-morrow that never comes. Every householder will buy his win- dow box, make his flower beds, and study his catalogue for bloomers to make his gardens grow, and not deny himself the pleasure until he is "able to move into the country."
Permanence is a secret of the charm of old gardens. It is the thought that the same flowers have bloomed year after year, and have turned their pretty faces to the sunshine of successive summers, increasing in glory with the passing of time. This, then, is a plea for perennials, shrubs, and ornamental trees, which may be compared to the virtues giving beauty of character to the encourager thereof.
What matter if one rents, and moves now and then ! Does he not get the reward of his garden of bloom while he remains, and does he not have the greater blessedness of looking backward at the garden he has left, knowing
36 THE JOY OF GARDENS
that others are watching orioles in the cherry tree, others gleaning surprises in spring, others enjoying the sweetness of his rosebush? It is enough to make a man more a man. The nature of the soil having been made perfect in early April, it is safe to think about seeding. Here are the lists of hardy perennials and annuals, and the lore of dahlias and sweet-pea planting. Before the middle of April the native shrubs going to destruction in suburban lots should be transplanted into the yard. What can be prettier than the Siberian dogwood, the pussy willow and its cousins, and the wild crab? If intent on improving vacant lots, a clump may be planted there, as well as four-o' clocks, Shirley poppies, sunflowers, and larkspurs, which persist under adversity. April, fickle and uncer- tain, opens the planting time and the practical garden making.
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT
HAPPINESS is a light-footed goddess dancing at- tendance on the consciousness of work well done. She plays at hide and seek, evading you as you turn to bid her stay, then shyly comes upon you unawares, whisper- ing a word that your heart may hear when you have put aside your longing in devotion to the duties nearest you.
Many a floral tragedy is created, many a domestic failure precipitated, by putting off the day of preparation. Who blames flowers for giving up the ghost when they have been invited into the world to meet beds unready and to suffer for nutriment and water? Who wonders that household bliss fades away where there is neither cheer nor welcome?
The world has such as the bouncing Bet and happy-go- lucky folk who flit away from environment and take pleasure gypsying in the sunshine ; but, in truth, neglected gardens, like neglected homes, are places of discourage- ment. In the final accounting let us hope that penalties for failure will be laid on the sinners who should have cultivated the soil fit for rising ambitions, and not on tender youth bom in an unfriendly world. 37
38 THE JOY OF GARDENS
The bird choirs have assembled robins, bluebirds, and other songsters who wake with the dawn. Gardening is play work when the sun is shining, the heavens are of April blue, and music fills the air. The garden books have not marked the red-letter day of planting just yet, but the flutter of nest building and the leafing of tree and shrub warn that nature is going ahead with her plans. She does not stay, or linger, dreading a busy season.
Who will be to blame by and by if the seeds do not come up1? Yonder lie your heap of perennial roots and bundles of shrubs. You wonder humorously to yourself why your friend the florist does not post a sign, "No gar- den without a spade."
The man in search of work, the man out of a job, the man who yearns to earn an honest dollar, is not hunting industry on the highroad at garden-making time in the village. You may lean on your rake in the sunshine under the robin's tree for sixty minutes — perhaps for a whole morning — and the man with a hoe, or the anxious laborer, will not loom up on the hilltop. The critical moment of decision has come; you must set the alarm clock an hour earlier, and toil if you would have your reward.
Break up the hard clods with a mattock, get the chil- dren to help with rakes, and when the surface is fine and smooth, the soil pulverized, a thrill of satisfaction will creep over your weary body, and genuine happiness greet
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 39
a good job. Unless this comes to pass, do not blame the seedsman when seeds refuse to come up and do their best.
Our trusted friend Eben Rexford bids us have patience and wait until May before sowing annuals. Turn the pages of the familiar log book. Oh, rapture ! It is sweet- pea planting time. "Sow in new ground as soon as it can be worked, except the white-seeded sorts, which should not be sown until the ground is comparatively warm and dry. Sweet peas do better in cool weather than in hot, sending strong roots deep into the soil."
My country friend favors a screen of brush for his sweet peas, which stand tiptoe, looking out sweetly from the brown twigs. Coarse-meshed wire netting, fastened to posts, makes a practical trellis which the sweet peas will cover with a leafy green and fragrant decoration from June to November. The failure of sweet peas usu- ally may be traced to neglect on the part of the gardener.
The choice of color is a personal matter, as all sweet peas are lovely. Our friends who have the naming pas- sion, who dote on calling snapdragons antirrhinums and everyday plants by many-syllabled Latin titles, can in- dulge their memories with the select "400" of sweet-pea society. What a delight to mention "Lady Grizel Hamil- ton," "Countess Spencer Var," when we have our com- pany manners on; or, when we are sportive, to talk jocularly of the "Gray Friar" or "Captain of the Blues."
The day of the first blossom on the trellis will mark an
40 THE JOY OF GARDENS
epoch in the garden diary — which of course you will keep, not only recording flowers, but birds, insects, tree frogs, and humankind that visit it. After that eventful morning the sweet-pea clippers must be ready, and bloom not clipped for the vases cut to prevent seeding, as every bit of life should go to making flowers.
A day's work with spade ends in a luxurious enjoyment of the hour of April sunset. Choose the west window, where the full beauty of fleeting gold, the brightening of the silver crescent of the moon, and the torch of Venus may be yours. One of the magic books may lie at hand, and you read :
"Just when you were safest, there 's a sunset touch. A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death. A chorus ending- from Euripides — And that 's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as nature's self To rap and knock and enter in our soul. Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring Round the ancient idol on his base again — The grand Perhaps !"
What heresy is this in the face of the sky pageant, the vespers of the birds, and the hopes of sweet peas planted in the garden! Shut the door on the elves of doubt. There is no "grand perhaps"; the grass is green once more, the crocus holds up its chalice of gold, and nature, unfaltering, is true to her ancient promises.
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 41
To dress and to invite one's soul is a privilege without price — and without sin if we invite the gods. To loaf and to invite nonsense is another thing in tune with plant- ing thistles for the sake of watching them come up. But who will say us nay when we half shut our eyes and behold iris trailing her rainbow robes across the sunny slopes of the ravines, awakening the rosy hepaticas to paint beauty over the brown earth, or follow her to the brook when the buttercups and cowslips open their golden coffers at the call of spring !
What punishment more awful than to be "shut away in outer darkness," without fragrance, music, or color, and to have eyes that see not and ears that hear not? The perfume of opening violets and lilac buds, the blue of rain-washed April skies, and the wind harps in the tree tops accompanying the robin's matin song would be as things that were not.
It is a blessed chance that coin from the mint cannot purchase these things, or earthly painters change the color harmonies that nature plays upon our eyes as strains of music fascinate our ears. The humblest and most sorely distressed needs but invite his soul to the vision of azure beds of scillas reflecting the blue of heaven from the fresh green of the young grass on the lawn, or look with rapture upon the gold-woven tapestry of royal crocuses gemmed with the dew of early morning, or go in search of the pink clouds of peach and apple bloom in the groves.
42 THE JOY OF GARDENS
In thinking of other worlds beyond, we should have vast comfort in this if we were certain that we could en- joy our garnered experience, which we have bought so dearly. Last season there was the memory of a tangled flower garden where each sweet thing went its willful way — and surely flowers ought to know what is best and grow in grace if given their way. We know advocates of natural gardens for children as well as for flowers every- where, and it is probable that the outcome is marked with the same astonishing results, since foxes of mischief and vagrant weeds of. ne'er-do- well tendencies creep through the palings left unwatched.
"Plant things sure to grow and leave the rest to na- ture," said a wiseacre disciple of the natural garden, pre- senting the seeds. Later he walked by on the other side of the street as scarlet zinnias touched elbows with purple phlox and blue larkspur and tall sunflowers looked dis- consolate among weigelas amabilis.
The disciple of the natural garden groaned inwardly while confessing that he had not dreamed a color scheme and invited his soul before seed buying. "All chance, direction which we cannot see," he murmured. "Even nature plans her color schemes, groups her plants, and harmonizes with ribbons of white and green." The superb scarlet zinnias massed by themselves with the green grass all around or a fringe of dainty feverfews, the purple phlox associated with their white kindred in a
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 43
clump apart, and the larkspur tangled with Shasta daisies, and order and harmony reign among these simple folk.
As in life we should choose friends for youth and friends for age, some for the idle hour and many for the everyday of passing years, in a like humor we may as- semble our flower companies to keep pace with the moods from January until Christmas. Why haste to plant all the garden at once, when it is so important, and the working and planning are a delight1? Its beauty, after all, is the reflection of the inner taste of the ardent gardener.
When to-morrow you stop to look across a lawn where bloodroot is nodding its cap among the hepaticas under the shrubbery, and where trilliums are lifting the mold under the snowberry bushes, and there are signs of colum- bine and shooting stars, you may smile to yourself that all that simplicity is like a charming verse of poetry, the fine picture of a divine thought of one who roved the wild- flower haunts.
And as you go down the street, and the tender grass waves about clumps of sunny jonquils, and there the sun shines warmest where a colony of narcissus poeticus is swaying, and in prim rows the tulip blades have cut stiff ranks across the lawn, you may say to yourself that here is one who has hoped and is now having high festival be- cause of dreams coming true.
Then perchance, as you note the ruddy buds of peonies
44 THE JOY OF GARDENS
and sharp swords of iris peeping above the ground, you pray your memory to remind you to pass that way again in May to feast your eyes on the purple of the iris and the luxuriant bloom of the peonies while the air is heavy with their fragrance and bees are gathering sweets.
Some time in your wandering you may rest under a hedge, awaiting the passing of an April shower, and look forth into a quiet little garden that brought out a picture of last June. Then it was flame and mystery with hosts of Oriental poppies, glowing red, dropping their heavy heads amid cool green foliage. What a wealth of gor- geous color was that tiny garden ! And as July came and once more you turned your steps to its familiar paths, lo! a cloth of gold, eschscholtzia of the Golden West, spread splendor all about, and you vexed your heart to know what manner of gardener had sown seeds to blossom so royally. Nor was the pageant done, for the frosted autumn woods bent above the cardinal of salvia framed in wreaths of star-eyed asters and goldenrod, and, as win- ter snows lay deep, the mountain ash, bittersweet, and scarlet berry shone above the snow.
The poet's feeling for sweetness and light leads us to make the garden charming with color and perfume. When we recall the old garden treasured in memory it had its color dream to live in the mind's eye; a back- ground of flaunting pink hollyhocks against a distant fence, a thriving tangle of mignonette — maybe naught
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 45
but a mound of tropic petunias heavy scented, or in a kitchen garden yellow-frilled marigolds and honeyed wallflowers.
It is an idle thing to scatter the seeds of good intentions far and wide with a careless hand. The strong plants will tower above the weaker, and the frail faint in the shad- ows, for that is the inscrutable law of life. The garden picture is arranged by the laws of gentle living for sweet- ness and light and the joy of color. Have fragrance aplenty — mignonette, rose geranium, lavender, and lemon verbena — and amid their cool greens weave a galaxy of hues to give the beauty of the rainbow through a season.
To-morrow will be May Day. How the merrymak- ers of old England loved it! "Corinna, come, let 's go a-Maying" out in the meadows where the cowslips spread gold for the larks and throstles. An English May is a joyous time, and of uncommon power to awaken in Milton, the sturdy Puritan, the song:
"Now the bright morning star, day's harbinger, Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her The flow'ry May, who from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose. Hail, bounteous May, that doth inspire Mirth and youth and warm desire; Woods and groves are of thy dressing, Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing. Thus we salute thee with our early song, And welcome thee, and wish thee long."
46 THE JOY OF GARDENS
Our land may be too young to have matured a love for wandering in spring and taking what God's lovely earth gives freely for the pleasure of all. It is not too late to walk new paths. Work and then play. Let's all go a-Maying. The woods and marshes are clad in fresh beauty. Come, let 's go a-Maying !
THE USES OF ADVERSITY
IT cannot be counted a sin to envy the goodwife who goes abroad in the dewy sweetness of the early morn- ing to dig dandelions from the grass on the park lawns. The atmosphere in the first hours of a May day is pale with gauzy vapors rising from the ponds and exhaled by the bursting buds on shrubs and trees. It is laden with the odor of an incense faint and exhilarating that wears the tremulous pianissimo of lily bells and honeysuckle flutes.
To such music the goodwife takes her basket and goes to the shrine of Mother Nature, and there one may find her on her knees among the tender herbage, hoarding the gold of the dandelion. She shares her treasure with the few elect, and, when dandelion season is gone, her simple faith in flower lore brings her again to knock at our doors with her basket heaped with old-fashioned bouquets of spice pinks, verbenas, mourning brides, alyssum, and sweet marjoram, bordered with the lace of asparagus.
Happy is he who has found his gospel of art and is satisfied therein. It is simple enough, if one is content to £0 through life looking through a punched elder stem. 47
48 THE JOY OF GARDENS
But if one is without blinders, and greets the dandelion gatherer and her bouquet sisterhood in the morning, meets our friend of the Japanese cult at luncheon, and dines with a florist, he ponders into the long reaches of the night and begs of the powers that be for a sign of the right and true way.
No gentle heart could deny sympathy with the posy bunch of the dandelion gatherer, nor could the finest tuned reject the gray- toned room with its single opening rosebud leaning from a crystal vase, nor could one turn a deaf ear to the creed of a "mum" or carnation breeder; the world has room for them all. It is only a question of selection and sociability.
The generous, loving heart would in time rebel at the vacant harmonies, the solitude of self and none other in the esthetic room, and the "mum" breeder would join in stealing off for a holiday behind the hedge, where the country folk were sharing harmless gossip and making bouquets for everyday homes, where willow chairs elbowed with mahogany, and books of verse disturbed the dust on neglected volumes of wisdom, while the wander- ing breeze rustled the chintz curtains before the casement.
Then, if we are given the grace to have courage to cultivate a tangle of familiar flowers that live but a sum- mer, the sun warns us that it is high time to plant the seeds. We may yet get ahead of the ambitious neighbors who made garden in April, for no seed will sprout before
THE USES OF ADVERSITY 49
the ground is well warmed to that cozy, half-dry condi- tion, not too dry nor yet too moist, suitable to hold and feed hungry rootlets. Most of the annuals do not root deeply, but live from day to day on sunshine and surface moisture, in common with many other gay children of the human species on earth.
While we may indulge in the luxury of a pergola draped with vines, one for each season, or have sunken gardens or water gardens for show, the woman gardener, with a strain of the feeling of the dandelion gatherer, takes her genuine comfort in the border of old-fashioned flowers. The flowers themselves are as curious and way- ward as the folk of a country village, and their outlook on life just as illogical.
Annuals in general refuse to grow symmetrically, and the botanist in search of freaks always finds his reward in quaint variations of the reversions to an original type. But the gentle housewife thinks of none of these things, cherishing the notion that she is going gardening when she puts on her sunbonnet, her leather gloves, and takes her basket of tools — a trowel, weeder, and clippers.
Before this happy stage of action is reached, who can tell what strategy has been practiced, what battles fought with the goodman of the house, or the arch enemy of things unconventional, the architect and the artistic land- scape gardener*? It is not well to meet in open fray in gardening any more than it is in nine tenths of the issues
50 TH.E JOY OF GARDENS
of life. The enemy must be circumvented by guile; he must be conquered without his knowing it; and he must be left imagining himself victor while the gentle house- wife goes her way quietly enjoying the spoils of conquest, which, when the truth is told, are all that she cares for.
Granting that the architect has set the house in green- sward with a motto of silence and serenity, eliminating notes of distraction to rest-seeking minds, then choose the other side of the grounds and shield the riot of merry color by a hedge of hydrangeas or castor beans, if he will not permit you to run your sweet-pea screen across this line. Hidden from view of the highroad, one may do what one will with his own, and give no offense to the high-bred taste of the master who contemplates his single clump of Japanese iris in ecstasy, or has made the happi- ness of a summer depend on a mound of flaming cannas edged with calladiums and waving grasses.
Alas for the apartment-house born and bred who have no memories of old gardens; and joy go with those who are making their first suburban garden of annuals ! Take comfort in the thought that the simple plants are deter- mined to grow if given a chance, and that the books will help the inexperienced.
We who know just a little, and have stolen a march and prepared the earth, should keep a sunny spot for nasturtiums, which will sprawl or climb and give bloom for bouquets until killing frost. Petunias also enjoy a
THE USES OF ADVERSITY 51
sunny colony; and Shasta daisies, sweet alyssum, candy- tuft, sweet-scented stocks, rose geraniums, and lemon ver- bena, planted irregularly, harmonize the variety of colors.
Among the yellows to-day is a fine, tall snapdragon, and the calendulas, coreopsis and calliopsis, and mari- golds have not lost a whit of their gold. The pinks are a host in themselves in bouquets, and for blues we must have forget-me-nots, velvet pansies, lobelia, and larkspur; in red, nothing finer than a poppy; for purple, heliotrope and ageratum, and the tapestry of many-colored phlox, aster, and zinnia, and, for fun, love-in-a-mist and ragged robins.
Yes, there are many more; but, as in life, too many friends are as heartbreaking as none at all, when we can- not gather them about us. Here, too, we must choose the few who will sweeten our days.
More than common piety must abide in the soul that accepts the sweet uses of adversity without a murmur when May borrows caprice of April, and with the windy temper of a vixen drenches the newly-seeded beds and washes the furrows into miniature rivers, creating rapids from the plots of choice phlox to the cherished planta- tions of pompon asters. All in the garden that was made fit and fine has been the sport of the storm.
How we had boasted of its neatness, and discoursed with envious neighbors on what June had in store, and the parades of July and of August, culminating in the
52 THE JOY OF GARDENS
glory of autumn! When, behold, as if Nemesis heark- ened, a little cloud appears in the azure sky, there is a flash of lightning, and the storm riots overhead, the gale rushing down to play havoc among our treasured posses- sions, while the rain falls in torrents.
Creatures of fate that we are, it is folly to make com- plaint, and naught abides but hope, looking for sunshine in the sweet uses of adversity. And then comes the morn- ing after, and if we are not blinded by stubbornness we must rejoice in the splendid greens of rain-washed lawns and the exultant rustle of the refreshed trees.
"Let patience have its perfect work," echoes the old phrase of wisdom, written by one who had not burned with a passion for gardens nor felt the smarts of disap- pointment. Yet what is there to do but to lean over the garden fence, and observe that our neighbors have fared alike*? All must wait for things to dry, the pools to dis- appear, and true hills of sweet peas and the borders of annuals to take on a natural aspect.
A warm May day is ideal weather; and, as we watch, the hardy primroses seem to shake their leaves and to turn their frilled caps to the sky, the pansies smooth out their wrinkles, and forget-me-nots and arabis look as fresh as if nature had touched them up with a paintbrush. It we had our way there would be no spring thunder gusts, but the weather scheme takes into account the delights of surprises, and now in this, the day after, we discover that
THE USES OF ADVERSITY 53
perhaps the rain was not so bad after all, and that flowers have a wonderful gift of looking out for themselves.
As we lean over the garden fence, the heart leaps at the sight of dandelion gold. The host arrived in a single night, whole colonies and companies, to possess the land. Their advance sentinels came days ago, but who had pictured such an invasion, lavishly spreading carpets of purest gold along the roadside*?
The dandelion gatherer is harvesting in the fields yonder, the grass cutter stands with his lawn mower in the middle of the road and knits his brows over the mis- chievous plants that betrayed him while every well- behaved creature behind the fence was shrinking before the storm. His crony, an old gardener, comes along and, leaning on his rake, confesses that he has a tenderness for dandelions; that he likes to see a disk of gold among the dewy grass of the early morning; that he would invite a wee crimson-tipped daisy to make free with his lawn, and had smuggled in a camomile because it shed a fragrance when the foot crushed it while treading the grass.
These give the human touch to the most perfect of seeded lawns, something to make the heart beat faster for beauty's sake, a modest flower to recall a poet, a blos- som to breathe fragrance and to entertain the errant bee.
Thus the law of perfection is put to naught if you lend an ear to the personal equation; but, as John Sed- ding, prince of garden lovers, has said, while men are
54 THE JOY OF GARDENS
what they are art is not all. Man has viking passions as well as Eden instincts, and the over-civilized man who scorns feasting with common folk has lost primal sympa- thy and much happiness.
The sin of exclusiveness joins the theory of order in advising the rejection of dandelions, daisies, and others escaped from gardens. The flaunting tulip, in a fringed coat of many colors, with a pedigree from Van Dam of Holland which has cost more dollars than the dandelion gatherer will ask in cents for a bushel of her spoils, roots and all, dares not touch the hem of the dandelion or camo- mile garment when it comes to the sturdy virtues of per- sistence, endurance, and smiling in the face of adversity.
And so it is with the host of the common people to-day and to-morrow, ever attending to business in sunshine and in rain, the best of company, striking roots deeper and living up to the faith that
"Who shuts his hand hath lost its gold, Who opens it hath it twice told,"
as George Herbert so prettily tells it. He too belonged to the brotherhood, and bequeathed us a magic book.
When dandelions blow and the roadsides in the coun- try are purple with violets, fair Phyllis in the garden longs to transplant wild flowers to her beds and make them her own. Violets will come gladly, because in their
THE USES OF ADVERSITY 55
associations with human folk they have philosophically adapted themselves to changes of moods and will ac- commodate themselves to circumstances. Other wildings are not so hardy, the shock of transplanting and the absence of wild earth, of decayed leaves, or undisturbed soil, trouble their nerves, and rather than keep up a piti- ful struggle they give up the ghost and vanish from the ken of society.
A tragedy comes to pass in woodland life when some well-meaning flower lover uproots hepaticas, trilliums, columbine, wild flowers, and all the pretty folk, carries them withering in a basket, and strives to make them adorn the earth in prim rows in a flower bed ; but if one is so fortunate as to own a corner of waste woodland, or a ravine, then wild-flower planting is an opportunity.
There we may scatter with lavish hands the seeds of partridge berry, broom and furze, plant sweetbrier, witch- hazel, wild roses and wild crab, and root beelwort, Solo- mon's seal, and Jack-in-the-pulpit. Thunder storms may shatter the elements, but a wild-flower garden of this kind will laugh it to scorn and become a haven for wild beauties of feathers and of fur as well as of flowers of the earth.
WHEN SOUL HELPS FLESH
IN that castle in Spain we have dreamed of for our sun- set years when leisure awaits our bidding, all clocks will chime the waking hour at break of day. None of the roseate loveliness of dawn will escape us, and we shall be abroad to keep company with the songsters and the busy folk of the feathered and winged world. They haste about their business as soon as it is light; and we shall go to our rest when they have ceased from their labors and the twilight has lowered the purple curtains of night.
The present scheme of the day's work is not best for successful gardening, for while the gardener takes a morn- ing nap all nature gets in extra stints of labor. Only yes- terday weeding began, and for that unwonted season of energy soul was tardy in inspiring flesh to shake off its slumbers and take itself briskly out of doors.
Memories of weed pulling weighed heavily, like the burden of Atlas, stirring the sources of vexation. While we had long since convinced ourselves that we had risen superior to growing pains and wisdom teeth, a painful reminder besets the joints, perchance an ancestral gift of housemaid's knee, a crick in the back, or, that vicious 56
WHEN SOUL HELPS FLESH 57
thing, an error of the imagination, clouding hopeful en- thusiasm and blinding the sight to visions of blooming gardens.
If the little breeze should cease playing interludes on the wind harp on the sill, the curtain would be drawn in an instant to shut out the inviting sunshine and the jeers of blue jays, and the satisfied "cheer-up, cheer-up" of the robins, all of which are a reproach and a warning. From past experiences we know only too well that weeds grow apace these fine mornings, and early birds levy taxes on lettuce beds and give thanks after salad.
Weeding time is here, alas! and fasting hours for nature that flies or crawls. Rather a cushioned chair on the sheltered side of the porch, a book or two, Omar or Walden, and let the time fleet pleasantly, than a weeding rug, the broad-brimmed hat, gloves, a basket, trowel, and clippers. Yes, the secret of discontent is out — weeding time is here.
Bestir yourself, idle gardener! Watchfulness is the price of virtue, industry the foe of garden flowers. While you have slept on your pillow and neglected reverence at the shrine of a sunrise in June, selfish longings for com- fort have filled your mind, and weeds have pushed roots deep into the soil of the flower beds. Cutworms have made cruel sport, and sparrows and doves have played havoc with tender sprouts.
Why should birds hunt seed boxes on bird tables when
58 THE JOY OF GARDENS
tempting greens grow for their eating, and that strange human in the sunbonnet, who coaxes or "shoos" as the notion is upon her, is wasting the best hours of the twenty- four thinking about herself? Look forth from the window and behold a sorry sight, my idle gardener. No wonder the blue jay laughed wildly, the catbird was gleeful with satire, or the woodpecker beat a triumphant tattoo on the trunk of the hollow oak — everything abroad has been a living legend of enterprise.
Even now more sparrows are busy among the radishes and young onions than we thought could be trapped in the neighborhood. Blackbirds and robins together are pull- ing worms in the pansy beds, yet there seems a lurking guilt back of the unconscious posing, and a suspicion that they are spying out the color of ripening cherries on our one treasured tree. Worm pulling may be but a diver- sion to pass the time, and who knows if birds may not take lessons from the handsome bantam rooster which crept under the fence and is making the dirt fly where we sowed the imported seeds from Japan?
Every plan for striking terror to the heart of the enemy has failed. The fluttering flags, presumed to suggest traps to sparrows, wave among the green like so many signals of peace, and both scarecrows and stuffed owls have come to naught.
A warbler is perched on the shoulder of the mummied bird of night, singing a joyous lyric, and I verily believe
WHEN SOUL HELPS FLESH 59
that the china cat, cozily dozing on the fence to be a menace to hungry doves, was touched with a wand over- night and invited all stray kittens to join her and make merry. Surely that is a fluffy angora on its back, playing with the strings stretched for the passion vine, a precious vine carried from an old plantation down in Alabama; and, if eyes do not deceive, another kitten is hunting catnip among the flourishing fringed phlox and snap- dragons. Had we been up with the dawn this would not have happened.
"To sum up the whole matter, this unmitigated hostil- ity of the cultured man (with Jacob's smooth hand and Esau's wild blood) to the amenities of civilized life, brings us back to the point whence we started at the com- mencement of this chapter. While men are what they are, art is not all. Man has viking passions as well as Eden instincts. Man is of mixed blood, whose sym- pathies are not so much divided as double. And all man asks for is all of nature, and is not content with less. To the over-civilized man — "
This was the page at which the book fell open beside the breakfast plate, and we lost the aroma of the first cup of coffee reading more. The unfolding of the scheme of life, whether in gardens or on streets, is just this thing — pitched battle with two enemies, that of inclination and that of the tide of human fellows and nature's followers at our elbows. Turn the fight to rout one, and the other
60 THE JOY OF GARDENS
gains the ascendency; if we plume ourselves on rounding out personal life, conceit plants a thousand faults to sprout amain, and jealous enemies unite for our destruc- tion. If we forget self, on the other hand, to uproot the weeds and drive off aggressors, then the selfish fibers of our hearts harden, the vision narrows, and the contest robs man of his divinity.
So fares the battle, and with the knowledge of it we pray in the dark and work by day, asking for grace and wielding the pruning hook alternately with the sword. It is a glad fight when one resolves to be captain of his soul. The Eden instincts soar for ideals; the viking blood sweeps from reach the returning savage. Yes, it 's a brave fight, this adventure of living, and a bit of byplay is the weeding.
After breakfast coffee the world looks brighter, and we are willing to extend pardons to all early birds who would feast on rising. As soon as the sunbonnet appears at the doorway the scamps wing to their places in the trees, and perhaps after all they have only eaten a proper share of nature's providing. Who would do without robins, for all the pansy beds; who would exterminate a catbird because of his pranks, or banish the social spar- rows? Under the sapphire blue of skies in June the heart expands in good will and sings the great Ode to Jov to an orchestration of winds in the trees and music of
WHEN SOUL HELPS FLESH 61
the spheres, finer harmonies than the mighty hymn in Beethoven's symphony.
The roses are bursting their buds, the syringas nave opened their crystalline blossoms with hearts of pure gold, shedding fragrance sweeter than any other, and even the weeds that rjave stolen entrance are looking their prettiest. "Weeding hour is here; do not delay for beauty's sake," warns the wise old gardener. "Little weeds grow to be usurpers, little sins steal life away; therefore steel your heart against them all" — the saucy plantain "soldiers" fringed so daintily with lace adornments, shepherd's purse with silver bloom, the Indian hemp bent on conquest like some young Samson, the encroaching burdock with trop- ical foliage, and the crab grass as persistent and deter- mined as a social climber.
What enemy sowed them in the night? What a foot- hold they have gained in moonlight growing, how nobly constructed to dare and endure and to preserve their family untarnished by degeneracy! Yet their energy is misplaced, and this fine quality, so admirable, is ban- ished from the garden to make green the waste places along the roadside because they lack sweetness and light. Mine be the garden of fragrance, of color, and of gentle flowers; so let's to the weeding!
The confidence of the birds is a continual wonder. They have made themselves at home without once asking "by your leave — if you please," just as if they had read
62 THE JOY OF GARDENS
by a secret telepathy that we were willing to take them into partnership if they would only abide by the laws of sharing equally. No human would dare to assert such airs of independence, no neighbor presume to do what they exploit in perfect freedom from the conventions of good society.
They know no world but the wide world, and taking their heads from under their wings between bat's flight and cock's crow, that stillest hour before the dawn, set about singing as if all the world were ready to get up and go forth rejoicing. We have met those who grumble that the country is too noisy with its songsters, cocks, and crickets. But hearken, do not these betray the misfor- tune of ears stopped with selfishness and love of the pil- low after day has lighted her candles'? When one has tuned one's soul to music, the bird chorus is a pean of joy not to be sung to instruments of strings or reeds, but sacred alone to the feathered creatures beloved by St. Francis.
Who, looking upon budding nature, does not sigh for the old days of faith, when art grew under the inspiration of human souls and became the flower of the Renaissance to glorify the gloomy houses of worship, to give reverence to childhood and motherhood, even to sanctify the singing of birds'? Blessed be St. Francis of Assisi, who brought love, human and divine, to gardens, to link nature with art. No more gentle touch comes to us down the
WHEN SOUL HELPS FLESH 63
centuries from that strange age of riotous living and the making of saints than the sermon of St. Francis to the winged creatures that came to the convent gate.
Here under the trees, with the robins overhead making melody, the thrush calling from the shrubbery, the twit- ter of the nestlings of wrens sounding like distant flutes, may we read in the old book that, as the saint had admonished them and lifted his hand in blessing, "those birds began all of them to open their beaks, and stretch their necks, and spread their wings, and reverently bend their heads down to the ground, and by their acts and by their songs to show that the holy Father gave them joy exceeding great. And S. Francis rejoiced with them, and was glad, and marveled much at so great a company of birds and their most beautiful diversity and their good heed and sweet friendliness, for the which cause he de- voutly praised their Creator in them.
"At the last, having ended the preaching, S. Francis made over them the sign of the cross, and gave them leave to go away; and thereby all the birds with wondrous sing- ing rose up in the air ; and then, in the fashion of the cross that S. Francis had made over them, divided themselves into four parts ; and the one part flew toward the East and the other toward the West, and the other toward the South and the fourth toward the North, and each flight went on its way singing wondrous songs."
There is room for me and for thee, bird neighbor,
64 THE JOY OF GARDENS
though tender herbs and cherries sweet are to thy liking. Go thy ways, and come again.
Over yonder flits another winged intruder, paying ad- mission in the coin of beauty. It is the butterfly, and with him comes his kindred of moths and other bright, gauzy creatures. Truly the butterflies among the blos- soms and the birdlings in the flowering thorn are appro- priate combinations without fault in poetry. As we fling the sparkling jewel weed over the fence, and uproot the sweet-smelling catnip trying to get foothold among the mignonette, the same fierce feeling of savagery rises at the sight of the white moths waving their wings above the nasturtiums. Well we know that not a royal butterfly soars in from the meadow but is bent on a mission to take toll or ask board for its offspring.
The weeding industry may cover a multitude of sins and questions which are debatable when there is argu- ment over the rights of possession. To whom does this garden belong — to catnip and its confreres, to the robins and the sparrows, to the butterfly kingdom, or to a wan- dering soul beset with weeds of character who dreamed of planting virtues and reaping heavenly rewards?
A WATER GARDEN AT TULANE UNIVERSITY, NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
AS FANCY FLIES
MY neighbor has a funny weathercock in the guise of a jaunty sailorman who balances the year around on a frigate sailing without making a single port in the skyey seas above the gable of an old barn. If it were not for the gallant sailorman breasting the gales with never a shadow of doubt of winds that blow, hasting in the teeth of the storm with the defiant courage of a Flying Dutch- man, the outlook from that home window would be grievous to the artistic eye. The little sailorman saves the day, shaping a world of his own for the imagination.
Often in August a morning-glory vine climbs from the hidden garden below to deck his ship with flowers, while a scarlet runner creeps along the ridgepole to lay its blos- soms at his feet. In autumn a bittersweet lifts its berries temptingly above the shingles, as if trying to lure him from his course, and all summer the birds, paying for lodging in melody, rest in their flight upon his decks.
At last, when winter snowdrifts heap about the lonely
figure, he is left in solitude to steer with the wind; and
those with books before the fireplace, who look forth to
take his signals, bless the little sailorman as an eye-trap
65
66 THE JOY OF GARDENS
never failing to harbor the restless thought and to turn it skyward to ways of faith and courage.
So truly a neighborhood character is this gayly painted weather vane that we are fain to believe its placing was decreed in the book of fate, and its maker rewarded for his deed. The gardeners thereabouts have perfect confi- dence in his predictions, and note if southerly breezes are warming the earth for sweet-pea growing; if it is safe to plant delicate seeds and to take storm windows from the east side of the house. Or does chance ordain that the frigate and its commander turn northwest, then the trowel is laid in the tool box and the garden hat hung behind the door. At the time of the equinox he records the prevail- ing winds, and in those desperate moments before a thunderstorm his good ship plunges and wavers like a rudderless craft in the grasp of the sea.
While a close touch of sympathy binds us to the for- tunes of the weather vane — for are we not all to a certain degree weather vanes ourselves, helpless in the winds of fate*? — the sundial affords another eye-trap to feed the mind upon, keeping us in touch with nature's ways of the upper air.
Dear, simple-minded Gilbert White writes that "gen- tlemen who have outlets might contrive to make ornament subservient to utility; a pleasing eye-trap might also con- tribute to promote science, an obelisk in a garden or park might be both an embellishment and a heliotrope."
AS FANCY FLIES 67
This is truly a pretty fancy, and reason enough to in- vite our sculptor friend to shape two obelisks, works of art, to serve as heliotropes, one for winter and one for summer, giving pleasure to those delightful souls who never cease to wonder at the course of the sun. "The erection of the former," writes White, "should, if pos- sible, be placed within sight of some window in the com- mon sitting parlor, because men in the dead season of the year are usually within doors at the close of the day ; while that for the latter might be fixed for any given spot in the garden, when the owner might contemplate, on a fine summer's evening, the utmost extent that the sun makes to the northward at the season of the longest days."
And in the same garden, let us add, let there be a rustic seat or two, beneath a sweet-smelling shrub, and within hearing of running water.
There is room for a sundial in the smallest garden, as it takes but little space, and honeysuckle or roses may embower it if one does not care for the clinging ivy. The creeping shadow on its face seems to link the effulgent glory of supernal day with the sunshine in our own little plot, and the passing hours glide away more sweetly when vanishing in silence.
A vast expanse of lawn is a dreary place without some note of play — an eye-trap, as it were, to catch the mind in nets of beauty or pleasure-faring thought. A circle of daisies will change such a lawn to a fairyland, a bird
68 THE JOY OF GARDENS
table entertain songsters unawares, a flock of feeding sheep make it a picture, a fountain suggest the naiad in its rippling waters; and the sundial and heliotrope count the hours of sunshine.
The great game of life is an endless round of tricks and diversions, of which garden-making is but a side play. If we are bold enough to shake off the shadows of domineering self and look out of our windows, setting our eye-traps, the play takes on a thrilling interest. How often do beauty seekers go out of the path to enjoy an old oak draped in vines, apparently an unconscious decoration of a modest yard? Who does not know of a trellis purple with hanging wistaria in June, or a rose- wreathed doorway, or an outlook from some window through trees that have been trimmed to make an ex- tended view over the hills and far away*?
Thoughtless friend, not one of these has come by chance. All are designed eye-traps; and you do your part by making more within doors by hanging a picture, and outdoors by planting a vine, making a woodland shrine, a bank for the wild thyme, or a nook fit for fairies and elves.
Nature is a veritable enchantress, and willingly lends her art to a few little tricks to inveigle the lagging dreams. Vines in particular are her favorite means of creating surprises. It would be fair to call them the "wild highlanders" of flower folk, wayward, usurping,
x^, mm$$;
AS FANCY FLIES 69
usually having their own way, and not to be depended on to do as you wish.
The gentle gardener never lacks variety in her vines, nor do any other plants better repay for care, weaving fragrant bowers, covering walls, hiding unsightly places, and taking no space at all when trained up the corner of the house or over a dead tree. Fortunately the roots are to be bought and will live for years if granted winter protection. The wild grape is to be encouraged; and where else is there such sweetness? The purple and white clematis, the sweet honeysuckle, Dutchman's pipe, trumpet creeper, and rambling roses, each and all are just waiting the chance to make an eye-trap.
"When thou dost a rose behold, say I send it greet- ing," sang the poet Heine in an immortal song of spring; that, with another charming Lied, "In wondrous lovely month of May, when all the buds are opening," has in- spired melody in music makers since his time, and stirs the hearts of singers everywhere in tune with nature. At this hour, when jocund day is smiling over fields and garden, if we listen we can hear songs of spring echoing through the groves and tinkling among the flower bells and from the trumpets of lilacs and sweet honeysuckles.
Joy shines in the faces of the quaint velvet-bonneted pansies, a finer fragrance exhales from the blushing crab- apple blossoms as we pay reverence to their beauty. In the woodland the atmosphere is alive with bird twitters,
70 THE JOY OF GARDENS
and soft whisperings of the breeze celebrate the festival of purple phlox, wake-robins, buttercups, violets, and radiant marsh marigolds reflecting purest sunshine where the brook winds into the open meadows.
Sing, one and all, and send greeting in this "wondrous lovely month of May," when the human heart receives once more celestial benediction from the skies, and can swing its censer with the incense of love and adoration for all thoughts bright and beautiful, and none dares say it nay.
Look out of thy window and abroad. What is there within eye reach to meet in kindly greeting beyond the sprouts in your flower beds? What torch have you kindled to lighten a flame at your neighbor's shrine? You need not journey to Lassa to meet curiosity and strange folk, nor need you draw money from the bank to buy a tonic to warm hearts.
There is a little crooked fence, maybe, near the back door, separating your lot from the weedy wilderness of the busy person hard by. Imagine her delight when she looks out of her north window some morning and sees a barren line of boards covered with climbing nasturtiums unfurling chalices of ruddy orange and gold amid set- tings of malachite.
If by chance a passer-by takes his privilege of cutting blooms creeping through the palings, what matter? You have sent a greeting of flowers to some one who wanted
AS FANCY FLIES 71
them; and alas! if it is permitted to turn to shadows for a brief minute, how often do we send flowers where they are not greeted, because that soul has not awakened to their tender beauty.
I should like to cherish the faith that there was a subtle kinship between the flower lover and the flower; and surely if one has known many gardens he must be- lieve that flowers respond to a spiritual greeting and fade under cold neglect, though conditions of earth and air seem to be proper.
Our own little garden world being weeded and doing its best at this high tide of the year, growing with all its might, one may take thought if the flowers of tradition have had due reward. There are the Johnny- jump-ups, the common daisy, primroses, cowslips, stocks, and fox- gloves, the flowers of the story book filling the dream gardens.
The Johnny-jump-ups, once invited within .your gate, remain evermore, and hard must be the heart that would turn them out to make room for an exotic or strange annual. Plant them where there will be little change of beds, and if a fence is near they will throw seeds through the opening; and some day you will see your neighbor bending over them with delight, or hear the shouts of children coming home from school who have discovered a saucy Johnny keeping company with a bouncing Bet long since escaped from gardens., and taking to the road
72 THE JOY OF GARDENS
like any Romany lass born to the camp fire and tent under the stars.
Primroses are shyer folk that need shelter, and in a protected corner, with sweet-scented stocks, hose-in-hose, and cowslips, will return with the bluebirds in spring and wait for the foxgloves to nod above them in June. The pinks open many a lovely old-fashioned blossom, transplanting with grateful compliments.
It is pleasant to remember that all these dear old- fashioned flowers are travelers, and have girdled the earth in their times. The primulas are natives from the rock heights of the Himalayas and distant Siberia, the Johnny- jump-ups climb to the Alpine snow-line of the Jungfrau, and the pinks were bred on the margins of glaciers from Norway to the Pyrenees and the head- waters of the Amoor.
They are citizens of the world, scattering beauty and flowers along common ways, and why not help them on their ceaseless march by sowing broadcast their seeds in waste places, with more of the pink-tipped and wild field daisy, the Shirley poppy, the sweet William and bouncing Bet1?
None of these ask for luxury, only craving permission to root, and paying toll in blossoms that, plucked, bring twice as many later on. Now and then in some out-of- the-way corner of the world we meet a member of the brotherhood of flower missioners who looks beyond his
AS FANCY FLIES 73
own plantations. When no one is spying he plants a vine, a traveler's joy, a trumpet creeper, or a wild grape along a fence to adorn the road and give pleasure to all that pass thereby, especially to those on whom the world's work bears heavily, leaving no time for garden- ing, but whose hearts are aching with stifled longings for beauty and natural things.
It is the generous act of a minute to plant a wayside flower, and the sin of the weed-grown waste is on our heads if we neglect it when for a farthing and a thought we might make it a beauty spot.
It is the fulfillment of a loyal natuie to treasure a love for old-fashioned flowers. If childhood has left any pictures of youthful fairyland, there is sure to be some lore of fragrant May pinks and flowers in an old garden which has woven a thread enriching memory in company with strains of old songs and snatches of 'verse more beautiful than any that we have known in later years.
Perhaps the garden was a clover field in June, a hill- side white with daisies, a rock bed where the red colum- bine swung its trumpets, or a meadow with shooting stars; and this, linked to the little beds of posies we called our own, made a haunt never to be forgotten. Childhood is a precious season, eager and hopeful, and he who may instill flower love in children gives a magic gift and unlocks a sympathy with nature beyond the effacing hand of time or fortune.
THE HIGH TIDE OF JOY
'TT'S June, dear June; now God be praised for JL June"; June, brooding above the timeworn earth, enticing to life the glory of summertide; June, of sap- phire skies and golden sunlight; June, of fragrant, flower- scented nights; June, gypsying in the fields afire with scarlet poppies, garlanding the marshes with iris, painting blushes on the peonies of the gardens, and waking the songs of birdland in ferny brake, in thickets, and in tree top! What to compare with June? In what season of the year is life more worth the living?
Yesterday the columbines were supreme in the borders ; they swung their trumpets in the breeze. And had our ears been tuned to such fairy music we would have known that to-day would be the royal pageant of the iris. Some time in the early morning the bladed swords guarding their loveliness were withdrawn, and now we may behold them like a winged angelic host arrayed in the palest silver, pearly white, and the purple of kings, melting into the faint harmonies of rainbow tints that might have been reflected from the foamy crest of an ocean wave.
74
THE HIGH TIDE OF JOY 75
A gardener born to his honors should be capable of generous friendships and endowed with a heart over- flowing with religious devotion. As a people we are held fast to an old Saxon trait that forbids showing our emo- tions and letting their warmth radiate kindness on all about us, but to the gardener comes the privilege of love and worship for those within the circle of his horizon.
Think of the wanderer this morning who is out before the breeze has stolen the dew from the daisies on the lawn, prostrating his soul before the effulgence of the rising sun with the faith of a fire worshiper of the source of light and life. He turns to the trinity symbolized in the iris, the fatherhood, brotherhood, and world-wide sympathy for struggling life, and partakes of the joy of hope and faith in an eternal purpose breathed from every flower uplifted toward the skies.
This is the true spirit of the devotional impulse of adoration and thanksgiving, beneath the dome of the skies, with nature's own incense filling the air in the great silence of the out of doors. The lily family alone of all the flower sisterhood has the right to provoke this feeling.
That grand old scientist, Professor Ernst Haeckel, speaks of the iris as endowed with "sensible loveliness." Dull must we be if this mystery fails us, and no sym- pathy rises in the heart as we approach a stately company of these queenly flowers, which are so fragile, so pure,
76 THE JOY OF GARDENS
that humility oppresses us with a sense of unfitness in the presense of such perfection.
The rose is the queen of the garden, voluptuous, ap- pealing to the sense, but queen above queens, a Mona Lisa, a Lady Godiva, knowing life, knowing love and sorrow, reigns the iris, a blossom not for the plucking, but to be planted at the foot of ruined altars, to remind that faith may rise triumphant on unsullied wings.
Another devotee of the iris said that when a group chanced to meet his eye in an English garden he was reminded of the gladiatorial hall, "Morituri te salutant" and Eden Phillpotts believes that they are to the garden what Chopin is to music, "the most wonderful, beautiful, and saddest of flowers; we sometimes miss the spirit in them, while overjoyed or overawed by the substance."
If you do not know the iris you have missed something in life. The garden books have not so much to say about the family as they should, being occupied with the com- moners, which may be met on more equal terms. Why we should shrink at approaching superiors I do not know, but if by chance a flower or a friend unveils mystery, in a moment we straightway seek out folk of our own kind whom we are sure of, and do not go forward on our knees and lift the veil to partake of the blessing of a nobler presence and the "benediction of the higher mood."
The superb varieties of iris grow as easily as their
THE HIGH TIDE OF JOY 77
relative wildings, which we seek in the swamps and plant in the marshy spots of our grounds. If one has reached that stage of years when his consciousness warns him that it is time to choose companionship to solace the hour when the race is to the swift, a garden inclosure to shut off the clamor of battle that tires the ears, then hunt for a favored spot that will make a bower of green in June.
Then with grave thought of what may fill your soul in the glory of June, choose iris susiana, the great Turkey fleur-de-lis, the mourning flower of the Japanese, "that I think in the whole compasse of nature's store there is not a more patheticall," writes quaint John Parkinson, and to the queen susiana present the king loreteti, the emblem of life and dawn in his brilliance and purity.
As soon as the frost withdraws from the earth the irises show the tips of their green blades, which advance in regular order from the underworld until a solid phalanx fills the space allotted to them. Nothing so cleanly or shining or strong as this splendid bed of foli- age, making ready for the culmination of its growing. On the morning appointed it bursts upon the eye in a splendor of purples, lavenders, violets, and yellows that pales the sunshine.
The honey scent once breathed is unforgotten among the experiences enriching a lifetime, and as the iris passion grows upon us, and more and more of the lovely species from China, Japan, Italy, or the secluded vales
78 THE JOY OF GARDENS
of the Himalayas come to dwell in our gardens, we may take comfort -in the thought that we are gathering the rarest offerings of June, the gladdest of all seasons to him who hath the secret learned "to mix his blood with sunshine and to take the wind into his pulses."
In mid-June comes an hour when garden color weaves a tapestried background for the parade of the Oriental poppies. Matchless in their beauty of scarlet and black, bursting their buds in the gray of a dawn, vanishing in the purple of dusk, it is well worth waiting a year to greet them as they flit across the threshold of summer in their brief span of life.
If you know the poppies' haunts haste to seek them out, — the odalisk, the gypsy queen, in fluted petticoats of red, flaunting their graces above fringes of silver green, passing languorously in a dance they learned long ago on the plain of Ind. They turn toward us with a look of mystery, and sway upon their stems as a Romany maid upon her dancing feet.
Why do they not speak1? The violet exchanges shy confidences in perfume, the tiger lily confesses volumes in sphinxlike wisdom, and we are loath to let the Oriental poppy escape without a hearing; its attitude is so elo* quent, its personality so vivid and glowing, and it nods as if it knew the secret of the ages.
Poppy friendship is a curious sentiment; it promises much, and when about to unfold its passion withdraws,
THE HIGH TIDE OF JOY 79
leaving behind it a warmth of devotion to its beauty and a tender sorrow that more of it was not ours. It is pleas- ant to imagine it has a place in the pretty theory of the transmigration of souls, wherein man's imperfect aspira- tions unfold by slow degrees from the nature of the insensate clod, gaining in spiritual loveliness through a cycle of many lives.
Why not, after wasting brute passion in the tiger, exhausting foolish loquacity in the parrot, soaring toward unattainable heights with the eagle, trying many paths to knowledge in the devious ways open to myriad- minded man — why not go a step farther and rest for a time to "climb to a soul in grass and flowers"?
You, perchance, in your pride, the tulip of the spring; your neighbor, the rose of a hundred leaves, and she with a desire for sunlight and color, an Oriental poppy, to dazzle the world with a spectacle of the garden afire, to shed beauty on the wind, and to take flight to other worlds when June has reached her perfect days.
Like the majority of good people we overlook in the crowds, day after day, whose virtues are not known until they do something to separate themselves from their fellows, there are many reliable garden flowers escaping the recognition of the passer-by until they reach the great events of their existence and astonish his eyes with blossoms, and he beholds an old friend before him.
Not so with the poppy tribes, which have an individ-
8o THE JOY OF GARDENS
uality so marked that the garden weeder does not mis- take them for waifs and strays when weeds are making a strong fight for possession. The infant poppy pushes a quaint little rosette of pale green leaves to the surface, the field poppy showing smooth texture and the Oriental one roughly furred. And as the warm rains fall they hold fast to this personal trait, standing alone in a blue- white among the somber foliage of foxgloves, cam- panulas, queens of the meadow, Canterbury bells, and larkspur.
All are ready for bloom at the midday of June, but nature seems aware it is the triumph of the Oriental poppy, and the unfurling buds of campanulas show dull blues, the foxgloves old rose and white, and other per- ennials join with pale yellows, bronze, and varied greens, as if agreed on harmony to create the scheme of richest cashmere color.
Then there dawns a rare day when the Oriental pop- pies spread their blood-red petals of crepy delicacy, opening wide their dusky purple hearts, and exhaling heavy, slumber-compelling odors, breathing the spell of the enchantment of summer. It is a triumph among nature's surprises.
The little field poppies, whose torches gleam in the yellow harvest fields and keep aflame all summer, are the broomstick witches of the wayside. There are dull days when I feel that it would pay "to go ten thousand
THE HIGH TIDE OF JOY 81
miles," as the old song has it, to look upon a hillside abloom with scarlet poppies. And when the sun rays are long and golden, lighting up the hidden fires in the poppy cups, the nodding blooms in the country lanes seem like the red kerchiefs on the heads of shy gypsy maids hasting to keep a tryst.
The garden log book records that the blackbirds sing in the linden trees, and weeds and white butterflies share joy and sorrow with the festival of the Oriental poppies. Butterfly sport seems a little business; not so little, how- ever, if you divide your heart between Oriental poppies and nasturtiums when the moon shines on midsummer nights. The swashbuckling cavaliers of the poppy world hide a bitterness in their veins to forbid salad-loving caterpillars, and even little flies and ants keep their dis- tance. But the gentle nasturtium falls victim if no butterfly net is out to capture white butterflies and moths, and a "prevention of cruelty to animals member" makes up her mind that it is a case of the fittest to survive.
Weed pulling must alternate with butterfly hunting until plants are big enough to shadow the earth, and then it must be butterfly hunting until frost. Both exer- cises are admirable to play upon muscles and temper, and more wholesome discipline than many a medieval penance we might name.
The whistle of the blackbird in the linden, celebrating
82 THE JOY OF GARDENS
the arrival of his first family in the nest and doing nothing in particular to help it along, is an exasperating neighbor. If only we knew how to train robins and blackbirds to feast on nasturtium caterpillars instead of boring the turf for earthworms, we would acquire ever- lasting fame in the garden books.
The nasturtium friend has two duties at his hand — butterfly and moth hunts and green-caterpillar catching. After all, why grumble? All is in the day's work, and the nasturtium border in cloth of gold, dewy, pungent, and beyond compare, is a reward. The south wind carries the fragrance of the linden bloom down to the weeding woman; the blackbird trills again that note of ravishing sweetness. It is the old tale of work and play, and to keep at it in good spirits is to make ready for the next transformation of June.
THE ODORS OF ARABY
A JOURNEY into the walled heart of a town, a night spent where every vista leads to chimneys or to the glittering allurements of city amusements, -is most salutary when the demon of restlessness stays the hand from weeding. Who can measure the gladness of the re- turn "? Who can picture that longing to be great enough to command, and rich enough to create, hanging gardens, wooded squares, and flowery terraces here and there and everywhere in the labyrinth of houses'?
Praying that an enlightened age may hasten the day when it shall be so, let us hasten to find a seat on the shaded side of the car whence the view will open on the park where the avenues of catalpas are holding aloft their bouquets of blossoms, and the lindens are opening their waxen bells for the honeybees. Along the way is a clover field, small clumps of blushing Alsatian clover, acting as forerunners to the acres of white across the road, where cattle stand knee deep in the perfection of June pastures.
And then comes "improved property." Why "im- proved," we wonder, with suburban homes touching 83
84 THE JOY OF GARDENS
elbows in twenty-five-foot lots, when the open country stretches free all around, and there might have been space for orchards and gardens'? Will there not be a great awakening for builders of that kind some day, when they see the error of their ways 2
The thought gathered like a dark cloud blown across a clear sky, and vanished before a whiff of fragrant rose- mary rising from the blossoming branches which a slim little woman in black, who had just entered the car, had knotted in the corner of her handkerchief and was now pressing against her cheek. The atmosphere was re- freshed, and the landscape seemed to unveil another garden where the pungent smell of box trees arose from an inclosing hedge of glossy dark foliage, where myrtle covered a terrace which sloped down to an herb garden with its company of sweet-scented plants.
"Who loves his garden still keeps his Eden" — for him paradise is regained very truly, as love is a generous re- vealer, bestowing a precious gift of insight ; and the lover of gardens may conjure them from the past or plant them wherever an ounce of earth takes hold in a crannied wall.
As the car sped on, the city smoke had settled on the distant horizon and the summer fields were making nature's gardens. It is wild-rose time, garlanding the prairies and forgotten byways; the spiderwort in in- imitable purple set among leaves of silvered green is
THE ODORS OF ARABY 85
spreading its beauty in the marshy hollows, and amid the ripened grasses are little colonies of boneset, everlasting, horsetail, and the first black-eyed Susans.
While this beauty caught the eye it required no un- common self-control to refrain from talking to the slim young woman in black who carried the sprig of rosemary. Would it have been an intrusion*? A short, fierce con- flict raged between the formal sense of propriety forbid- ding converse with strangers and the friendly impulse to exchange comment on the summer pageant with one who also liked rosemary. But the rare moment fled; before the shell of self was broken she had left the car, and a lonely little woman in black was taking her path down the dusty road between the fields of clover. Who knows but that we missed entertaining an angel unawares!
Back within our garden gate we speedily greet our own rosemary tree. No one can ever accuse a devoted gardener of gardening for appearances. When this hap- pens by chance the garden tells on its maker in unmis- takable terms. It is artificial, it is empty of sentiment, and it is a fictitious thing. The true garden is the comfort of those who hunger for friends. Just as there are book friends and picture friends for our moods, so there are flower friends. In as fine a sense they are as dear and, it may be, as consoling as you who are best beloved among the human friends that walk the earth.
Every child remembers the flower of his youth, and to
86 THE JOY OF GARDENS
many a one the sweet Williams have been the first. Here they are to-day in crimson, sanguine, and white. Stately and fringed, they have come for their summer visit. It was a happy thought to set them where they made a little hedge separating the herb garden from the posies. Long ago the old-man, lavender, thyme, and balm had a place among the hardy annuals in hopes that observant guests would come upon them unawares and be glad. And then followed the discovery that few take pleasure in odors, and fewer are observant; and the lemon verbena looked an alien, the old-man became shabby from the nippings of careless fingers, and the balm languished disconsolate.
And so a sunny corner behind the sweet Williams was planted for sweet odors of old days. It seems that the talent to enjoy fragrance is after all a gift of highly developed senses. Even more than the sense of taste the nostrils have the power to touch the springs of a forgot- ten past, and to one a crushed calycanthus bud brings the picture of a Pennsylvania hamlet with luxuriant gardens back of green-shuttered houses nestled deep in the Cumberland Valley; a dried sweetbrier is the magic of a romance; a spray of lemon verbena conjures memory of a tiny red prayer book, a high-backed pew, and long, long sermons while the birds were singing in the weeping willows overhanging moss-grown gravestones beyond the church door.
THE ODORS OF ARABY 87
In the little herb garden behind the sweet Williams the rosemary spreads its branches next a graceful rue, the pennyroyal and fennel are side by side, the old-man is sacred from desecrating hands, and thyme grown from seeds sent from Hymettus invites American bees. A silver sage, the purple-tipped lavender, and sturdy catnip make as pretty a group as any in the flower garden, and the mints, savory, basil, and balm have each a place.
The perfumes arising from the peonies, iris, and syringas culminate in the roses. Every blossom, how- ever humble — mignonettes, verbenas, alyssum — makes an offering filling the nights and the days with a fore- taste of scented breezes of a fairer world than ours. Go forth into the twilight and listen and wait in the stillness of the eve, and mayhap, like Socrates, you will fall upon your knees and pray: "O Pan, and all ye gods that haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward man" — nor dare there be any who will accuse you of irreverence to any in creation's plan.
It hints of self-denial to steal a morning from the days appointed for roaming the clover fields to spend it on a shady porch filling rose jars with dried leaves to sweeten the atmosphere of January. If in summer the senses are elevated to the seventh heaven of delight by the odors wafted from hay fields, in winter they rise to an exhil- aration of exquisite pleasure upon entering a rose-scented room.
88 THE JOY OF GARDENS
The magic of the rose, its thousand legends, answer to the spell cast by the aroma of an opened rose jar diffus- ing its presence like the shade of a beneficent genie from the land of Aladdin. Its memories give us privilege to moralize as we sift our rose leaves and spices. We are reminded that it is well to snatch sunny moments from the pleasure hunt of youth, and fill rose jars of remi- niscences to make brightness in the winter of life. Ah, but who can think of winter when the wild rose is abloom*? Away with all shadows set in motion to a minor strain by the hour among slugs and red spiders !
The old spell of the rose is upon us. It is the same weaving of wizardry that gives dreams of the Persian gardens, where nightingales and dewdrops sing and die for the love of a rose. It is this perfume that over- powers the brain, and the sense goes meandering in the mysterious ways of poesy. Close your eyes, and with the rose close to your lips yield to the charm.
It is all yours, this wealth of the world — the glamour of moonlight, the tinkle of a fountain, the song of a nightingale above the gentle twanging of a lute, and the fragrance of rose gardens in that far-away land of dreams — be it Persia or that one little garden hidden cherished in the memories of your heart.
All this with the incense that rises from the crushed petals on the altar of the rose !
Let us bury behind the books that unblushing
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romancer, the rose catalogue, which deceived us into believing that the prairies of the Illini might entertain hopes of bowers such as the talebearers told of the East. Led by their glamour we saw the beauty of lands of sun- shine, of vales of Cashmere, and Persian gardens where roses flourished of their own sweet will and scattered their fragrance to the thrumming of lutes, the trills of nightingales, and the quatrains of Omar.
The decalogue has nothing against the sin of desire to be a "rosarian," and a sense of justice rebels at the thought of that night when a rose catalogue set the brain afire and put wisdom in the closet while opening the pocketbook. Of course the cherished roses have lived — just lived — to be a battlefield for microbes unseen, slugs and worms too evident. The crimson rambler rambles cheerfully, the rugosa is spreading its tropical foliage. They leave nothing to be desired as far as their duties are concerned; but ask not of the Provence roses, the Irish roses, the rare hybrids that have excited so keen a rivalry among the perverse creatures infesting the rose garden.
At the end of the street is one of those old-fashioned cottages, now a dusky white, with timeworn green shut- ters. "What man failed to do with his architectural opportunities, nature has done most willingly with roses. All the past month young and old have leaned over its paling fence and gloated upon its disorderly charms, and then passed on without a thought of the careful lawns
90 THE JOY OF GARDENS
beyond. The woman who lives in the dusky cottage has roses to spare, and yet has never read a rose book or aspired to be a "rosarian."
The eglantine hedge, planted no one knows when, has crept around three sides of the lot within the paling fence, stretching out long, sweeping branches to arch the narrow gate. All the neighborhood knows that it is sweetbrier, and in June no schoolgirl who stops to greet its owner goes away without her bouquet.
At the side of the porch is a clump of Scotch roses, a variety that has adopted the climate as its own, and, being another of the delicious scented sweetbriers, adds to its grace in small roses of lovely shining yellow, a transmuted sunshine, a cloth of gold, if ever one was permitted by fairydom to drape a rosebush.
Not far away is another unnamed common rose — but is any rose common'? It bears a thousand leaves treas- ured by the makers of rose jars, leaves that shed a richer odor on being crushed, just as some lives bring out their loftier virtues under the pressure of adversity. The Baltimore belle and prairie queen have wreathed the window frames, and among the tangled grass below the wild prairie roses have crept in from the roadside with bouncing Bets and yarrow.
As we turn the corner of the house where the sun glares down on the clayey soil, we discover a small plan- tation of roses covered with buds and open blossoms.
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Why this prosperity amid neglect, when ours, watched by day and night, are the victims of hungry pests'? What have we done to call down insect Goths and Vandals'?
There is a freemasonry among gardeners safe to take advantage of, if we keep alive the right spirit of humility about our own successes and are more willing to take advice than give it. An offer of a pitcher of cold butter- milk on a hot morning, a plate of fresh huckleberry cake, or a basket of black cherries are the proper keys to invite civility, and the most crabbed gardener stiffened in his own opinions about you and your affairs must look kindly upon a Greek bearing such gifts.
However, a gentle neighborly curiosity impelled a visitor to approach the dusky cottage with a peace offer- ing, and to regard the owner of the sunbonnet with gracious deference. She was on her knees, with leather gloves, trowel, and clippers, giving service to General Jacqueminot, Marechal Niel, Clothilde Soupert, and Bon Silene, and a sweet sanguine rose nestled in her hair. She had no views on roses, but used her woman's wit to whisk her spiders with a broom, sprinkle an emul- sion from her own recipe of hellebore, soapsuds, and what-not, and there were two or three old umbrellas kept to hoist over precious buds when a thunderstorm was due ; and her reward was roses.
If fate denies those under the clouds of city smoke the right to become "rosarians" they may have other
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compensations. Every one who has a garden expects to hear how the roses are doing — keeping alive that pleasant fiction that if we will we may have them — and so we may, if we shut our ambitions from the varieties that belong to Provence and lands where it is ever summer and always afternoon, without the rains of a dying year and a winter of discontent.
Our sweet peas are like girl graduates, pretty, dainty, and youthful. They have come in rose time, and climbed high on their screen, and their little bonnets look far down the road. Cutting sweet peas before breakfast is a real sweetener of the atmosphere before planning to work, perchance to hunt stakes and tear strips of muslin to tie up the tall dahlias and gladioli. Dahlias take hours of coaxing, while the gladioli seem to consider life an easy affair; yet the dahlia fancier would not give one root for a dozen gladioli, and the devotee of gladioli would laugh to scorn a devotion to dahlias.
As we are denied glittering successes in roses, it is within the power of a tactful gardener to transfer his loves. Perchance when our back is turned on red spiders and slugs to lavish affection on some hardier plant than the rose, the pests themselves will travel along and meet a Goliath lurking in unexplored vegetation. Or it may be, if we let them alone they will find rumpled rose leaves in their Capua, and a gourmand appetite will urge them to anarchy and to devour one another.
THE ODORS OF ARABY 93
A devotion to the rose must be fostered as one of the finer passions of life, in which feeble human power offers a gift of affection to nature's supreme flower, without rival in color, and with a breath blown by enchantment from the Elysian fields to this commonplace earth of ours.
ET IN ARCADIA FUISTI
;<T ET not the grass grow on the paths that lead to the -L 4 house of your friend," warned the calendar for the day, inspiring the dreaming garden maker to take a subur- ban road to discover the triumphs of Phyllis and her flock of active children. It is thus that fate knocks at the door and points to unseen vistas in the land of the heart's desire, which in this instance was a garden not alone for to-day but for to-morrow. The home was modest and befitting the income of a city man, and, seen from afar, it was invested with a halo of glory of blooming shrubs. In common with many college-bred parents, these had their ideas concerning the bringing up of children, which, being in the spirit of the time, hinged on the vital impor- tance of play in the open air. Who with six lively young animals in the first stages of boyish independence could hope to keep flower beds in the pink of perfection in the confines of a seventy-five-foot lot?
A stern-hearted guardian and a bundle of switches might terrorize the thoughtless crew who, however de- voted to posies, must still have space to play ball and tumble about. Then as for fair Phyllis, no longer did 94
ET IN ARCADIA FUISTI 95
"fleet the time carelessly as in the golden world" of girl- hood— tiny boys and girls clamored for the hours, and gardening minutes were uncertain.
And so it came about that the shrub plantation trans- formed the little villa the year around, making it seem the haunt of a sleeping beauty in the wood, protected from the public road by a hedge of Japanese barberry, ever beautiful from budding time until the birds had nipped the last berry of the scarlet fringe that hung over the snowdrifts. A warm spell in April was sure to hang out the signals of gold on the forsythia massed together in a corner, and they have scarcely faded before the peach and the redbud trees shed the blushes of the rose on the other side of the house, where the children are hunting for violets in the grass.
After that, the long procession of lilacs, purple and white, between the neighbor's driveway and the lawn, begins to open clusters of bloom, and brings the walkers of a Sunday afternoon from far and near to sniff their sweetness at a distance and to look with longing eyes on the Japanese quince painting a bright spot of sea-shell red against the gray of stone foundations, or the rosy loveliness of the flowering almond that becomes visible on the other side of the porch as one goes on. In May the bush honeysuckle sheltering the kitchen door with jealous care is in bloom, and the snowballs loom up like ghosts in the twilight when you chance to pass that way.
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What a wonderland of delight it is to the children from the outer world, so full of mysterious hiding places, ever rich in surprises of birds' nests and blossoms ! It is a real fairyland, changing from day to day, and should you be one of the favored friends who may pull the latchstring of the gate under the arch of trumpet creeper, a day is all too short to visit the blossoming shrines and learn the latest tidings from the catbirds' nest that has made the regions about the flowering syringas forbidden ground.
It may be that the sweetbrier will be in bud, or that a single spray will have been kept for you on the pungent flowering currant. Perhaps you will hear that mush- rooms have come up where the meadowsweet was planted, or that a real fairy ring was discovered in the clover in the calycanthus bower; for surely so strange a flower as this, smelling of pineapple, must bloom for gnomes or brownies.
You may be taken to the nook planted with shrubs which you helped dig once upon a time in a ravine hard by, and your counsel asked about the red dogwood, the pussy willow, the buttonball, and hop tree, and you may discover that the shadbush is in bloom and one of the prettiest shrubs of all in the lacey robes of spring.
The snowberry is not yet flowering, but already an ingenious young rascal has rigged a scarecrow to warn off the birds, that snowberries and moutain-ash fruit may
A JAPANESE GARDEN AT WYNNEWOOD, PENNSYLVANIA
ET IN ARCADIA FUISTI 97
hang for winter provisions. And here are the latest guests, a double-flowering crab and a staghorn sumac, and in the background the weigelas and altheas, the harvest home and the Rose of Sharon, which will be gay in midsummer and early autumn.
While a garden is first of all a place for flowers, grounds are first of all a place for shrubs, which are but flowers of a larger growth. The shrub, be it calycanthus or flowering currant, is a grateful thing that will grow into the affections. Many shrubs chuckle in their secret hearts that they are always there, showing color or fruit or gallant shapes against snowdrifts when the perennials are nodding and the annuals have gone to their long rest.
If the plot of ground is large enough, and the heart likewise, there is much satisfaction in making compan- ionship of flowers and shrubs, using the latter for a back- ground or a shelter, and cherishing one while you cherish the other. The shrub has its willful sins and pestering temptations, with as many parasitic enemies as the most devoted among us, seeking the upward way to grace and flowering virtue.
If anywhere on earth, we believe in his garden, most of all, a man has a right to indulge his fancy. Set the compass by the polestar of beauty and delight, and what matter if others think you mad ! Go on and olant what you like.
A shrubbery lot comes a step nearer paradise if a
g8 THE JOY OF GARDENS
flower garden with hollyhocks, foxgloves, mignonette, and sweet-smelling and gay-looking blooms congregate where the sun shines. If joy is overabundant, then we can afford to hedge ourselves in with tall lilacs or mock orange, but one with the true beauty hunger would like a window to peep into his neighbor's orchard, and an opening where the neighbor could look in. Joy is a neighborly spirit, and a rambling company of rugosa roses bearing flowers for June and fruit for December for a pretending barrier, with outlooks here and there, would keep life's business in a summer mood.
On the lawn where the grass had been clipped away from the iris bed to let the sun warm the earth about the plant roots, a morning-glory seed sown by the wind had taken root and sent 'up a graceful stem full six inches in length that reached out a sensitive terminal bud to grasp a spray of iris about unfurling its purple bloom. Hard- ness of heart must be a virtue of a weeding woman. No good, aspiring soul realizes the seeds of cruelty buried deep within it until, in the guise of a gardener, duty points to pulling roots, slaying grubs and slugs, scaring sparrows and predatory kittens, and shooing chickens and the investigating child.
A stern sense of the survival of the fittest bars out the quality of mercy. Either admit sparrows, kittens, and youngsters, and make heyday with them while bidding farewell to neat garden beds, or maintain a firm front
ET IN ARCADIA FUISTI 99
and debar them all. Weeds are such a little way from humankind. If you have fought crab grass, plantain, or sprawling vines, sooner or later an eerie feeling possesses you that they know more than they confess, and that they are scheming at night while you are asleep. You wonder in what phase of existence they learned their tricks.
This wee morning-glory was bound to succeed, for it had been practicing throwing its lasso tendril by the light of the moon, as the perfect spiral bending toward the iris told too plainly. It seemed a sin to uproot it; but what about the waiting iris bloom, what of the artist iris lover to whom the offense of mixed plants was a greater sin than the ending of the life of the morning-glory vine*? With a look to right and to left to see that no one was watching, the tender-hearted weeder lifted the earth about the morning-glory roots with a wide scoop of the trowel, and, all unconscious that it was being taken to other worlds, it was replanted beside the kitchen porch in another warm, sunny spot, and a string made ready for its climbing.
Of all the plants that grow, vines are the most respon- sive and companionable. Their unceasing efforts "up, up to the light" help the soul in its battle for courage ; and, if one lacks amusement for the idle hour, it is certain to be found among the vines. Ten or a dozen are not too many for the garden that is to be a "sanctuary of sweet and placid pleasure." Each has its crochets, its fancies,
ioo THE JOY OF GARDENS
and its own sweet will, which to-day it will bend in gentle compliance to serve your own, and to-night go wandering.
We love it all the more because it is a bit willful, and because it will not be led by the rules of bittersweet, of honeysuckle, or of any other climber, taking the chances of its own vagaries. Manlike, you may string your nets and offer support, wooing — "I love you, love me back" ; but the vine, responding for the hour, reaches out long sprays to tempt the winds the moment you look the other way.
Fortunately vines keep on climbing whatever the weather, and it is a comfort to one in the toils of the day's work to know that his climbers are still aspiring. Nor need we go to India or Japan for beauty. In our own vacant lot is the wild grape, and many a forest oak, long dead, is draped with Virginia creeper, from which a start- ing plant may be taken without heaping guilt on your soul. The wild grape is a jewel among the vines; beauti- ful in grace and color, its leaves unsurpassed in shape, it blooms in early spring and in June sheds a delicious fragrance. In July its foliage is luxuriant, hiding the ripening grapes.
Your formal garden neighbor may object to reckless vine planting; but why ask him at all, for the probability is that he does not plant anything*? The stone wall will last a century, though vine fingers are feeling their way into the mortar. If it is so poorly built that it cannot
ET IN ARCADIA FUISTI 101
stand a Boston ivy, then the sooner the vine makes an end to it the better.
A vine-covered wall is the best recipe that I know for driving off the blues, and dull care cannot hold sway while vines are growing. Early in the morning you dis- cover that the vines need pruning; at noon you must climb the Indder to turn curious tendrils aside from creep- ing where you have forbidden ; at three o'clock a sparrow colony has chosen a location; at five a tent caterpillar has made its web, and so your business goes on all night while swallows and bats are on the wing.
The wistari? magnifica is a splendid grower to set at the post of a pergola or an arbor. It is an event in life to sit beneath its shade when June has opened its racemes of purple lilacs. The trumpet creeper is another of my favorites, not quite as aristocratic as the wistaria, but rugged, tropical, and glorious when it offers its swinging stems of flaming trumpets, and bees hum in and out, and every ant colony far and near sends its cohorts to steal the nectar from its cells. The Dutchman's pipe is another sturdy vine growing luxuriantly, and there is the new Jack-and-the-beanstalk, the Kudzu vine, a perennial that travels seventy feet in a summer.
What of the honeysuckle? Who that has ever hung enchanted over a spray of creamy pink and white, sweeter than the perfume of any other flower, would forget it*? It is the flower of the poet, created for bowers and arbors.
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The delicious fragrance of the white jasmine makes it a rival, the beauty of the Japanese clematis asks for its share of admiration, but none excels the honeysuckle — though if there is garden room I should have them all and rejoice in their companionship.
The large flowering clematis draping a gray wall in its purple is a charming thing; and then there are the lesser ones of the same species of pink and violet and white, most useful when we need a mass of color to put us in singing humor.
We need be wise in an age of the renaissance of the formal garden, lest our impulses for unschooled freedom, and plantations rich in suggestion of jocund beauty, of tender color and perfume, are bound by conven- tions. What more shall we ask of life than that it per- mit us to remain companionable and to become more companionable?
A screen at the kitchen door draped with common morning-glories — if you have not the Japanese variety — is a haven of beauty in the early morning and an encourager of sociable small talk. The makeshift of a coal house or tool shed will throw an artist into ecstasy if overrun with a foxgrape you have stolen from the woods, and the scarlet runner taking its way along the fence top, the gourd and balloon vines, the red cypress, are alive with quaint tricks, and the most social of all social climb- ers to take into the family.
ET IN ARCADIA FUISTI 103
Have you lost your faith in miracles? Then rise with the sun to-morrow, when garden and orchard and meadow are jeweled with dew. Stand before the humble morning- glory that you have despised, and while you look and would count the sparkle of crystal drops upon the emer- ald leaves, a host of flowers unfurl at some divine com- mand, chalices of pearl and blue and rose are lifted in adoration before the shrine of the rising sun, bringing another day to a thoughtless world waking under the. azure skies and yet forgetful of the heavenly presence.
WHEN BEES COURT THE CLOVER
A GROUP of double pink hollyhocks, blushing on the outer petals, deep rose at the hearts, set on stately stalks amid velvety leaves of richest green, nodding above a thatched beehive, compose as pretty a picture as one can find in all the floral books painted by landscape architects.
The association of bees and hollyhocks in this instance was one of those fortunate accidents brought about by a benign goddess of affairs who feared mischance would follow our reasoning. The giant snapdragon had been thought of to fill the corner behind the hive, the pentste- mons, the Canterbury bells, and foxgloves, but none at- tained the height of the hollyhock, nor did any own its air of remoteness and self-sufficiency. It seemed to have a sense of maintaining a decorative position.
It alone of all the hardy plants seemed to put in no plea for neighborly attention, and, for all we knew, was, in its flowery ways, pluming itself on being equal to loneliness and the exigencies of solitude — gifts not granted the common lot.
Lest the imp of discontent should creep in, as it may in exclusive society, it is well to have a note of life, and here 104
BEES COURT THE CLOVER 105
were set the busy humming bees to make work and play at the feet of the queenly hollyhocks.
Many a time we have blessed that hour of decision, for it is one of the very few corners of the garden to which we dare take a guest in confidence that he will not lift a critical eyebrow and comment on a might-have-been. To be a truly social spirit in a wide circle of friends it is necessary to cultivate an amiability to accept the criticism of those who have not learned the A B C of tact.
Only one remark lingers concerning the hollyhocks, and that was from an oversensitive person who said they reminded him of dairymaids, and ought to be relegated to kitchen gardens to give the artistic note to pumps and milk pans. Sheep in a painted landscape affected him in the same unpleasant manner — as they belonged to a sheep- fold and the market place, why drive them into our deco- rations? This one commonplace out of mind, the hollyhocks present a fine tableau of dignified plants with noble blossoms attended by adoring servitors of honey- seeking bees.
Once in a long time, and always in an out-of-the-way corner of the world, in Woods Hole, the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, or in Devon, England, lives a fanatical hollyhockian. He or she plants hollyhocks for variety, glories in numbers and queer sorts, knows them by name, raises them from seed or grafts, plants cuttings, divides roots, and does things that we should never dare to do.
io6 THE JOY OF GARDENS
Ten years ago such a person raised hollyhocks near Woods Hole — she may be there still — and travelers came from afar to lean on the fence and look at them. A few descendants of these thrifty plants ventured to the West, by way of seeds, in the corner of a pocket handkerchief. Of course they ought not to have grown, according to the views of strict morality, but every old-time gardener will tell you that stolen seeds do best — not that I would en- courage thievery, not for all the world; but there is such a saying, and hence the underground traffic in seeds in letters and vest pockets.
You know as well as I that if the flowers of the world waited to be listed on bills and given for coin, few would be grown, and the human carrier who takes a seed to plant is helping survival along, which the grub and the slug are ever lying in wait to destroy. Back of every flower bed lies a page of history its owners do not inadvertently tell.
Remembering the virtues of hollyhocks, it is strange that more hedges are not planted and the beautiful array of colors made familiar. The pinks and reds, frilly double whites and yellows, hold a place all alone, and the tall, well-proportioned plants make a distinguished deco- ration in grounds. So many other plants give bloom for the table and bouquets, and may be plucked, and have fragrance, that the home gardener can afford to give a space to a hedge or a corner of choice hollyhocks just for their ornament and value as a background. Of their
BEES COURT THE CLOVER 107
disadvantages nothing need be said, as they are easily kept free of pests and their merits gain a firm hold on the heart. Having the virtues of use and beauty, they are regarded highly.
While one beehive made a picture with the group of pink hollyhocks, another was hidden in a clump of rich yellow that towered above the French marigolds, coreop- sis, and calendulas, all yellows. It was a quaint arrange- ment, and artistic enough to call a painter with his three-legged stool and easel to sketch the tangle. The dairymaid character is not altogether a misplaced idea with sunflowers or hollyhocks, for a brief glance will show how difficult it is to be content with a refined flower of gentle lineage at their feet, while, when alone, the robust quality of stem and foliage contribute to a barbaric sort of beauty.
Have you ever planned a fete rich in tricks and sur- prises, and then awakened on the day with a beating heart lest the spectacle you had pictured had been shifted by a hand of destiny touching the kaleidoscope, and something else meet your view?
This should be the feeling of one who has given the affection to a garden of annuals and looks forward to early July, for July is the test of planting for color and midsummer beauty. Just now we lucky ones are glad if the hollyhocks of pink and healthy color are making bright their clumps, if the sapphire-blue larkspurs are
io8 THE JOY OF GARDENS
massing their reflections of the sky above snowy borders of candytuft and banks of recklessly blooming feverfew.
Earth has two orders of gardeners: the domestic kind who owns a "flower bed" into which he cannot crowd too many sweet, familiar flowers, and the trained gardener who plans on paper and judges all his success from effects seen from the street. The first weaves posies into his nature as he weaves the flowers of art and poetry, to en- rich his personality and to open his vision to human sympathy; and the second, well-meaning enough, esti- mates from the critic's point of view.
It would be a privilege to have a tender side for the lovely things behind the hedge, and to be able to satisfy the rules of art in color and arrangement; but if I can have only one gardener as a friend, give me the posy lover.
Over the hills and far away in the true farming country the white clover has thrown its veil of gossamer across the face of the landscape. The fresh green of the herbage takes on a silver sheen spreading from the inclosed pas- ture te the very edges of the dusty roadside and along the garden path; and had you seen it at sunrise you would have caught a glimpse of a thousand jeweled dewdrops spangling its folds ere the sunbeams caught them aloft into the azure atmosphere.
Look to-morrow morning, and impassioned July will have torn it away and the meadows will be blushing rosy
BEES COURT THE CLOVER 109
red. White clover's reign has given place to a new order of summer time, and all nature is paying obeisance to overblown blossoms of pale crimson.
The delicate fragrance of flower petals that lingered from the hours of June and culminated in the breath of white clover has vanished in the presence of the tropical odors of July in its prime. White-clover perfume is as elusive as that arising from swinging censers above the Virgin's shrine in Old World chapels, but red-clover fra- grance has all the alluring qualities of the pungent scents of sandalwood and Eastern spices.
Well should nature lovers cry "All hail !" in the hour of clover bloom, for these are the true aristocrats of the pastures, and have climbed high in the scale of evolution. The genuine thoroughbred, conscious that he is fittest to survive, hates classification and analysis of his family in- heritance. It is enough that he has selected admirable qualities of each generation, as he has held his own in the struggle for existence, and that he has been able to trans- mit the best to his progeny. Why talk about it at all, say they; why not fix all your powers to win over circum- stance, and "make stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things'"?
This is what the clover has done. The wee white clover, with its thousands of creeping roots feeling their way in the darkness and lifting the heavy soil to let sun- light and air into the depths, scatters its gifts of nitrogen
no THE JOY OF GARDENS
and gives to the earth as much as it takes. Like the soul of a saint, it makes better the places that shelter it. And counting its production of leafage and blossom, its stores of honey and meed of beauty, aside from forage value, the clover should be considered among the most welcome guests, as it really is, of the farming lands.
It is well worth while to adopt the clovers among our acquaintances. Pluck one little pea-shaped floret from the clover head and note its close resemblance to the white flowers that graced the acacia in June. Then hold it close to the splendid purple wistaria hanging from the trellis, and recall the locust bloom of springtime, the gorse and golden broom that decorate the Scotch highlands, the little blue vetch and purple nonesuch of the roadside and pastures, and, finally, turn to the sweet pea of the flower borders and the blossoms of the vegetable garden ; and lo ! they are all of one kindred. The modest white clover, the loyal shamrock, and its prodigal sister the red clover, are leaders in the evolution of this honored family of flower folk.
All the virtues that a kindly providence bestows upon the bloom of plants have been awarded the clover. They have changed more to suit their particular habits than any other species of their relatives. Beauty and perfume are theirs, and they are distinctively bee flowers. Each head of clover is composed of thirty or forty tiny white or purplish pea flowers, every one set in a protecting hairy
BEES COURT THE CLOVER 111
calyx of its own. The prickly hedge of thorns did not guard the sleeping beauty more securely from marauders until the right prince should come than do these bristling hairs protect the honey store from robber ants, giving only before the ardor of the honeybee.
The advance of the clover floret has modified its orig- inal shape, and it no longer resembles the common pea blossom, which has four distinct and separate petals. In the clover floret these will be seen to have grown together at the base, making a single tube most convenient for honey hunters. Yet look farther. Not only is the bee served, but nature has seen to it that the clover should benefit by the change. The stamens of the floret have coalesced with the petal tube, and the entering bee pays toll for his honey by scattering the pollen and fertilizing the blossom, making it a certain seed bearer.
Every one with a taste for sweets knows the flavor of clover honey. It inherits the deliciousness of the nectar of the gods gleaned from the thymy banks of the vale of Hymettus and the slopes of Parnassus; and who dares deny that the clover meadows were there, and but escaped the eyes of the poet though he inhaled their fragrance*? For no thymy banks can vie with a clover field in mid- summer.
The red clover claims the splendid humblebee for its very own. His proboscis was designed to penetrate its long trumpet and carry off the honey collected in the
112 THE JOY OF GARDENS
heart of the floret. The relationship of bees and clover is most intimate; so deep, in fact, that red clover would suffer for the assistance of the big burly black-and- gold humblebee, and all clover decline in the scale, if robbed of insect friends.
The humor of the scientist, who gravely reasoned that the crop of a field was dependent upon the spinsters of a neighborhood, has an argument so acceptable that we are willing to believe it. Its logic has wit in it. The play of field mice in the stubble is pretty sport, and when they go ahunting who would blame them for stalking the hum- blebees as game1? But again it happens as in life, the victor must be vanquished, and the roving tabby cat pampered by old maids is the Nemesis.
My neighbor of single blessedness has often bewailed the superfluous woman. Let this thought comfort her, that she has not been forgotten in the machinery of the universe. While she takes her walks abroad at evening, with Madame Tortoiseshell at her side, they both are actors in the great scheme involving the clover history, and their stage of usefulness is the clover meadow in blossom time, and even now while the sun drops low be- hind the distant hills and the vesper bells are ringing.
A PERGOLA IN A LOS ANGELES GARDEN
IN MIDSUMMER FIELDS
WHO counts the cost of a thunderstorm in July when that in May is worth a load of hay, and one in June wins a silver spoon? Every raindrop refreshing the thirsty flower is far more welcome than a diamond would be, sparkling in its purity, to play the part of a perpetual dewdrop; and no theatrical spectacle can equal the gran- deur of rain-laden clouds heaped mountain high with frosty, inaccessible summits.
The cloud panorama changes continually, never re- peating its scenes, ever wonderful ; and when it reaches a culmination of angry portent, heavy with gathered mois- ture, fired with stored electricity, it outdoes any "thriller" presented by an ingenious showman. '
Cloud watching is a pastime without disappointment. It is so far beyond human meddling that I feel as if I were looking into other worlds, and am made rich in expe- riences of fear, of awe and reverence, and delight that puny man dares enter into an appreciation of visible ex- citement in nature in which all his wisdom has no part.
As the thunderclouds roll on the horizon, and the dark- ness deepens, and the storm gathers, we recall that it was "3
ii4 THE JOY OF GARDENS
courage of an UDCOOBDGD order that inspired Benjamin Franklin to fly his kite and to flout the warning given Prometheus when he aspired to steal the fire from heaven. The age has produced only one Franklin^ one daring soul to reach out to the clouds and open another wonder to the
Before the approaching storm the nerves are keyed to a keen state of excitement. The elements let loose tangled ^itriflfr of lightning nminons flashlights gl are ?nd vanish, and loud peals of thunder seem to rend the clouds and to shake the solid earth on which we stand, playing havoc with nature and man's petty schemes.
After it is over the rain has fallen and the black vapors have gone with the wind, the storm muttering sullenly in the distance. Then the sun shines out sweetly, as if there had been no buisl of temper, the rain-washed skies are a heavenly blue, and the flowers lift their tattered petals to smile as before. The rain has purified the atmosphere, the ground is saturated, apd the garden begins to
The July snrriimr, ripening the harvest fields and AfAlMig a fervid beat to hasten the growing com and to dry the hay, is a mischief-maker among our annuals. If it has its way seeds would be maturing and blossom time a thing of the past. While out in tbe country the farmer
IS fnimr|h|TMy his o flUfff!^^** tifff QtV Pj^^Cf^n^T t lilUS to Tff^
forecasts of the weather bureau as he picks up his
IN MIDSUMMER FIELDS 115
morning paper. All signs seem to fail in dry weather; the poplars show the white of their leaves and prove false prophets, the birds fly low, and the spiders spin, all to no
The clouds rising in the southwest we were sure held the rains and, filling us with hope, crept aside to pour their waters on more favored pastures, Long experience has taught that a shower will do more for our blossoming beds than all the nights of a week devoted to work with the hose. Nature knows the right temperature, and just how to wash foliage and send streams to the roots.
BAoR. gardens have been ruined by careless sprinklers than by a dry spell, and sometimes weed pulling, stirring the sun-baked beds with a hoe, and faithful clipping of seed pods and dry AMPULS* will keep blossoms unfolding in a healthier condition than if sprinkled. The calendu- las, marigolds, coreopsis, calliopsis, and petunias should begin to look their best, and if an annual does not show ambition, now is the time to pull it up.
The thunderstorm of the early morning, clearing about six o'clock, is an invitation to be out. It delays the open- ing of the morning-glories, which the lazy sleeper rarely sees. The new Japanese morning-glory is a beautiful addition to the fair company of crystal cups, pink-tinted shells, velvet purples, and royal crimsons that the morn- ing-glory lover has ever looked for. The pillars on the porch and the long strings made taut for their pleasure are
ii6 THE JOY OF GARDENS
twined by ambitious climbers going as high as the law allows.
Out from the heart-shaped leaves push the tightly twisted rolls of buds, wrapped carefully for the eventful instant when, without warning, they gracefully unfurl, turning their perfect flowers to the morning sun. The opening of morning-glories creates a transformation scene, the green expanse being flower-decked while you catch your breath with wonder.
The evening primrose at sundown is as prompt as a clock. There is a trio of the wild plants just over the fence standing silent and without interest. If you know the secret you may imagine that the heart of the flower is throbbing in haste, as it bares its beauty without warn- ing, and scarcely has it spread the golden petals when a thousand moths come posthaste to fan it with their white wings and to taste of its nectar.
July has its compensations. The clematis Jackmanii and the traveler's joy celebrate their own time. The pur- ple clematis Jackmanii demands that it should have a corner all its own, but how graceful it is as it waves its star flowers over the trellis of green ! The traveler's joy, another clematis, seems to gain in grace as the days grow colder, and heaps hundreds of snowy flowers upon its stems, a very prodigal of its own wealth.
As the days pass, the trumpet creeper wins its way into real garden favor; but if you would see it at its very best
IN MIDSUMMER FIELDS 117
go to some country town where flowers are loved, and look for trumpet creepers on every woodshed roof. Neg- lected and forgotten shacks are bowers of green, and above them wave the luxuriant bunches of blossoms of the trumpet vine.
The cobaea and Dutchman's pipe, as well as the scarlet runner, put out flowers in July, and then it is well to take note of those one would like to call his own, a vine to wreathe an unsightly window to make it a joy to the eyes, an awkward corner that would gain by a clematis trellis, or a sunny side to a porch which might become in- viting if screened by a thrifty vine.
In the calendar of the wild-flower lover, April is the month of snowdrops and the frail Easter flowers, May puts on a touch of color in winking Marybuds, cowslips, and apple bloom, and June roses have stirred many a poet to song, while the air is heavy with grape blossoms and syringas and drying rose leaves.
After the flowers of early spring have gone their ways the July hedgerows adorn themselves in traveler's joy and broideries of color most enchanting. The meadows have put off their paler green to don tints rich in sugges- tions of bronze and reds from the ripened flowers of the grass. Here and there in the lush places, where a spring bubbles up or a bit of bog remains from days of long ago, a patch of Turk's-cap lilies flaunt their scarlet, or a royal iris holds up its banners.
ii8 THE JOY OF GARDENS
Flower gathering in July is replete with satisfaction. The days are warm, and lingering in the fields wraps the senses in a delicious sense of well-being. The sunshine has not reached the fervid heat of August, nor is there the chill and the mist that reminded one that ever- blithesome May had an edge to her temper. July crowns the summer in flowers that do not wither easily, and per- mits us to feel the full glory of the ripening year. It is then we like to go back to the old home and to revisit the haunts of childhood.
July spreads its vines and full-blown foliage over all, and dresses the fields in a prosperous harvest. On every side sound the notes of cicadas and crickets, and the nest- ing birds have not yet ceased their singing.
The returning wanderer, who had left the farm when a child, remembered how the bouncing Bets straggled along the road to the very gateway. Perhaps they would meet him now. Sure enough, when he turns the corner at the crossroads a bouncing Bet looks up shyly from the roadside, just as her cousins peep from every byway at this season. But in the course of time the bouncing Bets have increased in family, and behold, they have stolen through the gate, and a careless mower has permitted them to form a colony in a miniature hedge all along the inner fence.
Out on the roadside the mullein has opened its velvety leaves in a perfect rosette and is training its tall stems,
IN MIDSUMMER FIELDS 119
which rise with the aspiring lines of the great candles be- fore an altar. Here and there and everywhere creeps the camomile, starred with its yellow-centered daisies. Among it the smartwood has taken root and, feeling the impulse of summer, has hung out a rose-tipped and grace- ful plume of prince's-feather. Near the horseblock live the same little groups of butter and eggs, and the toadflax that keeps its snapdragon flowerets as dainty and velvet- lipped as if sheltered in the garden.
Along this same roadway are islets of white clover, sending out runners and tracing pretty patterns over what else were barren ground. Just across yonder fence acres of red clover are in bloom, with an army of bumblebees foraging for sweets amid the blossoms. The fragrance comes with every waft of the breeze. Here it was that we hunted for field mice, and here the great owl hovered at night and "came down like a wolf on the fold."
The "Marsh," as it is called, was the favored abiding place of many flowers in June. Now in the distance the scarlet of lilies can be seen. The white patch, with yel- low at the edges, is the yarrow bed, and where the hill- side rises to a drier stratum the pink and white boneset is in view. In the moister places the asclepias and butterfly weeds flourish to their heart's content. There are more of them to-day than twenty years ago, when a child wandered among them.
The yellow sneezeweed grew on the dry upland — a
120 THE JOY OF GARDENS
mass of sunny yellow painted against a clump of dark witch-hazel hints that it may be there to-day. In a cer- tain opening in the grove the evening primroses kept com- pany all by themselves. No blossom had a clearer yellow or a daintier structure. In the fence corners the more ple- beian assemble among the tall grass — the coarse cone flow- ers, some gaillardias, and spikes of warm blue vervain and Indian clover and wild parsnip.
From this fence corner one can look down the creek, where grew the cowslips of young days. A warm March afternoon, when the first blush of green was stealing across the meadow, the discovery of the cowslip was re- corded. A shallow black pool covered the bog, and in the midst of the blackness were leaves of tender green and golden-cupped flowers which seemed to have stolen their sheen from the gold of the springtide. The long stems twined in wreaths and cowslip balls — for they were cow- slips according to the old botany book.
It was a never-to-be-forgotten event — the golden hour of cowslip acquaintance. It was fairy gold, however, for it vanished when the child with the old botany book found that, according to another flower-namer, this "cow- slip" was a marsh marigold, and the primula veris, the "primrose" of her affections, was in reality the cowslip of correct classification. A stubborn affection retained the primrose on the river's brim a primrose ever, and the cowslip the yellow of marsh marigold. The old botany
IN MIDSUMMER FIELDS 121
book, faithless in its mission, was thrown into the fire, for it had misnamed and had led astray ideals. As life went on the cowslip illusion remained. No flower in all floral history has a more contradictory record.
Another May, and a cowslip hunt led the way in tri- umph to a colony of dodecatheons, shooting stars, the "cowslip" of many botanists, a flower pale and rosy, with a beaked tip, and called by the children "bird-bills."
And when another season came, and the same cowslip lover went hunting the fairy flower of youth, a learned botanist led the way through dark woods and wet places, through bracken and moss, where an opening let the sun- shine in, and there, bluer than the sky, drooped the bells of mertensia virginica.
"Behold the cowslip," he cried, "and I am the only man in these parts that knows the true cowslip !"
The flower lover was silent. Let the Persians call their cyclamens violets or cowslips, a rose by any other name; time had taught her that flower-naming was as much an invention as the christening of stars, and that the yellow cowslip dared hold its sway unshaken. For had not a well-thumbed old botany book named it, and the great authorities hinted that it was "sometimes so called" ?
A CARNIVAL OF GOLD
IF ever the face of nature smiles it does so in harvest time. The scant acres of suburban prairie don a gypsy garb of ripened grains, and lie peaceful and contented in the sunshine of the long afternoons. It is too soon for scattered burs and scratching thistles, and one may stretch full length in the grass, nestle the head on a fragrant tuft, and become part of the sweet idleness of the day.
Life is so short that we may count it among the sins of omission if the hours go by and we fail to make use of the best that summer gives, staying within city walls when nature calls at the end of a suburban car line. Of course there is the effort of making a rush at the noon hour of Saturday, but shortly the thick of the city is left behind, and we may be in the heart of the woods.
The country friend, owning a farm, little realizes the gifts he bestows upon the city prisoner in a week-end holi- day. The getting away from the pressure of noise, of thick atmosphere, of the bustling crowds, puts new spirit into the soul, freshens the point of view, adds to the stock of experience, and stores the memory with a thousand things seen and heard, as nothing else can do. 122
A CARNIVAL OF GOLD 123
Out on the country road and in the open fields man is another being. He enters the world of the trees, the feed- ing cattle, the wayside weeds, and the crows flying over- head. He is one of them.
When the whippoorwill calls at night it has its message for him. All the paraphernalia so necessary to his exist- ence in the city is useless here. He needs but ask for a roof to shelter from the heat and the wet, enough to eat — it matters not what — and the liberty to work or rest. The tyranny of fashion, clothes, fine furniture, hamper- ing customs, are as naught. He forgets all about them and turns back to the play with nature that went on in the Garden of Eden before the breaking of laws brought the penalty of hard labor.
Going aberrying is a delight of July. The waste acres, with hazel brush and scattered briers above a turf of good pasture grass, are as clean as any park. The long switches of the raspberry and blackberry brambles hand out their fruits to any one who will take them. The barricading thorns were intended to ward off man and beast, but the favored guests of the berry patches — the birds gathering in flocks and nesting in the clumps of trees and bush — are welcomed to the feast. The berry patch is the haunt of haunts to the bird lover, for here he may see the winged songsters on a frolic, and hear them sing the most joyous songs of living.
A host of queer relations have assembled in the berry
124 THE JOY OF GARDENS
patch. The wild cherry hangs its shining fruit overhead. In a shady place about the roots creeps the wild straw- berry; a rod away is a plum hung with ripened fruit, and here and there and everywhere the brambles of the wild rose embrace those of the raspberry, the blackberry, and the gooseberry. The perfume of sweetbrier fills the air.
The rose tribe is not one to forget its poor relations. Indeed, it is a hard struggle to find the poor relations, if any at all exist. The rose family seems to have been endowed with the peculiar virtue of looking out for itself and its progeny, and borrowing aid from all creation, while still retaining the affection of all. What rarer virtue could any climber in the scale of life pray for?
The lowliest kinsmen of the tribe, the cinquefoil and yellow-blossomed weeds, with hard, roselike, seeded fruit, are established in little colonies on the turf. Next higher in the scale above these is the strawberry, its rose-petaled blossoms proclaiming its place on the family tree. But how marvelously has it looked after the future, dressing its dainty seeds upon a luscious pulp to tempt the appetite of the most jaded robin or surfeited catbird!
In the clover field, on the hilltop, the bees are bu:-y transferring the pollen ' while collecting their bags of honey. And down in the berry patch the birds dt 'Meir share of work, in planting seeds under the wage of a square meal. All is harmony in this exchange of favors.
HOUSE AND GARDEN AT BAR HARBOR, MAINE
A CARNIVAL OF GOLD 125
Next higher in the scheme are the black and red rasp- berries, in which nature has tried still another plan of setting every seed in its own delicious cup of juice. Those of the strawberries are gathered over the surface of one pulpy shape. By their peculiar arrangement the black and red raspberries are enabled to get along with fewer seeds, protecting them with the thorns from all but the birds and daring human hands, making a brave headway in the struggle for existence.
The haw;% white thorns, and dog roses bear a fruit which is a modified berry with fleshy envelope to invite biids to distribution. If the imagination can still hold fast to the analogy, slight though the thread may seem, it can travel to the plum tree, the cherry, and the wild apple in the grove, on to the queen of the royal line of the rose family — the true rose of the garden.
The wild cherry and the plum mark the greatest econ- omy of seed. Returning to the little red strawberry nestling among its leaves, one may count half a hundred seeds, perhaps more, on its fleshy pulp; the raspberry at its best may have twoscore, and the apple six to ten, and the haw but two, and plvm and cherry but one.
"It is a wonder that pygmy man wonders," meditates the philosopher. And in a wild flight of the imagination we venture a query if in this vast mysterious scheme nature herself is learning by experiment, and playing with the breeding of fruits to discover where energy may be
126 THE JOY OF GARDENS
conserved and the species saved. The berry patch is a fertile field for thought. Its variety is so infinite that the hungry materialist seeking his dinner may be satisfied, the scientific inquirer find meat to his liking, the poet beauty for his verse, the painter pictures for the eyes, and the tired man all things for a holiday.
Berry picking is hard work under the guise of play. No one ever complains of its weariness. And well it would be for us if the day's labor at all times could be turned to play by overlooking the stubble that blocks the way and the brambles that scratch the hands of the hardy adventurer in search of success.
As the summer mellows it seems as if earth has stolen gold from the sun and decked herself like a queen to idle languidly in the long, bright days. The grainfields in the wide country farms reflect a yellowed light appearing to the half-closed eyes like sheets of burnished gold framed in the green of luxuriant lanes, fringed with a tracery of wild sunflowers, burnished and polished like disks of precious metal.
Nor does the trickery of decoration stop here. The same elf weaving the world-design has waved its wand above our flower borders, and as we draw aside the cur- tains to catch the fresh breeze of early morning and to gain a fuller hearing of the wren singing to her nestlings from her downy home under the eaves, the dew-gemmed blossoms of sunny flowers weave a pattern of gold lace
A CARNIVAL OF GOLD 127
the length and breadth of the little plantation. They seem to have decided in some mute way to come all at once and to make a festival of celestial yellows to echo what wild life was doing along the highways. The color notes shade from the palest canary hue, matching the breast of a little finch that comes to sing in the locust bower, and deepen and deepen to the bronze gold of the lilies and the flames of the tritoma.
None of these was planted with a view to garden color. Indeed, the garden color faddist works in the spirit of an artistic upstart who coldly sorts his seeds and plans as a modiste does over a set of trimmings, or as a rug weaver deliberates concerning a finished design to please the fashion of the hour. Garden enthusiasts are born, and garden architects are made. The first plant seeds in a passion to bring to light treasured friends among flow- ers, and the latter forget the individual in the pattern that may fall upon the eye during blooming time.
It is a happy chance when nature comes to the rescue, as she does to the most careless planters. If the enthu- siast has been generous in his choice, and far-seeing to select flowers for the procession of the months, he can depend on nature to keep garden color changing as the prism of the rainbow. It will spread in beauty the rose hues of June, shifting the kaleidoscope through the yel- lows of midsummer, the flames of late August, and mingling purple and crimson and gold when September
128 THE JOY OF GARDENS
arranged the closing scene. In the weeks that have gone the little drama has played through several acts, grant- ing surprises, undreamed of at night, which burst upon the eyes with the dew of early day.
As golden-skirted dancers awaiting a signal appear in groups, bowing sweetly at the word, the long-stemmed, star-eyed blossoms sway in midsummer zephyrs and dis- play their graces. All have an ancestry honored in old gardens, and inherit a character turning its back on dis- appointments. Who has ever put in the seed of calliop- sis, well-beloved black-eyed Susan, and failed to find her keeping the tryst in the harvest time"? The gold of wiz- ards and necromancers was used to fashion her leaves, and the richest bronze in all flowerdom adorns the center of her disk. The coreopsis, "Golden Glory," is a sister plant ever to be relied upon, and from heart to the tip of its petals the most radiant sunshine.
Every year, as soon as the reapers enter the oats in the yellow fields, calliopsis and coreopsis have grown to luxu- riant bushy heights, each tip bearing its flowers like a Christmas tree with gilt stars. On the ground below, the California poppies, eschscholtzia — the "Golden West" — weave a tapestry of lovely color, a strain of June sun- shine at break of day, stimulating to the senses and giving silent promises of hope. Clouds of sorrow are banished in the presence of these light-hearted notes of color which have a psychic influence hard to understand, but so
A CARNIVAL OF GOLD 129
joyous that none can turn back their message of faith to the soul.
The yellow sprite repeats its scheme beyond a misty cloud of gypsophila, in a lowlier mass of calendulas stocky and sturdy, varying the yellows from pale lemon to copper; and as in music the melody will flow on and on to culminate in a splendid harmony, so the golden thread enters a web amid a clump of French marigolds spreading their living hues above emerald foliage, a green of deep-sea depths brightening the prisoned sun- shine in the frilled flowers.
For the sake of contrast the white Shasta daisies per- mit a snowy interval, and then the yellow ribbon drops to the ground and climbs the fence in a wilderness of nasturtiums. It repeats every yellow note known in the scale of color, and plays upon them with variations. When twilight falls they exhale the finest perfume, which is wanting among the other yellow blossoms of this sea- son, though the marigolds have a bitter, pungent odor not at all unpleasant if you accept it alone and out of doors. The golden-leafed feverfew has crept from its bed to act as a restraining friend to the nasturtiums, and a little aloof on the other side of its rich growth rise the pride of present days, the giant snapdragons, velvety and golden- lipped, paler than the nasturtiums in yellows, but radiant as the purest lemon tints among flowers.
Here and there lesser plants join the carnival of gold.
130 THE JOY OF GARDENS
It seems as if they knew the day and the hour, for of all the proud dahlias the yellow and white alone are out. The sole gladiolus in blossom is yellow throated, the canna bed holds a yellow signal from amid the great mound of calladiums, where the yellow day lilies shake their bells at the base to warn the brilliant portulacas creeping at their feet that they are lowly things and chil- dren of a night. The gaillardias sport the darkest of velvet browns shaded from orange, and next is a golden privet bush, and, in the greenery of plants long since stopped blooming, rise the tritomas, "red-hot pokers," a bit ahead of their season and turning the flame color to newer tints of rose reflections.
Towering above all are the first sunflowers, rooted out- side the garden pale, and far down the road you may follow the cheerful call of tansy, goldenrod, evening prim- rose, helianthus, rudbeckias, jewel weed, the dainty butter and eggs tripping in meadow and on hilltop, where the mullein torches stand to catch the last gleams of the set- ting sun in nature's midsummer festival of yellows.
THE FRIENDSHIP OF FLOWERS
from your labors," cried the master of the garden from his seat near the radiant phlox to the worker with the watering can going to and fro after dusk among the thirsty flowers. "Your garden has been bought with a price of hard labor. Consider the lilies of the field; who waters them*? Who hunts the red spider on the wild rose"? Who traps the slug or nets the butterfly on the prairies?" But the mistress of the gar- den heeded not and went her way, while the listening toad under the petunias, playing his tongue in a cloud of gnats, blinked his bright eyes and thought nothing, What was restless man to him, guardian of the domain?
The mignonette rustled its crisp leaves in the shower of cool water, the heliotrope drank greedily with its roots and prided itself on the showing it had made under the hot afternoon sun, and every garden thing was grateful for the treat of a miniature shower on the dusty soil be- fore the dews began to wash their leaves.
In village wanderings we may discover a garden in which flowers fight for existence as weeds in a wilderness. It is then that we talk of them growing according to their
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own sweet will, when reason tells us that if certain sturdy plants do bloom, the chance which has made them fair to look upon and caused them to flourish, without many scars in the battle, is "direction which we cannot see," an invisible fortunate circumstance.
In a forgotten village in an Eastern mountain valley was an old garden filled with what some call permanent plants; that is, enduring perennials, self-seeding annuals, and members of the lily tribe, reproducing their bulbs. The broad borders of white day lilies — funkia subcordata — edged a brick-paved walk with shining rosettes of green, above which swung the fragrant trumpets in their season. Behind the iron fretwork fence was a hedge of the white queens of the meadow from July until frost, crowned with snowy pyramids of bloom; and along the walls in spring the columbine waved trumpets before the budding leaves of hardy late chrysanthemums.
The neighbors always stopped to look over the white phlox into the wilderness at the clumps of gillyflowers and pinks getting along in harmony where hollyhocks blos- somed in increasing numbers every year, and the Johnny- jump-ups traveled in endless procession in and out among them all.
Every one "knew the story of the broken-hearted recluse who lived behind the closed shutters, and every one lamented that for ten years no man, not even the useful village si ave-of -all-work, had ever passed the padlocked
A GARDEN AT WINNETKA, ILLINOIS
FRIENDSHIP OF FLOWERS 133
gate to spade and hoe in an inclosure always in bloom. "They never touch a thing," said a gossip. "They let them grow wild, and I 'd give a basket of eggs for a slip of that climbing rose."
The city person marveled at a garden that in ten — nay, in twenty years — had changed so little without a restrain- ing or encouraging hand. No place in all the world could rival the ribbon of rose woven by the May pinks, no modest garden could boast of gayer color in poppies in June, or cleaner day lilies when all the rest of the world was battling with slugs.
"It grows of itself. Those flowers sow their own seed and spread their own roots," said the village gossip decidedly. "I know that nobody touches them or even comes out to smell them. Everybody goes in the back way, and they receive no company."
For all the fiction of city breeding, the city person takes greatest pleasure in early rising in the country and stroll- ing off to the fresh meadows before the world is awake. One morning, going abroad with rod and line as the sun was gilding the misty mountain tops and the village still lay asleep, the way led past the old garden, and then the secret was out why the growing prospered.
Two ancient women in black with garden gloves were busy with might and main, clipping, trimming, digging, and watering, and at the sound of an echoing footstep on the brick pavement they silently flitted indoors behind the
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useless knocker of glittering brass, and the garden was alone to grow as it pleased. When it seemed the in- truder had passed on at this unheard-of hour, they were out at work again, looking suspiciously up and down to spy who had disturbed their labors.
Some imagine that the perennial phlox, queens of the meadow, will grow if left alone. How about your boys and girls, and your Irish-setter pup, your blooded colt, or angora kitten? The giant perennial phlox need care for their kind too. They require a restraining hand to bring out their points of good breeding and to look their pret- tiest before company. The discipline of pinching back brings out their best appearance.
One thing you may be sure of; that is, gratitude, a virtue not always conspicuous in a higher scale of crea- tion. The nightly prowl with the watering can and shears gets its thanks. It is a pretty fancy to believe in responsiveness, to have faith that the flowers know when you prune away the dry leaves, till the earth about the roots to discourage grubbers, and shake the flower heads to dislodge a possible caterpiller which may be nest- making there.
All these things the queens of the meadow and other blossoming members of your colony need, and the true gardener finds a joy in the work which never comes to the idle person sitting on the porch and watching the labor. He may call all his own, and take toll of flowers for his
FRIENDSHIP OF FLOWERS 135
buttonhole, but the weeding, watering gardener knows secret pleasures not to be his.
Let us sing praises of queens of the meadow, the peren- nial phlox growing in tall clumps, the flower head a bouquet. Because they rarely appear in the florists' win- dows, never in artificial flowers, and rarely in houses, the amateur of limited opportunities does not know their beauty. The appearance of the first bloom is the signal for a celebration in our garden. For years the fragrant white, the purest among flowers, was prime favorite, and is still, granting honors to a fine salmon rose and to a rich crimson-red variety.
The family of hardy phlox is distinguished for its color and novelty, the talents for design noted in the phlox drummondii being carried along in star eyes and fine diffu- sions of white and lilac, carmine, violet, or crimson, or appearing in a startling contrast of the new French species which has a glowing orange-scarlet disk with a blood-red eye and other strange arrangements.
The garden book says that phlox are "not too particu- lar," but has it not been your observation, as it has been mine, that some persons "not too particular" thrive best and develop sweeter graces if given a little of the atten- tion their shyness forbids the asking for"?
As the gate swings shut on a departing guest, and its lock springs fast and the bolt is speedily shot into place, we either enter a red-letter day in our calendar of pleasant
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memories or we sigh for the waters of forgetfulness to wash away the recollections of the one just gone who left shadows of regret in the desecration of the silence with trivial talk.
It may not have been the echoes of gossip, better un- said, which stirred our reflections ; perhaps it was only the idle chatter that in its way is as much out of place as a rag-time song from a graphophone when the wren in sing- ing her vespers above the low harmonies of an insect orchestra in the grass.
Brief though it might have been, it was enough to re- mind us that the choice of friends is an art. We will put up with all sorts and conditions of personality with humorous indulgence on a railway journey or at a public gathering, because they are actors in the human comedy, but when we visit an art gallery, listen to music, set forth on a country ramble, or would enjoy the sweets of a gar- den, then it is time to choose, and to beware lest those enter who rush in where angels fear to tread.
How often has it been that our goodness of heart has been its own undoing and our hospitable instincts have overruled our judgment. Our generosity is sadly de- ceived; the guest we invited to commune with our lilies could not free himself from the wit of a scandal, nor what he had heard at a play, and all our ingenuity to turn the talk from fashion to flowers was in vain.
Such disappointments are lashes in the discipline of
v'-.
FRIENDSHIP OF FLOWERS 137
experience, and good sense takes warning with a resolve to be choice in garden company, with a sudden recollec- tion that there have been those, some two or three, in whose presence we rise to higher levels and to whom a flowery inclosure is a sanctuary. This friendship needs no words — an exchange of glances, a clasp of the hand, and the afternoon may pass quickly, the shadows grow long, and the sun rays creep higher and higher on the wall ere the gate closes on a promise to meet soon again.
Then we understand the reminders of gentle Izaak Walton on fishermen choosing their company, and we vow that gardeners should do likewise, permitting none to taste of their salad or listen to the hum of the bees under the hollyhocks except a kindred soul in harmony with the best that is in us.
The changing procession of perennials has brought an interlude when they are blossomless and seem to be hold- ing their breath while the tall lilies reign supreme. Soon after the lilies of the valley stopped blooming in May the other lily buds began to swell. The quaint little tigridias crept in and out, holding out their offerings for recognition, and the tall white lilies made a first appear- ance, shyly enough, in June.
In a spot where the sun shines warmest the first lilium candidum, the white madonna lily, began to unfurl on Ascension Thursday, and, counting those on the shady side of the house, there will be white lilies right along
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until after the feast of the Annunciation, which, accord- ing to tradition, they must celebrate. No other lily has as many pet names or is as faithful to old gardens, multiply- ing and spreading regardless of hard frosts. Whether this fragrant lily is a candidum or not, the record refuses to say. Indeed, a certain woman nearly came to a pitched battle of words with a long-bearded gardener whom one had never accused of sentiment by calling a luxuriant tall white lily a candidum when none such could be found in a catalogue.
"Not so," cried this stubborn man, backing against his own hedge; "these are St. Josephs, those St. Annes, those of the Ascension, and these of the Annunciation," while the sharpest-eyed member of the party could not dis- tinguish a difference among them, and any one was a lily sheaf fit for the gentle hand of one honored among women.
Bookish amateurs are wedded to Latin names mean- ingless to the flower lover brought up on the homely, old-fashioned terms. The only benefit that comes from memorizing them is that they form a universal nomen- clature, a familiar language known to gardeners whether in England, France, Germany, or Norway, and the pro- fessional who looks down on the humble house gardener will give her respect if she approaches him with a high- sounding Latin phrase, rich in resonant vowels.
Hint to him of a glorious tiger lily you know at home
FRIENDSHIP OF FLOWERS 139
or have seen in his confines, and his indifference will chill you to the marrow ; but talk softly of tigrinum splendens or let murmurs of spedosum rubrum or lilium auratum fall from your lips, and at once he will melt, give you the grip of the brotherhood, and bid you welcome.
To return to the lily beds, it is quite remarkable how a stalk or two will give mystery and romance as well as beauty to the humblest inclosure. The iris is a distant re- lation; and hastily passing in review the lilies you have seen and lilies read of, is there another flower species more wonderful in variety, more curious in quality and charms?
Just now the yellow and tawny orange lilies parade the fields to make pictures of color with ripened harvests and bronzed grasses. The lilium canadense, straggling carelessly from disorderly blades at the roots, has the appearance of longing to escape from gardens to run after the Turkp's-cap camping in the meadows. The plantain lily (funkia) is the most obedient grower of all, making it a pleasure to set prim rosettes of shining leaves along the edges of paths or as borders to the beds.
The lilium spedosum rubrum, the crimson-banded lily, and the tigrinum splendent, most gorgeous of tiger lilies, are aristocrats from tip to toe. It is customary to set them in clumps of nine, the mystic number of the muses, and the rubrum looks its best in the early morning sun when the dew is exhaled from the grass, while the tigrinum splendens, so royal and gorgeous, is planted
THE JOY OF GARDENS
where it may enjoy midday heat and catch the lingering rays of later afternoon to keep on fire the warmth of its vivid, orange-red, mystic markings of purple and black. The liking for lilies is the test of the stranger. Does he treat the high-bred virility of the tiger lily with respect and turn toward the feminine loveliness of speciosum ru- brum with deference, we may know that he is in tune with our lares and penates, and open wide the gate to bid welcome as to a returning guest.
A GARDEN AT ARDMORE, PENNSYLVANIA
HERBS O' GRACE
MY neighbor, a goodwife, believes that the foxes of the field and the birds of the air know the herbs of their salvation. In an old book we read that "the swallow cureth her dim eyes with celandine, the weasel knoweth well the virtue of herb grace, the dove the ver- vain and the dogge useth a kind of grass." Such was the confidence that guided the planting of our herb garden, whose simples saved the doctor's bills.
One of the daintiest of all the plantlets to push its head above ground in the spring is the rue — as Ophelia names it, "herb o' grace o' Sundays" — because its dried stems made the brush to sprinkle holy water upon the faithful at church doors. Bitter as it is, and pungent to the nos- trils, it furnished four and eighty remedies, and was one of those tonics to clear the head made heavy with wine. Kings delighted in it as a charm against poisons, and it is in itself so pretty an herb when the dew is upon it that no one passes without pinching the leaves in recognition of its wondrous merits. When in blossom it adorns the spring with frail flowers so exquisite that they remind us of frilled lace of ancient pattern. 141
H2 THE JOY OF GARDENS
Whether it be the bloom of the cherry time or when the lavender shows its purple, we accept it as an excuse to in- vite the neighbors to friendly communion. If one is very crafty in social matters she will plant a little herb garden for this purpose, and when entertainment becomes dull, cause a sensation by asking friends to the number of the muses to coffee and an herb chaplet. Nothing is finer for the linen chest than Drayton's chaplet of herbs, lending a cleanly odor to napery.
Among the most ardent flower lovers will be sure to be those who will go on voyages of discovery among the plants, not recognizing the savory, the marjoram, or thyme from its dried package stamped by the grocer. The true herbalist will have his day, the one day of the year, and the herb gardener a fete not matched in the social annals.
The poet's chaplet follows the fantastic rhyme —
"A chaplet then of herbes I '11 make,
Than which, though yours be braver, Yet this of mine, I '11 undertake,
Shall not be short in savour. With Basil then I will begin,
Whose scent is wondrous pleasing, The Eglantine I '11 next put in
The sense with sweetness seizing. Then in the Lavender I '11 lay,
Muscado put among it,
HERBS O' GRACE 143
With here and there a leaf of Bay
Which still shall run along it. Germander, Marjoram and Thyme,
Which used are for strewing, With Hyssop as an herb most prime
Here is my wreath bestowing. Then Balm and Mint to help make up
My chaplet, and for trial Costmary that so likes the cup ;
Next to it Pennyroyal. Then Burnet shall bear up with this,
Whose leaf I greatly fancy, Sweet Camomile doth not amiss
With Savory and some Tansy. Then here and there I '11 put a sprig
Of Rosemary into it, Thus, not too little nor too big,
It 's done, if I can do it."
The August sun crisping the foliage and ripening the seeds before we can snip the pods from the annuals has brought the herb harvest to its prime. This is one of the events of summer in the garden, and all else is put aside to make the best of it. It is not safe to wait until to- morrow, when the heat has dried the pungent leaves and the sap lost some of its fire, but, on the very day that the plants have reached maturity and the full glory of their growing, approach them with a devout heart, bearing
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basket and shears, and collect your herbs for the uses of winter.
What a pity it would be if the honorable occupation of herb gathering should fade from the privileges of women, for it has pleasures of a dainty order, and the wonder is that there are not more of the gentler sex who embrace its work. It needs light fingers, knowledge, and wit, touches beauty and poetry, and lures into the meadows and forests. It is generous in its rewards, granting sweet graces of thought like those bequeathed to all who follow the beloved of the poets.
Ever since one to the manor born in herb gathering trailed her frilled petticoats among the dewy mints to pinch a leaf of sweet basil crouched at the foot of the rue, the scanty corner set apart for herbs has not been the prosaic place the cook avers it to be. Sage and old-man seemed to bristle under her fingers, and to dis- pense perfumes after their kind as she recited legends from herb lore of "an herb for every pain." Banished forever is our faith in apothecaries who build their honor on coal-tar compounds, as these are as naught beside heal- ing plants distilled and brewed to cure an ache or to "minister to a mind diseased."
All true herb gatherers are children of inheritance. The few that kind fortune has sent across my path in a lifetime have passed their wisdom by word of mouth as they learned it from some grandsire or ancient relative.
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Bit by bit it fell upon the ears while standing tiptoe before a white-doored cupboard. The shelves were filled with precious jars and vials, each bearing its own inscrip- tion in slant Italian lettering. The wisdom gained when hunting among the garret rafters lingers a lifetime. There bunches of drying odorous leaves hung among the wasps' nests; or, best of all, is the lore won through many long days tramping the woods for roots and herbs, haunting the marshes and streams, and in those hours when climb- ing lonely paths to rocky heights for plants that shun human association.
To the true believer faith is firm in the jars of golden liquid standing neatly side by side on the shelves. The child looks upon them with awe ; but as one passes out of the old-homestead atmosphere and grows to years of dis- cretion, he may cherish a doubt if the lily leaves plucked from the garden in the "up of the moon" when the dew is jeweling their whiteness, and bottled away in fine old rye, possess the power accorded them of the medicinal nature of herbs.
Is not this one of the primrose ways tempting the gentry, who look with horror on the wine that is red, to take an occasional draught "for the stomach's sake'"? The devotee of old-wives' wisdom and the learning of herb gatherers would cry heresy at the thought, for what other rite of the garden is like to that of gathering lily leaves in the radiance of a waxing moon, and storing
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them away to solace pain? It is the very next thing to owning a fairy wand and to stepping into the fairy frolics of fairyland itself.
Therefore know all men on the word of a sage that white day lilies do not bloom in vain, that their beauty and purity are created for those in distress, and next them is the foxglove — digitalis — whose juices distilled help the weary of heart. To these add, for completeness' sake, the decoctions of lavender, asphodel, and elder-blossom tops, cut with a silver knife to the words of an incanta- tion which warded off evil powers and preserved the heal- ing virtues of the plant.
The ceremony of distillation, brew, or extraction is a serious process. Then comes the sealed bottling of the purest of amber liquors, to be served in time in the tiniest of crystal glasses — perchance so treasured that a portion is doled out in a deep-bowled silver spoon to the anxious pensioner for aid. Just one visit of the ancient relative herb gatherer is enough to change the entire aspect of the garden in the mind's eye, and transform it from a pleas- ure spot to an inclosure of mysteries. No one records its secrets, which are told in whispers.
Summer is hastening to the season of fruits. Let none delay to look upon her meadows and through the groves, for autumn is already on the threshold, lighting its torches of goldenrod, fanning the blaze of its cardinal flowers, and unveiling the stars of the aster tribes.
HERBS O' GRACE 147
Far and wide, to north, west, and south, are spread the farms with the harvest fields carpeted with cloth of gold and shocks of ripened grain heaped in marshaled ranks, as if the wealth of a treasure house of the Incas had been scattered, awaiting the luggage carriers of a marauding army.
The clover meadows are showing another harvest of bloom, and the hum of bees is drowned by the rustle of the bladed corn waving its tasseled banners in great regi- ments whose numbers defy the count of spying eyes.
The old days of the rail fence, which wormed its path along the highway, are gone with the era of stone walls that defied the storms of winter. Barriers of wire cob- webs hold clover and corn and the empires of grain within limits, and, like the magic sign written on the earth and in the air by fairy guards, order the herds of sleek cattle, the sheep and lambs and frolicsome colts, to keep within proper domains.
But one strip of earth along the road is debatable ground and free to all the vagrants riding on the air or keeping close to the soil. These are the borders of the roadside, where live the weeds and the wild flowers, where the thorn trees and willows claim space, and wild rabbits and quail are sure of a sheltering tangle.
In August the mints gather in mobs and make conven- tions on the miniature hills of the wayside of the high- lands. Mints are not solitary, preferring to assemble in
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sociable families. The wild bergamot or horsemint deco- rates waste lands and the roadsides in masses of a lovely purple, each stem rising from the branched plant bearing its own beautifully arranged flower — a cluster of deli- cately fashioned bloom that has a spicy fragrance which lasts long after the flowers are gone and the foliage is sere and brown.
The catnip has taken to parasitic habits along with domestic animals, and is to be found in dooryards as well as afield. Another mint grows in sturdy branching plants with pointed leaves in whorls. Near the end of every up- ward standing branch the leaves masquerade as bloom in streaks of white and cream and deep rose, and beneath them are hidden marvelously constructed little flowers.
Now and then a little colony of toadflax, the butter and eggs of old times, and the wee golden-haired snap- dragons left from the July fields tramp near the dusty highway. The brilliant butterfly weed robed in the orange of sunset spreads its gorgeous clusters where the sands are deep, and perchance, if the earth has beaten hard under many hoofs and forgotten, it has been speed- ily clothed in the lacy foliage and starry daisies of the rock camomile.
Boneset and yarrow are likewise common among wild flowers, rarely receiving the appreciation they deserve be- cause of their omnipresence in the pastures as familiar as the camomile in the stable yards of the farms. Boneset
HERBS O' GRACE 149
clusters are grayish white at a distance, showing many fairy flowers on close acquaintance. Frequently the gray blossoms are tinged with a rosy hue like the blush of dawn.
At the foot of its taller companions the pearly ever- lasting establishes little communities of its own which are not to be driven out by ordinary means. Overshadowing it, black-eyed Susan twists its yellow-frilled ruff on its long neck, looking across to the spikes of blue vervain, bluer than a rain-washed sky of May. Bouncing Bet in her primal days must have hung over the gate by the light of the moon, for along country ways, if she is no- where else to be found, you will surely spy her ruffled cap under the shadows of a fence post or assembled just with- out a gate.
Late August shows few lingerers from the wild carrot, the queen's lace handkerchief from field-flower comedy. Its prettiness has given place to the milkweeds, many of which seem frail enough to vanish with the evening breeze.
At the very margin of the wayside, where the wheels cut furrows in the sod, the mullein sets out its rosettes of silver-gray velvet leaves, and from the midst of such royal furnishing rises the tall stem adorned with velvet ears and lightened by pale yellow blossoms.
Another distinguished plant just now is the evening primrose, modest in its sunny color; and, should the high-
150 THE JOY OF GARDENS
way we have been following descend the hill to a marshy bottom, the joe-pyeweed, iron weed, milkweed, and lowly grass of Parnassus are to be found in the moist places. Sheltered by a hedge or thicket, the cardinal flower hides its glowing color of warmest red. It may be that one of the late lilies, the red lily of the meadow or the saucy Turk's-cap, rises from its sword-shaped lances of green and, did one care to penetrate the marsh, there are the modest water-liking mallows, the bed straw, jewel weed, and other plants that seek the cool black earth.
Crowded in the fence corners, wild blackberry brambles set their thorns against intruders, and here are the climb- ing vines, a mass of wild vetches, and an army of blue harebells that dare not take to the open road.
Up hill and down winds the highway, bordered on either side with August wild flowers shut off from the fields. These are the heralds of autumn, snatching the hues from the sky and sunset west. And truly it seems that "earth 's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, a conflagration of color."
WHILE AUTUMN LINGERS
NOW the sunflowers great and small have assembled for their annual home-coming at the gates of Sep- tember. As the passing of summer was marked on the almanac of yesterday, it seemed as if the morning would discover a flitting of flowers over night, and that the gar- den would look deserted and bare, but again the clans of the helianthus have trooped to the rescue. From an upper window where one can look afar you may see them coming on the margins of dusty highways, in grassy lanes, across the fields, nodding their pretty heads and keeping tryst with autumn. Their sunshine gladdens the for- gotten wastes, it lights the tapers of the goldenrod, and gives an alluring sheen to the purple distance.
If, like Puck, we could girdle the earth in the twink- ling of an eye, it should be done this day by passing the greetings from one sunflower to another from the reef of Norman's Woe, following the New England highways, the National Pike, and the Santa Fe Trail westward through the mountain passes, to the last yellow bouquet on the edge of the desert. The clew should be caught again in the Sierras, until the trail led to blossoms
152 THE JOY OF GARDENS
in Golden Gate Park, reflecting the setting sun slipping low in the blue waters of the rolling Pacific.
What other flower can boast an ancestry traced to the courts of Helios, what other has as charming a legend for its heritage as that of Clytie, whose adoring face is ever turned toward her god in the sun chariot?
Whenever we walk abroad in the fresh morning air, or rest in the cool of the evening, the tall sunflowers are looking down at us from the other side of the fence. Fancy paints a curious face behind the powdered gold mask set in a fringe of radiant yellow which seems to be hammered out of pure gold. And if one steals around the back way to examine the sturdy plants garmented in abundant foliage, the uncanny superstition grows, and they appear to be some gallant grenadiers of flowerdom appointed to report for duty.
Another of the many queer traits of human nature is that which leads us to overlook the good common things and to hunt for the rare and unusual. Many an hour have we nursed a garden plant that refused to be recon- ciled to our earth and care, while, if we had been content to give our energy to native plants that would grow, we should have had an enviable spectacle of bloom from spring to autumn.
And with this is the reflection that many a time have we spent our strength in pursuit of false gods, of idle friendships, of superficial amusements, when the right
APPROACH TO A WATER GARDEN, LAKE COMO, ITALY
WHILE AUTUMN LINGERS 153
and true of the everyday plan was at our doors. Autumn is a season for thinking over, and the good company of the sunflowers has been the reason for moralizing.
The neighbor who planted a screen of sunflowers along his chicken yard is rejoicing now. The hens themselves cluck of seeds to come, and the cock has mounted the fence post to herald the news abroad. Any one who sowed a seed in the spring has a smile of satisfaction at the sunflower prodigality. The lesser members of the tribes helianthus, the coreopsis, goldenglow, calliopsis, calendulas, and the rudbeckias and marigolds, take a second start in life if the shears have been used on their faded bloom and superfluous growths snipped away.
Yellow is the color of sunshine and happiness, and at the beginning of the fall of the year, when we are think- ing of winter, the yellows shed glory everywhere. Where masses appear in the border, the purple asters seem more royal, the blood red of the lobelia cardinalis takes a warmer hue, and the whites of nicotinas, cosmos, and little asters are snowy in contrast.
The sunflowers and their allies play leading parts in the pageant of September. While there is a similarity in the character of ray flowers, there are differences in wood- land grace, a lavishness of bloom as if every plant was trying to outdo its neighbor in flowering.
There are signs of a second childhood in the vigorous ambition of the sweet alyssum to make white ribbons, and
154 THE JOY OF GARDENS
the blue lobelia never shone so blue in June as it does now, when it reaches an intensity in its color as strong as the temper of the red that flames in the zinnias and of the ever-faithful salvia. The touch of adversity in the frost in the air puts them on their mettle, and they will make the most of the days before them.
The mounds of foliage plants should have reached their prime, the calladiums attained their maximum size, the castor beans grown to trees, the cannas put forth their most luxuriant growth, and the seed grasses, waving gracefully between, be loaded with seeds. It is a proving of the early planning, and things come to the test, just as the mountain ash hangs out its bunches of orange berries, the rugosa roses fatten their brilliant fruits, and Japanese quinces hang heavy in the hedges.
The hydrangea paniculata grandiflora — a name as splendid as the shrub itself — is conspicuous in suburban parks. Out comes the garden notebook, and, if none graces our premises, down goes the resolve to have it. The rose of Sharon of the Althsea kindred has climbed to successes unheard of, a flower for every twig, and wreaths of blossoms and clean foliage — a flower miracle on the lawn as striking in its way as the hydrangea. It hints of mallow and hollyhock and of the cottage amid meadows.
It is a mistake to imagine that because the sun is turn- ing southward all is at an end, and that the woods and
WHILE AUTUMN LINGERS 155
marshes suggest melancholy days to come. The flower hunter has treasures of color in the groves and open country ready for the plucking.
All seem to come at once when the sunflowers make their home-coming. It is a celebration of beauty in the garden among the gentle plants, and a field day where the upland asters and tramp sunflowers seem to chat of helianthus cucumerifolius, content to live in gardens while its perennial relatives seek the highways.
Autumn lingers far away when the summer hours are stealing along and "a light of laughing flowers across the grass is spread." Then there comes a brilliant day vibrant with luxurious warmth and languor. At sunset long level bars of purple stretch across the crimson west, mountains of vapor are heaped on the northern horizon, and flashes of lightning play upon the snowy summits, while to the south the ragged fragments of storm clouds scud away from an aftermath of a distant hurricane, and, from the courts where the sun sets burning red, float long pennants of violet mist streaming across the sapphire skies to the infinite reaches of the zenith.
Morn dawns after a night when the winds blow east and then blow west, and the earliest breeze brings an arctic breath; the fragrance of northern pine forests comes in at the window, and we awake to the presence of autumn. The quality of sunshine has changed to a mel- lower light, and the fervid heat has been tempered and
156 THE JOY OF GARDENS
veiled at midday, while through the long afternoon broods the calm of contentment.
If we were to believe the flowers — the cosmos, nico- tinas, tritomas, phlox, cardinal flowers, turtleheads, and lilies and nasturtiums keeping a bold front in the pres- ence of the dahlias and gladioli — we would turn the pages of the log book and begin another month of blos- soms. But the September calendar announces seedtime, and among my dreams there are none so ardent as those that picture the future better than the past.
Next year the progeny of the golden-eyed coreopsis shall have many square yards to itself; next year the big snapdragons will become greater giants by sowing the seed in a sunnier place; next year the poppies shall stir envy in the hearts of the town. Then we haste to gather the seeds.
One of the privileges of pride in gardening is showing off its treasures to friends. It is a pure delight, for you are parading the glories of nature. And what think you when, boldly before your watching eyes, some thoughtless guest breaks off the seed that you have been nursing for days'? What would you do when they take "slips" from your symmetrical begonias and geraniums'? What say you when they wait till your back is turned and help themselves to a root of your choice dahlias, or smuggle a hoped-for Mefistofile or Baron Hulot gladiolus in their pockets?
WHILE AUTUMN LINGERS 157
These grievances, as old as Adam and his garden, have vexed every flower gatherer since that indefinite period B.C.; and who will declare that chance visitors from the Land of Nod did not help themselves to cuttings from the Tree of Life? History is silent concerning a vast quantity of important happenings of a time in which we are safe in supposing that human nature was already gifted with its tangents.
With a weakness for festivals and saints' days, I have often wondered why the almanac forgot seed gathering in the flower garden. In fact, others have spoken of it with a thought of introducing an event along with "Bird Day" and "Midsummer Eve" and the "Harvest Home." Then we reflected that the spirit of vexation walks abroad in the flower garden, and the elves of the wind make sport with good intentions.
There is this difference to be considered between well- bred cereals and flowers — the first are fairly prompt in their ripening and the harvester knows when to step in and gather his grain, and the second uses such a variety of methods in attending to personal affairs that the gar- dener must be wise and forehanded if he can forestall them.
All through life we are negligent in storing virtues to make joy for future seasons; so all summer long we overlook seed gathering. On a day in August it was decided to let the flowers go to seed. The cook wanted
158 THE JOY OF GARDENS
nasturtium pods for her pickles, and the gardener had marked the best colors and the most perfect flowers in all the borders either with a tag or gay yarn whose hue has a meaning for him, or with a bit of wire and bam- boo on which is written what he does not remember.
In the cool of his sanctum on a hot afternoon he marks a hundred little envelopes and fits them in a box, for it is right to do everything in order, and the card-catalogue system is the best for seeds as well as for cooking recipes and many another thing.
All seems to be going well on the eve before the day of seed collecting, to which a favorite neighbor has been invited; for surely there is enough for many. It is prob- able that the gamut of splendid color run by the Mexican zinnias has not missed a note in its scale in ripening seeds, and the pansies were never in better shape, the poppies have formed shapely pepper boxes, the sweet Williams and pinks have filled their goblets, and the balloon vine and Chinese lantern hang their fruits from the wire netting.
It is true we missed the columbine seeds in the wind that shook them from their cups on a stormy night in June; and, before we forget it, a search should be made for the lady's paintbrush that the children begged for — and could its fate be a hint of what came after*? On a pincushion top tilted a single seed, which sailed away on its own parachute while we watched it.
WHILE AUTUMN LINGERS 159
The delay was fatal — putting off until to-morrow what should have been done yesterday. The lady's-slip- pers popped their seeds as fast as they ripened. The innocent purple pansies had unclasped the fairy hands of their jewel cases and thrown the petals far and wide, and the violet was doing the sly trick of burying its pods in the earth, as if to imitate the heron's-bill, which has run the point of its ripened head into the ground and planted its seeds after its own fancy.
It was a mystery — and is to this day — how the poppies succeeded in emptying their box pods of the last seed, and no science will ever explain the wonders of wealth that are hidden in the black pearls of the cockscomb which gemmed the leaves of the creeping musk under the plants. Even the petunias had knocked the caps off their little cups and spilled the treasure, and the rings of hollyhock seeds skipped here and there from the plants as soon as you touched them.
With a thankful heart we recall the name of a reliable seedsman and his wonderfully pictured lists, and are glad that there is no moralist at hand to talk of the sins of omission and commission and seed gathering for another world.
MY LADY DAHLIA TAKES THE AIR
ALL the neighborhood is topsy-turvy, and weeds growing full speed in the borders, because it is dahlia time. The fanciers have assembled on street corners, talked long and late under the front windows, and declared their red-letter day of the year has come, because one among them has bred a new dahlia not in the calendar. It is unique; it does not match any heard-of description.
The dahlia passion is not half so ridiculous as some others, as it does effect an annual climax. The flower makes its appeal to the masculine sense — that is, more men than women may be counted among the dahlia en- thusiasts— and next to tulip madness is the speculation in dahlia bulbs in a quiet way by the very persons you would not suspect.
Friend K., coolest of business men, has haunted a cor- ner in his yard since he planted the dusty tubers in the spring. It leaked out through one of the children that a box of dahlia roots had come from France, but not a word was said of the matter. A knot of pink string dis- tinguished one green stalk from the clump of a dozen, and 1 60
MY' LADY DAHLIA 161
that was the stalk that brought to light the new dahlia. As dahlia collectors have as little conscience as curio fanatics, it would not have been safe to make the pros- pects public lest thieves come at night, and inquisitive eyes peer over the fence by day.
Friend K. assures the commonplace gardeners who are not dahlia experts that they have brought him good for- tune. His dahlias afford him an outlet for his nervous energy. They are something to think about not argued over in the daily paper, and from the hour of putting his roots in the earth, labeling and bracing the plants to stakes, he has a source of interest dependent only upon the sunshine and rain, as, fortunately, few pests come the way of his dahlias.
Since the birth of his passion he has a score of corres- pondents who, like himself, are absorbed in dahlia cul- ture, who keep log books and records of pedigrees, who enter them at county fairs, and know every perfect dahlia which is in the family tree of the aristocracy written down in catalogues. Whenever there is a flurry in the busi- ness world down town, Friend K. gets out his dahlia cata- logues if it is winter, or goes to the garden if it is summer.
The worried lines on his forehead give place to others of keen interest and hopefulness as he makes notes in the log book of triumphs in color and hints for another season, and the next morning he questions the truthfulness of stock reports, looks at the market with optimism, and cuts
162 THE JOY OF GARDENS
two of his choicest blossoms to present to a fellow enthu- siast in the next office. As he gets on the train he thanks his lucky stars that he has dahlias to comfort him, and feels that a fairy godmother smiled over his cradle and frowned on the unenlightened neighbors.
Just as we have found it hard to convince others of grounds for our enthusiasm in flowers, Friend K. has dis- covered that dahlias "are Greek" to other men. His golf chum, W., looks at him curiously as he comes in with a lurking smile and whistles contentedly to himself. When the world is at sixes and sevens in a financial way, Friend K. wears a monster crimson dahlia on his coat and sits on the sunny side of the car without grumbling.
Has he dropped out of society, that he chooses a dusty laborer for his companion*? And what can he find to say to him, though he has a crushed dahlia in his buttonhole which perhaps a child put there as she said "good-by"? And as W. listens, his puzzle over Friend K.'s sanity deepens, and the phrases are meaningless: "Seed in March in boxes — thirty-seven varieties — bewildering col- ors— purest strain known — madder red — sunflower yel- low— perfect to a petal — no sports," and so on. As the voices rise above the rumble of wheels, W. observes that others join the group, and the wordy war on the compara- tive values of seedlings and tuber-grown sends him out of hearing of such jargon. Of course, a man has a right to a fad.
MY LADY DAHLIA 163
The dahlia fancier is a man of a type. It may be that you who read are one ; and if so, look down into your own soul and discover why you consume so much interest on so unresponsive a flower. The dahlia is splendid in vel- vety texture, gorgeous colors, and construction, but its elegance of dress, like that of so many dames we know, has taken its all and forgotten its spirit. It is more of a wallflower than the wallflower itself, standing aloof, giv- ing nothing and taking much without a breath of per- fume. This is whispered sub rosa; it is heresy in the ears of dahlia enthusiasts walking in their gardens at this very hour, yet they have their stings of disappointment, too, to pray for our sympathy. They may be secretive in Spar- tan reserve, but it hurts.
Imagine a newly elected devotee in the early spring dreaming of the beauty of all that he has seen in the autumn and, with the illustrated catalogue, hoping for royal successes in the summer before him. His tubers are set, his seeds are planted, and he awaits the momentous hour of opening buds. What are his emotions when he beholds his supreme treasure of last year, that may be of burnished gold, a "sport" of this season, the brilliant fluted rosette marred by an unbecoming patch of common red ! In his haste he may pull it up and throw it on the ash heap, and then turn to the garden log book to check up the descendants of 1907 in the column of 1908. Then sign follows sign as more "freaks" enter the lists,
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and the notes at the foot of the page are more elaborate than those in the orderly margin.
Yet if he can register but two or three loyal high-bred varieties, and half a dozen gorgeous newcomers, some accounted for by his purchases and trades and others that he hopes are the result of his own breeding, he accepts the conviction that dahlia growing, like life, has its ups and downs.
If the next mail brings a letter and a catalogue from another dahlia fanatic the hurt of disappointment is gone, and the grower has a succession of visions of singles, doubles, ten-inch monsters, and dwarf chickadees, — decorative, pompon, and cactus-bred and chrysan- themum-mannered,— and, as the fire of passion flares up again, he turns to his gentle gardener partner and says: "Next year."
What is there to compare with a fancy like this in which men of affairs have found refreshment in working with nature? The ancient magic has not fled the earth so long as common man can bury a dahlia tuber in early spring and bid it be gay in autumn, confident that it will keep the tryst with him — which it does.
Flower gatherers lingering in the twilight know the hour by the kindling of the gypsy fires. The red flames make circles of light in the gloom, and wreaths of smoke curl upward as if from the burning of some sacrifice. All through the long summer days the gypsy caravans
MY LADY DAHLIA 165
followed the country byroads, camping at night in shaded nooks near ever-flowing springs of fresh water, and asking largess of no man. Summer gave generously of her high- way fruits, and the night repeated no gossip of visited cornfields, haunted gardens, or the vanishing of stray chickens.
But the first hint of frost in the air brings the gypsy nearer his settled kindred, and he lights his autumnal camp fires on the edges of villages and the outskirts of cities. You may see the flame of the caravan's torches to-night after sunset on the prairies which they have known for years to the southwest and the northwest, though the growing city has given warning that they must move farther on.
Many a housewife double locks the door at the vision of a dark-browed Romany peering above her garden fence, or hastily drops her curtain when the gypsy for- tune-telling princess and her alluring band approach the back door. She knows that there will be mischief abroad in the neighborhood, that prophecies will sow discontent among the maids.
She knows that the boys will be drawn by the romance of the camp fires, and that men will dicker in the shad- ows behind the wagons. All the glamour veiling a race that has wandered since the making of the world, count- ing themselves in league with the powers of darkness, does not overcome that insistent suspicion that bids us
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beware of the gypsy, who toils not, neither does he spin. Yet for all that we may send greeting to the gypsy, out- side the pale of our lives though he be. For he loves the open world, the night, and the sunrise, and his is an in- domitable spirit that refuses to bend to conventions and the money craze of the time. His is an unquenchable thirst for freedom.
But the gypsy of the black eye and gay-striped skirt and tinsel-trimmed jacket is not the only mischief-making tramp in the fields in September. The human gypsy is a gay, light-footed soul, but not so fleet as the winged gypsies, the moths and butterflies that are putting in their tricks among the late vegetables in the gardens and the autumn flowers.
Swarms of little white butterflies flutter their wings over the cabbage patch, the parsley beds, and the nastur- tium borders. Armies of warm-hued, brown-winged creatures have invaded the city streets, and the butterfly lover is bewildered at the numbers and varieties to be seen above the marshes and where goldenrod and asters are in bloom. The mischief-making gypsy butterflies are living swiftly in the brief period of life permitted them. It is birth from a hidden chrysalis, courtship, mar- riage, and the laying of eggs among plants where the hatched grubs may find material to fatten upon and the fine threads with which to spin cocoons from which to begin a new cycle of existence.
MY LADY DAHLIA 167
Butterfly life is fascinating, and to our unseeing eyes free from care, yet who can imagine a more dutiful or a busier one bent on making ends meet*? When all is said, it is near that of the Romany who builds his camp fires where others have cut wood, and who sets his youngling at the barn gate at milking time.
The butterfly gypsy plays havoc in the parsley bed and cuts many a cabbage and tobacco leaf. It is a mischief- maker of the first order. Its beauty of painted wing and jeweled head does not blind us to its purposes in life. Other gypsies frequent the waste places, steal through the broken paling in the garden fence, and excite the wrath of the man who sows and reaps. These are the weeds now in the high tide of their mischievous careers. As in the case of Romany, there is a sense of caste among them, high-born and lofty mannered and the lowly tramps. The goldenrod, wild sunflowers, mints, and asters are camp followers, and much is forgiven because of their beauty.
The true gypsies are the ragweed, Indian hemp, pig- weed, hogweed, plantain, pusley, smartweed, and thistles — and not to be forgotten and mighty in their schemes, the whole bur family. They seem bent on annoying humankind; and, unless one looks closely, they do not have signs of beauty to invite the passing interest. Not so daintily winged as the butterfly nor gifted with the turn of temper of a Romany of the camp fire, the gypsy
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weed plods along in the dust, intent on winning more acreage and looking out for his chance to perpetuate his kind.
The ragweed has a prettily cleft leaf which seems as if nature put herself out to invent a particularly good pat- tern. Above quite a graceful plant rises the central stalk, with tiers of what seem to be greenish buds, but the eye is misled; every round green cap covers a dainty flower which actually showers golden pollen at your touch. The ragweed is lavish in its supply, and takes no chances with economy; it is determined to survive and send generations down the line. It scatters its pollen on the wind in boun- tiful supplies, waving its wee bells in triumph as the sneezing human nature passes by in frank recognition that the evil hour of "hay fever" is at hand.
The smartweed is a near relative of princes'-feather, with a pretty pink plume, and the smartweed bloom is not to be despised in a wild-flower bouquet. Camomile is modest and daisy eyed, mallow has a wee flower and little cheeses for the play teas of children, but these are the gay young Romany folk who invite to the presence of their coarser elders.
The ragged pigweed is a gypsy tramp of unredeeming qualities. It comes uninvited, and steals its food from the soil without a friendly return. It is in league with the winds, and flies on the gales, begging for transporta- tion. Though not provided with the hooks by which the
MY LADY DAHLIA 169
burs catch fast to my lady's skirts and follow the trail of cattle and sheep, not disdaining to take passage on the tail of a high-stepping thoroughbred if that will serve a purpose, the pigweed makes its way in search of new worlds to conquer.
By far more degenerate than human or butterfly gypsy, it manages to add its generations of happy-go-lucky career without embellishing the records of beauty or romance of the summers of centuries past and present.
Yet we may be mistaken. A wiser age may discover uses for weeds, and a turn of the wheel of fortune pamper them that they rise in the scale of loveliness.
IN ELYSIAN FIELDS
BY a strange oversight the garden books have slighted the art of making gardens for children. Of course a garden is a fairyland at any time, a wilderness of pure delight, and the most barren can be decked with fancy until it blooms like the Vale of Cashmere. We who have always loved gardens from our earliest days, and remem- ber those of the first years of childhood, know how great the contrast is between the flowery land of our dreams and the fenced inclosure that we return to visit after a score of years and are told that it has not changed at all. Where is the glamour and whither has flown the vision -fair1?
Blessed childhood, blessed with rosy hopes and faith that all before and about us is what we wish it to be! The rosebush with the single rose is a bower, the strug- gling bed of posies the source of every perfume and delight in flower land. They are ours for the day or the summer, and what can compare beside them !
Next to being born with a dreaming fancy is the rare
gift of an imaginative friend to take the child by the
hand and to make fairy rings grow in the grass and elves
live in every flowery cup. Such a friend throws wide the
170
IN ELYSIAN FIELDS 171
windows of the soul to poetry and to beauty in after life. It is a gift of inheritance abiding with the years and be- yond the changes of fickle fortune.
Little yellow-haired Barbara lives in a fine garden planned by a garden architect. It is superb, a landscape picture in masses of foliage of varied greens in dense shade, broken by patches of filtered lights where the sun scatters living gold on a carpet of emerald; and all along the borders wave ribbons of color as perfect as if painted from the palette of a master artist — as truly they were. Little Barbara walks up and down the flowery ways, and perchance stops to pluck a clover bloom in the grass, or a shepherd' s-purse that through some mysterious dispensa- tion of Providence escaped the lawn mower and the eagle eye of the garden architect.
And while now and then she stops to smell a fragrant bud or to watch a grumbling bee dust himself with gold as he forces his way to the treasures of snapdragon or nas- turtium, she never dares to take a flower for her own, though they hold up their pretty heads with mute affection and seem to talk to her in flower language. When no one is watching, Barbara throws conscience to the winds, and hunts the loose panel of the iron fence and slips off down the road to the washerwoman's. There the children, one and all, make clover chains and pick the four-o' clocks blooming industriously in the chicken yard, where hens are dusting themselves under the sunflowers
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and it is free and pleasant in the shade of an old apple tree.
It is a fete day when Barbara comes to our garden. The architect had no hand in its planning, and near the close of the summer its beauty shows the wear of a season, though some plants are blossoming valiantly enough. The strip of bed set apart for Barbara's pleasure gives fun to fill a week of holidays. It is thick with original plants, and, as I think of it, it reminds me of the jolly company that gathers for an annual picnic, each one with his own basket and his bag of jokes and a riddle book. No feeble, characterless creature was invited in. The lady's-slippers brought their trees of flowers and bursting seeds, Job's- tears carried silver beads, the balloon vine strung inflated green bubbles along its climbing stem, the flycatcher spread its molasses around its stem to trap the little ants and gnats, and a big clump of four-o'clocks opened promptly with the clock, and then slept late in the morn- ing sunshine.
Among the evils to be trampled down in the ascent to the higher life the poet Longfellow prayed to be de- livered from "irreverence for the dreams of youth." In those youthful dreams are the forget-me-nots, the sensi- tive plants, bachelors' -buttons, Canterbury bells, colum- bines, love-in-tangle, snapdragons, dusty millers, ragged robins, immortelles, and black-eyed Susans that the garden architect scorns.
fERRACE WALK, HOME OF MRS. FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, KENT, ENGLAND
IN ELYSIAN FIELDS 173
The humbler ^members of the larkspur family, so faith- ful in supporting a mass of blue color in the artistic land- scape, furnish spurs to make the loveliest larkspur chains for childish play. For the same reason one should encour- age daisies, the little pink English flower, "wee, modest, crimson-tipped thing," and the marguerite, by which one can tell if "he loves me or loves not" and make daisy chaplets.
Pinks great and small, the sweet clove pink, double and single pinks, are prime favorites. Boys take most kindly to pinks, and the husky lad, who sniffs at the flower garden in general, tries to wear a spice pink in his buttonhole as long as the plants are in bloom. The phlox drummondii is another boyish favorite, though it has no tempting odor. There must have been something appeal- ing in the star-eyed design that induced a boy to work among his phlox every day and keep a small book record of thirty-three different patterns of reds and whites, yel- lows and mauves, star-eyed and ring-eyed, streaked and splashed in freaks of color.
The petunia has color, and the portulaca is a quaint plant if there is not enough room for another. Its juicy foliage sparkles with dewy lights, its innocent flowers of purest yellows, reds, carmines, and white, and later the curious seed pods make it a never-ending source of delight.
I fear that the rank odor of the marigold keeps it from the place in the affections that it should have, but many a
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time has a little child gazed fondly at the golden frills, thinking of King Midas' "Mary Gold" and the story of the golden touch. The cockscomb and princes'-feather have their personal association too, and the shining seeds of cockscomb, like so many black pearls, are gems among the treasures of children.
No one with sentiment would deny a child all the rose- geranium leaves, all the rosemary, old-man, lemon ver- bena, and feverfew that it wanted, and the privilege to make bouquets after any fashion that it saw fit. More than one little Barbara pines for a garden in which to put the plants and to pluck them as she will; and the very best time to decide on such a garden for next year is just now.
The phrases of the Good Book are eloquent of a com- mon-sense wisdom which we do not always accept as we should to our own enlightenment. The oft-repeated text, "Eyes have they and see not, ears have they and hear not," is one of the finest educational warnings ever writ- ten. The children's garden is more than a passing amuse- ment. Its possibilities are so many that we shall be forgiven if we do not attempt to master them all.
The crime of crimes is that of selfishness, and of gar- dens be it said that they of all things, next to the nurture of a little child, have no place for idle coddling of the weeds of self-indulgence. They may open the eyes to the pleasure of seeing beauty and interest in the marvels
IN ELYSIAN FIELDS 175
of nature, and ask for an unselfish care to be rewarded with the response of sweet returns. It is theirs to awaken curiosity for plants everywhere, and to open the ears to the songs of birds, the insect orchestra which dwells within gardens, and all the while to sharpen the inner spiritual sight to things invisible yet present in the atmosphere.
From the child's garden of simple plants to the fields is a short step, and at autumn how glorious is the treat ! A neglected pasture is a paradise. Here the mints riot after their own fashion ; bergamot, horsemint, and others of various names that have lingered past the summer, fill the air with a pungent scent; and here live the late cone flowers and the rudbeckias. Some vervain may wave its blue spears here.
The milkweed is busy filling its pods of silk, and the everlastings are trimming their snowy flowers to make a good appearance before frost. Ironweed and fireweed and butterfly weed stayed as long as the warm days. Their roseate mauves and dull purples gave rich hues to the spread of color. Down in the grass, the silene, the starry and bladder campions, loosestrife and turtlehead and ladies'-tresses go on flowering as if autumn was not near. Here the closed gentian, sturdier than the fringed, makes bluer its globes to match the sky, and perhaps wild chicory along the edge of the harvest field mirrors its cerulean hues. The boneset and tansy tower above the
176 THE JOY OF GARDENS
grass; the leaves of the sassafras blush scarlet; and the flower hunter, gathering them all, goes home through the purple twilight laden with the spoils of the last of the procession of flowers.
Overwork should be counted among the unpardonable sins. Too often the day of labor stretches beyond the eight hours and cuts off the needed spell of leisure. Many of us are so deeply dyed in this sin of incessant work that the conscience does not trouble us while we are pushing the spade or weeding with aching back, and for- getting that we are not giving praise for fair skies and sunshine.
But just as soon as the play feeling comes upon us, and we should like to be children once more, frolic with the lambs, make crowns of oak leaves, and disport with nature, up rises the warning voice, "Thou shalt labor," and we are overburdened with the idea that all is wrong. If by chance a friend comes along who believes in the gospel of play and in the religion of leisure, our spirits may take a holiday, yet never forgetting the sneaking sense of guilt.
There should be moments to gratify the longing for joy, though common sense tells us the battle between order and disorder is continuing among the pansies and the dahlias as well as in the business marts. While Tho- reau contemplated society from his solitude near Walden Pond he made the conclusion that "a broad margin of
IN ELYSIAN FIELDS 177
leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste no less in life than in housekeeping. Yet the man who does not betake himself at once desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the door of heaven all the while, which shall surely be opened to him."
The ideal life would know how to measure labor and leisure. Life without innocent joy is dwelling in penal servitude, for bread and butter do not feed the soul, and the slave may have food and clothes and shelter. Then let us apportion our days — time for work and time for play — and let the children into the secret. If ours is the right eloquence in spreading the gospel of leisure and the spirit of innocent play, the next generation will have a finer cheerfulness.
We may knock at the door of heaven, giving praise in pleasure as well as in work. Religion with a sour face and downcast eye was invented by the evil one, we know, because it is so hard to follow when the natural world, free to the hand of the Creator, smiles and is glad.
A subtle fancy may question what curse sealed the door of the senses that man should live blind to the sub- limity of the heavens and the panorama of the year, deaf to the music of the winds and nature's songsters, and unheedful of the summons of the divine upon earth, until wisdom unlocks the gates to joy.
Who can cast a shadow when there is
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"A haze on the far horizon, An infinite tender sky, The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields, And the wild geese sailing high;
Knd all over upland and lowland
The charm of the goldenrod — Some of us call it Autumn,
And others call it God."
As the night falls, the beauty lingers. Though as- sured yesterday that summer had taken her gentle pres- ence away, the evening was warm and fragrant. The children had gathered herb balls, twisting the stems and dried leaves to place among their linen, and the house was redolent with minty vapors, while through the open win- dow stole the breath of autumn, perfumed with calamus and the odor of ripening grasses.
A mystic autumn night is such an opportunity for revelings! Let us call together the children, fling wide the doors, and, escaping from the familiar paths of the home inclosure, cross the- lots to the wood and the walnut grove.
How fast the shackles of convention fell from the limbs as we climbed the fences and hasted along in Indian file, the dullest alive in the freedom of rapid motion. The full moon looked over the eastern tree tops, with a ruddy face diffusing a pale light that did not penetrate
IN ELYSIAN FIELDS 179
the shaded places, and above, the stars hung like dia- mond lanterns in the arch of heaven. Turning from the grassy road into the thicket, a fusillade of fairy shot from the witch-hazel brush bombarded the advancing troop. A gray owl hooted derisively, and a sleepy crow made a cynical protest, while there was a flutter of heavy birds among the dry leaves of the oak, and a ghostly four- footed beast, gray and lithe, checked the happy shouts of the young folks as it slipped across the path silently out of sight, uncanny and weird, until a plaintive "meow" be- trayed the unrecognized family cat prowling for field mice.
The opened consciousness sharpened in the culture of the garden awakened every child instinct to sights and sounds of the grove. Who will ever forget the foray among the walnuts and hickories, or the picture of the blazing bonfire, the sparks flying upward in jewels of light to vanish in the gloom intensified by the contrast of ruddy flames'? On the edge of the circle yellow pen- nants of the witch-hazel fluttered as if waved by the hands of gnomes, and the snapping of twigs and fall of nuts created a new world of sight and sound.
At last, when the logs had burned low, the happy troop trailed back as they had come, the physical senses stimu- lated by the odors, the mysterious rustlings, the scented atmosphere, and the glamour of autumn veiled in the
i8o THE JOY OF GARDENS
silver moonlight now illuminating the earth to the far horizon. The village streets were deserted, here and there a light glimmering among the trees; and the old gypsy spirit of pilgrims abroad in the House of the Open Door under the curtains of the star-gemmed sky possessed one and all with a feeling of unreality.
But the day had not ended. Behind the hedge of our own garden a stout-hearted cricket was beating its drum, the windows were ablaze, and one left behind cried the news that the night-blooming cereus in the southwest nook by the porch, sheltered and discouraged the summer through, had at this late day opened its miracle of bloom.
All fell upon their knees on the grass to look at the tropic flower without peer, virginal and lovely, gleaming in the light of many candles. Heaven had granted an- other rare surprise of beauty when nature by many signs had dropped her curtain on the pageant of blossoming plants. Under the warmth of the aftermath of summer it had come into its own, and lo ! as we looked, from the silent reaches of the darkness a large white moth came floating on wings of pale silver and green to touch the heart of the flower.
In all creation is there a diviner miracle? Who says that we have fallen on evil times'? Who can have doubt in gardens'? The spirit of peace, of beauty, and of mystery is abroad in sunshine and in starlight, elevating the thoughts to nobler ideals.
IN ELYSIAN FIELDS 181
"'A. garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! Rose plot,
Fringed pool, Fern'd grot —
The veriest school
Of peace ; and yet the fool Contends that God is not — Not God ! in gardens ! when the eve is cool ?
Nay, but I have a sign ;
'T is very sure God walks in mine."
Remember this, ye of little faith, and be glad, for it is the law and the gospel of the poet.
ESCAPED FROM GARDENS
SOON after the equinox, the wild woods being ablaze with ripening leaves, we go miles to the north on a crooked river to spy out the shrubs that will bear trans- planting within our gates. The fruits and seeds are in winter dress, and the fine shapes of branches and twigs are apparent. What a fine hedge of witch-hazel would grow, if it would take kindly to a civilized neighborhood ! Its yellow pennants flutter gayly, and its popping fruits and grotesque bushes are decorations not to be despised.
Chill weather comes early in the north woods of the river country. The frost sprite was abroad the night we slept before a fire of logs in the cabin. It had spun threads of silver across the water buckets at the well, and thrown a veil of sparkling velvet over the meadows. The woodbines draping dead trees were battle flags of burn- ing red, and the sumach was scarlet among weeds of yellows and bronze. The witch-hazel pennants were pale and frosted, hanging forlornly.
In the hollows of the road thin ice crackled under foot, wild geese were flying southward, and the squirrels chat- tering of winter stores in the hickories. The gophers 182
ESCAPED FROM GARDENS 183
frisked before us with cheeks pouched with nuts and corn, exciting the blue jays that screamed their discontent in reply to crow philosophy cawed in the grove across the ravines. All nature was prophetic of winter, though autumn would linger yet a little longer.
Our home garden, protected from north and west winds, still flaunts the latest blossoms of summer. But here it is autumn, forest and plain reminiscent of the changing year and the ebb and flow of life. Even the friends of childhood still living in their old homes in this out-of-the-way neighborhood repeat the thought that this familiar planet on which we dwell maybe has reached its November.
An ancient road from a woodcutter's clearing twisted and turned among stumps and outcropping rocks, the gray bones of the hill ridge. To the fancy it played a game of hide and seek with some forest-born "Brushwood Boy." It descended into the valley to a glen that might have been the abiding haunt of gnomes, and then, with a short turn across a brook and over a rocky steep, it entered a sylvan glade where cardinal flowers showed red under a protection of hardy bracken, and near a shallow pool pros- pered a colony of fringed gentian, blue as if cut from the celestial curtains of the sky.
Then the winding road turned its back on fairyland and clambered between bowlders to an open plateau and the mournful reminders of a deserted farm. The
184 THE JOY OF GARDENS
windows were shutterless, the doors of the tottering house unhinged.
The glass panes reflected the light with an unmeaning stare, and, as the cloud shadows obscured the sun, myste- rious presences seemed to look forth and vanish in the vacant rooms beyond. The fitful breeze flapped the gar- den gate, rustling the tangle of forgotten rosebushes, and stirred the tall growth of asters as if a mysterious some- thing came along the weedy paths and passed on to the gloom of the forest road.
A neglected garden is the best book on hardy flowers. Its record is written by time, for only the fittest to fight out a battle with dry seasons or wet, cold winters, hot summers, and voracious insects and usurping weeds live over a season. Here above the fence looked the coarse yellow marigold, the sweet Williams had established themselves in a community, and row upon row, all in the pride of vainglory, grew the self-sown cockscombs, claim- ing the right of numbers.
Still triumphant amid the forlorn tangle of the deserted garden, cockscomb awaits in defiance the approach of win- ter. It holds its head high above its woody pedestal and looks across the vacant spaces where goldenrod and mari- gold once held sovereign sway. Gone are the flowery train. Cockscomb alone retains a vestige of the splendor of royal crimson. Though wounded by the midnight frost and sadly battered by the gales, it seems to proclaim:
COURT OF THE SULTANA, GENERALIFE PALACE, GR
ESCAPED FROM GARDENS 185
"Manners maketh the man; behold my temper; I shall endure to the end."
Cockscomb is a prolific producer in the economy of the natural world. It owns not a stingy fiber. From the ten thousand cells of its plumed florescence it brings to light as many brilliant black pearls, pearls more precious than those treasured in a reliquary, the sharito of the Buddhist. These never play false to the devout soul. They are in truth "breeding pearls," and if the dusky gems found in ashes of a consumed saint refuse to bear a life for the next generation by some fault of conscience of the devotee, the reliquary of the cockscomb ever keeps its promise.
With the spring it gives birth to a jaunty, frilled flower top, a miracle of creation that steadfastly preaches to the listening world the philosophy of the "flower in the cran- nied wall":
"Could I know you all in all I should know what God and man is."
Cockscomb sets no price in its riches of seed pearls. It scatters with lavish prodigality. With a shake of its head it lies down under the first snowdrift and lets the future take care of itself. Its short life presents the spec- tacle of duties done and the joy of inconsequence. Its folk are the bourgeoisie of the autumnal garden. They are conspicuous and assertive, and must be the observed
186 THE JOY OF GARDENS
of observers, whether ruddy or colorless, dwarfed or tall, slender or corpulent, according to individual traits. All, from the giant to the dwarf, are collectors of black pearls; all enjoy the air they breathe and add a quota to nature's great museum.
While the curious west wind shakes the black pearls from the receptacles of the cockscomb, at the same time he tears snowy locks from the head of Madam Thistle, and Fairy Thistledown spreads its snowy parachute and sails away wherever fate may will. Madam Thistle is shut out from Eden. Across the fence, along the dusty road where the shallow earth barely veils the rock ridge, she must make the best of an existence on sufferance. But such is the paradox of life; bourgeois cockscomb is cher- ished in good society; aristocratic thistle receives scanty recognition. Pride and the consciousness of an ancient lineage afford her consolation.
My Lady Thistle loves the appearance of luxury. Wherever fortune grants her a foothold she spreads out her skirts of foliage with careful art. Each leaf is per- fect with handsome curves and thorny spines guarding a luscious green surface. The stem might have been copied from the device of some clever engineer ; but truth puts it just the other way — the engineer studied nature's con- struction and borrowed wit from the plant stem.
Most wonderful of all is the blossom that crowns my Lady Thistle. Set in a cup of green, protected and
ESCAPED FROM GARDENS 187
adorned with unmatchable art in foliage and coloring, is the cluster of purple flowerets. Time was when the bot- anists gave recognition of this perfection, and all the flower tribes of composite were united under the name "Thistle family." But sentiment has vanished, and now we tack nomenclature to science.
Thistle bloom gowned in Tyrian purple, with the rare perfume from Araby and nectar cells inviting the bees, gossamer-winged gnats, and butterflies, is the center of rustic festivities on a midsummer day. When the gay whirl of pleasure has spent its brief hour, the flowerets sleep for a night and wake with the next sunny dawn to shake out a mane of powdered locks and set sail a million winged arrows pointed for mischief.
Then merrily soar the Thistledowns to plant the fields for the coming summer. The weed killer abroad with bonfire and hoe looks after them as if they were a flight of mischief-loving sprites bent on adventure.
"Trifles light as air," he muses. "When the bread- makers and Beauty's children have gone to rest, these re- main— the trifles light as air. My Lady Thistle, I love you, just for your inconsequence. The world is peopled with sorrow makers, with hard workers and tramps and idlers. Nature gives you but one short year, a wondrous beauty, and a prickly sheath to keep lovers at a distance. For all the cruelty of circumstance, you seem to make the best of things. Yours is the light heart and the joy.
i88 THE JOY OF GARDENS
Alone you are innocent; with a following you would be a menace to society. For this I cast you upon the blazing pyre from which the smoke rises in thank offering for the blessings of autumn."
Mints, calamus, herbs, roots, and pine cones brought from the hilltop made a fragrant smoke as the weed fire died to its embers. The weed killer and his company passed along on the road by which we had come, uproot- ing and looking for stranger plants waiting to make in- roads on the next year's crops. The blackberry tangles, a place of joy to flower lovers, knew no mercy, because these are the hosts of the wheat rusts.
A chill blast coming like a mighty sign from the north, a flurry of snowflakes from the clouds, bade us hasten on to the lowlands, where the amber of a declining sun painted a land in which it seemed ever afternoon. Here the farmers were weed burning too, and neat housewives cleaning gardens. It was a weedy paradise on either side of the road, as if human foresight had been bent upon affairs at home, forgetting that mischief-makers were gathering burs in the public highway to make ready for an onslaught of mischief.
How scornfully we speak of those who vegetate ! Thus are we guilty of flippancy of thought and speech. Judg- ment and reason are lacking when we overlook the power of the creatures of vegetation. We imagine that they are tied to the earth, prisoners of circumstance. Far from it.
ESCAPED FROM GARDENS 189
This notion is a pleasant fiction. The botanist does not romance when he says that they have appropriated vices as well as virtues; that among them are parasites and thieves ; that saints and martyrs of the wronged and help- less of the plant world cry out for mercy, and should have a reward from the accounts written down in the records kept by the guardian angels of all who suffer without reason.
Naughty Tommy and silly Jenny making mud pies on the edge of the prairie may tell a thing or two from the tragic histories of creatures that vegetate. They know that a tribe of plantain crept across the front yard, crushed humbler plants out of existence, and kept incar- cerated within a paling fence until the intruders were uprooted.
Have they not heard of the crimes of wheat rust, of en- croaching tares and Canada thistles? Have they not wept over the ban against the starry blossoms that make the daisy chains? And now, as they peep above the tall grass, another army of tramps rushes down the dusty road, tumbling before the Indian summer breeze, joying in its balmy breath, and paying toll to all the roadside fertility by showering crops of seed for next year's har- vest— tramps indeed more dangerous than any from the hosts of the unwashed from the London slums.
"Russian thistle out for mischief," said the farmer, stopping his team. "This is the first bunch of the pest
igo THE JOY OF GARDENS
that has tumbled into this county. When last heard from it had taken root just the other side of the line. Here, you children, help me gather up the stuff. We'll go back to the crossroads in our hunt and make a bonfire. Maybe I can find a yellow pippin for each of you. This is worse than any tramp that follows the railroad. One thing we can say for it is that it pays first and eats last. But I have known other villains to spend less money to carry out a bigger robbery."
Russian thistle thieves from the farmer, and keeps busy sending out scouts to do mischief to its neighbors. It sucks the life out of the soil, wearing its best clothes while it does it. In the spring it pushes a pretty green head out of the ground, blushes pale pink, turns crimson, and looks so innocent that you hate to pull it up. Its beauty para- lyzes the weed killer. All summer long its good looks save it from suspicion. No one remembers that it is the dreaded thistle.
When autumn comes, it puts on a sober brown veil ; it dries to a lacy brown, bushy ball, and looks more harmless than ever. It hugs millions of seeds in its pouches. And, as if dead to harm, one fine morning lets loose and sails away, no doubt laughing in its vegetable heart at the trick it played. Now it shall make merry after a fashion of its own.
Its hour has come for traveling; it is so light that the wind hurls it for miles, so compact that it fails to catch
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securely among other weeds. It blows about until cov- ered by snow or caught in the ice ; but meanwhile it has showered evil seeds far and wide, and accomplished its mission.
"Tumble weeds remind me of the society tramp," re- marked the cynic who had come along under his umbrella. "They feed off the property of the industrious. The tumbleweeds usurp the fields of the useful, they deceive the unwary by making a show of good clothes and im- pudent manners, they are careless of the rights of others, they abhor honest labor, and are the epitome of selfishness. 'Let me live, and the rest of the world go hang,' they cry. To the fire with them, good farmer."
While tumbleweed has foolishly bounded along the highroad, sowing disorder and discontent, under the shadows of the hedges Jenny notes here and there a flower favorite or humble shrub hanging its wilted head.
Frost has not sent the gentian to rest, and the starry aster bears signs of good health. Why the discourage- ment of the others'? She searches farther, and nothing alarming meets the eye other than a delicate little vine hung with clusters of pearly berries.
"Dodder," she cries with disgust. "Come, Tommy, see the horrid thing squeezing the life out of this pretty flower."
It is too late to tear the offending parasite from its hold ; the mischief is done, but she may save the plants of
192 THE JOY OF GARDENS
next year by gathering the dodder berries and casting them into the fire with the tumbleweed. It, too, bears the garb of innocence, appearing an inoffensive, slender vine curling affectionately about a flower stem. Like the Rus- sian thistle, dodder belongs to the rank and file of Satan's great army of evildoers.
"Yes, dodder is another society parasite," mused the cynic, rubbing his spectacles. "I know the type well. Under the guise of gentleness it sneaks into your privacy, invades your secret thoughts, feeds on your comforts and hospitality, and, while appearing well before the world of fashion, it gives not a whit for its entertainment or its living. The dodder parasites are among the most hateful things of society. They are like leeches, crying 'More, more,' and when they have worn you out, wasted your substance, they fling you aside and take up with your enemy, if he happen to have comforts worth pursuit. Root out the dodder, children; crush it under your heel. The woods and the world are full of dodder parasites."
OF DRIFTWOOD AND DREAMS
"T T ERE hath been dawning another blue day" — the JLA blue day beloved by Ruskin, when the air is still. Not a leaf stirs on the aspens waiting breathlessly ever to catch the breeze. The smoke from the chimneys of a thousand household hearths curls upward in misty spirals higher and higher, like incense rising from altars to reach the far heavens.
Who would stay within doors'? Not a book on the shelves or a painting in the galleries colors pictures of dreams to match the landscape of garden and roads and hills far away. The clear air spurs the hand to make things fairer, and the passion for pruning, weeding, and planning for richer harvests fills the morning hours. We are hungry for conquest, all aglow to collect what re- mains in the hedgerows and has stayed to beautify the plantations.
Some one whispered that the orphan school was to pass this way for their monthly fete in the grove. Ought they not to have more than bread for their outing*? Every flower in blossom and in bud must be clipped and tied into neat little posies, to make gay with color and sweet- ness. There is a shy kinship of flowers and children about 193
194 THE JOY OF GARDENS
which we know so little, since we have forgotten the "glories whence we came."
The message sent to the door bespoke plain food. Why not cake"? Have the good people ever thought that the repressed little bodies clad in subduing gingham might hunger for flowers to feed their souls? It was my gentle neighbor who wound the message about a late-blooming Japan lily — "Hast thou two loaves of bread? Then sell one to buy flowers of the narcissus, for though the bread will nourish thy body, the flowers will strengthen thy soul."
Mohammed said it long ago, repeating a message from the Infinite. The mission of loveliness created in the Garden of Eden has fed the souls of poets and prophets and those who thirsted by the wayside. What has pre- served the ideal of beauty like -the rose, of purity like the lily, of sweetness like the violet, of grace like that of the primrose?
The church clock struck nine as the demure procession came in sight under the arching trees. A golden shower of tinted maple leaves floated down upon the uncovered heads of little boys and girls, walking two by two. The leaders stopped as they reached the gate, as if dazzled by the baskets of bloom, and stepped back abashed at the offering of flowers. Then, with the quick acceptance of blessings natural to hopeful childhood, both hands soon reached out, and eyes shone on the scarlet of geranium,
DRIFTWOOD AND DREAMS 195
the blue of ageratum and forget-me-not, the white of cos- mos and daisy.
Now they have gone their way to the pine grove, little human flowers escaped from gardens, we take up our task again, wondering why more human hearts do not grasp the larger gardening in life. What nobler work for the isolated on farms who complain of loneliness than that of transplanting children from asylums in the city to country homes ! The childless man and wife could gather a company of ten about them, and know loneliness never again. The battle with weeds of character in the adopted plants is not so desperate as the battle often is with self and discontent. And by and by the harvest comes, when the boys and girls of a few years' culture and pruning go elsewhere to make other gardens and to call their guar- dians blessed.
Life would be a fairer fabric if we could cut away barren stalks and dried leaves, and gather up the waste of a season ready for the burning. We never seem to know when to let go, and keep out half-dead begonias and pot- ted herbs to deface the order of the front windows. It takes courage to pull up a sickly rosebush or chop out a lilac that has harbored molds for years. We know it ought to be done, and do we do it as many times as we should?
Moralizing is inspired by fall weather. When the cleaning spell is upon me not a corner of the fence escapes,
196 THE JOY OF GARDENS
not an out-of-the-way jut in the wall which might shelter a nesting caterpillar or insect snuggling in comfort for the winter.
The world is suspicious of the man who willfully sets foot upon a worm, nor would count him among the most desired of friends. There are times, however, when a neighbor encroaches on his neighbor's property, and the judge must decide which is the fittest to survive. Far be it from us to callous our sentimental tenderness for the smallest of living things.
At night, when the sun is down, the flowery world is a different place from that we know by day. The colony of toads which has been protected for the sake of their fondness for insects preying on plants, goes awalking in the dusk. They are a friendly company. They enjoy human society, though the human giant must look colos- sal to their bright eyes.
When any one takes a book in the late afternoon and rests in a big chair near the nasturtiums, hop-hop down the path come two, three, or more toads to sit in an admiring circle. Company manners do not interfere with business, for a lightning-motioned tongue darts rapidly as Mr. Toad takes the good of insect life coming his way.
The cool of the evening is an ever-returning reminder of how fair the world can be, and how at peace. The flowers are grateful for the shadows and the de\v, lifting
DRIFTWOOD AND DREAMS 197
their tired heads eagerly. The Words worthi an creed is truest at that hour :
"To her fair works did nature link The human soul that through me ran,"
and no scoffer alive but, feeling the gracious mood of poet and the charm of eventide, would say :
"Through primrose tufts in that green bower
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths ; And 't is my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes."
"The breezy call of incense-breathing morn," the dewy evening — these are the divine hours. All things seemed to have declared a truce between battles. By the very nature of the earthly scheme, the struggle for existence is a battlefield in which the fight is a furious one. The Happy Valley of Rasselas has never been found but in dreams.
The free-lance career of toads upon insects is matched by the conduct of the creeping lizards domesticated in the rock pile. They are the scourge of creepers and winged in their domain. Innocent sunning at midday is only a ruse. They are spying out the playgrounds of flies and ants.
The spiders are bandits of the first order. It would take a lifetime to cultivate an intimacy with the tribes at
ig8 THE JOY OF GARDENS
war on winged creatures and at sword's point with each other. From the big meadow spider with yellow stripes to the uncanny little red spider the size of a pin point in- festing the roses, there are a score of families terrible to think of, interesting to meet.
The meadow spider, harmless to gardeners, is a friendly dame. We say dame, because it is she who does the spin- ning. Mr. Meadow Spider is a stranger, as spider lore has not gone very far among us. Mrs. Meadow Spider, or her daughter, has come year after year. It may be con- ceit on our part, or plain courage on hers, which permits us to imagine that she knows us. She sits very still in the midst of her silken-thread palace swung from the chrys- anthemums to the barberries, and lets us look at her with a reading glass and comment on her surroundings.
She is as indifferent to manners as the toads and the lizards. If we come at the appointed hour she traps care- less rainbow flies, binds them, and devours them before our eyes. With every appearance of one contemplating nature for the love of its beauty, she is cruel and cunning — only waiting her chance to take advantage of her victim.
I have observed, against my will, that there is an iron hand in the velvet glove of the morning-glory. When rich odors fail toward September, the tuberose sends up its spikes of richly perfumed blossoms to make fragrant the night. The tuberoses are the successors of a clump of
DRIFTWOOD AND DREAMS 199
dwarf white phlox which is through blooming about tube- rose season. In the earlier summer the phlox make a pretty green tangle above the tuberose plants, each giving and taking amiably.
The morning-glories from seeds that lay dormant until late escaped notice while the phlox spread their stars, but hardly had the tuberose spikes set to growing before the morning-glory tendrils found them out and set forth to climb. Round and round twined the ambitious vine, em- bracing its host with such vigor that one day the tragedy was discovered. The heads of tuberose buds hung withered, choked to death by the vine which triumphantly swung bells of crystal and crimson above the tombs of those it had slain.
There is a cherished waxen asclepias, as fragrant as the tuberose, which catches the trunks of moths and butter- flies and hangs them by the head when they come for nec- tar and honey. Often on a summer morning the ground beneath the plant is a battlefield strewn with the bodies of wretched insects torn to pieces to escape the trap of the asclepias. Should we uproot it and fling it to the winds?
Now and then a field dodder reaches its white tendrils through the fence or sets a foothold somewhere in the shrubbery. This is a parasite of the first order in crime. It throttles its victim, feeds on its life-blood, and dresses gayly, affecting the thread-lace airs to conceal its depravity.
200 THE JOY OF GARDENS
If it were not for their flowery looks, who would toler- ate even the catchfly, trimming its gummy stems to trap feeble ants; or the carnivorous Venus' flytrap, or the pitcher-plant holding a deadly drink*? How well these fit Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw."
Others there are, crowding to the wall weaker plants, through usurping arrogance. We can understand why the dandelion, camomile, and roadside weeds must push and hang on for dear life if they would survive, but why plants in a garden should pursue a selfish policy is not to be understood. In cleaning time those who give an inch and take an ell are trimmed back. The blue-eyed forget- me-nots, the May pinks, and sweet Williams are energetic spreaders. Dividing plants and giving away roots does not lessen their numbers ; they are up and doing early and late.
Tragedy paints the darker shadows in the pictures of life. We cannot understand, and yet above it all is the unquenchable faith that "all 's right with the world." Though Tennyson sang sadly of nature's cruelty, its gloom, hiding the loss of many lives, is dispelled by the larger trust. We need but look on the brighter side and beyond.
"From belt to belt of crimson seas, O'er leagues of odor streaming far, To where in yonder Orient star A hundred spirits whisper peace."
DRIFTWOOD AND DREAMS 201
The poets loved gardens. If they have become kin to our sympathy they walk with us in the flowery ways — the gallant, gentle spirit Edmund Spenser, the myriad- minded Shakspere, gay Robert Herrick, even sober Milton and the magister Amadeus Wolfgang von Goethe.
Let memories of them assemble as we gather the herbs, the dried plants, and grasses raked from the paths and beds to make a sacrificial fire to the fall of the year. The fragrant smoke ascends in the mellowed sunlight, shaping to the figure of an Aladdin's genie. Hail to the past of those who made gardens ! All hail to every flower lover in the land! We join our voices to those who have sung their praises since time began.
Cast sweet incense in the flames with gum of myrrh to recall the days when shepherds watched their flocks by night and wise men walked the flowery plains, following a star in the east.
Bring hither bunches of moly and rue, of sweet basil and thyme, of balm of Gilead, cedar of Lebanon, and wreaths of bay. Let the smoke rise higher and higher, and evoke the days of the ceremonial of Solomon's temple, of the Golden Age of Greece.
Then break and scatter the log of driftwood, and shatter the recollections of other lands and scenes woven in the wanderings of a lifetime. Here to the nostrils comes the scent of salt seas, of rolling breakers on a
202 THE JOY OF GARDENS
northern shore, of the cots under the hill and peat smoke dissolving in the blue of Irish skies at even. Who with a drop of Celtic blood in his veins will forget its pungent odors? Who that has once looked for fairies in the peat fire will lose his gift of seeing far"?
The fire has burned low — the dead flowers have van- ished— ashes to ashes. It is night, and the lingering cuckoo is calling from the distance. The doves have gone to rest, the new moon hangs a silver horn beneath the evening star, and Mercury holds his torch just above the western hills. In another moment he will have wheeled onward.
Come within and close the door. The wind has risen, and the same blast that beats at the unlatched gate is toss- ing the ships far out at sea and beating incessantly on the shores. Home-faring hearts treasuring happy memo- ries are best.
Light the lamp and look what the mail has brought in a casket of palms and ferns. It is the promise of the future. These dreams of daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, and lilies will not fade as illusions. Hidden deep in the bulbs lie the pledges of another life. Hope wings its way, and to-morrow we '11 do the planting.
IN GOD'S ACRE
1LIKE to lean over the garden fence and look down the long road losing itself in the violet mists of an autumn afternoon. The whole world becomes a garden in St. Martin's summer, and the idle road lazily taking its course between bending elms and maples bearing the tat- tered banners of red and gold of October foliage leads on and on to dusky tangles where lingering blue gentians still look to heaven with the eyes of faith, and to forests where the woodbine drapes its crimson wreaths, and on and on, no one knows where. The dream escapes us, following the vision ever going on and on.
What will be our mental state, I wonder, when we have found out all the secrets of nature. Knowing as we do the cantankerous make-up of man and his unreliabil- ity, why should we want to manage the weather, and to discover the secrets of the machinery of the solar system*? My neighbors have prayed for rain, but I do not want it, regarding every fair day of autumn as so much gold in the treasury of esthetic pleasure. Suppose it should rain and rain, from the equinox to the solstice, what a sodden place would be the gallery of recollections for that season, and 203
204 THE JOY OF GARDENS
when should we have had time to do our bulb planting or leaf burning*?
For man to have a share in the running of the planets would be dangerous, we may be sure. The chariot of the sun would whirl off in a tangent, the trade winds blow awry, and two or three autocrats of a decade confuse nat- ural events for centuries. The rest of us poor mortals, thankful for the vagaries of weather, under wiser powers than we wot of, would have more than our share of suffering.
Still looking down the long road which has crossed the river beyond the highest hill, and then, as we learned on the nutting tramp, turns west and makes a bee line di- rectly to the courts about the setting sun, we give thanks that we may not know all things. Could we foresee the winter and the spring we should be deprived of the bliss of expectation and the zest of ups and downs whose con- trasts make the variety of life.
We should lose the little surprises, knowing all the events that matter to no one but ourselves — the year of bloom of the wild crab apple, the occasional return of an oriole to nest in the cherry tree, the autumnal after- math of a blossoming wild rose, and November flowers on the quince and the blackberry. These and, yes, the accidental meeting of friends estranged, and the coming of one new and congenial with an affinity of tastes. So for our part we prefer to look down the long road
IN GOD'S ACRE 205
vanishing in the mists, burnishing the mirror of hope for beauty and good which we cannot see as yet.
A fickle breeze rustling the bronzed foliage of a clump of oaks creeps groundward and blows the dried leaves to play in circling whirlwinds. The flock of sparrows that have been holding excited congress for some days past, whether to be or not to be of the migrants like other birds, have grown sportive in the warm air, and fly low in the mysterious manner betokening a change in the weather.
The primeval stir in my own veins that urges me to break down the bars and walk over the hills and far afield, to follow the light of the gypsy-star, is akin to the sparrow restlessness which they cannot forget. It is so long ago since any of their ancestry have taken the south- ward journey that the instinct has become but an echo in the blood which throbs as the sun goes south and fore- warnings of winter appear. And then the sparrow flies low among the leaves on the ground while the human, harking to the same feeling, looks down the long road, takes tramps by starlight, or plays a Chopin prelude in the dusk of the gloaming, and wonders at his restlessness.
All Saints' Day has stolen upon us unawares; the clouds betokened the cold November rain, and while we searched the garden for the lingering flowers to deck the graves according to the sweet old German custom, more lifted their pretty heads than we had believed escaped the continued succession of chilly nights.
206 THE JOY OF GARDENS
There was an abundant nosegay ready for our hands. The last warm-hued asters, the mignonette, like a fragile gentleman growing strong in the face of adversity, as fra- grant as in summer; the graceful daisy-eyed cosmos; the scented nicotina, the ruddy marigolds, and, shyly lying close to the ground, the pansies still blooming cheerily. The rose geraniums which usually blacken before the frost gave sweet-smelling branches, owing to our fore- thought in covering them, and the salvia had fringed sprays of red to add to our treasures.
Our little cemetery has been cleared of its unsightly monuments, and the tablets are hidden, sunken in the sod or hidden in shrubbery. It is God's Acre, where the weary are at rest and sleep close to nature's heart, while the souls are soaring on and on — earth's fretful turmoil over, and the earthly labors done — to another life.
The fall of the leaf and the fall of the year have no sadness for the brotherhood of gardeners. The awaken- ing of spring, the bursting of bud and the unfolding of leaf, the glory of the flower and the ripening of fruit with the perfection of seedtime and harvest — that is all of life. Our own cycle of infancy, youth, maturity, and age is just like it — the year but a little longer, the vicissi- tudes of weather and of cultivators and pests only another kind; and when the winter of life comes to us, as it does to all, we too, like the lily of the field, may lie down under the sod to pleasant dreams and a resurrection.
IN GOD'S ACRE 207
The flower chaplets of All Souls' Day are emblems of the wreaths of love and grateful recollections that ascend invisible to the spirits of the dear ones gone before, who may return on this day of days and join the communion of saints. I cannot feel that they have left us. nor can any who have tasted the joy of gardens believe that with winter the flowers lie dead. They gave us a brief vision of their beauty materialized, and then vanished to bloom in other spheres.
The last leaves are floating gently in the still calm air, a golden vapor that spread abroad when the clouds blew to the north at noon. St. Martin has returned to walk in the autumn fields, and the piles of burning leaves appear on every side. The slender columns of smoke, blue as if snatched from the skies, arise as if from a thou- sand altars of autumn to the feasts of All Souls and All Saints.
How shortsighted is the man who believes that the fall of the year, and the fall of the leaf, end all. Every clump of grass, the humblest weed, refutes such heresy to the divine plan. Who that has worked in gardens could cherish the thought for an instant? The scattered rose to-day promises fairer beauty to-morrow, if the worker has done his part. No melancholy hours are in store, unless weeds and neglect have worn out the cour- age of the plants, and they lie withered and dead, with no shred of hope to bind them to to-morrow.
208 THE JOY OF GARDENS
This is the punishment of the planter of short-lived annuals. He is the man who has made friends for an hour's entertainment, not for a lifetime; for, strange to say, and it always comes to us as a surprise when we dis- cover nature inconsistent, flowers in a garden resemble the people in a village.
If we have chosen from the gentle and the gay, the sturdy and the arrogant, the company will be a varied one; the weak will brace themselves against the strong, the graces of one will temper the boldness of the other, and, after storms have passed, some will have weathered them and remain. The year will never be barren of beauty, as the hearth will never be vacant of friends, if they have been selected with wisdom.
Turn from dreams to reality. What has been your forethought of the morrow and the spring? Has life flitted away while you were looking down the long road to fairy gold at the foot of the rainbow or have you alter- nated work and play*?
In the past of planting time a wisdom, looking ahead to faith and hope, thought of November while it was May. Then were set the shrubs of character which promised cheer for the seasons as they passed — unfolding of leaf in spring, blossoms in June, and joy of exuberant growing in midsummer. Now the snowberries are hang- ing like pearls against the bronzed leaves, the fringes of barberries trim the thorny branches with coral, the orange
IN GOD'S ACRE 209
of rose hips glows like topaz in the shadowy depths near the ground. The switches of the Siberian dogwood show the warm blood coursing with the sap, and the shrub world has no disappointments in autumn.
Through the ages since long ago the hand of destiny has been weaving a fabric reflecting the ebb and flow of the tide of life. It is a richly hued tapestry with a splen- dor of lights made brilliant in contrast to dull shadows, and from beginning to end, through them all, runs a sunny thread ever leading toward dreams of future unfolding.
The design has never approached completeness. We may turn the leaves of history, follow its pageants of glory, its masques of comedy, its interludes of tragedy, and the strand of hope weaves on and on, unraveled and unbroken in sunny luster; and as we look beyond to-day we watch it dipping below the horizon of to-morrow, whither the imagination takes courage to cling to its certainty.
This sun ray penetrates the clouds of an unpromising spring and burnishes the gold of a fruitful summer. Now, as winter is at hand, it shines again in St. Mar- tin's weather, and if to-night a prophetic snow cloud throws a purple bar across the west, if dawn is gray and chill, be sure that the torch of hope is flashing out some- where, and if we were watching between the hours we would catch a glimpse of its light. All this is visible in
210 THE JOY OF GARDENS
the skies above the garden ; and this we know, if we have kept step with a pilgrim's progress, that hope has never flitted out of reckoning.
The sun has dropped behind the distant hill where eternal fires seem to blaze against the sky behind the cypresses in God's Acre. A glory not of earth reflects from the church spire, "pointing to heaven like a finger in the sky," teaching of faith in everlasting good. The fall anemone, opening its white petals in the dried grass along the road, carries the message from paradise to earth.
Turn your back on the winding road, you of little faith. Plant to-day, that in spring you may have purest joy. The garden awaits the beginning of a newer and more joyous season. The work of one year has rounded through a cycle of seedtime and harvest. Turn the brown earth with industry, and deep in the heart of nature plant the modest crocus, the daffodil, the lily of Easter, the tulip with her chalice for heavenly vintage; and when the snows of winter retreat before the return- ing spring, make festival in the garden and wreathe its altars with garlands, for the resurrection of life is at hand, and nature is true to the heart that loves her.
THE END
APPENDIX AN ALL-THE-YEAR GARDEN
A GARDEN of persistent perennials may be so planted that it will result in bloom and color the year round. The plants may be chosen to produce a succession of flowers until late in the winter, and some of the evergreen varieties will put forth shy pansies, violets, or Christmas roses (helleborus), under the shelter of dry shrubbery, when snow lies on the ground.
When chosen with the color idea in mind the fruits and bark of certain kinds of shrubbery exhibit distinct shades of red, green, brown, and gray, becoming more attractive as winter turns toward spring. The groups of fruiting shrubs with rose hips, snowberries, bush cran- berries, wahoo, hops, or dark berries are pleasing in the gloomiest weather.
It is best to begin an "all-the-year" garden on a small scale, adding desirable plants as they are discovered. If the space is limited, each group of perennials must con- tribute its share of color. The taller plants should be at the back and those but a few inches high in front. When
211
212 APPENDIX
the plan is arranged the gardener will find it profitable to make out a calendar of the appearance of blossoms; that is, the earliest to appear, and in their turn the others as they are due, so that there may be no period when the beds are without color, from the peeping of the first snow- drops to the appearance of the latest hardy asters or Japanese anemones.
As soil, moisture, sunshine, and exposure influence plants, forcing or retarding them, every garden must be planted to meet its own conditions, or the perfect garden of one location may be a failure at another. Borders and beds should also admit the weeder and flower gatherer. It is not well to have too wide a bed, as that necessitates stepping in among the plants.
In the accompanying charts the intention has been to guide the inexperienced gardener. There are many more valuable perennials than those named, but those chosen have been taken because of their reliability, color, and their ability to grow in proximity to other plants. Hap- hazard planting is as disastrous as inviting a mixed com- pany of guests; the ambitions of one plant may put another in the background, and the greediness of one crowd another out. Certain plants grow amiably side by side, and these should be placed in companionship.
As a rule all the plants named will thrive in the northern middle latitudes. An effort has been made to omit the delicate and the unusual, The magnolia and
APPENDIX
213
the jasmine, which do well in the South, will not survive the northern winter, and while it is possible occasionally to find a southern species in the North, its existence is by chance.
Each vicinity has species thriving well undej the con- ditions peculiar to it. Thus a garden maker in Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Pittsburg, or anywhere else, if he be wise, will study the gardens about him, and first of all buy the tested products of home seedsmen and home nurseries. Later he may experiment.
PERENNIALS FOR THE SPRING
Color Yellow
Various White
Blue
White Sky blue
White Various Various Various
Pink and white
|
Common Name |
Botanical Name |
Height |
|
Cloth of Gold |
Crocus Susi- |
Lowly |
|
anus |
||
|
Spring crocus |
Crocus vernus |
|
|
Giant snow- |
Galanthus El- |
|
|
drop |
wesii |
|
|
Glory of the |
Chionodoxa |
|
|
snow |
Luciliae |
|
|
Siberian squill |
Scilla Sibirica |
|
|
Phlox |
Divaricata |
|
|
(Canadensis) |
||
|
White rock |
Arabis albida |
|
|
cress |
||
|
Dutch hya- |
Hyacinthus ori- |
|
|
cinth |
entalis |
|
|
Primrose |
Primula Sie- |
|
|
boldi |
||
|
Tulip |
Tulipa Due van |
Medium |
|
Thol |
||
|
English daisy |
Bellis perennis |
Lowly |
214
APPENDIX
PERENNIALS FOR THE SPRING— Continued
|
Color |
Common Name |
Botanical Name |
Height |
|
Yellow red |
Columbine |
Aquilegia |
Medium |
|
chrysantha |
|||
|
White |
Lily of the val- |
Convallaria |
Lowly |
|
ley |
majalis |
||
|
White |
Poet's narcis- |
Narcissus po- |
Medium |
|
sus |
eticus |
||
|
Various |
Alpine poppy |
Papaver alpi- |
|
|
num |
|||
|
Yellow |
Star daffodil |
Narcissus in- |
|
|
comparabilis |
|||
|
Yellow |
Jonquil |
Narcissus Jon- |
|
|
quilla |
|||
|
Various |
Peony |
Paeonia offici- |
Higher |
|
nalis |
|||
|
Bright red |
Late tulip |
Tulipa Gesne- |
|
|
riana |
|||
|
Deep pink |
Grass pink |
Dianthus plu- |
|
|
marius |
|||
|
Rose |
Bleeding heart |
Dicentra spec- |
|
|
tabilis |
|||
|
Lavender |
Fleur-de-lis |
Iris Germanica |
|
|
Deep violet |
Turkey flag |
Iris pallida |
|
|
Blue |
Forget-me-not |
Myosotis |
|
|
White |
St. Bruno's |
Anthericum |
|
|
lily |
|||
|
White |
Bedding pansy |
Viola cornuta |
PERENNIALS FOR THE SUMMER
|
Color |
Common Name |
Botanical Name |
Height |
|
Golden yellow |
Alyssum |
Saxatile com- |
Lowly |
|
pactum |
|||
|
Green |
Old-man |
Artemisia |
Medium |
|
Dark blue |
Asters |
Grandiflorus |
|
|
Blue and white |
Canterbury |
Campanula me- |
|
|
bells |
dium |
APPENDIX
215
PERENNIALS FOR THE SUMMER— Co******
|
Color |
Common Name |
Botanical Name |
Height |
|
Sky blue |
Larkspur |
Delphinium bel- |
Higher |
|
ladonna |
|||
|
Lemon yellow |
Shasta daisy |
California daisy |
|
|
Pure white |
Shasta daisy |
Shasta im- |
|
|
proved |
|||
|
Blood red |
Hardy pink |
Dianthus Napo- |
Lowly |
|
leon III |
|||
|
Varied |
Foxglove |
Digitalis glpx- |
Higher |
|
iniaeflora |
|||
|
Purple |
Giant cone |
Echinacea pur- |
|
|
flower |
purea |
||
|
White and li- |
Day lily |
Funkia subcor- |
Medium |
|
lac |
data |
||
|
Orange red |
Blanket flower |
Gaillardia |
Higher |
|
Deep golden |
Tickseed |
Coreopsis lan- |
|
|
ceolata |
|||
|
White |
Baby's breath |
Gypsophila |
|
|
Orange |
Sunflower |
Scaber major |
Tall |
|
Yellow |
Yellow day lily |
Hemerocallis |
Medium |
|
Rosy red |
Mallow |
Hibiscus |
Tall |
|
Various |
Hollyhocks |
Althaea rosea |
Tall |
|
Yellow |
St. John's wort |
Hypericum |
|
|
Moserianum |
|||
|
Rose color |
Gloxinia |
Incarvillea |
Medium |
|
grandiflora |
|||
|
White |
Hardy pea |
Lathyrus lati- |
|
|
folius albus |
|||
|
Blue |
Lupine |
Lupinus poly- |
|
|
phyllus |
|||
|
Rosy purple |
Blazing star |
Liatris |
Higher |
|
Fiery scarlet |
Cardinal flower |
Lobelia cardi- |
Medium |
|
nalis |
|||
|
Blue |
Lavender |
Lavandula vera |
|
|
Orange scarlet |
Campion |
Lychnis |
|
|
Various |
Oriental poppy |
Papaver |
2l6
APPENDIX
PERENNIALS FOR THE SUMMER-Continued
|
Color |
Common Name |
Botanical Name |
Height |
|
Various |
Hardy phlox |
Phlox suffruti- |
Higher |
|
cosa |
|||
|
Crimson |
Giant daisy |
Pyrethrum |
Higher |
|
Blue and lilac Mourning |
Scabiosa atro- |
Medium |
|
|
bride |
purpurea |
||
|
Silvery white |
Meadowsweet |
Spirea Aruncus |
|
|
Kneiffi |
|||
|
Blue |
Spiderwort |
Tradescantia |
|
|
Mixed |
Sweet William |
Dianthus bar- |
|
|
batus |
Higher |
||
|
Orange scarlet |
Torch lily |
Tritoma |
|
|
Pure ivhite |
Adam's needle |
Yucca filamen- |
Tall |
|
tosa |
|||
|
Blue |
Knapweed |
Centaurea |
Medium |
|
Bright red |
Bee balm |
Monarda |
Medium |
|
didyma |
|||
|
Rose or red |
Beard tongue |
Pentstemon |
Medium |
|
PERENNIALS FOR THE AUTUMN |
|||
|
Color |
Common Name |
Botanical Name |
Height |
|
Golden yellow |
Golden rod |
Solidago |
Tall |
|
Yellow |
Golden glow |
Rudbeckia |
|
|
Yellow |
Sunflower |
Helianthus an- |
Tall |
|
nuus |
|||
|
Yellow |
Sneezewort |
Achillea ptar- |
|
|
mica |
|||
|
Purple |
Joe-pyeweed |
Eupatorium |
|
|
purpureum |
|||
|
Lilac and white |
Michaelmas |
Hardy asters |
|
|
daisy |
|||
|
Purple blue |
Monkshood |
Aconitum au- |
|
|
tumnale |
|||
|
White |
Chrysanthe- |
Pompons |
Medium |
|
mum |
|||
|
Yellow |
Evening prim- |
Oenothera |
Medium |
|
~- rose |
glauca |
APPENDIX 217
SHRUBS FOR SUMMER BLOOM AND WINTER COLOR
Height Time Common Name Botanical Name Color Feet
April Golden bell Forsythia yellow 8
Spiraea Thunbergii . .white 4-6
May Japanese quince Cydonia Japonica scarlet 3-6
Flowering almond . ..Amygdalus nana pink 5
Red-fruited elder . . . Sambucus pubens white 10
Tartarian honeysuckle Lonicera Tartarica ..pink or white ... 28
Common lilac Syringa vulgaris ....purple or white.. 10
Double-flowering
plum pink 8
June European privet Ligustrum vulgare ..white (black ber- ries) 10
Old blush rose ,. . . . flesh pink 6
Sweetbrier Rosa rubiginosa pink 4
Hybrid perpetual rose red, white or pink. 2-3
Snowball Viburnum sterilis ..white 10
Snowberry Symphoricarpus race-
mosus pink 5
Sweet-scented shrub. .Calycanthus dark red 6
Bridal wreath Spiraea hypericifolia. .white 6
Golden spirea Spiraea aurea white 8
Wahoo or burning Euonymus atropur- bush pureus purple 15
Staghorn sumac Rhus typhina greenish yellow . .20
Mock orange Philadelphus or sy-
ringa white 8
Tamarisk Tamarix pink 5
Early white vibur- num Viburnum lantana . . .white 8
Weigelas Weigelia pink 6
Golden flowering currant Ribes aureum yellow 8
Japanese barberry ...Berberis Japonica ...red or yellow... 4
218
APPENDIX
SHRUBS FOR SUMMER BLOOM AND WINTER COLOR— Continued
Height
Time Common Name Botanical Name Color Feet
July Indian currant or Symphoricarpus vul-
coral berry garis pink* 4
High-bush cranberry. Viburnum opulus ...white 8
Golden-barked dog- wood Stolonifera aurea ...white 12
Rugosa roses Rosa rugosa pink or white 4
Button bush Cephalanthus white 6
Aug. Pepper bush Clethra alnifolia white 5
Rose of Sharon Hibiscus Syriacus ...white and rose...io
Sept. Hydrangea Hydrangea panicu-
lata grandiflora . . . white and rose . . 5
OLD-FASHIONED ANNUALS
(Common
Ageratum or floss flower Alyssum
Amaranthus or love-lies-bleeding Snapdragon Hardy marguerites Columbines Asters
Sea-pink or thrift Lady's-slipper or balsam Portulaca Marigolds
Calliopsis or prettyface Coreopsis or golden glory Calendula or pot marigold Canterbury bells Candytuft Cockscomb Dusty miller Spider flowers Morning-glory
Names)
Scabiosa or mourning bride
Scarlet runners
Sweet peas
Verbenas
Sunflowers
Four-o'clocks
Forget-me-nots
Nasturtiums
Love-in-a-mist
Cornflowers
Pansies
Phlox
Johnny- jump-ups
Feverfew
Job's-tears
Cypress vine
Angel's-trumpet or datura
Clove pinks
Gaillardias
Shirley poppies
APPENDIX 219
OLD-FASHIONED ANNUALS— Continued
Larkspurs Horn poppies
Cosmos California poppies
Pinks Sunflowers
Snow-on-the-mountain Mignonette
Bachelor's-buttons Heliotrope
Immortelles Phlox Drummondii
Hollyhocks Lupins
Rockets Scarlet sage
Lobelia Petunias
Nicotiana Balloon vine
Chinese lantern plant Zinnias
Stocks Periwinkle
Wallflowers Violas Pentstemons
HARDY LILIES
Lilies of the valley Funkia or day lily
St. Bruno's lily Hemerocallis or yellow day lily
The annunciation lily Tritoma or torch lily
St. Joseph's lily Amaryllis
Lilium Harrisii Lilium Canadense
Lilium auratum Tigrinum splendens or tiger lily
Lilium pardalinum or leopard Lilium candidum
lily Lilium umbellatum Lilium speciosum rubrum
INTERESTING FLOWERING BULBS
Gladiolus— various colors Spider lily, pancratium
Ismena Calathina Oxalis
Tuberoses Tuberous rooted begonias
VINES WORTHY OF CULTURE
Common Name Botanical Name Description
r glossy foliage
Native bittersweet \ yellow flowers
scandens [ orange berries
220
APPENDIX
VINES WORTHY OF CULTURE— Continued
|
Common Name |
Botanical |
Name |
Description |
|
Japanese clematis |
Clematis paniculata |
firm foliage white blossom |
|
|
Virgin's bower |
Clematis Virginiana |
high climber flowers white fragrant |
|
|
semi-evergreen |
|||
|
Hall's Japanese honey- |
Japonica |
foliage |
|
|
suckle |
Halleana |
cream-colored |
|
|
flowers |
|||
|
f glossy foliage |
|||
|
Scarlet honeysuckle |
Fuchsioides J red trumpets |
||
|
[ red berries |
|||
|
Trumpet vine |
Bignonia radicans |
rich foliage red-orange |
|
|
I |
trumpets |
||
|
sturdy foliage |
|||
|
Wistaria |
Wistaria |
magnifica J |
fragrant cluster of blue |
|
' 1 |
flowers |
||
|
f graceful |
|||
|
Woodbine or Virginia |
Ampelopsis foliage |
||
|
creeper |
quinquefolia 1 red winter |
||
|
[ berries |
|||
|
Hop vine |
Humulus |
lupulus (-graceful \ vine |
|
|
fdeep purple |
|||
|
Clematis Jackmanii |
Clematis |
Jackmanii 4 velvety |
|
|
[ flowers |
|||
|
Kudzu vine or Jack- |
Pueraria |
Thun- ( |
a remarkable |
|
and-the-beanstalk |
bergiana |
climber |
|
|
f scarlet |
|||
|
Matrimony vine |
Lycium |
J fruit in |
|
|
[ autumn |
APPENDIX
221
WINTER COLOR IN BARK AND FRUIT
An attractive appearance may be given to home grounds in the dull winter season by means of a choice of shrubs and decorative trees having blossom and foliage that are equally desirable in the summer. The fruits of scarlet, orange, white, gray, blue, or purplish tints give life to leafless shrubbery and invite the birds and the squirrels. The colors of bark and twigs when the sap is rising show marked differences which lend beauty to a landscape when the earth is bare or when snowdrifts are heaped around. Each of the following shrubs and trees has its special color note for winter.
Common Name
Winterberry or black alder
European barberry
Japanese barberry
Holly barberry or mahonia
American redbud or Judas-tree
Sweet pepper bush
Siberian dogwood
Blue dogwood
Round-leaved dogwood
Cornelian cherry
Golden-barked dogwood
Scarlet thorn
Cockspur thorn
English hawthorn or May
Japan quince
Silver thorn
Bush honeysuckle
Burning bush or wahoo
Botanical Name
Ilex verticillata Berberis vulgaris Berberis Japonica Berberis aquifolium Cercis Canadensis Clethra alnifolia Cornus Siberica Cornus alternifolia Cornus circinata Cornus mas.
Cornus stolonifera aurea Crataegus coccinea Crataegus crus-galli Crataegus oxyacantha Cydonia Japonica Eleagnus edulis Bella Candida Euonymus atropurpureus
222 APPENDIX
WINTER COLOR IN BARK AND FRUIT-Continued Common Name Botanical Name
Spindle tree Euonymus Europaeus
Witch-hazel Hamamelis Virginica
Sea buckthorn Hippophae rhamnoides
Amoor privet Ligustrum Amurense
European privet Ligustrum vulgare
Bush honeysuckle Lonicera cserulea
Matrimony vine Lycium
Nine-bark spirea Spiraea opulifolia
Hop tree (wafer ash) Ptelea trifoliata
Mountain currant Ribes alpinum
Shining rose Rosa lucida
Ramanas rose Rosa rugosa
Buffalo berry Shepherdia Canadensis
Snowberry Symphoricarpus racemosus
Coral berry Symphoricarpus vulgaris
ON GARDEN PLANS
The most charming gardens are the result of years of growth and reshaping of plans. The longer one works over a piece of ground the more clearly its possibilities define themselves. A genius may create an artistic -gar- den, planting as the inspiration seizes him, but the average man or woman needs a definite plan sketched on paper. There must be a certain symmetrical arrange- ment of paths and beds. If the plan appears too formal at first it is possible to modify it later. It is far better to have a formal arrangement than to waste space because of lack of any plan.
Nearly all pieces of land are measured in rectangular proportions, and hence the plans presented in this volume
APPENDIX 223
are for the shape of the average residential grounds. It is neither necessary nor desirable to follow any one of them exactly. Parts of a plan may be used, portions rearranged, and paths made to suit convenience. Though the brotherhood of artistic gardeners warn against the garden plan and bedding, it must not be forgotten that space is more economically used when defined in beds, turf, and paths. An orderly mind enjoys a plan, and can break the formal lines into curves of grace by spreading border plants backward among the taller plants, and by the introduction of original ideas in grouping and in the placing of seats, arches, trimmed box, or cedars.
A small suburban or city lot less than a hundred feet in length and half as wide can be made to give an im- pression of spaciousness, and to deceive the eye, by means of curving walks, shrubbery, and receding borders, which lend to the lines of distance.
At present there are arguments for and against paths in gardens. Equal numbers are arrayed on each side, and when so well balanced it is safe to assume that each has some truth worth considering. The eminent landscape architects of the past, among them Repton, have laid down rules for paths. Fashions in path making change, however, and while one generation decides on gravel another prefers brick, a third pounded earth, a fourth cement, as most practical, and the naturalist insists that shaven turf makes the finest path.
224 APPENDIX
A clean, well-shaven lawn spreading between borders presents a beautiful appearance; the plants grow more naturally in their frame of grass. The old objection to damp paths for the weeder is done away with since the stout boot and the rubber shoe have been worn. The borders of hardy flowers pushing into the lawn, even the most lowly — the daisies, cowslips, primulas, arabis, myo- sotis — seem to weave color into the border of green.
John Sedding, a prince of gardeners, decided a path should be wide and excellently made. It should lead directly from one point to another, and if it curved there should be a genuine reason for diverting its course, a reason defended by art or demanded by nature. A clump of shrubs, a rise of the land, or an obstruction by floral mound, fountain, or sundial is sufficient to bend a path, that it may be made more graceful in its course.
The eye is better satisfied with definite boundaries, and seclusion being one of the virtues of a garden, a hedge, stone wall, or shrubbery may inclose it as a frame does a picture. Here and there should be places for real retirement and privacy, which can be secured by an arrangement of beds, arbors, or shrubbery. A distant view through an arch to the landscape beyond is a pretty addition, • and every means should be employed so to deceive the eye that, although seclusion is secured, a narrowed feeling is prevented.
The edging of beds is easily effected by allowing the
APPENDIX 225
lowly plants to run to the margins, where the clipping shears can cut them back from the path or lawn. A formal edge is not considered in good taste, while a good deal of work is necessary to keep it in order. The simple way of planting alyssum, Iberis or the hardy candytuft, forget-me-nots and musk, pansies and primulas, perennial phlox or the conventional border of geraniums, letting the inner line be broken by allowing plants to grow irregularly and to mingle with other groups, is the best method.
Weedy plants running to foliage rather than to bloom should be uprooted; it is not a kindness to nurse sickly plants in a border. The whole aspect is spoiled and the entire colony endangered by weedy plants ready for parasites, and sickly ones which may spread a mold or some other disease.
A lily bed may have a straggling appearance unless the tall lilies have been set in the center or at the back, and the shorter at the front. This rule, like all others, should not be observed so exactly in any border or bed that stiffness is the result. A slight variation of a tall plant breaking a line is pleasing, and an irregularity gives the zest of novelty. Among the lilies the little dwarf ground plants make a pretty carpet over the earth while setting a background for the stately blossoms above them.
The truly formal garden is so planned that its form catches the eye first of all. It does not follow that
226 APPENDIX
geometrical beds should appear as stiff when planted in color as the lines indicate on paper. In nature the har- mony of colors and array of plants will be the attraction, and the orderly arrangement of growing spaces merely an item of convenience.
Richard Jefferies says that birds love to build in the box and the yew, but they detest vacant, draughty spaces underneath, and avoid spindly laurels and rhododendrons. "The common hawthorn hedge around a country garden shall contain three times as many nests, and shall be visited by five times as many birds as the foreign ever- greens, so costly to rear and so sure to be killed by the first old-fashioned frost."
The cedar walks, the wilderness, and the maze and avenues familiar in old English gardens contributed to delightful ideas of seclusion. There should be shaded ways for getting about, and cool retreats for hot days. As Bacon has said, one ought not to "buy the shade by going into the sun" when passing from one section to another.
The flower border, usually of the spring bulbs which are succeeded by the perennials, close around the founda- tions of a house, relieves that bare appearance so notice- able when the walls spring directly from the ground. This flower border should contain a succession of plants to keep blossoms until frost, and the plan should be continued in flower borders at the foot of shrubbery,
APPENDIX 227
forming, as it were, a floral ribbon linking the house and grounds to the garden. A careful effort will prevent the blank spaces of earth between clumps of perennials and under the shrubbery. The evergreen candytuft and dwarf phlox, the starworts and anemones, day lilies and hardy ferns face the shrubbery gracefully. These plants and others of a similar habit creep over the ground, crowding out weeds and keeping the earth above the roots moist and clean.
THE WINDOW Box
When Leigh Hunt wrote a chapter of classic prose on "A Flower for the Window" he met an echo of in- timate feeling from the hearts of many who had owned a potted plant or cherished a window box. No one can care for flowers without accepting the rewards of un- selfishness. Their dependence admits them among the daily duties, and their joyful appearance in blossom spreads delight about them.
Among window boxes, as in the majority of the affairs of life, there are the matter-of-fact and the personal. The first relate to decorative arrangement and the latter to little companies of flowers whose diversity is a matter of individual taste and enjoyment, and which under proper conditions, though lifted away from Mother Earth, will thrive on an insecure foothold in pots or re- ceptacles perched on window sills.
228 APPENDIX
The window-box gardener has perfect command over his resources. He can sum up his advantages as well as his disadvantages and control his results with the success of one who sows and reaps in larger grounds. The soil can be prepared, the moisture controlled, storms averted, and, the sunlight having been measured, the crops can be regulated accordingly.
The artistic possibilities of window boxes as accessory decorations to a residence or even to an estate, for their use can be extended to summer houses, barns, and the rail- ings of bridges and arched ways, may be carried as far as the imagination of the gardener will go. The humblest shack can be turned into an artistic bungalow and the cot- tage of dreary surroundings be made a beauty spot by a few plants in boxes on the window sills.
A touch of color given by scarlet geraniums, relieved by the white of feverfew and daisies, the green of their own foliage, and an edge of yellow-eyed musk above trailing sprays of silver-leaved myrtle or the glossy English ivy in the most ordinary of window boxes, against a brown painted wooden wall or the dull brick of the commonplace house, creates a picture. None of these plants are rare and all endure more than the average neglect of a busy housekeeper and will thrive in a dry summer.
The practical person asks first of all for the box itself. With money in the purse one may purchase a patent con- trivance, self-watering, safely drained, and fitted to the
APPENDIX 229
place it is to occupy. Certain boxes are made of metal, others of wood with metal pans, and others of plain wood fashioned by the neighborhood carpenter. The home- made box made of odd pieces of lumber knocked from grocery boxes will do just as well as any of the more ex- pensive -patents. A dime's worth of paint will cover all the boxes needed for the front of a house.
The quality of the soil and the drainage are most im- portant. No box need leak to any extent, nor plants grow soggy, if the bottom of the box has been covered with a layer of broken stone and some charcoal. Nearly every florist has a heap of properly mixed mold from which he is willing to sell. It contains the correct pro- portions of black earth, sand, and clay for flower culture. The soil just under the sod in vacant lots is also suitable for this purpose, and in fact any garden earth will do that has been enriched with manure finely worked over.
There are as many ways of selecting what shall be put into the window box as there are gardeners. For a for- mal decoration of an English front or a colonial type of house a simple hedge of small box trees before the win- dows answers the purpose. Where there are many win- dow decorations about a house it is pleasant to introduce at least one of these quaint arrangements to diffuse a pun- gent fragrance. The box of ferns, or English ivy or myrtle gracefully trailing, is -at once elegant and austere. Although of only one color, the tender greens kept fresh
230 APPENDIX
and free from dust add to the beauty of their surround- ings. All of these will grow on the north side of walls, or in situations where the sun rarely shines.
Among the flowering plants the begonias, pink and scarlet, and the impatiens sultani with attractive rose- hued flowers, are recommended for north or shaded walls.
The idea of using one species only to a box is fre- quently productive of the best results. The experienced gardener knows what certain plants will do and can ar- range in localities congenial to them the abutilon or flowering maple with its handsome bells, or the blue ageratum, or the orange and red lantanas, or plants af- fording flowers for vases.
Some years ago a certain section of London attracted visitors because of the cheerful fronts of the houses, trimmed with window boxes. On investigation it was discovered that a florist took the contract for the summer and filled the boxes with potted geraniums, and various other plants, removing a pot whenever the plant faded. This practical method commends itself to many, especi- ally to those in the city who have little time for the care of a window box.
By planting in pots set in the larger receptacle the dis- play may be changed with the season. Boxes with bulbs, such as scillas, hyacinths, daffodils, and tulips, may appear with the first warm spring days. These should
APPENDIX 231
be followed by pansies, daisies, forget-me-nots, and potted stocks, and these in their turn can give way to nasturtiums or specimens of the splendid hydrangeas and scarlet salvias and chrysanthemums for the fall. While every window box need not harbor the same plants, it follows that those on the same wall should harmonize in color, and that there should be some relation between them.
In the selection of plants the question of exposure is an important one. How much sunshine pours directly on the wall*? Is this the side of the prevailing storms'? Is this wall always in shadow, owing to a neighboring house? Is the situation exposed or protected?
Some plants will endure neglect, survive a hot summer, revive if drowned by careless watering, and manage to exist with a semblance of cheerful courage. Others, ap- parently hardy, will refuse to put up with unsympathetic treatment and will lie down and die. While the oppor- tunity of the window gardener is great, he must exercise a degree of common sense and realize that there are plants which will refuse confinement, and that his success must lie among plants that have been tested.
A gay household decoration can be secured by plant- ing the seeds of annuals. The pot marigolds or calen- dulas repay with an abundance of yellow flowers; the cypress vine or burning bush is an annual of interesting hnbits in its change of color, and indeed nearly every
232 APPENDIX
annual — nasturtiums, phlox, and the like — can be made to thrive and to be a pleasure to the one who cultivates them.
The following rules for the selection of plants have been drawn from long experience. A very sunny expos- ure can be modified by preparing a screen of cheesecloth or paper to shelter the plants during the hottest hours of the day. The west wall suffers more than the east or the south wall from the heat of the afternoon sun. The morning hours are cooler, tempering the rays of the sun before midday, and the light on south walls is continu- ally changing. The north wall, gray, cool, and often damp, must be accepted as it is, but as previously stated there are plants of a delicate nature which thrive best under these conditions. Among these it is possible to em- phasize the ferns and begonias, fuchsias and impatiens.
Under average conditions, for the flower box on a shaded exposure select scarlet and white geraniums, of which there is a good variety, rose geraniums, pelar- goniums or Lady Washingtons, begonias (coral and white), feverfew, marguerites, spirea (white), lobelia (blue), petunias (purple and white), impatiens (rose), verbenas (many colors), and ivy geraniums and ageratum (blue).
For a sunny exposure, either south, east, or west, choose any of the above and to them add the sun-loving helio- trope, the single petunias, periwinkles, and coleus, a
APPENDIX 233
decorative foliage plant. The nasturtiums will adapt themselves to any situation if the soil is right and there is not too much wind. The fragrant gilliflower, hardy sedums and saxifrage, sweet-scented musk, lemon ver- bena, and mignonette take kindly to box culture when their needs are considered. The oxalis is a dainty foliage plant with delicate bloom, and when foliage is consid- ered the nearest florist usually has some fern or trailing vine which he knows is a reliable friend.
A CHILD'S GARDEN
It is true that the open heart of childhood enjoys every flower that blows. The work of gardening, however, does not appeal to every child any more than it appeals to every grown person. It is dutiful work, and the imagi- nation does not run far enough ahead to show the young person what is to come from the seeds. All flowers are mysteries and beautiful, but the child takes more kindly to those that have an association with pleasant sensations of beauty and fragrance, as the sweet pea and the rose, or that may be linked in some way with his toys or his sports, as the gourds, larkspurs for chains, and Job's-tears for bead strings.
The following list has been made especially for a child's garden, and to it may be added the popular an- nuals noted for color and fragrance.
234
APPENDIX
FOR A CHILD'S GARDEN
snapdragons
balsams
clove or grass pinks
foxgloves
ostrich plumes
oxeye daisies
sweet Williams
sunflowers
red sunflowers
Johnny- j ump-ups
star-eyed phlox
dusty millers
Job's-tears
morning-glories
goldenrod
four-o'clocks
mourning bride
bird of paradise
English daisies
love-in-a-mist
columbines
Black Prince poppies
balsam apple
quaking grass
prettyface
black-eyed Susans
Canterbury bells
canary-bird vine
Mexican fire plant
hen and chickens
snow on the mountain
coleus (rainbow mixture)
cosmos
cypress vine
lady's paint brush
angel's breath
Chinese lantern
Chinese bellflower
forget-me-not
cypress vine
asters
sweet peas
zinnias
blanket flower
balloon vine
pouch flower
Venus's-looking-glass
coxcomb
bachelor's-buttons
ragged robins
larkspurs
cigar plant
gourds
hollyhocks
marigolds
catchflies
martynia
musk plant
torch lilies
burning stars
THE ROSE GARDEN
The rose is a decorative plant of the highest order. There is an increasing feeling in England that the rose must come back to the flower garden in its natural beauty. The prize rose growers are to blame for the mistreat- ment of one of the fairest flowers, trimming it and training it to standards, pruning it away from its natural style as a plant, and forcing it for the sake of size in blossom until we have lost sight of the true value of rosebushes and climbers.
The failure of many rose gardens is due to the
APPENDIX 235
importation of strange stock. Every locality has its native roses, and there is no corner of the world which has vegetation but possesses its own wild roses susceptible of cultivation. About all cottages grow June roses and monthly roses which, by reason of their being familiar, escape the gardener in search of fine things. These the home gardener, planting a rose garden, will use first of all, giving them the places they like best. In return there will be no disappointments such as he might have had if he had sent a thousand miles for a rare rose which must be acclimated.
A rose garden should have loam at least three feet deep. Its surface should be varied, and while room enough be given, no space should be allowed for foolish standards. Let each rose tree do its best after its natural habit; the climbing rose has its wall or trellis, the creep- ing rose its rock heap, and in place of teasing the soil, let nature take it in hand by planting rbckfoils, stone crops, violets, myosotis, and little Alpine plants which cover the ground with a delicate carpet, and mulch the roots naturally. Any one, by using home roses, can have a successful rose garden.
A WATER GARDEN
A brook or the margin of a lake or stream is a fortu- nate accessory to a garden. It may be the means of low areas for the bog plants, orchids, and lilies, and a
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vegetation not possible under any other circumstances. Aquatic plants grow easily. They demand sunshine, water, and a foothold in rich earth, all of which can be supplied in a cement tank or a buried cask, and if set there the average water lily, hyacinth, or cress will take up the task of blossoming as if in its native haunts.
An earthy margin affords the opportunity for the half- aquatic plants and the sweet flags, the sagittaria, and the arum lilies. Again emphasizing the supplies of a local- ity, the reader is reminded that each district has its native water plants, which thrive amazingly when brought under cultivation. After these have been chosen the water garden may accept the rarer lilies.
The Victoria regia or royal water lilies are grateful in the home garden. The hardy nymphseas of both European and American stock and the Nelumbiums may be depended upon where the water has a circulation. The Nelumbium speciosum or Egyptian lotus has superb flowers and magnificent foliage, and the Nelumbium luteum or American lotus, the water chinquepin, is nearly as magnificent.
The edge of a water garden is framed picturesque!) by clumps of Egyptian papyrus, pampas grass, typha latifolia or cat-tail, and the decorative zizania aquatica or wild rice. The ornamental possibilities of these is very great. The Montevidiensis, or giant arrowhead, is a persistent grower.
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In the native woods every brook has its fringe of flowering plants. There children gather the crowfoot buttercup, blue and white violets, forget-me-nots, and fragile flowers which will form a pretty border and be- come domesticated in the cultivated grounds where the brook is the flow from a water pipe or an irrigating ditch instead of a natural stream. A dwarf iris and a spirea, one of five acceptable varieties, is to be depended upon, as well as the ever reliable marsh marigolds, hemerocallis, "flowering fern" or Osmunda regalis, Senecio japonica which has handsome deep yellow flowers, and the Inula helenium of the sunflower family.
For shaded nooks near the water there are still more members of the widespread iris family, and few places are better adapted for the growing of primroses, popu- larly known as primulas and cowslips. The Mertensia or Virginian cowslip, with its blue bells, and the culti- vated dodecatheon or shooting stars, prefer moist shade. In such places, too, the wild-flower gatherer will plant the trillium grandiflorum, the lobelia cardinalis or cardinal flower, the wild geranium, and the perennial wind-flowers.
The finer species of ferns seek the waterside. A per- manent fern bed, to accomplish anything of a luxuriant nature, must have the native ferns of adjacent groves for its mainstay. The adiantum or maidenhair is more hardy than it appears, provided it has shade and moisture. The
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royal ferns and feather ferns vary the plantation. North America has a noble assortment of ferns, and to these it is possible to add a number acclimated from Japan.
In gathering up the threads of thought about gardens, it seems as if a well-made garden resembles an embroid- ered fabric in which every inch has been utilized for design and every possibility touched upon. Such is the thought conveyed by old gardens where the stone walls, the stepping stones, and the ascending ways are made the support or background of "flowers in the crannied wall." Alpine plants cling to ledges, violas look from nooks where a handful of earth has given the roots encouragement, the stonecrops and rockfoils make velvet on the balustrades, and Alpine toadflax fringes graveled paths.
The creeper-shaded walk under the pergola is a natural part of the scheme. It is not conscious art, nor an arched way conspicuous in the plan, but a trellis festooned with grape vines, Banksian roses, wistaria, clematis, honey- suckle, passion flowers on their lacey vines, flame-red trumpet flowers, or other climbers which have found support. The springing arches over parting ways admit- ting from one fragrant plantation to another are devices for holding the great design in unity, and seem to be there by chance for the adventures of convolvulus,
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morning-glory, scarlet runners, or other light-minded climbing plants.
A handful of earth in sunshine and rain may be the cradle of violets, of the rose of a hundred leaves, or of the fruitful corn. What then are the possibilities of a garden*?
"O universal Mother, who dost keep From everlasting thy foundations deep, Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing to thee."
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