A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

" CARRY ME TOO "

A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

BY

SARA ANDREW SHAFER

AUTHOR OF "THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY,"
•'BEYOND CHANCE OF CHANGE," ETC.

WITH FOUR PLATES IN COLOR, AND OTHER
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY

FRANCES AND MARY ALLEN

CHICAGO

A. C. McCLURG & CO.

LONDON: METHUEN & CO. LTD.
IQIO

Published June, 1910

The month-verses appearing in this
volume were first published in "The
Outlook," New York, 1904, and are
used by permission.

TO

EVERYONE
WHO EVER GAVE ME A FLOWER

FOREWORD

~"*HE year has turned, and the divine
stirrings which herald the resurrection of
that body which, in our blindness and our
pride, we are pleased to call the lower creation
have begun. It will not be long before there
will be about us a new heaven and a new
earth, amid which the clouds, the cold and
the shadows of to-day will be forgotten. A
part of the coming glories will be brought to the
dull ken of man, who fancies that the eternal
forces work only for him, but a far, far greater
part will be seen only by the eyes of the count-
less millions whom our ignorance and our
arrogance declare to be without knowledge or
understanding. Who knows ? Is it true that
"the soul sleeps in the stone, dreams in the
animal, and wakes in the man " ? And is

vii

CONTENTS

PAGE

FOREWORD . . ™

APOLOGY . . xv

JANUARY . . «

FEBRUARY . . J9

MARCH . . 43

APRIL . . 65

MAY '. . 9i

JUNE . . .: "3

JULY . '43

AUGUST . . l67

SEPTEMBER . . *9S

OCTOBER . 2I9

NOVEMBER . . 245

DECEMBER .... a?1

XI

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"CARRY ME TOO" (in colour)

A WINTER MORNING

A WINTER POOL

SUNSET

THE RIVER .

THE MEADOW

THE ROSE GARDEN (in Colour)

BLOSSOM

THE ROSE (in colour) ,

THE TROUT BROOK

REFLECTIONS . .

MAPLES

THE MEDITATIVE WALK

CHINA ASTERS

MORNING GREY

THE HILL . .

THE RIVER . .

GREY TWILIGHT

xiii

Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

3

21

45
56
67

93
98

118
128

145
1 60
169
172
I78
188
192

xiv A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

FACING PAGE

GOING TO MEETING (in Colour) . . .197

THE NORTH MEADOW BROOK . . 204

ASTERS IN THE ORCHARD . 2IO

BROUGHTON'S POND . . . .216

THE CHESTNUT TREE . . . .221

THE BONFIRE . . . . .226

LATE AFTERNOON . . . . . . 247

THE FOREST POND . . . . 256

THE PETERSHAM WOODS . . . .264

A FROSTY MORNING . . . . 273

APOLOGY

nr*HE first sunbeam of the new year shone
in on me through the year's first garden,
giving me a foretaste of the beauty of all the
gardens through which all the sunbeams of the
year should pass.

In the night there had been a sudden lower-
ing of the temperature. There had also been
an escape of steam somewhere in the labyrinth
of pipes netted through a great caravanserai
in which many of the cliff-dwellers of these un-
happy and unnatural days find shelter. Thus
the frost found a chance to work his magic.
Happily I do not care for what are known as
window draperies, and I do care for the light
which comes, fresh and unstained, with the
dawning of each new day, and so, when I
opened my eyes on New Year's morning, I
b xv

XT! A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

saw, with the first grateful glance, what had
been prepared for me.

With a breath of vapour, and on a pane of
glass, the frost fairies had painted scenes that
I held my heart to look at. Mountain ranges
were there, with cliffs along which pointed firs
marched in valiant phalanx. Valleys were
there, down whose slopes rivers, fringed with
willows and with reeds, flowed to vast oceans.
Spars of ships at sea were there ; islands
crowned with palms ; ruins of old temples ;
galaxies of stars and bars of light ineffable ;
fronds of ferns, and a thousand symbols for
thoughts for which we have no words. All
these were painted there, and blending the
unheard music of their frozen harmonies with
the far-off chimes of bells calling the faithful
to prayer, I heard the voices of the winter-
spirits whispering.

" We are of the most ancient guild of master
craftsmen. Since Time has been we have
spoken to men as we speak to you. Thou-

APOLOGY xyii

sands of years ago we told our story ; thousands
of years hence we shall tell it again in these
lines which were fashioned before Eternity
began. We change, we fade, we die, in a
changing, fading, dying world, but we come
again, obedient, each tiniest crystal, to the
ultimate Law."

As I looked at the frost garden, and listened
to its voices, I thought of gardens I had known
and loved before. Some of them are with the
snows of yester year, some are so far away that
I cannot even hope to see them with the eyes
of flesh again. A great wave of desolation
came over me as I thought of myself shut out
from all the things I cared most for, shut in
by all the things I most abhorred : a sparrow
on a housetop, with not even a sparrow's
heritage of a green bough to cling to.

Balzac had once such a desolation, such a
longing, and this is how he overcame it. He
made the roofs of Paris, spread out before his
garret window, a playground for his imagina-

XV111

A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

tion, a garden for his thoughts. There were
the wet slates shining in the grey weather ;
there were the lights at night ; there were the
smoke-forests ; there were the mosses, parched
by sun, freshened by rain; there were the fogs;
there were the skies, the stars and the dawn.

He had no more ; had not I as much ?

The "captive of an idea" I arose, my eyes
wide with a great resolve.

I too would have a garden. My body might
be imprisoned but my soul should be free. For
what was my fancy given if it be not to over-
ride circumstance? Why should my memory
so linger over every leaf and flower, every
light and shade, every sound and movement
of the beautiful world that once was mine, if
out of its hoard I might not fashion a garden in
which my thoughts might dwell ? Why were
my brain-cells stored with the words which
those who have gone before me have said
about the green world which they loved, if I
may not set them forth where I can touch them

APOLOGY xix

at any hour, and point them out to others, if
I please ? Why, if I may not have sight of
garden joys, may I not have faith that some-
where they exist ; hope that some time they
may be mine again, and love that shall carry
me bravely through a whole year of imagined
beauty ?

I will have a garden ! Reams of paper shall
be my acreage, and pen and ink shall be my
spade and trowel. Never a blight shall fall
on my flowers, nor shall they suffer an un-
welcome rain, or an untimely frost. It shall
be here to-day, and there to-morrow : an old
pleasaunce which I remember, in one hour, and
in the next, a new realm untrodden by the foot
of man. If I choose, the whole landscape shall
be my garden, or it may be an orchard, or a
field of clover, of bending wheat. If I like, it
shall be a marsh, hot in the sunshine, and full
of strange bog-growths, or it shall be a forest,
vast and dim and inscrutable. Perhaps it will
narrow down to the shadow cast by a pot of

XX

A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

ferns on a window ledge, or to the fairy graces
of a saucerful of bluets. The garden that
might serve for the days when the fair maids
of February walk through the snows ringing
their green and silver bells may well be too
small to content me when roses bloom. But
what of that ?

The Indians divided their year into moons,
calling each by a word full of meaning. Moons
will divide my garden also, since moons reign
when dreams are abroad.

There are fields in dreamland which I may
annex without the fear of the curse which pro-
tects my neighbour's landmark. There are
cloudy hillsides which I can see from my
window, to which no one has a better right
than I. My seeds and roots shall be the
things I remember ; my flowers and fruits
the words which others have spoken, by voice,
or pen, or brush. Little vistas shall open into
unsuspected and unrelated regions, and there
shall be deep breathings whose coming and

APOLOGY xxi

going I can neither command nor control. In
the paths wherein I shall walk, fine spirits, who
have already learned the secrets of peace, shall
walk also. In the orchards I shall be a child
again ; in the uplands I shall spend my prime,
and in the shadowy alleys I shall find what
balm there may be for sorrow. There again
I shall meet the friends whom I have hailed on
my journey. There again I shall listen to dear
voices which have passed on into silence.
There I shall sing, unabashed, bits of song
that may come to me — there I shall laugh ;
there I shall weep. Winter and summer, fall
and spring, I will make a part of each day
sacred by dwelling apart in these gardens
which I may not touch or handle, but which
are mine by every right of the spirit, and in
my white-paper garden I will disclose some-
what of what all gardens should be, even were
they not, haply, all of the stuff that dreams are
made of.

" By a garden is meant, mystically, a place
of spiritual repose, stillness, peace, refreshment,
delight."— JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

" If beauty, absent and dreamed of, does
not affect you more than beauty present, you
may have a thousand gifts, but not that of im-
agination."— VICTOR COUSIN

JANUARY

The blue sky bends in a solemn bow

Over a world of stainless snow.

In chill, brown lines, the hedges creep

Past sheltered farms to forests deep-

The steel-blue ice, wind-swept and clear,

Covers the breast of the lonely mere.

In cedar thickets blue jays scold,

While snow birds whirl through the bitter cold.

A tiny, timid, hasty print

On white drift gives of hares a hint !

I.

A
WHITE - PAPER GARDEN

JANUARY

THE SNOWY MOON

JANUARYS, thank God! come every
year, and every one of them has thirty-one
days which are of a shortness, and are almost
sure to be of a snowiness and a coldness
which distinguish them from even December
days or from those that belong to February.
January sunshine brings us an experience that
is all its own, and never else-time may such
sunsets be seen.

Taking these things separately or together,
it is at once obvious that January is a most
propitious garden-month, with gifts which it
were both sin and folly to ignore.

" Live they not against nature that in the
winter ask for a rose, and by the nourishment
3

4 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

of warm waters, and the fit change in the heat
in winter-time cause a lily or a spring flower to
bloom?" If in the days of Seneca this were
wisdom — why not in ours? January will give
us more than we dare ask, in a hemlock bough
strung with little shining brown cones, and
powdered with snow. Why should we care for
a midwinter rose ? A poor perverted thing it
needs must be, no matter how long its stem,
nor how thick its petals. Born in a stifling
atmosphere, shut out from the skies and the
winds by a roof of glass, with never a bee to
give it greeting, what can it know of rosehood ?
Better by far a brave spray of barberries holding
their colour against the cold.

In the north I would have my garden, and
as this is not a time for petty things, but for
big ones and bold, let it be painted into the
landscape with wide washes of the tints that
belong to the season. Tints, not colours, save
for the heavy blackness of the evergreens, since
winter means reserve, and withdrawal, and
grey and white silences. No one is ever in-
timate with Winter. Even the children, who
pile fortresses of his snow, and riot in the deep
drifts with all the joyous abandon of young

JANUARY 5

animals, know that only thus far can they go —
and that beyond the line which lies but a step
farther than the threshold of their desire, the
hush of death is waiting.

A winter garden ought to begin with
rounded purple masses of woodlands, skirting
a low range of hills. In the sunshine of a mid-
winter day they will melt and lift, like faint
mists, giving promise of ever- widening horizons,
and will offer to us that elusive beckoning on-
ward which is the best of gardening, as it is the
best of life. Through wide planes of air, they
will darken as stormy weather approaches, and
by their white effacement they will announce
the coming of snow. The eyes should be led
thitherward by dark lines of field-defining
hedges — or by stone walls — not too well kept,
which guard the sacred earth in which the new
year's bread is asleep in the young wheat.
Chance trees, elms, red oaks, wild cherries,
or close-breasted cedars must group themselves
about in the unhusbanded corners of fields ;
above stone piles, and along the brooks that
sing under the ice. Orderly battalions of
cedars must march along the roads leading
towards the village, keeping sentry over the

6 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

tentlike stocks which bring the crows cawing
from their distant pines.

Of all the birds that fly I love the crows
most dearly. Their slow cries mingled with
the half-sleeping, half-waking dreams of dawn,
and their strong wings measure off the sky-
gold of sunset with a beauty and system which
gives them a right to be called the chief of our
winter birds. Others come and go — or they
are too small or too few to impress themselves
upon the largeness of the out-of-door world
but the crows may always be depended upon
to give the landscape the sharp accent of their
black wings, and the note of mastery in their
undaunted voices.

If we would have crows always, and black-
birds later and blue jays when the gay spirit
that rules them pleases, we must plant pines.
Even in an estate encompassing a castle in Spain
there could never be pines enough, and were
I the owner of Aladdin's lamp I would endow
whole landscapes with the glory of rows and
clusters and avenues and forests of these royal
trees. Nothing so lends distinction to country
life as the possession of pines. A splendid
mansion doubles its dignity by an approach

JANUARY 7

guarded by these lordly conifers, and the
simplest farmhouse loses all vulgarity or sor-
didness when it is sheltered by them. A home
so adorned and comforted reminds one of a
beautiful woman robed in costly furs, who
does not defy cold by her wrappings, because
they have rendered her unconscious that cold
exists, and who diffuses a sense of warmth and
opulence by her presence. The pioneer of the
older states planted these trees by the tens
of thousands, and more than one American
family points with more pride to the ancestral
pines than to the cross which was the guerdon-
right of a crusader on the unused coat-of-arms
which lies, half-forgotten, in the desk in the
old farmhouse under the sighing trees. All
pines are noble, but the tree of which Emerson
said unforgetable things was assuredly that
of which the masts of ships are made, and if
the fable of Daphne has in it that saving grace
of truth which lies deep in the heart of all folk-
tales, and if every human soul has its counter-
part in the soul of some lifeful green thing,
then must the pure and austere spirits of the
men and women who have made our republic
look out on us from between the pine boughs

8 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

when the moonbeams find their way between
the singing leaves, and throw their blue-black
shadows on the snow.

An old pine is best seen when it is grown
about by younglings of many stages of growth,
from the feathery whorls of the babies in their
first summer to the young giants rejoicing in
the strength of their youth. The pinetum
ought not to be a thing of to-day nor of to-
morrow, but of always. Deep — oh ! deep
within the human heart lies a longing for
permanence. Soul calls to soul for pause, and
as we hurry through the little day that lies
between the eternities, with what passionate
desire do we cry out to those who have gone
on into whatever lies before ; and with what
piteous futility do we try to be remembered,
if only by a single kindly thought, by those
who are to follow us! We cannot stay —
that we know full well — but some of the
things it pleases us to call our own, may live
a little longer than ourselves, and so, young
and old together, the pines should grow. The
little ones are to be loved and nourished as
one loves a young child, but the old ones
are to be cared for and honoured as one cares

JANUARY 9

for the beautiful old people whom the aged
pines resemble. Buffeted by winds, pruned
by storm, scarred by lightnings, it may be,
or worn by neglect or cruelty, how full of
meaning the pines become ! No tree, unless
it may be an oak, becomes as human as does
a pine which has lived for generations in the
intimate companionship of man. When the
trunks have grown grey and resinous, and
the boughs are mute witnesses to the struggles
of the soul of the tree, they take on the same
beauty which shines in the faces of men and
women who have grown old in the quest of
high ideals, and in the service of noble en-
deavours. They know so much, the ancient
trees, whose breath is for the healing of the
nations, that when the wind, who is the oldest
of the master musicians, begins his hymnings
among the dark leafage, there is no mood of
the soul which may not find therein an inter-
pretative melody, and no sorrow of the heart
to which they refuse to bring a message of
peace.

Against a stockade of pines it were well
to plant in, irregularly, other cone-bearers —
spruce firs, cedars, arbor vita, hemlocks,

10 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

junipers. The blessed conifers! Through
how many ages they have striven to adapt
themselves to their environment ! How ten-
derly they hold their soft burden of snow !
How cheerfully they shelter the birds from
the storms ! If you chance to see the delicate
embroideries the feet of a covey of partridges
print upon the white drifts, follow it, and it
will be almost sure to lead you to a thicket
of hemlocks. There you will find also, un-
certain, shy, nut-hatches and juncoes — com-
pact, cold-defying little scraps of life, whose
tiny " cheep " or crisp interrogatory call to
their fellows is all the conversation the busy
things have time to toss to and fro in the
frosty air, so earnest is the warfare they wage
against the eggs and larvae hidden under the
bark. What an evil it would be if they would
decide to become migratory birds, or take it
into their heads to wish to know what a palm-
tree looks like! The jays, those gay, blue-
mailed freebooters, haunt the evergreens, and
bid defiance to the cold in harsh cries that are
of a courage so high as to put a bit of their
bravery into the faintest heart. Once in a
way a flock of ruby-crested knights may search

JANUARY 1 1

among the spruce buds for their dinner, and
it may be a pine's good fortune to become
host to an owl or two, whose wide, soft flight
through the wintry dusk will be a thing to
remember.

Near the evergreens I would plant as many
birches as I could find foothold for — white,
grey, brown, shining, clustering, growing
singly. How the trunks take for themselves
the tints of the snow, the earth and the rocks !
How the branches symbolise the inconstant
winds with the thoughtful movement of their
delicate traceries. No other tree gives quite
the idea of purity that belongs to a white birch.
If I were a painter and wished to paint the per-
fect flower of womanhood in Our Lady's face, I
would place her in the shadow of white birches.
Their slender swaying branches would shield
the head of the little Child upon her knee,
and He would try to catch the flickering beams
of the sun which fell between them with the
hands that were to be held out in love to
all the world.

A beech shall grow in one corner of my
garden, the corner I shall call my sound garden.
Why not ? The ear has as good a right to

12 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

be thought of as have those pampered members
of the body — the eyes and the nose. A per-
fectly trained ear knows by the sound of the
wind in the branches of the tree under which
it is passing what sort of tree it is. Harsh,
some of these sounds will be ; delicately vibrant
others ; mournful others, and cheery yet others.
There are oaks which are types of village
gossips, so full is their persistent foliage of
whisperings and insinuations. There are
beeches which rustle through the winter with
the silken frou-frou of great court ladies, and
there are dry, sarcastic, unfallen leafings which
hurt like the smile of a cynic. In some
strong-caned bushes one hears the voices of
the builders of great commonwealths, and in
the creakings of certain assertive growths the
materialism of this age has long been fore-
boded. The catalpas rattle their long cas-
tanets ; the locusts clash their pods in unison
with the beating of the invisible drums for
which the balls of the sycamores are for ever
ready. Through long grasses and sedges
poets and musicians sing to us, and in the
contented rustle of the corn the great dear,
commonplace, indispensable common people

JANUARY 13

tell of their joys and sorrows, and speak with-
out boasting of humble duties faithfully per-
formed. Briars and brambles send messages
by a code far older than Morse's, and in the
mighty race of the cone bearers, fugues and
chorales, concertos and symphonies are for ever
sounding, while to the Spirit of Winter the
whole vast orchestra ministers.

For January, as for all the months of the
year, I should like to plant a seed garden. It
would be hedged in by a thicket of black-
berries, over whose strong lattices the Virgin's
bower would weave a cloudy thatch. Chick-
adees always know where to find the feathery
grey seed clusters, and as I should listen to
their chatter over their breakfast I should look
— always in vain — among the smoky puffs of
seeding for a single spray which lacked one
line of that grace which is the birthright of
the clematis. Cat - briars would climb the
thorn-trees which would grow on the outer
boundaries of the plot, since no berries can
be handsomer by contrast with the scarlet
haws than are the heavy blue-black clusters
of their fruits. I may not call the bitter-
sweet a weed, yet it shares with weeds the

i4 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

care-free joys of sauntering along the high-
ways as nonchalantly as any gypsy, and
reddens its cheek against the wind as cheer-
fully as any vagabond who ever deserted a
humdrum rooftree for the open road. Some-
where there must be elderberries, frozen but
sweet, and frost grapes, and there must be
plenty of dog roses, and some spindle-trees.
I like this last, pretty, homespun name almost
as well as I like their pretty tricorned fruit-
cups. The Indians called it wahoo, a shivery,
owl-like sound that goes well with the frosty
air. There must be sumachs somewhere in
this goodly fellowship of light-o'-hearts, and
a spice bush must offer its aromatic twigs to
the nibbler who alone is the true out-of-door
man; and above all coral -berried dogwoods
must find place here, where so many friendless
folk are merry and helpful together.

Those for a background, and against them
I would plant in all of the bescorned sisterhood
of weeds. All the long summer they were
quietly and patiently gathering strength : all
the long autumn they were making the most
of rain and sunshine and sweet earth foods,
and now that the starving time has come to

JANUARY 15

the little birds, who have no barns, these
granaries are open to a horde of pensioners.
Every puff of wind shakes down the flat seeds
of the umbels, and every hour the brown
weights that act as rudders to the parachutes
of the great family of the composites grow
sweeter and sweeter. Thistles stand out in
angles that only an artist of old Japan could
understand. Queen Anne's lace throws sha-
dows which no one but Bonvin could interpret.
Asters, goldenrod, Jor-pye-reed, grasses, sedges,
yarrow mallows, and even jimpson and
plantain, mullein and burdock and pig-weed
have a value now. Men never plant these
things. They even cut down those which
have planted themselves, and pride themselves
upon the performance of an act of civic virtue
when the weed pile vanishes in a flash of fire .
and a puff of smoke. It may be that they are
right, and perhaps I would do it myself if I
had the next year's grains to look after ; but
here, in this spot dedicated to St Francis of
Assisi, the weeds shall stand forth in all the
beauty of loving service, offering their bounty to
the birds in a right true brotherliness good to
see and good to share.

1 6 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

There is but one flower for the Garden of
the Month of the Cold Moon, and that is the
Christmas rose, or hellebore. In seedsmen's
lists it is mainly conspicuous by its absence,
and it really belongs only in gardens where
Tradition loves to gather her treasures about
her. Protected by the leathery curtains of its
strong leaves, the pink buds begin to show
themselves in November. Persisting through
the most discouraging frosts and rains, the
blossoms unfold about Yuletide. White, as
becomes a snow-flower ; with a heart of pale
gold stamens, and a flush as of dawn, the
flowers are as beautiful as if May winds had
blown their petals apart. True children of
the cold, they must be left in the open, since
they pine and blacken in captive air.

The whole garden is incomplete unless there
be snow — the soft, light snow, the swarming
white bees! everywhere, and bends every bough
and covers everything with its pure mantle.
Then when the sun shines as it loves to shine,
when the cold has freed the air from dampness,
when the frost flowers lie light and sparkling,
when blue and mournful shadows are cast by
every grass blade, as well as by every tree bole,

JANUARY 17

then is there a garden so spiritual that our eyes
are unworthy to behold it, and our souls stand
abashed before such a revelation of holiness.
There is one supreme hour in the snow
world, and that is when twilight settles down,
chill, still. Trees are etherealised, distances
vanish. One by* one the colours die out of the
west : one by one in the far, cold sky the stars
come out, each attentive to " God's calling the
bede-roll of the little stars, and each answering,
' Here am I ! ' What majesty, what solem-
nity, what awful beauty, in these glories of
the most ancient of all gardens ! As they
deepen and brighten and grow, and the cold
strengthens, perhaps the air will be fanned for
a moment by the wide wing of a snowy owl ;
perhaps the white burden of snow will shiver
down from some evergreen bough on which a
restless jay has found shelter ; perhaps there
will be a fairy tinkling of

" Icicles
Quietly shining to the quiet moon."

So many things may happen in a January
garden !

FEBRUARY

The laggard sun, on frosty morn
Throws level beams through stubble corn.
Against the sunset, naked trees
Weave magic bredes and traceries.
From woodman's axe white splinters bound ;
The flicker's cheery tappings sound ;
Ice thaws, and in the quickening flood
Are vague, fond hopes of leaf and bud ;
When lo ! like fleck of living sky,
Full-songed, a blue bird sweet flits by !

A WINTER POOL

FEBRUARY

THE SNOWY MOON

A LTHOUGH it is February, I would not
•**• leave town if I could. It is the one
month in which the most enthusiastic gardener
is as well off here as elsewhere, and the
friendly streets and sheltering walls are no
bad substitute for melting snowfields and
sudden, revolutionary conditions of the mer-
cury, which, one hour giving a hint of spring,
in the next bids us think of the Glacial Period
— and our steps. February is certainly the ugly
duckling of the year's brood, and nobody cares
much for his company. Everybody gives him
a peck and an ill word, and everybody grudges
him even the eight-and-twenty days given him
by the calendar men, and considers himself
insulted when

" Leap year makes it twenty-nine."

It is a time for books and for plans. Books
may be read anywhere, our plans may be made

21

22 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

as satisfactorily in walled cities as in sodden
orchards or on spongy lawns — better, perhaps,
because there we miss the discouragement of
actual contact with the unlovely disintegrations
that are all too evident in St Valentine's
weather ! Perhaps it was for plan-making
"that Februarys are made, after all ! They
are near enough to the beginning of things to
encourage a free outlook, and not too far from
other things to let us forget the failures and
successes, the disappointments and achieve-
ments of the past. A gardener is, as Alfred
Austin reminds us, a true Dogberry, " a man
that hath had losses." He is also one who has
known "the purest of human pleasures," and
so he stands in the waxing strength of the
February sunlight, remembering the things he
promised himself not to forget, but which he
will forget when he sees the first daffodil, and
it is already too late to say, " This year thus
and so shall be done."

I write my name large in the list of those
who most gratefully acknowledge their debt to

writers of books. I No ! I renounce the

difficult joy it would be to try to say what I
owe to the printed page, and I hasten on to

FEBRUARY 23

say that in February there is but one kind of
reading that wholly delights me, and that is
the reading of catalogues : plant and seed, and
fruit and bulb, catalogues. Herbals, botanies,
manuals — garden-books in general — these are
for all the year. In this month I care only for
the lists of things men who deal in living
plants have to sell. Because my name is found
only in the most modest corner of their order-
book — since air-gardening is not a costly
pursuit, and all I ever buy is an occasional
packet of seeds for some friend who owns a
leasehold of more tangible soil than mine — I
am obliged to send shamefaced postcards, or
deceitful notes enclosing stamps, to the men
whose advertisements are the crowning delight
of the monthly magazines. I cannot buy their
wares, I know, but, as it is better to give than
to receive, it is only a kindness to them to
enable them to place at least one of their
pamphlets where it will do the most good — to
the recipient if not to the sender. Moreover,
it would not be polite to refuse a courtesy, and
they beg so prettily for our names and ad-
dresses that it would be a rudeness to refuse
them.

24 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

In a few days I begin to watch for the post-
man, and never watch I in vain. The kind
growers make all haste to disseminate pleasures,
and in a trice my desk is covered with the most
fascinating of all forms of literature. Then I
shut the door, and invite my soul to a lordly
feast. It is nothing to me that the skies are
heavy and grey. I do not care if the fog
steals up from the river and, with white, bale-
ful fingers, presses against the pane. I take
no thought of Candlemas shadows which
others fear. I am at the gates of a paradise
from which no angel, flaming sworded, bars, but
which all may enter if they will but have a key.
Tables and chairs are soon over-littered with
the charming sheets which come from every-
where, and by every post. Of late there has
crept into these a habit of illustrating their
text by photographic reproductions of actual
flowers, a practice I cannot too rigidly contemn.
If the florist must go into court, and hold up
his right hand, and solemnly swear that thus
and not otherwise grew his campanulas and
his foxgloves, where are we to look for the old
delight that lay in the woodcuts of asters that
were as big as chrysanthemums, and chrysan-

FEBRUARY 25

themums that had the diameter of a dinner-
plate ? Compare a list of to-day with one of
even half-a-dozen years ago — can there be such
deterioration in plants ? And is there to be
no more that keen stimulant given to one's
imagination which the old catalogues offer ?
One is indeed far gone in worldly wisdom
when he no longer pins his faith to those pro-
fuse and mammoth flowerings, and when he
once begins to distrust the colourings set forth
on the covers he is a lost man. Let the photo-
grapher turn his lenses on the locking-pleasant
faces of his clients, and leave the picturing of
garden things to the freer brush and pencil of
the gardener's choice.

A real gardener is, as all the world knows,
a most honest man. One thinks of him, in-
stinctively, as going to church on Sunday, his
wife by his side, and a rosy tale of little off-
shoots following happily behind. There is a
clove-pink in the buttonhole of his best coat,
and a sprig of citronella decorates the family
hymn-book. One allows him a glass of some-
thing-and-water, now and then, to keep out
the damp, but for generosity — within discreet
bounds — for truthfulness — except under great

26 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

provocation and for open-mindedness, — except
on subjects on which he knows that his opinions
cannot be bettered, — a gardener is an honest
man. It is because of our faith in him that
we accept this picture of a rose-bush whereon
petal touches petal from root to crown ; that we
believe in this bed of pansies, whereof no leaf
shows, but only a sheet of wide-eyed blossoms,
and that we are eager to credit this bank
of forget-me-nots with florets as large as
sixpences. In our hearts we know that such
roses and pansies are not, and that such forget-
me-nots will never be. Yet year by year we
linger over those enchanting woodcuts with an
interest more perennial than any perennial
whose virtues they celebrate.

From the table beside which I sit, I put
away everything but an ink bottle, a pen, a
pencil — red at one end and blue at the other —
a foot-rule, and some sheets of paper. I make
believe, to use the happy phrase of childhood,
that the foot-rule is a tape-reel hundreds of feet
long, but, as one must accommodate one's
desires to one's environment at times, the foot-
rule answers very well as an ordinary sur-
veying outfit. Where I need to mark a circle

FEBRUARY 27

for a place for a sundial I make a very good
one by drawing a line around the cork of the
ink bottle. Thus equipped I am ready to be-
gin my plans and my lists.

I do not think it could be possible for a
garden to have too much box. On the con-
trary, I am sure that it could never have enough
of that imperishable shrub which inhales the
present by its millions of lungs, and breathes
forth a past of inconceivable antiquity in its
sighs. Dr Holmes fancied that we have
brought with us from some antecedent life
some subtle relationship with this shrub, which
comes back to us with every inhalation of its
unforgetable scent. A thorough democrat,
because of its thorough aristocracy, I do not
know anything which grows so capable of that
which we call friendship. The most intimate
secrets may safely be told it, the safest counsel
comes from it, and summer and winter there is
healing in its breath. It is the most natural
shelter and playfellow for children ; it is the
fittest confidant for dreaming youth. In the
book of remembrance over which men pore
more and more fondly as years go by, it
borders the dearest pages, and it is the one

28 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

thincr to hold in the hand at the last. It should

o

stand for immortality in the language of the
flowers since in its vast life, man is but an
incident, and it is easy to believe that when
the last rays of the dying sun shall shine on
the masterless jewels which have been the
pride of a hundred forgotten kings, the box
will catch the last gift of its light upon its
rounded leaves, and then will pass into the
final darkness without fear.

In my garden, therefore, will I have long
hedges of the precious box leading in every
direction from the dial, which is the garden's
heart, to the windbreak, which is even more
needful in February's uncertain thaws and
freezes than it was in the steady, solemn cold
of its forerunner. It is a hemlock shelter now
and feathers down toward the grass, in a wide
planting in of rhododendron and laurel, with
some mats of savin or juniper and here and there
a small cedar. In nature there are few abrupt
transitions from tree to grass. There is almost
always a blending of boughs and blades through
the friendly air of shrubby growths and tall
plants. Sometimes the effect of many tall
bare trunks is too precious to be lost, as one

FEBRUARY 29

sees it in the coast pines, but far more often is
the beauty of those most beautiful of all trunks,
the beech boles and the stems of birches,
greater if veiled by a foreground of green.
Box is not hospitable to close neighbours, but
away from it a bit, where the dogwoods have
tipped the foils with which it fights the cold
with the round buttons which are to conquer
the whole world by-and-by, the smaller ever-
greens must be set, so that the ground be
covered by them. The English ivy makes an
unexcelled carpet. It will grow thus even in
the most inhospitable climates, if the stock
be taken from plants already adjusted to the
surroundings. The common myrtle is exceed-
ingly hardy and, once entrenched, will grow and
prosper and ripen with the years until its rich-
ness becomes proverbial. Thyme is another
winter carpet well worth everybody's while to
plant, so readily does it grow, so dense is its
green and bronzed foliage and so homelike is
its scent. The most beautiful of our native
evergreen trailers or creepers, the lycopodium
and the exquisite partridge-berry, refuse domes-
tication.

I put down the foot-rule, and the cork of

3o A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

the ink bottle. The sheet of paper is filled
with radiating and connecting lines marked
"box" and curly little rosettelike marks sur-
rounding figures. Corresponding figures in
the footnotes indicate the names of the
trees and shrubs which are to occupy these
positions in my garden — hemlock, dogwood,
rhododendron, laurel, juniper, savin, cedar,
myrtle, ivy, thyme ; it is such a short list, and
there is such a worldful of things to choose
from !

I take up my pencil — the red and blue one —
and I begin on a fresh sheet of paper the list
of seeds which I would buy if I had wherewith
to buy, and wherein to sow. List-making is a
serious matter, even if one uses the blue end of
the pencil to check off the things one must have,
and the red end for the things one can do with-
out. All choice is serious, since life is only a
series of acceptances and rejections, and either
may be endless in its consequences.

The lists vary with the weather. A sunny
day ? Oh, then by all means let me prepare a
retreat full of cool white and green things
against the summer heats ! Clouds, and a low
sobbing wind ? Let me have only yellow, sun-

FEBRUARY 31

shiny flowers in my books, with many, many
light-hearted pansies, and with plenty of frag-
rant leaves. On some nights I will have
only perennials ; on some days I turn from all
old friends and care only for those marked
" novelties " ; but these are the restless days in
which I have gotten into the strange electric
currents that threaten the old, evolved peace
in which happiness dwells. The pencil-marks
shame me when the ill mood has passed, and
my heart has again found anchorage in the still
waters beside which the flowers of my youth
are growing. Sometimes, in sheer despair of
making a list to which I can ever hope to
write "the end," I decide to proceed in the
orthodox, alphabetical manner. I did so
yesterday, and I got no farther than the word
Adlumia.

So it stands on the seedsmen's lists. I hope
I need not again write down a Latin or a
Latinised name. They have their uses, and
" express the plant's standing in the scientific
world, as its common name reveals its relation
to humanity." There is always a bit of the
life of the plant itself in its common name, its
home, its private story, its affiliation with rock

32 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

or water, its suggestion of bird or beast, its
healing graces. It is touched, thus, by man's
religion, by his superstition, by his loves, — not
often by his hates. Poetry lurks in every
letter that helps to spell out the names of the
oldest favourites. A rose would most certainly
not be as sweet by another name, and if the
daffodil were robbed of one syllable of the
name that looks like its upspringing, slender
leaves, and sounds like the music of its pale
trumpets, it would not be the daffodil that I
love.

So, because I have lists headed " Creepers,
trailers and climbers," " Biennials," and " Old
friends," and because at the head of each stands
this unlovely word — which I have just crossed
out, and for which I have substituted " Alle-
ghany vine," and " Mountain fringe " — I sat
with poised pencil, and wondered why this
particular little plant should have been registered
in so many places, and as I wondered I began
to dream dreams, and to see visions.

Once upon a time, in the country that lies
Back of Beyond, there stood a farmhouse.
Pine-trees stood about it chanting perpetually
that battle hymn of the republic of trees in

FEBRUARY 33

which they bid defiance to all the winds that
blow, and fling down a gage to all the powers
of frost, and cold, and quick-spent lightning.
Or else, in summer twilights, and in silvery
April dawns, they sang a love-song as old as
the eternities and as vast as space. Back of
the farmhouse lay an orchard : rose-white in
April, pearl-white in May, green in midsummer,
golden and crimson and russet at the fall of the
leaf, and grey and brown in winter. Through
it the seasons came and went in orderly pro-
cession. Children played in it. Thrushes
sang there in the starlit dusks, and a gentle
old man with white hair walked there in the
sunshine of the afternoons. The winds came
sweet and pure across the fields to rustle the
curtain that overhung the farmhouse door.
Such a curtain ! The gracious, wandering
sprays of which it was woven were like green
frostwork ; the pink-white clusters of its odd
little pendent flowers were not flowers at all,
but quaintest fairy garments hung out to dry
after the rain that had silvered the leaves, and
oh ! the exquisite roundness and blackness
and shiningness of the tiny seeds ! To gather
and gather them was one of the joys of the

34 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

childhood that threw them away after the
moment's possession which sufficed even for
things so beautiful and so precious. Have I
not given good and sufficient reasons why the
Alleghany vines cannot be left out ? Is there
not a memory like this behind the name of
every flower that grows, and when the mid-
night has turned toward morning, and the
rain is falling, does not the homesick heart
cry out for the loved ones at home ?

Down goes the list and out comes the foot-
rule. When I was laying out my box borders
I forgot to put in a privet hedge. There is
nothing prettier than the sturdy privet, which
carries its clean, dark leaves well into the
winter and, after its pearly flowers in mid
summer, jets itself over with shining black
berries. I must plant privet across the lower
end of my paper or — stay — shall I not have a
cherry-tree at either corner, which will grow
bigger and bonnier as the years go by, and
between them a strong netting for sweetpeas
and colza, and moon vine and morning glory ?
Or would it not be better to build in a lat-
tice for sweetbriar and eglantine, and prairie
queen and Baltimore belles, and for clematis,

FEBRUARY 35

and starry honeysuckle, and all the healthy,
hardy things that would love to climb over it
or lean against it ? Yes, I will have the lattice,
and the sweetpeas can grow on a netting some-
where else.

The foot-rule goes into the drawer. The
lattice may be any length I choose, so there
is no need to measure it off.

I count myself in few things else so happy as
that even on a seedman's list of flowers I can
read the whole story of my life. Thoreau says
that there is a flower for every mood of the mind,
and it has long been an article of faith with
me that the history of any country-bred heart
can be told by the flowers he loves best. A
child cares most for the things that are nearest
at hand. With the minted gold of the dande-
lions, and the measureless wealth of daisies
and buttercups he fills his hands and his heart
with happiness and splendour. Later, while
still unspotted by the world, he cares for those
which he can bend to the new uses which life
is every day discovering to him, and he enters
into that poetic relation with the Over Soul
which is expressed in the flower games, world
old, but new to every generation of men and of

36 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

things. He fights violet battles ; he has snow-
ball wars. He gives balls at which the guests
come freshly and beautifully dressed from the
rows of hollyhocks, and from the beds of
balsams, and are feasted at tables spread with
cups cut from rose hips filled with wine turned
from water, and held in bottles made by patient
manipulations of the thin outer membranes of
the leaves of live-for-ever, and plates which were
acorn cups, and handsomely set out with mallow
cheeses. Larkspurs come into value when it
is discovered that their honey-horns may be
removed and strung together into the wreaths
which are found, sometimes, in after years, and
in alien places, among the leaves of forgotten
books.

Phlox grows because of its great value as
necklace and bracelet making material : orna-
ments so necessary in the personal adornment
of the actresses in the dramas so easily arranged
if one have but a bit of sunlit turf for a stage,
and a lilac bush by way of withdrawing-room.
A thousand industries keep the child busy in
the summer garden, alive with elves and fairies,
and full of enchanted castles, with moat and
drawbridge all complete, and the relations there

FEBRUARY 37

established between him and the infinite heart
of Nature will be eternal. I should not like to
think of children and fairies and gardens, and
leave unquoted these verses from one of the
Kate Greenaway books :

" Beneath the lilies, tall, white garden lilies,
A princess slept her charmed life away,
For ever were the fairy bluebells ringing,
For ever through the night and through the day;

" When lo ! a prince came riding through the sunshine 1
The wind just touched the lilies, to and fro,
And woke the princess, while the bluebell music
Kept ringing, ringing, sleepily and low."

As childhood gives way before the mysterious
disturbances of larger growth, other flowers
become dear. Cowslips give place to pansies,
and daisies to violets. Flower-beds are too
small to hold all the sweetpeas and mignonette
one ought to have, and the longest hours are
too short for the converse one would like to
hold with the lily-of-the-valley. Then come
roses, only roses, and it is a part of the rainbow
gold that gilds all our morning thoughts, and
lures us on to hopes of high achievement, that
our roses must be large and splendid, heavy
with odour and rich with colour. We may

38 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

have our days when the tea rose is all-in-all
to us ; and we may have moods in which the
appeal comes from the gorgeous hybrids, but
it is always the big, triumphant roses for
which we care. Later we come to an ap-
preciation of the simpler flowers, the pink-
and- white cabbage roses, the hardy little
Scotch roses, or the sweetbriar, and at last
we arrive at the rose of a hundred leaves, and
then we know that we have reached the top
of the hill.

We do not lay aside any of our old loves
even then. They are a part of ourselves, and
we could as easily change the colour of our
eyes as our loyalty to those tried friends,
but henceforth we add others slowly to our
affections, and these are chosen frankly be-
cause of their wearing qualities. Asters come
in for a great share of our favour, and hardy
phlox, and even dahlias, and zinnias, and
always chrysanthemums. In a world where
life is a vain and fleeting show — as saith the
old hymn — and all passes like a dream, we
come to hold fast by the sturdier friends who
can stay with us for a longer time than the
rose's little day, or for the brief glory of the

FEBRUARY 39

iris, and so we pass on into relations with
the good perennials and shrubby things on
which we can rely with a sense of content-
ment born of long experience.

Then, as a gentle spirit is ever going back-
ward toward the Youth it remembers while the
Youth it knows not draws near, our hearts go
back to the lost dreams of our morning time
and we come into fresh and closer companion-
ship with the flowers of our dawn. The
daffodil becomes a cup from which we drink —
not to our friends behind, but to our friends
before. Violets are violets no longer, but
symbols of that which we can no more share
with another than we can share aught else of
the richest, sweetest happenings to our souls.
Deep is calling unto deep, and once again, be-
hold ! all things are new.

As in the Shepherd's Calendar each month
had its emblem, so has mine. January had
the Christmas rose ; February has a flower
even fairer for her own. In the chill northern
garden in which — in spite of the pencils and
the foot-rule and the catalogues — I have gotten
only so far as a wind-break, some box borders
and a lattice, I must show you my snowdrops.

40 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

Their only rival is the border which grew in
the garden at Nuneaton, where George Eliot
played as a little sister. By the time she was
old enough to drink in their beauty, the aged
sods of snowdrops, a foot in width, bordered a
path thirty feet long. I have dreamed about
that border for years and years ! Since there is
no sensation more pure and innocent than the
recognition of that first beating of the heart of
the rising of the Spirit of all things visible —
which is expressed in this flower. The tiny
spark of vitality which warms the breast of
the pines and the chick-a-dee is the only
thing I know as full of the Life Everlasting
as is the snowdrop. By her own courage
she melts the snow above her, and pushes
her green stalk through the round little well
which she has thawed by the warm pulsing
of her own high purpose, and aided by one,
at least, of the

"ten thousand liveried angels"

which lackey the chaste soul. She hangs out
her bells : green for summer coming ; white
for winter going. She has so many pretty
names— Candlemas bells, Our Lady's bells,

FEBRUARY 41

fair maids of February, Notre Dame Fevriere,
the dainty lady with the honey-sweet breath !
After all, twenty-eight days are none too
many for a moon which can bring us a snow-
drop !

MARCH

On the western sky, in a yellow line

The wind of his might paints a warning sign.

The March clouds, torn like shipwrecked sails,

Drift at the will of the angry gales.

On crumbling log the moss grows green ;

The free'd brook laughs the rocks between ;

The melting snow, the sap's full tide,

The varnished buds that the young leaves hide ;

These, and the flush on the Mayflower's cheek
To dullest ear Spring's message speak.

MARCH

THE GREEN MOON

T F February be for plans, so is March.
Already there is what countryfolk call "a
feel of spring " in the air, and we are conscious
of a distinct personality as he approaches
— boisterous, uncertain, often unkind — always
stimulating, and always sure to bring gifts
which no one else can offer.

There are those who say " it is spring "
when the last leaf is torn from the February
calendar ; there are those who are so precise
as to leave the word unsaid until the sun has
crossed the line, and they can take part in the
ancient wrangle over the equinoctial storms.
It is really spring when the first robin calls
from the tree top, and the first bluebird warbles
the delicate spirals of the plaintive melody of
her "wandering voice." It is full spring for
the heart when the solemn and mysterious
calling of the wild geese cleaves the air with a
45

46 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

sound that seems almost an echo from skies
divided by their wedge-shaped flight. There
is nothing that is quite of the same value as
that high, lonely crying ; and poor indeed is
the garden above which it is not heard. I
remember a warm, misty night when the birds,
attracted by the lights of the city ; bewildered
by having lost their invisible clue ; circled,
crying, calling overhead for hours — a most
mysterious night.

There are so many winds abroad in March,
and so many cruel damps and chills, that I
shall shut in my garden to-night by a high
brick wall, and I shall content myself with
smaller quarters than I found necessary when
I needed wide spaces for my January ever-
greens, or when February called for long
stretches for my box walks. I think I can
get all I need within the compass of an
acre, but I must insist upon the brick walls —
red-brick, mellowed to dullness by time, and
overgrown with the mosses that are so quick
to respond to the warmth of the returning
sun. I cannot but think that it was by ob-
servation of the quick colouring of these
charming plants, and the way they have of

MARCH 47

turning the last frosts and the first rains to
account by their swelling and expanding scales
and fronds, that the Indians gave this month
the name of " The Green Moon." Bradford
Torrey happily says that "The North
American Indians had a genius for names
as the Greeks had for sculpture and for
poetry." For thoughts reaching into the
heart of things also, he might have added.

The mosses are the true aristocrats of that
kingdom for which I devoutly wish we had a
better name than vegetable. Theirs is the
longest pedigree and the proudest conscious-
ness of a great work done to make the world
habitable. Forgotten in the great rush of
modern life, they cling to the rocks and hide
in the forests for the most part, but they love
to haunt neglected walls and old roofs, giving
the grace of their colour and texture to crumb-
ling decay, and welcoming remembering winds
and rains, quite careless of the poor creatures
called men, who are but for a day.

The wall is to be broken here and there by
shallow buttresses. Against these ivies cling,
and the beautiful Japanese ampelopsis. There
is an evergreen, climbing euonymus, which is

48 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

excellent and hardy in such situations, and
there must be roses everywhere. Even in
March the strong canes and thorns of the
roses are attractive, and although they have
no leaves the tiny scarlet buds are bright with
promise. Stiff junipers and standard box and
fire-berries must group themselves along the
wall irregularly, and there must be a thicket
or two of Thunberg's barberry with coral tips
along its quickset branches. This good little
shrub bears the only berry which retains its
colour all the winter. An upright evergreen
euonymus is so great a favourite with me that
I must have it standing sentinel wherever a
sentinel is needed. In and around these
bushes as much myrtle as chooses may grow
unhindered, since nothing can be more cheer-
ful than its shining leaves.

In the warmest angles of the wall I must
have many plantings of the small-flowered
yellow jessamine, which ought to be hardy
everywhere, but which needs a bit of shelter
as far north as Philadelphia. Its green canes
are prettily angled and curve most gracefully,
its pointed buds are so eager to turn them-
selves into golden stars that a bush is almost

MARCH 49

sure to bear a few of them after two or three
days' sunshine in all but the bitterest weather.
I do not know why this cheerful shrub, which
is so peculiarly adapted to warm corners and
sunny walls, is not more generally grown. It
is so clean, so free from insect enemies, and
so altogether desirable that I would that some
Society for the Propagation of Good Cheer
would send it forth broadcast over the land to
preach its gospel of good will and hopefulqess.
Even in the coldest days a handful of its twigs
brought into the house and placed in a glass
of water will make haste to return thanks for
the hospitality received, by opening its yellow
blossoms, and all summer long its fountainlike
growth makes it a thing of beauty.

Two or three scarlet maples must stand at
the farther end of my garden, and close beside
them, well away from drains and water-pipes,
a willow or two, whose yellow stems will
brighten as the days draw near in which they
may toss out their catkins and push forth their
leaves. The old English names of sallow and
palm are forgotten here, the latter name being
given by the sweet old fashion of using the
green thing nearest at hand on Palm Sunday.

50 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

Not everyone knows that the odour of blos-
soming willows is one of the sweetest and most
refreshing of odours. Willows are Nature's
thermometers, which one soon learns to trust.
Perhaps they will not open their buds just
when we think they ought, but they know
infallibly when winter is past and gone, and
the time of singing birds appear ; and it is a
wise gardener who looks at his sallows, not at
his almanac, or even at his last year's note-
book.

In a proper March garden there is also a
sassafras, a spice-bush, and a "pussy" willow :
three true-hearted Americans, accustomed to
our late springs, and careless of our inhospit-
able winds. There is small sense shown in
sending all over the face of the earth for
doubtfully adaptable shrubs when our own
waste places give us such treasures as these
and many another perfectly in harmony with
our environment. More and more every year
we are losing our idle desire for novelty and
our slavish wish to imitate the gardens of other
countries, and are coming to understand that
our greatest opportunity for having successful
plantings lies in our hearty acceptation of the

MARCH 51

aid of our closest neighbours. We are not of
the tropics, so why waste time and money in
efforts to give a tropical effect to our patently
northern-temperate pleasure grounds ? Thank-
fully, indeed, do we accept the treasures brought
to us from foreign lands, and adapted to our
needs by patient, generally unknown, growers,
but it ought to be our pride to think first of
those things which are a part of our goodly
heritage as Americans. Good sense, as well
as good patriotism and good taste, should lead
us to make the most of the plants which have
fitted themselves to our soil and our climate by
uncounted ages of careful adjustment. Think
of the trees which may be brought in from
any bit of woodland and planted without the
long exposure that must lie between a nursery
and the planting site. Pines, oaks, elms,
lindens, beeches, maples, sycamores, tulip-
poplars, birches, hemlocks, larches, firs, spruces,
wild cherries, catalpas, ash, mountain ash,
sassafras ! Look at the smaller trees and
lesser shrubs, almost all of which grow within
two hours' drive of our eastern or middle-
western towns and villages, the judas tree,
dogwoods, thorns, crab-apples, sumachs,

52 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

wahoos, witch hazel, magnolia — for the south-
east — fringe tree — south-east also — elders,
white flowered and red berried. Then think of
the rhododendrons, laurels, azaleas, barberries,
blackberries, spice-bushes, wild roses and
snowberries ! Of hardy herbaceous plants
and bulbs we have enough to keep the garden
fair and sweet from early until late, — hepati-
cas, bloodroots, violets, thalactrums, trilliums,
phloxes, lady's slippers, columbines, larkspurs,
iris, lilies, lobelias, blue and red, monardas,
liatris, ox-eyes, buttercups, ageratums, helian-
thus, rudbeckias, yarrows, goldenrods, all of
the wonder-world of asters, the ferns, the
grasses and the sedges ! The list is endless,
and the joy of giving a helping hand to these
beautiful compatriots (some of whom are in
danger of their lives from the ignorance and
greed of men) is one that need not be withheld
from anyone who has an ell of ground. If you
like, you can buy all of these, and many another
from some of the sensible and public-spirited
growers, who devote themselves to the cultiva-
tion and dissemination of patriotism in this
charming way. You will find, however, that
your garden means something very much

MARCH 53

higher and broader and deeper if you can
collect your treasures for yourself, and if, with
every plant you gather into your fold, you
garner also a memory of the time and place
from whence it came ; of the friend who dug it
for you, sharing your joy in its discovery, and
adding his good will to your happy tasks. A
garden must send its roots down into the heart
of all that goes to make your life if it is to
avail in its highest purpose, and beneath the
earth stirred by your spade and trowel there
must be a subsoil rich with memories and sweet
with love.

With hope also ! March lies in the Region
of Pure Hope, the one apostolic grace which
comes by nature, and which outlasts our life.
I like to think of it as having for its laureate
the buoyant Stevenson, own brother to the
robins and to the windy dawns and sunsets of
the warring month, in his brave fight for better
things. He must wear on his breast, as star
of the order of high hearts, a knot of snow-
drops, of which there would not be enough if
half of the brown March fields were covered
by their pearly blossoms. Even he did not say
the right word concerning this flower, with the

54 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

curved white sepals, the three of hearts painted in
green upon their drooping corollas: the modest
poise of their pretty heads ; the faint sweet
breath with which they call the half-awakened
bees! To Wordsworth a snowdrop was "a
part of the sermon on the Mount."

Even before the snowdrops come, the maples
begun to think of spring, and their red leaf-
scales and flower buds announce that the sap
has already mounted to the farthermost tip of
the branches, and sugar-making time is here.
It marks the first stage of the farm-year in the
woods, which are the best part of the farm-
garden. The sweetest harvest of the tem-
perate zone is that which drips from the
wooden spills driven into the maple's bole, into
the wooden trough below. Here is gardening
indeed, and a welding of many industries into
one. The troughs, to be proper sugar troughs,
of the kind that belong to the old days before
glucose and other abominations, are made by
leisurely winter firesides, by members of those
arts and crafts societies of the countryside
whose work is always beautiful since it is
always sincere and direct. The faint blue
reek of the sugarmaker's fire, diffused through

MARCH 55

the still air, is reflected in the blue eyes which
the first hepatica opens under its furry hood at
the tree's foot, and which seems to be a part
of the wild, uncloying sweetness drawn from
the maple's very heart.

" All the forest life is in it
All the mystery and magic."

The name maple is almost the only Celtic
plant-name left us — hawthorn and groundsel
being its only rivals, and the sugar camp is the
one link left our rather prosaic farmers, and
their remotest nomadic ancestors. Sugar-
making is not a labour : it is a rite.

When there are hepaticas in the wood-gar-
den there are crocus in the home one. Their
stout spears, covered by a tough, white, pro-
tective tissue, have been feeling their way
since the snowdrops first hung out their wel-
come to the spring winds. Of these two, the
gardener is exceedingly greedy, nor would he
have too many if he walked through their
native fields in Greece and the Levant. Men
gather their golden hearts there, and make
commerce of them, hiding their veniality by
calling the product saffron. Of that colour

56 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

were the robes of Aurora, and of Hymen,
and of that

"Lyric woman with the crocus vest
Woven of sea wools."

sent to Cleon by Protus. Bacon would have
crocus in the garden of his dreams, and spoke
of them by the colours which they still wear
for us — yellow, purple, white and grey. We
have but to look at the shadows in a blue-and-
white crocus to see that his use of the adjective
is true, and that his eyes were more discriminat-
ing than ours would have been without them.

What a piece of work is that garden essay
of his ! After all the years, and even centuries,
that have passed since it was written, it re-
mains the crown and summit of all garden
words. Where else are written down delights
so ravishing as are condensed in those all too
few pages in which he who had " taken all
knowledge to be his province" tells of the
pleasure gardens he would have if he could?
Of all that he did or said or wrote nothing is so
well known and well loved as his garden essay,
which, like my own, lay in that part of Spain
known as Heart's Delight. Wise and simple,

MARCH 57

rich and poor, how many generations of men
have walked in thought over the thymy reaches
of those sweet acres ; have rested in those dusky
boscages ; have passed along the parti-coloured
borders where

"One by one, the daughters of the year
Through that still garden passed,"

each with her coronal whose colours and odours
no time can fade or change — a true paradise,
that, in which world-weary hearts may ever
walk by faith, and where joys pure and imper-
ishable are hoarded up for the refreshment of
the citizens of all time !

The little crocus hath made many friends,
and loved ones and true.

" They were all said in Herrick's days,
Of flowers the fittest words of praise ;
As worthy praise are you !
As brave you lift your chalice up,
With wine as rare you crown your cup,
O Crocus, brimmed with dew !

" And were old Robert here to paint
Your cheerful virtues, humble saint,
Pure, knowing naught of fear :
'Twould scarce be better worth your while
To light the March days with your smile,
Than 'tis for us, my dear?

58 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

" And in our northern land, as sweet
A welcome waits your punctual feet
As Charles's bard could bring.
Not lealer heart e'en he could bear,
Than ours that greet you, year by year,
O herald of the spring !

" For us the winter, too, was long
And hearts grew faint that had been strong
With waiting for your day !
But now, with happy bees that rest
For hours contented in your breast,
We sing our roundelay.

" Not richest gold of richest mine
Can 'gainst your yellow glories shine
And not grow dim and pale.
First largesse of the year, you are
In her bright dawn the fairest star
First, fairest, crocus, hail !"

Before the crocus are fairly aflame the black
mould is pierced by the stout green shoots of
the daffodil, an event to be marked in red
letters in all the calendars of No- Man's- Land.
The hour the pointed wedges cleave the earth
is a sacred vigil, pointing onward to the holy
day when the brave trumpets of this flower
of flowers ushers in the spring. When one
has once lost his heart to the daffodil, he
has no recourse. All other blossoms seem
tame and uninteresting beside it, and the rose

MARCH 59

herself but a common thing for a common
eye.

Charles Lamb called Spenser " the poets'
poet," and surely the daffodil is the poets'
flower. From the oldest days it had its
votaries among them, the singing syllables of
its very name being brought from the asphodel
which grows in many a goddess -haunted
meadow, and which was, men think, this very
flower. We know it to have been called
asphodel of old French and English bards,
and how dearly they have loved it we may
know if we care to read. Chaucer cared for
the flowers, Spenser saw them blooming in
fairyland, and Shakespeare made himself their
poet laureate for ever when he spoke of the

" Daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and takes
The winds of March with beauty."

Milton wove them into that strange garland
which only a town - bred fancy could have
fashioned.

" To deck the laureate hearse where Lycid lies."

Herrick followed with delicate, pensive
verses, so true, so dear, that he who has

60 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

read them a hundred times has only begun
to discern their beauty. Keats and Shelley
loved them, and oh ! how they danced before
Wordsworth's adoring eyes !

To Swinburne they showed one of their
many sides before he wrote of one of them —

" Erect, a fighting flower,
It breasts the breeziest hour
That ever blew;

For all the storm wind saith still,
Stout stands the daffodil."

In a most appreciative study of the flower
the Rev. Hugh Macmillan wrote : " There is
no flower so vigorous and so full of life. It
has the strength and simplicity of a Doric
column. We have in this flower of March,
the beautiful combination of winter and
summer ; of the raincloud and the sunbeam ;
of the warmth of the sun in its bloom, and
the coolness and freshness of the floods in its
leaves : the whole plant being thus an expres-
sive symbol of the true elements that help to
make up its lovely life."

We could follow it through the pages of
Tennyson, of the Rossettis, of de Vere, of Jean
Ingelow, of Mrs Ewing, of Austin Dobson,

MARCH 6 1

and of many and many a writer whose pages
have been lightened by the charming gaiety
of its virginal innocence. Among all the
books that be there is one lacking, and that
is one in which all that has been said and
painted and sung of this flower may be
gathered into a volume for its lovers. I
wonder if there would be room in it for such
lines as these —

The March winds blow, now high, now low,
The changeful shadows come and go,
The old Earth stirs in her sleep and wakes,
On greening fields her glad smile breaks:

And into the ear of the waking year
Faint, fairy music is ringing clear :
Blown from the golden trumpets fair
The daffodils lift high in air.

Alert, arrayed for dress parade.
Comes marching now the bright brigade
Triumphant, proud, not one to spare
However many may be there.

Of the tint of skies where daylight dies ;
Of the faint, sweet scent of Paradise ;
Cool, up-springing 'mid pale-green leaves,
What is this spell that the March air weaves ?

Over the wold, whence frost and cold
Have gone from the damp, life-giving mould.
Can you not hear when winds are still,
The gay fanfare of the daffodil ?

62 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

" Sorrow is past," peals the jocund blast,
"Joy with the morning is come at last:
Stout we have kept our hearts till now,
Though night was long in the dark below.

" But for a day our brave array
Then, like a shadow, we pass away,
Other springs will have other flowers,
Only this little day is ours.-

"Whither we go we do not know:
We are content that it should be so.
Life no briefer than Love may be,
And Love is as long as Eternity.-

" Safe in the Hand that our beauty planned,
Ours but to follow — not to command.
Gladly we follow where He wills,
The Lord of the Host of the daffodils."

There is no better plant than this for the
wide and poetic use which people call naturalis-
ing, and there is no better mission for any plant
than to be sent forth to do its work and live
its life in its own way. A hillside sloping sun-
wards with a partial shading of a few trees,
with a little stream at its foot, or a level pond
for mirror, is made more than beautiful if
shot over with these golden flowers. A stretch
of orchard grass, left to itself until June hay is
ready for the mower, is the best possible home
for the daffodil. I have seen them by the

MARCH 63

hundred about the ruins of forgotten home-
steads, where, as in Dr Holmes' pathetic verse,
only the cellar and the well are left to speak of
the place whence life and thought are gone
away. They are at their best, also, in a " care-
less orchard garden " and lose much if planted
in rows and circles after the manner of the
Philistines. Since there are so many varieties
and sub-varieties of the lovely narcissi they
may be with us for over a month — perhaps for
two months, beginning always with that clear
trumpet of pale yellow in which there are green
shadows and frosty high lights. The scent is
like the scent of no other flower, and looking
into its heart one sees, perhaps, as far into
infinity as it is given to man to look.

Wherever the Garden of Heart's Desire may
lie, when March winds are blowing it must be
rich with those faint stirrings of the under-heart
which show that the year has turned indeed.
There are purplish shoots which tell where the
phlox will start its upward way ; there are pink
cones which show where the peony roots are
bedded. Before we have had time to look for
them, the columbines have unfurled two or
three metallic root leaves and some of the

64 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

hardiest pinks are brightening up their long
silvery spears. There is a pansy already in
the warmest corner. The chickweed, hardiest
of all our native plants, rarely lets a fortnight
pass without looking out to see if the world is
still faring on in the old way, and the paths
are fringed over with the fairy laces of the
whitlow grass.

Crocus, as many as may be, daffodils, more
and more and yet more. This is my idea of a
Green Moon garden.

APRIL

The swallows circle, the robins call,
The lark's song rises, faints and falls:
The peach boughs blush with rosiest bloom
Like ghosts, in the twilight, pear-trees loom :
The maples glow, and the daffodils
Wear the same hue that the west sky fills.-
The moon's young crescent, thin and bright,
Shines in the blue of the early night.

And over all, through all, April bears
A hope that laughs at Winter's fearss

THE MEADOW

APRIL

THE MOON OF PLANTS

ever five letters compact into
another word as sweet as April ? The
very syllables seem to drip with freshening
showers ; to glisten with sudden, relenting
shafts of sunlight, and to glow and pale with
the rainbows which span the drifting, purple
clouds. The songs of mating birds are in
them ; the scents of the quickening earth ; the
taste of spiced buds ; the touch of light breezes ;
the sights of the infinite awakenings and un-
foldings of the world about us. For every
sense its own delights ; for every letter a thou-
sand new sensations ; for every day a new
heaven and a new earth.

When April goes through the fields which
are hastily donning festal garments in his
honour, he pipes on a magic flute which neither
young nor old, merry nor sad, grave nor gay
can withstand. Feet that have plodded along
67

68 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

aweary are eager now to follow and to find.
After him, over the vernal meadows, and
through the thickening woods, troop the goodly
fellowship of the poets who have been his joyous
slaves, and one with the perennial freshness
of the songs of his birds are the haunting
words into which they have tried to put his
charm. That they could not do so was no
fault of theirs. The glory and the beauty of
April are for the spirit and cannot be made
flesh.

All of the virtues praised by the Apostles
may be found in an April garden, but it is
chiefly as a Land of Promise that it looks to
us, as the first days come and go. Daffodils
are abloom by the hundred, and in many
varying shades of sun-colour. There is more
sentiment connected with the old-fashioned
yellow one, but there are so many lovely
narcissi, that the day of this charming flower
may be greatly prolonged by planting in many
sorts together. I, myself, in happier days, had
a bed of them which bloomed for six weeks,
and even that time might have been prolonged
if I had had some of the bulbs of a dear old
double white variety that used to grow in old

APRIL 69

gardens here and there. It cannot be forced,
so the florists do not care for it, and it will not
be coaxed or bribed into yielding any con-
siderable number of flower stalks, but it has
a richness of texture, and a subtlety of odour
which makes its scantily borne blossoms a
distinct feature even when the garden is bright
with tulips, and the earlier iris. I am taking
leave to class all of these delightful flowers —
daffodils, jonquils, narcissi — under one head ;
which saves trouble ; takes them away from
the unsympathetic rulings of scientific nomen-
clature ; and puts them where they (of all
flowers) belong : in the dear company of the
best-beloved, who look up and smile an answer
no matter by what name they are called.

Snowdrops have begun to drowse a little,
but the crocus are in their glory. If you care
for a new colour sensation blend into a heavy
planting of dark purple crocus as many blue
scillas as you can get. When they open their
hearts to the sunbeams you will see with your
inner vision the light falling through old minster
windows, and you will hear, with that subtle
inner hearing which goes with a sense of fair
colours, a deep-toned organ playing, and the

70 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

chanting of many voices in a glad Te Deum.
You will remember it as I remember an April
symphony which I saw long ago, and far away,
and for an hour only. A long oval bed was
bordered by that hardy, white -wooled cine-
raria whose leaves start forth as soon as the
snows are gone. Inside this border a second
border, evidently the growth of many years,
since it was so very dense, bore hundreds of
clusters of yellow primroses — schlusselb lumen,
St Peter's keys — and then a central space filled
with brown wallflowers, which were orange in
some lights, and black in some shadows, and
velvet everywhere. Beyond this stretched the
April-grey valley, and the blue mountains which
lost themselves in the ineffable beauty of an
April sky.

I have said April-grey since I dared not use
the word green to describe that faint, undefined
change which comes over the world which has
just left March behind it. There are yellows
in this grey, and there are blues, so there must
be greens also ; but so faint are they, so
ethereal, that they seem to be but that allur-
ing mist which hides the future, or that gracious
haze which blots out the past. If the outlook

APRIL 71

be wide enough, there must be in it semitones
of brown, swelling beechen buds, and russets,
and pinks, and bronzes, and even crimsons and
lilacs of other expanding scales ; but in spite
of these I think I am right in the use of the
adjective which is so charming at the dawn of
a summer day, and so dead and cold when a
November night shuts down upon us.

The grass too has a greyish tone unlike the
dull ochre of its March gown, since its spring-
ing green is feathered here and there with the
first silvery panicles of its quiet blossoming.
What an endless variety there is to the grass !
Compared with its soft blending of many tints
and textures how crude are the best greens
of man's compounding ! The blessed grass !
Mother ol all grains, nourisher of all life !
How fit it is that of whatsoever we tire, we
never tire of it, since that which was the
softest playground for our infant feet becomes
the sweetest, tenderest covering for our last
long sleep ! Patient, humble, working always
for others, there is no lesson we may not learn
from its "clear courage."

I should like to have a grass garden. Think
of the possibilities of a stretch of ground given

72 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

over to it, and to whatever else the wind cared
to add to it by way of seedlings. The gentle
little silvery grass just spoken of should be
there ; the aristocratic blue grass — the tall,
soldierly timothy, with its purple-fringed
banners ; the redtop in which one sees a fore-
cast of oak-woods in autumn ; the foxtails ;
the quaking grasses, and many another whose
names I do not know, but of whose beauties I
am sure. To be perfect, this garden would
slope downward to a marshy hollow, where
wild rice and many sedges would grow, and
should rise to a hill-crest down which winds
should race over billowing, golden wheat, or
grey-green oats. Maize would be planted in
a field so close at hand that all the summer
would be filled with the music of its leaves,
whisper, whisper, whispering ; and somewhere
about should be a patch of broom corn and of
sorghum to show how regal are the growths of
these largest grasses of the temperate zone.
Of grasses alone a most lovely garden could
be made, but among them what a succession of
other things would give themselves permission
to grow ! Dandelions would be almost the
first comers, unbuttoning their flat rosettes of

APRIL 73

dented leaves from the sod, and throwing out a
few coins of that larger minting which is the
true largesse of May. Clovers would follow,
daisies would follow. Buttercups would be
there, bindweeds, milkweeds, speedwell, catch-
fly, yarrow, with mullein, mints, each so
generously given, each stealing after his fore-
runner so silently and so surely that we have
hardly time to say " The clover is here," before
the clover has gone, and we are crying "It is
yarrow-day ! "

With April in the air, comes a passionate
desire to be in the open, and to one who is
village-bred it is to village garden plots that he
would return. There, he knows, the dark soil
is already turned up toward the sun by that
first spading which, like the sowing of seeds,
and the gathering in of harvests, has the
symbolism of the most elemental acts. In the
village streets householders are keeping a
holiday by burning the waste and wreckage
of last year. It is almost a religious rite, the
making of these vernal fires. There is a
special colour and odour given off from them,
and the man with his rake, or the woman with
her basket just emptied on the smoking,

74 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

smouldering pile, are priest and priestess,
all unknowing. Blue-birds are singing their
pretty, plaintive notes as the blue reek curls
upward, and robins are busy in the freshly
upturned soil from which the rubbish has been
taken. There are a few clouds over the sun,
but there is no wind, and the air is warm. The
day for the spring bonfire is always carefully
chosen lest the flames spread. Everything is
still and sweet, with the wandering voices of
the blue-birds to listen to, and a handful of
ladies' delights to look at. It is only in old
village gardens that these brave and cheerful
little pansykins grow, but there they are always
abroad to overlook the April bonfire. Modern
plantings know them not, and modern seeds-
men have never heard of them. They are
called viola tricolour in the botanies, and adv.
frm. Eu. is placed after so meagre a description
of them that no one could guess them to be the
dear, familiar friend to whom our honest fore-
fathers gave so many names. Garden gate,
birds' eye, three-faces-under-a-hood, Kit-
runabout, come-and-cuddle-me, come-and-kiss-
me, kiss-me-ere-I-rise, pink of my Joan, Johnny-
jump-up, and that astonishing combination of

APRIL 75

words " Meet-her-in-the-entry, kiss-her-in-the-
buttery," which Mrs Earle assures us is a name
only to be excelled in singularity by the folk-
name of a stonecrop, which Miss Jeykll reports
" Welcome home, husband, be you ever so
drunk." I would like to think that no one but
Patient Griselda ever grew stonecrops !

That the seedsmen do not list this dear old
friend is no matter : it is even better so, since
a flower so intensely human ought not to be sold,
any more than love should be sold. It should
pass from hand to hand between people to
whom it is dear. Once received, it knows its
own, and will camp down with the utmost
composure, and with all the good will in the
world in precisely that corner in which it is
most needed, and once there will offer their
bright little posies almost every day in the
year. In 1587 Gerarde wrote of them :

" The floure is in form and figure like the
Violet, and for the most part of the same Big-
ness, of three sundry colours purple, yellow,
white or blew, by reason of the beauty and
braverie of which colours they are very pleas-
ing to the eye, for smel they have little or
none." With this statement I beg to differ

76 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

with the worthy herbalist, since there are but
few odours that are as absolutely fresh and
pure as that of this little flower ; the violet
and primrose only having allied qualities.
Tiny enchanted princesses, the children of my
day called them, and fancied out all sorts of
adventures for them in the quiet old gardens,
where they sun themselves as they did in
Anne Hathaway's, where young Will Shake-
speare must have loved them. I like to
believe that she carried some of the little
friends with her, when the family moved to
the grand New Place, and so tried, as women
will, to keep old memories sweet. And I
am almost sure that the ladies' delights were

the pansies

"freaked with jet"

which Milton knew.

In a village garden of the old days, crocus
were planted in stiff little bunches close to the
southern walls of the houses, where the eaves
sheltered them, in a way, and the radiated
warmth of the foundation bricks urged them
into the earliest possible blooming. It is a
much better fashion than the modern one of
scattering them about the lawn. Lawns have

APRIL 77

their own work to do, even on the smallest
grounds, and should rightly be a smooth
stretch of even, well-clipped sward of blended
grasses and white clover. Even the presence
of the tiny Veronica,

" The little speedwell's darling blue,"
or pink-tipped English daisies, escaped from
the border, and lapsed back into single blessed-
ness, is not to be tolerated ; while only less
pernicious than plantain is the intrusive little
ground ivy, or Jill-over-the-ground, which is
in itself an exceedingly pretty plant, with clean
round leaves and very attractive little blossoms.
If custom bars out these gay little vagrants,
why should it insist on the tiresome and costly
planting of crocus bulbs, which, so used, can
never have the advantage of the close massing
in which they show at their best, and where
they can mature their leaves and store up food
against the winter in a way impossible on the
lawn ? Nature abhors a spotty effect. If she
uses but one or two specimens of a flower in
her landscape making, she so blends it with its
surroundings as to double its value, and she
never dissociates it from the background best
suited to it.

78 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

I am very fond of the long, narrow beds
which are always connected with the village
garden ways. Proper beds are two, or at
most three feet wide, and as long as possible,
with strips of grassy sod as wide or wider
between. There is no way in which the
amateur gardener can so easily plant, and dig,
and weed, and fertilise, and cover his pets as
in these beds which can be reached into, or
leaned over so comfortably. In the days of
front yards, which are gone where so many
dear and beautiful things are gone, it was
thus that the walk that led from the front
door to the front gate was adorned. In them
grew the choicest bushes and plants pos-
sessed by the ladies, to whom chiefly the
flowers belonged, and who thus offered to
their guests the most charming and delicate
welcomes and farewells. Larger shrubs, and
hardier, coarser flowers grew along the fences
dividing the yard from its fellows on either
hand, and one has only to be old enough
to be able to remember the days when
the individual was not yet merged into the
mass, and it was still possible to express
oneself, and not be, of necessity, a copy of

APRIL 79

one's neighbour to remember those border
fences !

And now that by chance I have found
myself in an old front yard, I shall stay there
a bit, and shall make what plea I may for a
return to the sweet old ideals which make
them possible. They belonged to the days
when children arose from their seats when
their elders entered the room, and when even
big girls would have blushed with shame at
the idea of going about the streets ungloved
and unbonneted. They were a part of the
time when reverence for sacred things ; when
belief in reserve and courtesy ; in leisure and
thoughtfulness ; in hospitality and unselfishness,
were a part of the common heritage : and who
shall say that these high things were not, in a
way, dependent upon the fences, and upon the
gates which shut out the world from the de-
mesne which belonged to the family ? To
step into a man's private grounds without the
preliminary formality of opening his gate —
with a clicking latch certainly, and with a
rusty hinge perhaps — is it not as offensive
to the highest breeding as it would be to call
him by his Christian name ?

8o A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

The old front yards, then, were always
sheltered behind fences, and along these was
planted a fringing of large growing shrubs,
lilacs oftenest, whose bronze-green first leaves
give forth a scent as memorable as any the
plumy blossoms ever boasted ; syringas, as
they were called — Philadelphus, as they are
listed ; Japan quince, flowery almond, straw-
berry bushes, spireas, snowberries, — such things
as these. They did not form a proper hedge,
since after one had passed one's first years
it was easy to peep between them, or above
them into the yard beyond, but they served
the same purpose that a veil of lace does to a
lady's face : they softened the features and gave
a hint of reserve that was most attractive.
The choicest shrubs stood on either side of
the gate, and that barrier once passed the
visitor was in the full enjoyment of whatever
the season had to offer ; since the path to
the front door was bordered by the long beds
which have served as a text for this digression.
A list of the flowers seen in an afternoon
spent in paying visits in the old days would
have held the name of almost everything
which could endure the cold winters and

APRIL 8 1

withstand the late springs and the hot sum-
mers of the village in which I chiefly knew
them, yet no two borders would be alike, and
the tastes and opportunities of the owners of
the beds were revealed in the most fascina-
ting way. The experience of a very few years
taught the children just where to go to see the
flowers which they loved, and in their eyes the
village ladies were important in degrees that
varied with their success in raising this flower
or that. Their charms and virtues were cata-
logued in the minds of the small critics in
proportion to the generosity with which they
shared their gardens with their little neigh-
bours. I think that my own mental collection
of old ladies — a collection of immeasurable
value to me — began with opposing types of
front yard gardeners, and I am not sure that
I have ever added to it the portrait of any-
one who had no taste in gardening.

Looking backward the ideal garden seems
to me to have been in a front yard !

It belonged, as so many did, to a woman
who had never had a child, and who had
sought and found, in the flowers of God's
giving, the comfort other women find in their

F

82 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

children. I do not know where she came
from, nor who were her kindred. Where
rests the little handful of dust which was
once her tiny, alert body I know, but even
that everyone else seems to have forgotten,
since beside the handful of pansies I take
there, once in a while, no one ever seems to
give a flower to her who gave so many to
others. I do not know what was in her
house, for I never entered it, and I have no
idea what became of her during the long white
days that closed down soon after the last tiny
pink and yellow chrysanthemums had faded
under her windows. When she went to the
Methodist meeting-house she wore a black
silk gown, with a handsome lace shawl draped
carefully over her shoulders, and she carried
a fringed parasol in her lace-gloved hands.
Always, I think, since I do not recollect her
in any other robes of state, so she must have
belonged to summer ; and other of my old
ladies I can recall as having furs and velvet
pelisses, and plumes in their bonnets. My
only communications with her were the fervent
thanks with which I received the bounty her
good hands held out in answer to the appeal

APRIL 83

of my eyes as I hung on the pickets of her
fence, and watched her moving about among
her flowers. When I have gardened, my
hands have been sights to behold, my hair
tosses in the wind, and my face flushes sadly.
When she held her trowel in her half-gloved
hands, no stain of the earth ever touched her
little, white fingers, and the pretty crispings
of her hair were never in the least dishevelled.
Perhaps her exquisite personal orderliness was
the reason why things grew for her better than
they grew for anyone else, and why spring
seems to have stayed for ever near her ! Japan
quinces seem always to have flamed against
her fences, and kerrias, in her borders, per-
petually tossed the golden balls of their pretty
pawnshop where bees bartered song for honey.
Below them clusters of yellow English prim-
roses alternated with plots of the very whitest,
doublest, double white daisies ever seen. Be-
tween these and the rows of tall, late tulips
were mats of pansies of every shade that
pansies ever were anywhere — thousands of
pansies, like and yet unlike the gay little
ladies' delights I have been praising. Did I
say I loved those better than these? That

84 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

was an hour ago, and an hour is long for
April constancy, and here are the pansies
eager to claim an allegiance no one can deny.
One of the other old ladies, who had a long-
ago front yard, and had also the sweet and
gentle fancies which must needs come to all
who share in the innocent joys of a garden,
said of her pansies :

" I love the little things best of all. They
look up into the face of their Heavenly Father
as if they hadn't a thing to be ashamed of."

An appreciation that seems to me to reveal
the secret which has made men call them
heart's-ease. In the coldest Januarys the
blossoms look out from under their purple
hoods, and when the latest November storm
has turned the bravest chrysanthemum into
a bit of brown wreckage, they are still here
to bid us be of good courage. Full of mischief
they seem to be at times, but full, sometimes,
of a divine directness of glance which makes
plain what was meant by a poor outcast of
the slums to whom a knot of white pansies
was once given. She looked at them, and
with a burst of tears she answered them :

" I'll try ! " she said. " Indeed I'll try ! "

APRIL 85

Proper borders are to be planted as it were
antiphonally. If a group of Madonna lilies
stands at the end of the right-hand border,
another group must stand at the left. There
must be two clumps of bluebells, not one, and
two flat cushions of the grey-green leaves, and
fringed white or rosy moss-pinks. Strong
little bushes of Hermosa roses must be balanced
by more Hermosas, and if one is forced to
begin with only two blades of the small blue
iris, which is like a baby's eyes for blueness,
one must be planted in each border, with a
view to the future. The iris are not called
iris in a proper border, but flags, and great
sheaves of them in royal blues and glacial
whites must grow along the fences beside the
peonies, the tall Greek valerian, the lemon
lilies and the columbines.

A front yard is no place for trees. Trees
grow outside, in the strip of clean grass be-
tween the walk and the roadway, where their
shadows cannot harm the flowers. It is
always permitted, however, that a few old apple
and pear trees stand about, for the very
obvious reason that they are bouquets them-
selves, the hugest and sweetest imaginable,

86 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

and that under them the violets love to grow,
and violets are as much a part of April as the
sunshine or the rain. When one begins to
speak of violets one loses all self-control and
becomes frankly sentimental, and ready to
swear with Mahomet that they are " only
comparable with the religion of Islam." Of
them more than of any flower it may be
said that " they admonish and stir up a man
to that which is comelie and honest, for their
beauty, varietie of colours and exquisite form
do bring to a liberal and gentlemanlie mind
the remembrance of honestie, comeliness and
all kinds of virtue." Such is what the old
herbalist Gerarde calls "the gallant grace of
violets," that its colour gives name to one of
the bands of the rainbow.

" Those seven listed colours whence the Sun
Maketh his bow, and Cynthia her zone."

The rainbow itself would be unimaginable
but for the thrill of that last, loveliest, fleeting
bar — given the last place, as in a triumphant
pageant the crowning glory is left for the
vanishing moment. In almost all languages
its name is but a variant of one singing word.

APRIL 87

One with youth and beauty, one with new
sweet love, and older sweeter constancy, it is
the rival of the rose, winning by one subtle
test. The blossoms that are folded away
where no eye but your own can see them —
what are they ? Roses ? You know that they
are violets, and that, however brown and dead
they might seem to others, to you they will
always be fresh and fair. These are the flowers
we love to think of as lying on the breast of
Mary the Mother, and how many a beloved
face has been shut away from the sight of all
living with less anguish because it was pillowed
on these faithful hearts.

Borders of them grew in the yards I speak
of — mats of them, carpets of them, and never
one too many. Little fragrant white ones, for
April only, and purple ones that rarely fail to
have a blossom or two on hand except in the
hot midsummer days when they are busy with
small, fertile blooms, which no one knows
about but the bees, and with packing their
seeds into little purses which shut and open
with a spring. A royal flower, the violet, in
many ways besides its colour !

Beside these and the roses, which came later,

88 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

and which sat apart in a corner by themselves,
the old front yards were rich in tulips, which
were planted in double rows against bunches
of white columbines. People either love tulips
passionately or they do not care for them at
all. They are not flowers to be half-hearted
about, any more than they are flowers to plant
by the dozen. Dozens of hyacinths, if you like
their heavy odour and their stiff, haughty stems,
but hundreds of tulips, red

" Like a thin clear bubble of blood,"

pink, white, yellow, orange, brown, with such
tones and semitones of colour that, borrow-
ing the words from music, one can almost hear
their loud triumphant paean of victory over
Winter.

There was always room near the tulips for
plenty of little dull-pink polyanthus, with their
cheerful April faces, and there was always
a corner for the wild flowers brought home
from woodland rambles — hepaticas, blood-
roots, dicantras, trilliums, windflowers, sweet
williams, larkspurs, with perhaps some cypre-
pediums, the "moccasin flower" of the early
Protestants, the " lady slipper " of the Catholic

APRIL 89

pioneer. It is a great pleasure to see so many
of our native plants now figuring in the cata-
logues, although but a short experience will
teach the average grower that very many of
the shy, wild things will not ' accommodate
themselves to new conditions. The appalling
waste of our forests caused by the greed of
lumbermen ; the devastation worked by fire
or by the needs of settlers ; the cutting off of
water supplies ; the draining of marshes ; the
reclamation of sandy wastes, and, alas ! the
cruel thoughtlessness of flower hunters — all
these are hurrying on the day when Americans
will be forced to look in the glossaries
made by the editors of their time, of the
poets of ours, to find out what was meant
by Indian pipes, or Quaker ladies, or May-
flowers.

Mayflowers ! Of no garden but that of
Nature's most thought-filled planting, half
hidden by last year's fallen leaves, neigh-
boured by pipsissiwa, by crimson-berried
wintergreen, or partridge-berry, by curling
wreaths and plumes of ground pine, it is the
flower that made the exile of our forefathers
bearable ; the truest of all Americans, the

90 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

freest, shyest thing that grows. In the
flush of its rosy cheek, in the absolutely
individual sweetness of its fleeting breath lie
all the Aprils that have been or that yet
may be.

MAY

Over the pebbles the brown brooks flow,
Singing their cool songs, sweet and low :
From white-boled beech, and elm top tall
On lilied shallows deep shades fall.
In swaying cradles white eggs rest
Safe and warm 'neath the brooding breast;
Sweetbriar lifts her winsome face,
The brambles weave their lines of grace,
All joys are here, each dear delight,
And April's faith in May is sight.

THE ROSE GARDEN

MAY

THE MOON OF FLOWERS

T F the five letters that spell out the delights
of April are enchanted, what of the three
that guard the secrets and publish the joys of
the time when "the year has piloted us once
more into the flowery harbour of May " ?

There is now no longer any need to wonder
if that be a rising mist which veils the maples,

" Blown silver by the winds,"

for the flowering of the trees themselves stand
confessed, and before this certainty has been
fairly grasped, the rose-pink vapour which has
trembled over the oaks has been condensed into
the velvet foliage which tells the farmer that
corn planting time has come. A solemn holy-
day if men would but look at it rightly, when
the

" Son of six thousand golden sires "

is dropped trustfully into the dark bosom of
the great Mother, who takes us all — seed and
93

94 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

man — with equal care and carelessness, into
her keeping.

In Maytime the best gardens are not gar-
dens, but are orchards, and orchards to be the
best orchards are apple orchards. Orange
and lemon groves are very beautiful, but they
are too newly come among us and are too
local to touch the common heart. One must
have a certain peculiar training to care for
rows of peach-trees, and it would, I think,
be impossible to enter into very intimate rela-
tions with them in spite of the exceeding
loveliness of their short flowering time.
Cherries and pears and plums are charming in
their virginal purity, but it is to old apple-trees
that thought flies with unerring instinct and
directness when one thinks of an orchard.

I thank the tiny brain-cells in which the
greater part of my earthly possessions are
kept, that they hold so close and so fast so
many orchard pictures that it does not much
matter where Time and Chance lead my body,
since I can go back when I will to the

old familiar places and see This is what

I see.

A place without limit, because the eyes

MAY 95

which look at it had as yet no sense of propor-
tion ; and yet it was but a little orchard, after
all, hedged in between a bit of sloping meadow
and an ancient wood. The meadow was an
ocean, if it chanced to be sown with oats,
rippled into waves by wandering breezes. It
was the field of the Cloth of Gold when wheat
was ripening there. Armies encamped on it
what time hay was drying in tiny cocks, and it
was a village of Indian tepees when corn
was gathered into pointed stocks. And so,
too, the wood was not simply a little wood.
It was the Schwartz-wald ; it was the forest
of Arden ; it was the home of Robin Hood
and his merry men, the lair of fearsome giants
and trolls, and winged dragons. It was the
jungle in which wild beasts and painted
savages skulked ; it was the haunt of elves
and fairies. Enchanted castles were hidden in
its depths ; robber caves were shadowed by its
great trees ; and beautiful princesses and
knights, without fear and without reproach,
wandered through its leafy glades by moon-
light.

And the garden through which a pathway
led to the pear-trees growing at the orchard's

96 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

foot! More eyes than mine can see it, when
I say of it that it was

GRANDMOTHER'S GARDEN

" In grandmother's garden ! The very words
Bring back the carols of long-dead birds :
Bring back the croonings of countless bees ;
Bring back the odour-ladened breeze
That swept through the white-domed orchard trees,
And the purple plumes that the lilacs bore,
And the sweet May-roses beside the door.
The world is old, and over it still
The world-winds wander and range at will,
But they cannot blow, so far — so free
As to find that garden again for me !

"In grandmother's garden the hollyhocks
Row upon row lifted wreathed stalks
With bloom of purple, of pearly white,
Of close-frilled yellow, of crimson bright.
In ruffled robes of satin dight
With pointed mantles of powdered greens
What gay court ladies, what royal queens,
— With each a daisy for diadem ! —
What pomps and pageants we made of them
In the sweet, lost garden we used to know
In sweet, lost years — so long ago !

" In grandmother's garden the roses red
Grew in a long, straight garden bed,
By yellow roses with small close leaves ;
And yuccas, — we called them Adams-and-Eves ! —
Threaded with fringes of fairy weaves ;
By marigolds in velvet browns,
And heart's-ease in their splendid gowns ;

MAY 97

Primrose, waiting the twilight hours.
Touch-me-nots, and gilliflowers.
Was it October or June, or May
Grandmother's garden was always gay.

" In grandmother's garden the iris blue
Unfurled his banner, his snood leaves drew
And marshalled the slim, red tulips, tall,
The peony's bursting crimson ball,
The almond wands and the moss-pinks small,
Buttercups spendthrift of their gold,
Columbines misers of sweets untold,
Gay Sweet Williams, and four-o'-clocks,
Prodigal sheaves of the cool white phlox ;
The lovely army has long marched past
For grandmother's garden could not last:

1 Grandmother's garden ! ah, who knows
In what far, heavenly land it grows I
Watched, perhaps, by her loving eyes ;
Kept for us as a glad surprise
When we shall reach her in Paradise !
Not one missing, one tiniest leaf,
One breath of fragrance — one bird-song brief
Nor — ah, God grant it I — one that played —
Lad true-hearted or bright-eyed maid —
In the shade the lilacs used to throw
In grandmother's garden — long ago ! "

And then the apple-trees ! There was much
grass in the place, and where the still acres
dipped toward the wood many violets were
blue in April, and early in May turned down
the borders of their caps to make ready for

98 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

the long nap which should last until another
April came dancing over the fields. The
young browns and greens of the forest trees
stand out in glad contrast to the bloom by
which the peach boughs call the bees in a
thousand tones of the colour — which is not blue,
nor crimson, nor pink, nor lilac — but peach
blow ! There are cherries and pears beyond
the garden gate, but of the apples there were
aisles and tents, all heavy with blossoms and
murmurous with bees. Could the body, uplifted,
sanctified, ask for a lordlier pleasure house
than this ? Oh, to be this night in that true
Paradise, that old orchard, where the apple-
trees are blooming — and where it is always
May ! — Oh, to see once more, and to hear once
more, and to touch once more that which
comes back, with the single bough of young
bloom which is all the May bloom that is
mine !

" Soft on thy lips I lay this tender kiss
My cheek I press against thy breast of snow
Who bringst me back the wonder and the bliss
I knew in an old orchard, long ago I "

There can be no task of importance great
enough to be rightly bartered for one of the

MAY 99

hours of the apple-blooming days, no duty
that might not better be left undone that this
little hour may be garnered and treasured up
to a life beyond life by the refreshed and
restored soul. Under the trees are the green
pastures of recreation ; beside them flow the
still waters of purification. Theirs are the
embroidered veils of the temple wherein count-
less urns of incense are swinging. Only good
thoughts can dwell in an orchard, and only
with a pure heart and clean hands might man
venture into its sacred precincts.

There are birds in the orchard. In every
tree they have found a home, coming back,
year after year, to the pleasant haunts of their
ancestors, saying to their nestlings, no doubt :
" From time out of mind this orchard has be-
longed to our family, and this apple-tree has
been our habitation from all generations. It
is a great thing to be a bird of assured posi-
tion, and to have a landed estate." They are
not unmindful of the laws of reciprocity, and
for their shelter pay such a toll of song that
from grey dawn until grey dusk the air is
thrilling with music. Richard Jeffries has
boasted that every loaf of English bread had

ioo A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

been sung over by an English lark, and we
may say that every apple eaten by the Christ-
mas fire was cradled and ripened to melodies
composed by the Lord and Giver of Life Him-
self, and was performed by an orchestra of
His own choosing.

So many birds! So many nests! In that
rough mud-and-stick nursery on the apple
bough a robin sits on five turquoise-coloured
eggs, and on that careless layer of twigs a
dove broods over two white treasures. An
oriole has swung a horse-hair hammock high
in the pear-tree, and in the hole in its trunk
a blue-bird has hidden the pale, fitful opal-
blue eggs which shall be song and colour
and movement before long. An old cap,
left hanging on a limb, by a careless boy,
is home to the wren for whose ecstasy the
days are not long enough. Cat-birds and
thrushes fancy the hedges belong to them, and
make very personal remarks about the sparrows
who, nothing daunted, perch on the tip of the
quickset boughs and sing such a song as brings
to mind the loving exclamation of Izaak Walton :
" Lord, what music hast thou provided for thy
Saints in heaven when thou affordest bad men

MAY 101

such music on earth ! " If there were not so
many dear birds in the lovely May world,
surely the sparrows would be dearest of all !

And yet, in the thickets, in the grasses, in
the tall trees, how many shy feathered things
find refuge. In the fields the quails are
whistling, and in the pine-trees the grackles are
cawing. The barns and sheds belong to the
phcebes and to the swallows. The swallows
are gay freebooters, busy with their own con-
cerns from morning until night ; but the little
phcebes sit about quite idly, complaining with
their pretty little sorrowful voices that seem to
have nothing in common with the riotous
mirth of their neighbours, whose epitha-
lamiums are filling the world with joy. Ah,
there were birds in plenty in the orchard that I
loved, and it was because the little brothers
of the air knew that its master loved them,
that all gentle minnesingers rested safely when
he was near. What if their presence meant a
scanty crop of cherries, or the loss of the
juiciest pears ? A single sparrow singing in the
hedge at dawn was worth all the cherries that
ever grew, and all the pears that ever ripened
were but a poor exchange for the evening

102 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

hymns of the thrushes, hidden deep in the
wood. Because of this fostering care the May
festivals there were the finest in all the
countryside. Oh, dear Master of the Orchard !
now that your many, many Mays have been
given back to you, who have gone on with the
gentle story of your life of love, and patience,
and all sweet brotherliness, and pure delight in
all the works of the Good Being for token ;
now that all your part in

" The summer glory of the hills
Is that your grave is green,"

the little friends are true to you, and your
high requiem is still chanted from your trees !

A May garden must be hedged in by lilacs,
that we may drink deep of the joy of the season
which Dick Steele gives us leave to call the
youtherie of the year, and for which Horace
Walpole revived the charming folk-name lilac-
tive. There are many things of which we can
never have enough, and one of them is the
lilac. Lilag, the Persians call it, and it is
Oriental to the last tip of the tossing plumes
of purple and white, and blue, and rose-colour,
all blended in that lovely colour for which we

MAY 103

have no name but the name of the flower itself.
To read "The Arabian Nights" properly one
must read the stories where riot these blos-
soms, which carry in their scent all that they
have to tell ; and where, lifting half-conscious
eyes from the page, one can see the butter-
flies hovering over the blossoms as they hover
nowhere else, palpitating, wavering, poising
drifting !

It is singular that this flower, steeped in
Eastern sensuousness, should have been the
chosen one of the Pilgrim women of Puritan
days, but it is so. Whatever else they were
forced to leave behind or to forego, they had
always lilacs springing up about the doors of
the habitations in the wilderness to which they
brought their longing thoughts of the homes
they would see no more. Generation after
generation, the lilacs have followed the family
fortunes, lilacs, and sweetbriar roses outlining
the very name of the dwellers in the deserted
houses beside which they stand on faithful
guard, until at last there is nothing left to
tell of the gentle souls who cared for the
flowers, but their yearly appeal for sympathy.

Next after the lilac and the sweetbriar, in

io4 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

the homespun garden, must be the almond.
" Flowery almond " the country folks call it,
in fine recognition of its lavish bloom, "the
Awakener " being its name in the Palestine of
its nativity. Since I may have all the almonds
I care for in this White-paper Garden, I will
have them by the score. They, too, belong
by right to the meek-eyed Puritan women.
Wherever they went, together with the lilac
and the sweetbriar rose, they carried the
Madonna lily and the almond. I wonder to
what subliminal consciousness they appealed,
since, surely, it was to something quite outside of
their narrow, colourless lives ! I wonder what ?
The charm of the almond is unspeakable.
Nothing loses more by being cut and carried
indoors. Yet the impulse to do so is all but
compelling. Nothing gains less by careful
culture. The almond is sufficient to itself, and
its long wands, beset with little pink roses, are
as lovely and as luxuriant by the doorstone
of an abandoned house as in a walled-in garden.
Loveliest of all are these when planted at the
orchard's edge, and the pink below reaches up
to the pink above in a harmony of colour, and a
grace of line that leaves nothing to be wished for.

MAY 105

Hundreds of tulips belong to my May
garden ; the late kinds — left over, as it were,
from the April World's Fair — and it must have
a row of the old favourite Crown Imperial. It
is a stately plant, holding itself "high and
disposedly " like the dancing of good Queen
Bess, and, to use Pet Marjorie's phrase, " all
primmed up with majestick pride" because of
the pearly drop of nectar hidden at the base of
each petal. For show only are the dull red
and yellow things planted, as for show only
we ask certain persons to our dinner parties
sometimes, and our receptions often, not
because they are interesting, or pretty, or
bright, but because of an obsession regarding
them which makes us like to see their names
in the list of our guests ! Why ? A woman's
reason — Because !

For love only are the cowslips planted, since
they have no great beauty of their own. It
were folly to deny that their charm is that
they were the chosen flower of the greatest of
poets. Were our ears but fine enough perhaps
we could hear Ariel singing as he swings in
their freckled bells, singing of the good old
days when fairies danced on the green, and

io6 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

the world was not so old and sad and wise as
the world we know. It is all very well that
men have cast the parallax of stars, and have
made electricity into a handmaid, but to see the
kindly little people at play in the moonshine,
and to hear the horns of elfland faintly blowing,
that would be very well also !

Between my cowslips of many colours, little
clumps of dwarf iris shall grow, and against
the almond hedge — or at least within such near-
ness to it that they shall appear to be close to
the lovely, bending pinkness — there shall be a
long, long row of flags, the royal banners of
the conquering sun. These shall be the great
white Florentines, or Germanicas — the same
flower is accredited to both Italy and Germany
in various lists — with a thick planting of the
white Spanish iris, and some tall clusters of
single white columbines, to give grace to the
stiff ranks of flag leaves. Beyond shall be
another field of banners wherein shall be
planted standards of many colours :

" Blue flags, yellow flags, flags all freckled,
Which will you take, yellow-blue or speckled ?
Take which you will, speckled, blue or yellow
Each in its way has not its fellows11

MAY 107

That was Christina Rossetti's feeling! In
one of his most intimate passages Frederic
Mistral tells us of his own passion for yellow
iris, and one needs but to turn the pages of his
best loved books to find how dear the flower
has been. And the reason is not far to seek.
The more one studies it, the less one knows,
yet the more completely one falls beneath its
spell. It seems to be a condensation of water,
rather than a product of the soil, and to carry
hints of frost in its grey shadows. The mark-
ings of its petals are occult ; the suggestions
of its stains, mysterious ; the ermine of its
furring a distinction, and its steadfast loyalty
to royal colours, purple and gold, and to
the white of absolute unworldliness, set it
apart as a flower above flowers.

Once fallen under the spell of a single iris,
its lover is lost, and his passion absorbs him.
The great German flags, the prim English
varieties, the strange, broad-petalled Japanese,
the queer little Persians, and the delicately fair
Spanish are all food for an insatiable greed for
more varieties and yet more which consumes
him. Happily it needs no great skill to grow
them, and they are fond of pushing their crowns

io8 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

out of a wet, rich mould, but they are not particu-
larly averse to either heat or cold, sunlight or
shadow. The finest sorts are not very ex-
pensive, and all over our dear country are
marshy tracts and reedy hollows in which the
wild iris shows as lovely a flowering as any
Japan ever greets with a holiday. Ferns and
tall grasses are the natural complement of the
flags, and they are always at their best if they
can grow at the foot of a wooded bank, with
even the smallest level of clear water close
enough to let them look at their own re-
flections.

It is in May that the snowballs hang out
their balls of heavy, greenish-white sterile
flowers. A rain is sure to scatter them before
they have passed their best days, and in the
old days when these Guelder roses grew in
every garden plot the country people called it
the snowball rain. Sometimes they speak of
a blackberry rain also, as a storm is apt to
come about the time that waysides and wood-
edges and old stone walls, and the dear,
delightful Virginia rail-fences (which nobody
will ever build again, and which coming
generations will never see) are overgrown

MAY 109

with the gadding brambles, lighted by their
pretty roselings. There is no finer shrub than
the blackberry. From the time its strong,
purple canes throw their shadows on the snow,
through its days of foamy blossoming, its
greening, reddening, purpling fruitage, until
the last copper-crimson leaf is blown from the
stem, it is distinctly decorative and refined.
Poor it may be, and hard pressed to find the
wherewithal to fashion its raiment or to spread
its table, but ungraceful, or inhospitable, or
apologetic it never is, and always it is worthy
of Whitman's praise :

" The running blackberry would adorn the parlours of Heaven."

May is the month of azalea bloom, a plant
which certainly will share with the arbutus the
fate of being killed by its friends — that is, if
friends are ever those who are ruthless flower
gatherers ! It is only with regard to our native
plants that I am a high protectionist, and here,
alas ! my championship of the cause avails it
nothing ! Men are too busy with steel rails
and ship subsidies, and the things electricity
will do, and stocks and bonds, and other un-
satisfying things, to think of the beautiful wild

no A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

things which are of so much greater spiritual
worth to the commonwealth, but which, having
no vote and no lobby, and so no friends at
court, must go the way of all the friendless. In
a world already overfull of societies for this or
that, may there not be yet room for one which
will begin a crusade against cruelty to plants ?

The crab-apples are out ! Pink ? yellow ?
lilac ? What is the colour of the life-blood
which courses through the veins of their petals
and gives them their sacred fire ? From whence
comes their morning incense ?

And dogwood week is here ! Since we have
strayed from the garden and the orchard into
the woods, where can we go with happier feet
than to the hillside whereon the dogwoods are
spreading the level layers of white bloom against
the red bud and the yellow sassafras ? Under
them hosts of birds'-foot violets and pansy violets
are in bloom, and clouds of bluets. There are
blue larkspurs there also, and white meadow-
rue. What an order is that of the Ranun-
culids that these should be sisters, and how
much would have been lost if it had been left
out on that busy day of creation when the
green things began growing! From the peonies

MAY 1 1 1

to the windflowers, from the monkshoods to
the columbines and larkspurs, down to the
smallest abortive buttercup, what a range !
Was there a founder of the family from whom
all these variants are descended ? Is there, as
Buffon dreamed, a single primeval life-growth,
or, as Faraday suggested, a simple, all-
comprehending element from which all things
have been evolved ? Is there one purpose,
changing, changeless, running through all
being, and is that which we are pleased to
call a clod, one with that which we know as
spirit ? Surely this is the large hope which we
hear in the song of the May birds, and in the
falling of the May blossoms leaf by leaf to the
ground.

" We know in part, the seed must rot to quicken
And one comes up an oak, and one a lily,
The whole idea perfect in the germ*
But what we are, and how we are, and whyfore
We are the thing we are, behold ! we know not."

JUNE

Full-leafed, in pride of deepest green
The earth in the sunlight basks serene.
Where linden blossoms crowded cling
A thousand bees are murmuring :
As showers drift from the gladsome land
With a seven-barred bow is the rain-cloud spanned,
The wild rose yields her sweetest scents
Where hay-cocks pitch their fragrant tents,
The longest day's too brief for June,
The night's too short for such a moon !

THE ROSE

JUNE

THE HOT MOON

T F I were wise, or indeed if I were but willing
to take a common-sense view of my own
limitations, I would leave a blank page in my
book, headed by the name of the first of the
summer months, and would go on my way
sure that June means a different thing for each
man and woman who has had Junes to remem-
ber ; who has Junes to enjoy, or Junes to hope
for ; sure, also, that each one is content with
his own thoughts, and has no need of mine.
It is a part of the egotism of everyone who
fancies that he cannot well leave the world
before he has written one book, that he cannot
brook the thought of an unfilled page, and so,
when I think of what a garden might be, I
turn my back on self-restraint, and begin to
cover more paper with raptures.

It is time to close doors. Think! there
will be but thirty of these perfect days, and it
"5

n6 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

will be a whole year before there can be any
more of them ! There can be no business in
life more pressing than to wait in the still,
green world, and to absorb the young summer
with every breath.

"Still?" Again a word is misapplied, for
who can call the garden still, when from
earliest, greying dawn, and the first lonely cry
of the little fly-catcher, there has been one
long, jubilant carnival of birds ? It is love time
with them, and not even what Dean Swift
called "high cherrytide" can make them for-
getful of the patient mates brooding under the
leaves, nor win them from the happy task of
lightening the world with their songs. To
speak the names of the birds is to bring back
old, unheard melodies, and to hear the voices
which answer to the June roll-call is to be
transported instantly to the Land of Pure
Delight,

" Where everlasting spring abides
And never fading flowers."

June is summer, but it is spring as well, the
fortissimo, as the hour in which the snowdrop
buds in February is its pianissimo.

It is well that we need not be limited in

JUNE 117

space now that June is here, but that on the
Delectable Mountains may plant all that we
like, since labour here is not labour but delight.
Against the hedge of hemlock which is to
shut in my garden a thick shrubbery of rhodo-
dendrons is to be set. Not the tender, dis-
appointing hybrids, but the hardy Americans,
grown in a cold nursery, and shipped to me
with huge balls of earth bagged about their
roots. There is a scornful jest, that as soon
as an American millionaire realises his wealth,
he buys a house and sends for a car-load of
rhododendrons to plant about it — an amiable
weakness, and one for which his sons .will
thank him. There is nothing finer than the
great shrubs climbing the rocks of the Blue
Ridge ranges, or which lean over the stones
that fret the cold mountain brooks, to smile at
their broken reflections in the hurrying waters.
Ferns grow about their knees, and beside them
the laurels set fire to the matchless lamps of
their urn-shaped bloom, " the ten-tongued
laurel " of Emerson's love, whose " beaten
bosses of hammered silver, beaten out, each
petal, apparently, by the stamens instead of a
hammer," made Ruskin think of the craftsmen

n8 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

who beat out the sacred vessels of old altars.
The restraint and simplicity of line, and the
polished and enduring texture, of the laurel
leaf made it the Greek symbol for lasting
fame ; and as for the blossom-balls it tosses
so lavishly at the feet of June, pink with a
hundred crimsons, and roses, and pale morning
colours, white in a dozen greys and blues and
greens and pearls, these are sights to dream
of in long wakeful hours of pain and sorrow,
and when storms are abroad in the winter
midnights.

If the old doctrines be true, and I must
enter life after life before the final rest comes,
I hope that I may be reborn into the Heath
family. Others are more distinguished ; others
more aristocratic, others more useful, but there
is that in this Order that appeals to some inner
sense, giving it that rare value which in an
individual we call distinction or charm.
Cassiope and Andromeda are not more
honoured by having their names written high
in the polar skies than in the bede-rolls of
this family, nor is the daughter of Priam and
Hecuba elsewhere more worthily celebrated.
It was reward enough for Peter Kalm that

THE TROUT BROOK

JUNE 119

his name has been bestowed upon the moun-
tain laurels ; and who was Dr Gauthier of
Quebec that the rubies and pearls and scented
leavesof thewintergreen should have beengiven
him for his own ? Over the world it ranges,
caring nothing for men, yielding little to them
by way of submission to cultivation, but much
in the way of gentle uses and most to the high
mission of adding to the world's beauty. No
praise can be adequate and no loyalty too
sincere.

Against the planting of the rhododendrons
and Kalmias I would like to place my peonies,
a long, long joy, since between the coming of
the stout old "p'iny" of our forefathers' day
and the latest Kelway triumph of selection, at
least six weeks may be counted. There is no
plant which may be more safely trusted to do
its duty in all stations of life to which it may
be called. Let it alone, and for half-a-century
it will care for itself. Give it plenty of air, of
sunlight, and of water ; top-dress it in spring
with a good compost ; give it a second dose,
well worked in about the roots, as flowering
time draws near, and tuck it away for its
winter sleep under a heavy mulching, and it

120 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

will repay you tenfold for your care. I do not
know a more satisfactory plant, and I rejoice
in the attention bestowed by those whose efforts
to spread beauty may not be wholly unselfish,
but who are our benefactors none the less.
With the first warm stirrings of the heart of
April, the peonies will pierce the soil with
their strong wedges, whose upthrust tells of
a vigorous self-knowledge and a masterful
will. Then comes the wealth of foliage cut,
polished, grey, olive, bronze, which Miss Jeykll
likens to the amalgams of Japanese metal
workers. Thus does the peony prepare the
stage for the final effort upon which its thoughts
have been fixed from the beginning. The
little buds — such marvels of adjustment and
economy of space — grow into big hard balls,
which almost as a matter of course must have
suggested some such ideas as Mr William
Coles wrote down in his " Adam in Eden, or
the Paradise of Plants." "The peony," he
says, " having some signature and proportion
with the head of man, having sutures and little
veins dispersed up and down like unto those
which environ the brain, when the flowers blow,
they open an outward little skin representing

JUNE 121

the skull," the peony being, therefore, in the
symbolic medicine of that day, "very available
against falling sickness."

In spite of this, however, the peony is
eminently the flower of good health, and there
are certain people of whom I am always re-
minded by it ; people who are delightful at
a dinner party, but from whose presence in
sickness or sorrow one shrinks as from a blow.
Charming, well - dressed, graceful, generous,
opulent, the peony is for robust health and
honest animal enjoyment, not for sentiment.

It is for the sentiment that made me plant
the dwarf flags in April, and the Florentine
iris in May, that I would have as many of
the late flowering iris as possible in my June
garden. Named for the rainbow, and dedi-
cated to St Genevie"ve, it is no wonder that
they were the chosen emblems of kings, and
stood for courage, and chivalry, and high en-
deavour. They carry their history in their
faces, and a bed of them is a battalion of
swords and a blazonment of many banners.
Like flights of Cingalese or Brazilian butterflies ;
like wonderful tropical orchids, they flutter
in the warm breezes. No wonder that where

122 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

the shadow of Fusi Yami falls into blue
water as its white crown rises into the blue
ether, ladies, like fine netsukis, walk with
hushed delight through the iris fields ! No
wonder that plain country housewives, who
have little time to care for mere beauty, still
cling loyally to the bunches of "blue flags,"
with falls of royal purple, and wings of deli-
cate azure. May is iris month ; but it is in
June that we must go to the marshes planted
not for us, but because

" Other eyes than ours
Are made to look on flowers,
Eyes of small birds and insects small,
The deep sun-blushing rose
Around which the prickles close
Opens her bosom to them all,
The tiniest living thing
That soars on feathered wing
Or crawls among the long grass out of sight
Has just as good a right
To its appointed portion of delight
As any king."

It is hemmed in by ferny thickets under
oaks and pines, where club mosses and part-
ridge berries grow, and where there are white
waxen bells of winter-green and pipsissiwa.
Marsh roses lean over the peaty, sedge-green

JUNE 123

hollows where the iris are blooming. Tens of
thousands of them stand there in the warm
sunshine. Some of the flowers are as deep
in colour as the darkest violets, some are as
pale as the faintest harebells. When the wind
ruffles the hollow, or when, after a passing
cloud is gone, the sun shines suddenly into it,
there is a wonderful joy of colour. Later, I
know, the fringed orchids will hold up tall
candles of white, or orange, or pale lilac,
among the heavy-headed pitcher plants, and
later still, among the white boneset and purple
asters and marsh golden rod, tall cardinal
flowers will glow, and fringed gentians will
haunt the silence of the marsh edge ; but the
June iris day is a day by itself.

In gardens now white lilies are ablow.
Long rows of them stand forth in the virginal
purity of dewy mornings as they stood in the
garden of Mary, who held a stalk of them
against her breast as she bent her head to
listen to the Angel of the Annunciation. I
think much about lilies. I do not put my
thoughts into words, because I cannot.

Yet even without trying to set down my
lily-dreams I may try to tell of an old lily

i24 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

garden where the rich loam had been light-
ened by much sand, and where the cold north
and north-east winds are fended off by a
high brick wall. Creepers of all kinds grow
over these ancient barriers, and there had
been some attempts to train fruit-trees against
the comfortable background. I do not think
much was gained in the way of finer fruits
by this treatment, but the bees found their
way early into the garden for the summoning
peach blows ; and to have early bees is a
great thing. There is always some planting
of the early flowering bulbs, some daisies grow
there, and primroses, and there are always a
great many things with good smelling leaves,
but the gala days begin when the Madonna
lilies begin to bud. Every third August the
old plants are lifted, divided and replanted in
soil that has been carefully prepared with
much wood ashes ; each has a handful of
clean sand about it, and so the two long rows
which are all that the garden master allows
of this variety is always in the best possible
condition for flowering. To keep up the
stock he has a little school in one corner of
the garden, in which young roots are set to

JUNE 125

mature, being removed to the ever lengthen-
ing rows when they are old enough to bloom.

Behind and between, and before the
Madonna lilies, many other varieties are set,
because, alas ! even in this June-worthy spot
it cannot always be June ! Clumps of the
white and the rose coloured Japan lilies grow
against the wall, and many, many gold-banded
lilies. A few Harris lilies grow there also,
but not many, and in the farthermost corner
stand tall, red or orange or salmon coloured
lilies, with recurved petals and many-flowered
stalks. There is, however, an interval of
shrubbery between these, so that the pink
blossoms are not lessened in value by the near-
ness of opposing colours. A great many ferns
are planted in this border, and so are pale lilac
foxgloves and larkspurs in every shade of
blue, the two plants growing together in un-
believable harmony. They come from another
nursery - bed where biennials and perennials
stay until transplanting time, and where so
many provisions are made in case of any
emergency, that it is never thought wise to
keep the old plants in the border after their
best days are over. They are, therefore,

added to the compost heap if they are free
from defect ; if not they go on the bonfire, lest
blight or pest be spread therefrom, mayhap.

The colour effect of the myriad of white or
pale gold or deep pink lilies, with the infinite
blues of the larkspur, and the lilacs of the
foxglove bells, is a thing beyond compare.
After these go to the Place prepared — who
can doubt it? — for good and faithful plants
who have done their duty lovingly and faith-
fully here, tall phlox, in white and pink colour-
ings, which have been growing unobserved
among the lily stalks, come into eight weeks
of loveliness. Once, when for a time the pink
lilies were removed to another part of the
garden, African marigolds took the place of
the phlox, and Shasta daisies made a border,
so that the white of the late-flowering lilies
and the gold bands of the auratums were
repeated a thousand -fold. In some years
asters are bedded with the lilies, purple and
white asters. Never anything with a red
flower enters the garden ; never anything
that suggests a greenhouse, or a fear of early
frost. At the end of the wall there are four
or five hemlocks, and three white birches.

JUNE 127

This is all of the garden visible from the
porches or windows of the house. It is not
a rich man's garden, and it is a small one,
but it is perfectly satisfying.

Even in my dreams I should be slow to
think that I could add to the praise of the rose.
It speaks all languages, as Emerson tells us,
and all languages have spent themselves in
their homage to the flower which has the
world's heart for her own. Here and there
are stray souls who cleave to other idols, but
to the most of men she is what her name im-
plies— the flower. Where, or how, this befell
we know not, but we are told that each of the
Four Great Peoples of Asia chose a variety of
the rose as its emblem, and if this be true, who
can say but that man's passion for this flower
may not be a part of that past by which he is
bound to his remotest ancestors in a thousand
different and unsuspected ways ? The rose of
a hundred leaves was the type chosen by the
Indo-Germanic stock from which we are sprung,
and it is pleasant to think that it is not the
tenderest personal association, not aesthetic
delight, but a feeling far deeper, that makes the
heart stir at the sound of her name. Each one

128 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

of us has a list of favourite words which we say
over as a private litany of our own. I, for one,
would think but ill of one from which the name
of the rose were left out.

High priest of the goddess — yet only a quiet
clergyman in a cathedral close — Dean Hole
takes this for the text of one of his garden
sermons :

" If a man would have beautiful roses in his
garden, he must have beautiful roses in his
heart."

Were my purse but as full as my gratitude
is deep, I should like to^ print and scatter
broadcast the works of this Dean of Roses,
binding up with them St John's vision of the
New Jerusalem. As a Tract for the Times
how much they would teach of patience and
contentment and gentleness and all sweet
courtesy and brotherliness. I would have
liked to listen to the hymns and canticles of a
service of his ordering. There would have
been :

" By cool Siloam's shady rill
How fair the lily grows !
How sweet the breath beneath the hill
Of Sharon's dewy rose."

REFLECTIONS

JUNE 129

And the wonderful mediaeval garden song :

" O Mother, dear Jerusalem ! "
And George Herbert's

" Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so brighti"

And oh! so often! some portion of St Bernard's
hymn with its passionate refrain,

" O sweet and blessed Country
The home of God's elect !
O sweet and blessed Country
That eager hearts expect ! "

And the text would, I am sure, have been about
the time of singing birds, and considering the
lilies, and so worth spending a fair summer
morning for.

How could earth have satisfied him who
wrote, " There should be beds of roses, baskets
of roses, vistas and alleys of roses. Now over-
head, now at our feet, they should creep and
climb. New tints, new forms, new fragrances
should greet us at every turn. If I had all
Nottinghamshire full of roses, I should desire
Derbyshire for a bedding-ground."

What could quench a passion like that ? The
Tenth Commandment must shrivel up before
such a whirlwind of desire, and yet who could

1 3o A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

call that a sin which only meant that there can
never be roses enough in the world? In fancy
we can conjure up the grassy alleys between
rose hedges along which are marshalled
those brave regiments, each in a uniform of
his own choosing, and bearing the proudest
names. Personally I do not care for the
names by which the roses are known to the
cognoscenti, or to the rosarian, but there is
something very touching in the association of
the name of man, or woman, or place, with a
blossom, and it is thought to be adding crown
to crown to call a rose for a queen. Long after
a warrior has fought his last battle the rose
which bears his name and title is an ever-living
medal of honour. Marechal Niel — what did he
do ? I have not the faintest idea, but I shall
be long in forgetting an ancient crepe myrtle
leaning over a crumbling wall in a sleepy, tide-
water Virginia village, whose shining foliage
was half hidden by a pink mist of bloom, and
this, in turn, was forced to escape from under
a wealth of the pale gold roses which are called
by his name. I have seen no portrait of
General Jaquemenot, but there is a bush in
a still valley in Maryland that publishes his

JUNE 131

fame in a June glory which makes a portrait
unnecessary. I have no doubt but that Madame
Plantier was the most charming of her sex, or
why is she remembered, year after year, by
the flowering of the great, sweet, white, amber-
hearted roses found in all old gardens worthy
of the name? Paul Neyron was hardly an
enchanter, but from his counterfeit presentment
in the garden of gardens at Mount Vernon
arises such an all-encompassing cloud of
fragrance, as passing into the memory, lives
there in secret crypts, whence it issues at un-
expected hours, and brings back the sun-
shine that filters through the trees upon the
greensward that lights the quiet river into
silvery reflections, and touches the far-off hills
with a benediction of peace.

That our forefathers cared little for rose-names
even although their homes were set about by

" Sun-flecked roses by the score
More roses and yet more I "

we may guess when we know that the first
catalogue was made by the rosarian Rivers,
in 1831, and gave only a modest list of four
hundred and seventy-eight names. Even there

1 32 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

we look in vain for the musk rose of Shake-
speare's praising, nor can we with certainty
identify the eglantine, which Chaucer and
Spenser thought so fair. Perhaps it is better
that we have no absolute knowledge of these
two roses, and we can think into them colour
and fragrance such as Keats found on the
Elysian lawns where

" All the daisies are rose-scented
And the Rose herself has got
Perfume which the earth has not."

When I think over the rose gardens I have
known I hold two in supreme regard. Over
one, old elm-trees hung fringing shadows lightly
over walls of box clipped so closely that it
seemed as if the broad level tops could easily
bear one's weight if one walked on them
swiftly down the long alley which led to the
sundial and so divided the roses into two dis-
tinct groupings. Standards stood about on
picket duty. Hybrids covered plats and formed
hedges. Small plantings of Hermosas gave
promise of perpetual succession of bloom, and
glorious masses of tea roses lifted their delicate
blossoms among the strong crimson and copper
foliage of their new wood. Prairie queens,

JUNE 133

Baltimore belles, seven sisters, crimson
ramblers, and a host of climbers and trailers
grew along a sunward lattice, and the stones
of the wall which enclosed this paradise
were covered by Wichurianas, and by the
hybrid sweetbriars which are "thrice crowned,
in fragrant leaf, tinted flower and glossy
fruit." Nothing else grew in the garden,
but nothing else seemed needed. The rose
sufficed.

On the other garden I came by chance. In
the pearly dawn of a midsummer morning when
the trees of a rough bit of marshy country were
but half awake, and the ferny pastures were
grey with the dews that were as yet untroubled
by the sun, the single prairie roses were
blooming. Robins were singing of them ;
song sparrows were giving thanks for them.
In thickets, in clusters, in specimen plants,
covered with masses of blossoms which
ranged in colour from deepest pink to purest
white, with many tones of blue and lilac
shadow, the roses bathed themselves in the
freshness of the day which should have been
set apart as a state holiday that all men every-
where might have leisure and opportunity to

i34 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

see such an intimate revelation of the divine.
Only — if rose day had been set apart by Act
of Congress it would have been vulgarised by
excursion trains and their attendant horrors,
and even the opalescent dawn could not have
thrown over the blossoms such a veil of
mystery and purity as touched them, flowering
in the lonely waste. The very heart of the
blue summer weather beat softlier there, and
it was hard not to believe that their Maker
had not paused for an instant in the vast
workings of everlasting plans to smile down
on the lovely, unheeded things He had
made.

" It is curious when you come to think of it
how large a space the rose idea occupies in the
world," muses Mrs Wheeler. " It has almost
a monopoly of admiration. A mysterious
something is in its nature, a fascination, a
subtle witchery, a hidden charm other flowers
do not possess." It certainly possesses the
charm of individuality, since there were never
two petals curved with the same grace, and
never a leaf but is pointed with a coquetry all
its own. Each thorn tells its own wilful tale,
and each wind-rifled blossom fallen on the grass

JUNE 135

carries its own burden of fragrant sadness.
Beside the poorest cottage door the rose will
bloom with every whit as good a will as by a
palace wall. It is her divine simplicity which
makes her queen of hearts.

In the old gardens of the day before our own
the rose was at its best. Not the varieties
that are the pride of the florists' arts and
crafts, but the old free bloomers that old-time
people knew and loved. Madame Plantier with
her lovely offerings of white, apricot-flushed,
yellow-stamened blossoms ; cabbage roses,
oldest of types, since it was the favourite of
the Rome of the Caesars ; banksias, the
hardy little Scotch roses ; the old-fashioned
yellow rose, with small leaves and few
petals, making

" Sunshine in a shady place " ;

the old Giant of Battles was there, and the
yet older George the Fourth, so deep in colour
as to be almost black ; the York and Lancaster ;
the broad-petalled, sweet-breathed old June
rose, which overgrows ragged lawns with its
sturdy little bushes, and last and best the dear,
dear damask rose, with its hundred leaves.

136 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

What a list ! Yet where are they now ? Even
the pot-pourri in which they lived a second
life, since

" Of their sweet deaths are sweeter odours made,"

has gone out of fashion.

Still, in sheltered homes in byway villages
there are even yet women who compound the
delicate blending of scents that are treasured
in Chinese jars, or old painted French urns,
and that their secrets may not be wholly
forgotten here is a recipe of their cherishing.

" Gather the roses on a fair clear morning
after the dews are dried. Take them into the
spare chamber, on the floor of which fresh
linen sheets have been spread. Crumble the
leaves [petals] gently from the hearts of the
roses, and sprinkle the sheets thickly with
them. Open the window towards the sun
until evening. The next day the leaves will
be so withered that what filled two sheets
may now be spread on one, and fresh-gathered
leaves may be strewed on the empty spaces.
On the third morning the leaves will be still
more dried, so that you may gather up the
first day's roses and place them in an empty

JUNE 137

basket. Stir occasionally, and every day add
to them the leaves dried to the proper texture.
When all are dried, prepare a bowl of sweet
spices, which shall contain small bits of dried
orange and lemon peeling, sticks of cinnamon
and buds of allspice, cloves and cassia, bruised.
Add a tonka bean, cut into fine shreds, and
much violet-smelling orrisroot, grated. A
grain of musk is liked by some, and amid so
many divine perfumes is not obtrusive. Of
handsful of lavender be not sparing, nor of the
sweet leaves of the rose geranium, and of dried
sprigs of citronella as much as you may. Now
into your jars place rose leaves and spices
alternately until they are lightly full. Put on
the covers, which are to be removed when the
room needs refreshing."

Can you not see the pot-pourri makers,
with their smoothly ordered hair and fair calm
brows, and their delicate hands busy with their
task? What gracious dames, what gentle
spinsters, thinking no evil, remembering no
wrong, hopeful, wrapping the sorrows the
years have brought them in a reticence that
was itself fragrant with the hoarded scent of
many roses, sharing the joys of their uneventful

138 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

life with a cheerfulness which was a pot-pourri
of itself. To make pot-pourri is, I take it, a
test of gentle blood, and more things are needed
than rose leaves and spices to properly fill the
Chinese jars, which the old-time ladies handled
so tenderly.

When I die I shall have gone through life
and out of it with a wish ungratified — a wish
which has followed me through all of my con-
scious years. It is to have a button-rose for
my very own : to hold it in my hand, and put
it in a vase — a glass vase — and to look at it
and love it until it begins to show faint signs of
withering, and then to press it in a book
to keep for always. It has been ages since I
saw one of the stiff little bushes that bore the
fairy roses, and more ages still since I saw one
of the flat pinky-crimson roselets. I never
touched one. I do not know if they were
fragrant, since between the very small person
which held my eager soul in those lost years,
and the scrubby little plants, which grew only
in one border that I knew, there was a great
gulf fixed, which I dare not think of passing.
On my way to and from school I hung on the
picket-fence which bordered the gulf, hoping

JUNE 139

that the mistress of the strip of garden in
which the button-roses grew would come out
from the prim house door and break off a
branch for me. The house door never opened,
and the miracle never eventuated. Once I
saw her stepping about among her flower beds,
her skirts held forbiddingly about her slender
figure. Linen mitts covered her long hands,
and a sunbonnet hid her face. Evidently she
did not belong to the order of old ladies whom
children of my day ever ventured to address,
but as my desire had never even dreamed
of fulfilment, and as Opportunity and I had
never met before, I choked back the lump in
my throat in order to be able — when the
expected moment arrived — to express my
thanks properly.

"Now," thought I, "she is going to say:
'Little girl, would you like to have a button-
rose ? ' "

A lifelong love and gratitude was ready for
her had she but so spoken. No ; all she said
was :

" I do not like to have children hang on my
fence."

Whereat I climbed down and fled. There

1 40 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

are no fences now, they say, in the village in
which the button-roses grew — but if they were
there, and I were there, and my ga-den had in
it only one flower, I would offer it to any little
child whose heart hunger for beautiful things
led it to imperil its life on my picket-fence in
rose time.

At the end of the garden which I long for, a
gate in the wall leads out into a lane along
which, as evening draws on, slow lingering
figures of young men and maidens pass. Older
figures pass also, enjoying the twilight in the
perfect confidence of long-married love. Over
the tangled hedgerows lush growths of the
evergreen honeysuckle, twin-flowered, send out
clouds of perfume to mingle with the potent
sweetness that falls from the blooming wild
grapes which lace the wayside trees together
with a tapestry of wonderful grace and beauty.
In all the range of precious odours which bless
the world, beginning with the violet and the
crab-apple, there is none that compare, with
their combined essences, and if, in the alembic
in which they are transfused, there be also the
dear drenched freshness of sweetbriar leaves,
they are mostly of the throbbing June dusk, lit

JUNE 141

by the evening star, and voiceful with songs

lttr*» f-nic •

like this :

" Slow from the sunset sky
Soft colours fade and die ;
Ashes of roses lie
On Day's grey altar.
In far, dim depths of blue
Slow stars come into view
— World-old, but ever new —
Nor change, nor falter,
Good-night 1

" Here in the garden still
Waking, a late bird's trill
Sets every pulse athrill
With June's own passion.
Sweetbriar, a country maid,
Blushes in fragrant shade
Of her own heart afraid
Wooed in such fashion,
Good-night !

" Around the casement twines
Shelter of twin woodbines
Pale there thy taper shines,
Now it has vanished !
In night's fields, slumber sown,
Sweet be thy dreams, my own;
Give me a dream alone —
All others banished !
Good-night ! "

JULY

Beneath the full midsummer heat

Are stocks of golden garnered wheat ;

Are billows of unripe oats, grey-green ;

Are armies of corn blades, trenchant, keen,

The killdeer flutes his mournful cries

The hawk in charmed circle flies

Berries ripen beneath the leaves

And warm and still are the musky eves.

The moon shines bright in the cloudless sky,
The crickets sing — and the night birds cry !

MAPLES

JULY

THE MOON OF THE DEER

A LL winter we long for summer. We
shut our eyes to the beauties of the
snow, and of the bare trees, and cry "Oh,
for the time of singing birds ! "

It is not July that we mean when we speak
of summer. After we have passed the years
when, as good Americans and true, Inde-
pendence Day, with its lights and noises and
excitements, fills us with joy ; after we have
learned that love of country is a thing so deep,
so quiet, so sacred that it can never be put
into words, we do not care for the mid-
summer month, and would be glad if it
were possible to curtail it to a February
shortness. The almanac men would have
done far better had they doubled the number
of the days of April and May, June and
October, and had halved or even quartered
the allotment of some of the other months.
K 145

146 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

There are, to be sure, July days worthy of
Emerson's lines —

" Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire.
One morn is in the mighty heaven
And one in our desire."

But these do not come every day, and, when
they do, belong to the wide landscape and the
far horizon, not to the garden.

However, since July is here, it must have
such a garden as it may. The big brushes
which were put away in January must come
out again, and the colours must be laid on in
wide washes. The palette shall be set with
the yellows and blues that, rightly blended,
shall mean the greens I love. There must be
plenty of cool greys and purples for the shadow,
and white for the few flowers I shall care to
plant. I do not think a July garden need care
for any other flowers than white ones — unless
I can find a few blues cool enough and distant
enough to suggest the far-away hills for which
the tired soul longs in the days when the heat
palpitates as an unseen flame about us. There
will certainly be none of the yellows and
scarlets of the Philistine. The world hardly

JULY 147

needed William Morris to tell it that red
geraniums were invented solely to show that
even a flower could be hideous, and, for myself,
I need no warning but the shudder of my own
soul to tell me that the flare of cannas is little
short of an immorality. There is one other
flower from which I shrink as from a blow,
and that is the scarlet sage — salvia — a flaunt-
ing braggart! It is as impossible to evade
its insistence as it is to avoid the sound of
a megaphone. It is the visible demon of a
flaunting commercialism, the very type of all
those things from which a sensitive soul must
draw back. As the Blessed Damozel leans out
from the gold bar of heaven, it is easy to fancy
the seven lilies lying along her arm. As our
thoughts are lifted higher, it is with no irrever-
ence that we think of Mary as the rose of
womanhood. In the green pastures and be-
side the still waters of the Psalmist, and in the
hymns of the Middle Ages, many and many
a blossom lifts up its head and exhales the very
breath of the Celestial Country, but I do not
think it could enter the mind of any man to
think of finding salvias there.

If the paper garden needed space in January

148 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

that there might be heavy plantings of
white pines to fend off the north wind, how
much more does it need it now, that there may
be shelter from the sun and a playground for
such winds as may be wandering about in
search of a home ! It is beginning to trouble
me, this greed for space which I am developing.
Once I would have been happy with a visible,
tangible box of honest black loam — the

" Long green box of mignonette "

which belonged to the Gardener's Daughter —
now so insatiate are my desires that I must
have a field or two beyond my hedges, a river
beyond my fields, a hill beyond my river, and
above and beyond the hill a wide stretch of
cloudland. To such a pass hath covetise,
unchecked and unabashed, brought me !

Once upon a time a July and I went hand
in hand through a garden. There was no
one else to share it with us but Neglect,
but when Neglect does its best it makes a
very fair under-gardener to Mistress Nature.
There was plenty of space there, and plenty
of green, so with what freshening rain St
S within chose to send us, and with the air

JULY 149

that flowed in from the hill country beyond,
there was nothing left for the trees and the
grass and the flowers to do but to grow. I
took many lectures in landscape gardening
that year. I learned more than one of those
esoteric mysteries of grouping, of selection and
of reclamation, which are at the root of all
successful planting, and I had more than one
lesson in the art of the harmony due to contrast.
Between the unkempt lawn and a rarely-
travelled lane there had once been a fence with
some pretension to elegance. I imagined this
from the height of the square brick pillars
standing in dignified decay along the border
line, and covered to the very crest of the stone
cups-and-balls they bore, with gadding vines
and with mosses. I never saw the fence, and
the ironwork of the gates was a matter of
guesswork. Two or three elms were left of
what had once been an avenue ; there were a
few ancient cedars in the corner where the
lane left the forgotten highroad, and a wilder-
ness of white-blossomed althea bushes crowded
themselves about the grey knees of the old
beech-tree whose dead top was overhung with
Virginia creepers. Four or five fountainlike

150 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

growths of Eulalie grasses outlined an over-
grown path which led toward an opening
where once had been closed gates. Some-
body had left these open overnight once upon
a time, and a branch of evergreen honey-
suckle had thrown a wandering arm across
one, while the English ivy of the farther gate-
post had made haste to seize upon the other.
Nobody had taken the trouble to think of
the gates since about that time. Neglect,
who had been but a chance visitor, took a
permanent lease of the premises, and one by
one the tendrils of the vines had woven about
them a cordage far too strong for any wind to
break, and so, over these green entrances the
white, clustered roses ran riot, and made a
pretty strife with the blossoming grape vines
to see what might be happening in the lane.
Against the north wall of a ruined green-
house a long bank of Funkias spread their
green cordate leaves, and disposed their stalks
of white, heavy-scented blooms. That was
all, but it was business enough for one summer
to listen to the play of the winds among the
tree tops ; to study the shadows as they came
and shifted, and stole away ; to watch the slow

JULY 151

blossoming and fading of the few flowers, and
to breathe the air that made it worth while to
lengthen the day by being in the lane before
the dawn left it.

Once, in those languid days, I made a little
list of the people I should like to have share
my garden walks. For the dawn-hour I chose
three — Chaucer first, because of his rapturous
greeting of the daisies ; Jeffries next, because
the dayspring itself was his, to have and to
share ; Corot was the third. Already he had
opened my eyes to many things which have
always been before them, but which, but for
him, they had been too full of day glare to
perceive. In the misty half-hour before sun-
rise what could he not point out to me ! How
cool, how vague, how silvery white-and-green
all things would be ! The little leaves,
refreshed by the stillness and darkness as
much as by the dews, would offer, each one,
his pearl of dew to the returning day. The
cool grey clouds would be reflected in the
water of the pond, over which willows would
lean, and on whose banks, to the singing of
half-awakened birds, fauns and nymphs would
have just left off dancing. No haste, but all

152 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

pale, refreshing tints and peace and rest and
recreation.

It is only when we have left youth behind
us that we come to a full understanding of the
values of dawns and twilights. They linger
so much longer than noons or midnights, and
show us so much more that is truer and
lovelier, and so belong first to the days when
we have no idea of proportion, and then to
those in which we know what it is. Youth is
to age what the blossom is to the tree ; every-
body knows that ; but where would be the
tenderness of the one without the battles the
worn old bough has won in its many militant
years ? Young folk need that lovely connect-
ing link with the past which can come only
from contact with old people, as an apple
blossom needs the sap from the old tree.
Perhaps the trees have their legends for their
children, and it may be telling their runes and
sagas, when we say the wind is passing at
dawn. At midday, in mid-life, there is no
time to think of things like these, but

" In green old gardens hidden away
From sight of revel, or sound of strife,"

the hours bring each their lesson.

JULY 153

DAWN

" The colours of an opal faint and flush
On the pale sky, wherein one lambent star
Lights in the Hours. In the expectant hush
The low tide sobs against the hidden bar.

NOON

" Dawn vainly longs for, and Midnight regrets,
And Sunset emulates Noon's splendid strife.
Noon, overborne with restless toils and frets,
Envies their charmed stillness; This is life.

SUNSET

" 'Tis not the dying Day that paints the skies
With green and crimson, purple and pale gold :
'Tis Father Past, who thus in state doth rise
Another son to welcome to his fold.

MIDNIGHT

" The moon rides high, the skies are cold and grey,
The earth's asleep ; the waves are murmuring :
To-morrow, smiling, takes from Yesterday
The worn old crown of countless discrowned kings."

I think I said I should have a white garden
for July. I am sure it should be planted
chiefly with the respectable hardy sisterhood
who are like efficient spinsters in their ability
to care for themselves, and like notable
mothers of families in their cheerful endeavour
to make everybody comfortable. When July

154 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

heat broods over the world no one has energy
for transplanting and coaxing, and all one is
able for is a wholesale sprinkling at evening.
Even the weeds cease to be the disgrace they
were in June, and too often what promised to
be a well-ordered parterre becomes a tangle
of rough grasses or wretched little cheese
mallows, or still more wretched purslane. The
hardy plants do more than all the patent
weeders or cultivators ever invented to solve
the problem of order and neatness. To be
carefully planted in good soil, deeply spaded,
and finely powdered in the fall ; to be covered
in by a mulching of litter during the winter,
and to have some bone-meal dug about their
roots in the spring — these are the few and
paltry attentions asked by the good biennials
and perennials, and surely these are not ex-
travagant requirements !

In even the limited space afforded by an
ordinary suburban or village garden plot, a
succession of white bloom may be ensured by
planting from this list which I have treasured
for ever so long in my desk-garden —

Snowdrops, crocus, hyacinths, narcissi,
violets, Star of Bethlehem, tulips, candy-

JULY 155

tuft, English daisies, trilliums, bloodroots,
iris — Spanish, English, Japanese and German
— lilies-of-the-valley, columbines, fraxinellas,
peonies, phlox, Canterbury bells, foxgloves,
Achilleas, feverfews, larkspurs, balsams, ver-
benas, Shasta daisies, China asters, pansies,
petunias, mallows, nicotinas, hollyhocks, dahlias,
anemones and chrysanthemums. Of this list
only three are annuals — balsams, China asters,
petunias ; none ask for any particular coaxing,
and none are very costly. For shrubs and
small trees with white flowers there are, beside
the roses, dogwoods, magnolias, rhododen-
drons, lilacs, fringe-trees, hawthorns, spireas,
Philadelphus, privet and hydrangeas. For
climbing plants, clematis — the native Virgin's
bower — the paniculata, and some of the broad -
petalled hybrids, the charming evergreen
honeysuckle, the morning glories, wisteria,
var alba, the moonflowers, and the sweet
Madeira vine.

The true garden is a thing of slow growth,
and a place in which the individuality of its
owner is shown at its best. Sentiment,
crushed down and kept out of sight elsewhere,
must here have full play. The plant bought

156 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

for money is worthless except as a starting
point from which many paths may trend into
many ways, since, by the generosity of its
nature, it makes instant provision for that
multiplication which openly admonishes us to
share its good with our neighbour. It repre-
sents far less value, at best, than the plant
given from love, and this in turn is only
higher in order than that which has been
acquired by that pleasant system of barter
known to all diggers and delvers in the soil.
Once let this spirit of exchange enter, and it
becomes a passion to drive about through
country byways, and to stroll along village
side streets, making mental notes of the things
which have learned to accept those climatic
conditions to which our own treasures must
subject themselves, and that soil on which
they too must feed. Then, when time is
ripe, to return with a basket of the roots which
we can spare, and of which we have marked
our neighbour's lack, and we enter with a
proposal to drive a bargain. What kindly,
friendly chats ensue ! What ready sympathy
is evoked ! What a strife as to which shall
give, not get, the more ! How much better

JULY 157

the world is than we had thought it, and how
much good will there is all about us ! With
what cordial glances we greet our new friends
when next we meet on the highroad, asking
after their garden as if after their families.
Perhaps we fall into the habit of sending
them a packet of pansy seed or an auratum
lily bulb at Christmas, and perhaps, when they
drive into town, they bring us a " taste of
their seckel pears." Such widenings out are
inevitable, significant as well. The glorious
company of flower growers is ever increasing,
and for them should be a special clause in the
Te Deum, since, being of those who make the
world brighter and gentler, more unselfish,
more contented, more pure in heart, theirs
is surely a most apostolic ministry and
vocation.

The very best gardens, from the humanist's
point of view, are those unpretentious little
ones which cuddle up close to the eaves of
weather-beaten farmhouses, and those which
are hidden away along the streets of those
blessed villages which have kept themselves
aloof from the seven devils of modernism.
There is rarely a master to these small

158 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

domains, but there is almost always a mis-
tress, who has lived long enough to have
much treasure laid up in that sweet and sacred
place, wherever it may be, where good pasts
are kept safe until "the day of the restitu-
tion of all things." Here are found those
humble livers in content who figure in no
nurseryman's list, but which are priceless in
their wealth of association — heirlooms, as it
were, by which she tells her life-story, and if
she will but tell us whence they came we may
make a bede-roll of the friends she has loved
and the places she has visited. It is she
whom we see in the railway cars and on the
decks of summer-faring steamboats with her
basket of plants, and her little sheaf of slips.
We smile, but why ? Every slip will grow,
because it knows she loves them, and every
root will make haste to duplicate itself that
she may enjoy the privilege of giving. So
she passes through life and out of it, and
long, long afterward her name is kept dear
in a way the old hymn-writer did not dream
of when he said —

" The sweet remembrance of the just
Shall flourish when he sleeps in dust."

JULY 159

In these calm retreats live also the old
flower-names which "express their relation to
humanity, while the scientific names are a
necessity for schoolmen." Not every gardener
has the same nomenclature. What is larkspur
in your garden may be lark's heels in mine,
and Elijah's chariot across the way. Your
monkshood may be my Cupid's car, or my
sister's dumble-dore's delight. Forget-me-not
appeals beseechingly to us under half-a-dozen
guises. Ragged robin and bachelor's button
are names borne by at least twenty widely
differing plants, and honeysuckle and pinks
masquerade under at least as many. That
which we are apt to call cornflower has, it is
said, over fifty nommes de plume, ranging from
the Old English hawdod to the rustic break-
your - spectacles. Almost every nook and
corner of the land from whence our speech
came to us has been remembered by its home-
sick children in connecting it with some beloved
plant, and every holy season and saint in the
calendar has its emblem. To " Our Lady
the Virgin " whole floras have been dedicated
— Marybuds, Marygold, Maidenhair, Virgin's
bower, Dame's rocket, Madonna lilies, Annun-

160 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

elation lilies, Lady's tresses, Lady's fingers,
Lady's slipper, Lady's smock, Lady's kirtle,
Lady's mantle, Lady's delight, and so on, end-
lessly. In a lesser litany other saints have their
flowers, under the leadership of St Genevieve,
the patroness of all flowers, whose own emblem
is the iris. St Joseph has a lily ; the cowslip,
or schlusselblumen, or keys of heaven, falls
naturally to St Peter, while the amaryllis is
allotted to St James. The leek, as all men
know, belongs to St David, as does the rose to
St George, the thistle to St Andrew and the
shamrock to St Patrick. To St Agnes is
dedicated the black hellebore, although lovers
of Tennyson will always associate with her
that

" First snowdrop of the year "

which lay on the breast of the nun, who under
St Agnes' moon prayed for the purity of its
snows. To St Gregory belong the daffodils,
which used to be locally called Gregories, from
their punctual flowering on that saint's day,
the twelfth of March. Wherein lay the sym-
pathy that gave St Dominic the harebell for
his own and who was the Archbishop of
Canterbury who chose the lily-of-the-valley,

tiD^, ^

'»

'•*

THE MEDITATIVE WALK

JULY 161

which had for an alias, once upon a time, the
dainty name of liricon fancy ? The Canterbury
bells were dear to Thomas a Becket, and in
the Sweet Williams,

" With their homely, cottage smell,"

we see the saintly William of Rochester.

The birth of Our Lord is commemorated
by the Christmas rose and the flowering of
that Glastonbury thorn which was said to
have been the miraculous springing into life
of the pilgrim staff which guided Joseph of
Arimathea to England. The Star of Beth-
lehem is the flower of the Epiphany season, and
Lenten days are daffodils and narcissi, by their
old name Laus tibi. A green hellebore, with
its German name corrupted into Krichblum,
grows in a few out-of-the-world corners, and is
called a Lenten flower. For Palm Sunday the
young shoots of willow called sallows were
formerly much used, together with the wood-
sorrel, which Gerarde called Alleluias. At
Easter, nowadays, everything that hath breath
joins in praise, but formerly the ranunculus or
Pasque flower was given and received as a
token. Pentecost has the Guelder rose and
the azalea ; pinxter flower or pfingsten. At

1 62 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

Trinity-tide the shamrock and the viola tri-
colour set forth the proper lessons. Birds,
beasts, fishes ; mythology, history, geography ;
the virtues and vices — what have not been linked
to the flowers? From what far sources have
come the names dear and familiar to us ; how
in our English speech we have kept but one
from Celtic days, maple ; and two, hawthorn
and groundsel, from Anglo-Saxon ; what we
have adopted from the Indians who lived here
before us — all these belong to a subject too
difficult to engage us on a July day.

If one must have colours in July, there be
colours ready to his hand — unless one be of
the disagreeable brotherhood who are not con-
tent to wait until proper seasons arrive, and
who plant sweetpeas in March or, worse yet,
in October, that they may come earlier than
anyone else's. Sweetpeas should be in their
glory in early July. Deep planting, careful
stirrings of the earth about the tender stems,
early opportunity to climb the cotton nettings
— which are far better than the wire ones, on
which the stalks are often scorched — plenty of
water, and most assiduous cutting, never
plucking, of the blossoms — these are the re-

JULY 163

quirements of sweetpea culture. It has gotten
to be a florists' flower now, more's the pity !
They are forced for Easter weddings, and they
are "improved" until only the scent remains.
Twisted, curled, they are said to "look like
orchids," as the last triumph of the special
breeds. Why should a sweetpea look like
an orchid ? Why not let the orchid look
like itself, and leave to the peas their
own delicate butterfly graces ? Was not that
flower already good enough of which Keats
said :

" Here are sweetpeas, on tiptoe for a flight
With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things
To bind them all about with tiny rings."

A proper sweetpea should have a wide
flaring, and daintly cloven standard, self-
coloured. Its wings should be broad, well
curved at base, and curved gently to meet the
stout keel. Three flowers only should be
grown on one stalk, When cut — and they are
eminently a flower for cutting — there should
be cut with them a few tips of their own foliage.
No other green should ever come near the
blossoms, which are like the dawn for purity of

164 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

colour, and like nothing but themselves for
deliciousness of scent.

Phlox, with what Maeterlinck calls its
loud laughter, is an invaluable July plant.
Its story is so short ; it is such a little while
ago that the reddish-purple phlox of our
swampy glades began to respond to the culti-
vator, that it seems a type of certain dominant
influences which we dare not decry since we
owe too much to them. For eight weeks,
perhaps for ten, sometimes for twelve, we can
rely upon the phlox to keep the garden gay,
a virtue it shares with almost no other plant.
The snapdragon, with its gorgeous wayward
colours, is another midsummer darling, most
trustworthy in every regard, and the poppy
makes a third to this admirable trio. Mrs
Earle heads one of her chapters, which are the
delight and despair of every garden writer,
"Joan Silverpin," a pretty and provoking name,
which, however, lacks all that the older word
poppy means to us. There is something
heavy-headed and drowsy in the word, which
suggests the languid grace of the stems, the
drooping of the sleepy buds and the sensuous
charm of the silken blossom. A long, long

JULY 165

train of beautiful thoughts which men have
had about this mysterious flower, with its
poisonous heart, and its sunny face, come
singing by, and we repeat its name, and it
needs all of its colour and all of its life to rouse
us from the dreams which will but barely end
when the wind rifles the drifting cloud of
poppies and, white or scarlet or pink or pale
silver, the last crinkled, crispy satin petal falls
from the stalk. With the passing of the poppy,
July is gone.

AUGUST

Over the blue sea broods the heat ;
In faintest pulses the tired tides beat ;
Over the sands, with the sun aglow
Silent, the cloud-shades come and go :
A white-winged sail on the water gleams ;
Faint and far like a Ship o' Dreams.
The Year's great Sabbath fills the air
And slumber and languor are everywhere

Then storm winds rise, then breakers roar
Then wrecks are tossed on rocky shore.

AUGUST

THE STURGEON'S MOON

A /T ONTHS are said to have their comple-
ments in precious stones, why have they
not also their representative colours ? It would
seem as if Nature had arranged for the dwellers
in temperate climes a delicate chromatoscope
in which we may read the passing of seasons,
as we tell them by the wheeling constellations
of the Zodiac. In January there is the white
of the snows, and in February the bronzes of
certain leaf buds, or the ochres of stubble fields.
In March we look up, not down, and we see
the blue of the sky filled with prophetic gleams.
In April the colour of the first violet is the only
wear, and for May that wonderful symphony
of pink that means that the true bud-break
of the year has come. June means roses ; July
lilies. In August we long for the green of
grass and of sheltering trees, and in September
the yellows of countless blossomings speak for
169

1 70 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

themselves. October means crimson, and
November? I think November means the
deep green of pines, forgotten in the heyday
of the summer's splendour, but steadfast and
true, a gracious, benignant presence to which
we may return, forgiven prodigals, sure of the
pardon of which we are not worthy. Scarlet,
the colour of Christmas, ends the list.

For August, therefore, I choose green for
my garden, which shall be a formal garden,
and have in it the four things Sir William
Temple declares "necessary to be provided.
Floures, fruit, shade, and water," and in it,
to quote the good man once more, I will
" shote strong and tenacious roots." I will have
caught hold of the earth, to use a gardener's
phrase, and neither my friends nor my enemies
will find it an easy matter to transplant me.
What has indoors, anywhere, to offer in
August ?

Formal gardening is, I take it, the desire of
man to infuse somewhat of his own personality
into the growth and disposition of trees and
plants. The old story of the hanging gardens
of Babylon as having been the gift of a royal
husband to a much-loved wife who longed for

AUGUST 171

the hill-country of her childhood, and who, in
the pleasaunces upreared on vast bases of
masonry found a symbol of the land she had left,
is most significant. In it lies the germ of all
gardening. The water that plunges into the
basin of many a fountain, in many a classic
land, does not attempt to do more than suggest
the wild leap of down-rushing mountain tor-
rents. The long channels of pure water led
through Spanish pleasure-grounds, lulling the
senses by their gentle flowing, wooing the birds
by their cool sparkle, and nourishing the life
of the oranges and myrtles that lean over
them, are no counterfeit of the untamed rivers
that carve their way through hills and valleys,
but a frank adaptation of their spirit. A foun-
tain, upspringing, downfalling, rainbow-tinted,
musical, does not exist anywhere in nature, but
responds to some human desire, or it had never
been possible. Clipped trees and hedges
whose growth have been restricted and thwarted
until they are like the fantasies of Hamlet's
disordered vision : deciduous trees — coaxed
into unnatural habits of rounded heads or
pendulous branchings — these are of that art
which Goethe calls nature passed through the

172 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

alembic of man. Not for alway nor for every-
where, but for sometimes and for some places,
is the formal garden. And August is surely
the time.

For such gardens flowers are not wholly
necessary, they are a by-product, the chief
requisite being much green — grass first, as
furnishing the background upon which the
picture must be painted ; the key to which the
harmony must be set.

There can never be grass enough anywhere.
In one or another of its forms it is certainly
the highest achievement of vegetable life.
Divinest of givers — like man in its little day,
like God in its loving service — the common
grass is the truest comforter to broken hearts,
the most effective teacher of patience, and
cheerfulness, and humility, and self-forgetful-
ness. Under its safe shelter we leave our
heart's dearest : to its faithful care we creep,
ourselves, at the last. I should like to think
that some time I should not be covered by
grass, but should be grass, and that this body,
which after its poor best has served me so
long, should, by sweet, natural processes, be
quickly restored to that from which it came,

AUGUST 173

and that my hands and my eyes might live
again in the breathing, happy leaves, on which
the dews should sparkle, and from which the
spider's web should float in glistening silver and
which should be white with rime at frost-tide.

There are to be beech-trees in the open
glade beyond the clipped hedges, their grey
boles so flecked with lichens that they are a
part of that green which makes the beech the
coolest and most companionable of summer
trees. He is to be pitied to whom August
brings no memories — if it brings no sight — of
the fluttering garments of great beeches, half-
revealing and half-hiding the slender grace of
their delicate limbs. For grow they ever so
great, and live they ever so long, there is a
perpetual youth about them, and a most
charming coquetry for ever animates their
boughs. It is among beech-trees that one
hears in late August evenings an occasional
bell-tone from a hidden wood-thrush into which
"the soul of a year's music is distilled into a
few drops of sound." It is in beechen shade
that a certain shy little flycatcher sings his
delicious strain, so far away, so near at hand,
as if he were singing to himself in a pure

174 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

joy of being, and in loving praise of the
trees.

The outer hedge should be of arbor vita,
tall, old, and heavy with the masses of tiny
cones which hang over the fruiting trees like
mantles of richest embroidery. I do not know
why it should suggest gorgeous priestly vest-
ments, but it does. Perhaps the aromatic
fragrance that envelops the tree like an un-
seen cloud of incense creates the illusion. It
is, indeed, one of the most beautiful effects to be
imagined, and, as arbor vita is neither costly
to buy nor hard to grow, it is nothing less than
a shame that we are so poor in the hedges
it makes. Not a low hedge, but a high,
strong barrier, through which we may, if there
is anything worth looking at beyond, cut an
archway here and there for a vista. Not
many plants care for the close proximity of
such a hedge, but within a reasonable dis-
tance grass will grow, and hemlocks or cedars
or yews, or retinosporas may be set, either
for clipping or for specimen growths. Beyond
these again, in what long alleys or in what
fanciful device we will, box, the eternal, may
be grown if the climate be friendly, which, alas !

AUGUST 175

it is not sure to be in many places. A ragged
hedge of box is a sorry affair, for which it
is much better to substitute English ivy,
pegged down and confined within fixed limits.
It makes a lovely border for walks, and for
large beds, as does also the periwinkle or
vinca or myrtle. Covered with its angled
blue stars in April, the myrtle is charming,
while its deep green glossy sprays are invalu-
able during the cold days of winter. Here,
too, the cost is practically nothing, since every-
body who has a rod of earth to cultivate knows
of some abandoned farmhouse around whose
deserted doorstone the myrtle has crept and
matted in thick tangles which are at any-
body's disposal, and which will take hold of
any new soil to which they may be trans-
planted with all the good will in the world.
For a ground cover under trees anywhere,
this good, old, tested green is unsurpass-
able.

In my garden plot, rhododendrons shall be
banked against some stone steps which shall
lead down from the terrace above. In August
the not-too-beautiful offerings of their far-too-
often purplish blossoms are past, the plants

176 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

are busy with the fashioning of the pointed
buds into which they are packing the stores
needed for another year, and the looker-on
has time to admire the stately leafage of the
shrubs themselves. An ancient garden favour-
ite, which is exceptionally fresh and young in
this month, when insects and blights do chiefly
flourish, is the matrimony vine, a nuisance if
it be not trained and pruned, and a joyous
fountain of green branches if it is. Yuccas
are interesting in the formal garden. The
fine columns of their glistening silver flowering
are gone, but the stiff bayonets of their leaves
are delightful, set along the edge of a terrace,
against a planting of the Eulalia grasses which
are such a contrast. The yuccas do not care
for much water, and so are especially good in
poor and sandy sites, but they should never
be left without some care in cutting away the
spent flower-spike and the old leaves.

Another comfortable August plant is the
Funkia or day-lily. Its few white blossoms
have an exquisite freshness, and for fragrance
are hardly equalled, while its corded leaves,
broad and cool, are good indeed to see. Year
after year the clumps grow in beauty and

AUGUST 177

stateliness, loving a partial shade, but caring
more for plenty of water to drink.

I like grass paths, even in box-edged gardens.
The sharp contrasts between the greens of
hedges or the blossoms of plants, and the greys
and browns of gravels are not pleasant. To
be sure grass paths are damp after a rain, or a
heavy fall of dew, but shall not the overshoe
men have a chance to make an honest living,
and is life so short that we cannot spare a
moment in which to slip off and on the rubber
sandals by whose aid we may defy all weathers ?
Stone walks, laid in blocks of different colours,
are almost as bad as were the pavements in the
garden of Erasmus on which the taste of that
day painted representations of flowers ! Grass
paths sympathise with all kinds of garden
efforts, and are the complement of every flower.
They ask only for frequent clipping and rolling
to serve you better and better as age toughens
and strengthens the sward.

By August the ferneries have lost the crisp
freshness of their prime, more's the pity, and
more's the pity, also, that certain wild things
— the natural companions of the ferns, in the
glory of our deep, northern forests — refuse to

1 78 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

adapt themselves even to the green shades of
the greenest gardens. Pipsissiwa is one of
these ; a most charming plant, and the shin-leaf
is another. The wintergreen belong to the
same sisterhood. All of these belong to the
great family of the heaths, which have a habit
of clinging to the haunts and ways chosen by
their forebears, and, as, notably in the ex-
quisite trailing arbutus, claim the right of
selection due their high lineage. It may be
that occasional plants survive transplanting,
and make themselves at home amid new
environments. I do not know. Perhaps it is
just as well that man should stand abashed
before the stronger wills of some of these
delicate aristocrats. Perhaps it is better than
well that, instead of seeing them in humdrum
garden beds, cheek by jowl with jolly-faced
marigolds or flaunting tulips, " those flowers
who are true clients of the sunne," we must
seek them in their proper homes. Everything
loses something by being dissociated from its
natural surroundings : that is the lesson of
Emerson's "Each and All," which is the one
perfect answer to many questions.

For August gardens there are two perfect

THE HILL

AUGUST 179

flowers — the heliotrope and the mignonette ;
perfect because neither of them takes anything
from the repose of the place on which one
would gladly be

" Annihilating all that's made,
To a green thought in a green shade."

On the contrary, both bring with them
supreme gifts. Cowper tells us that it was in
the year of his majority that England first saw
the Frenchman's darling, which surprises us,
because we had seemed to have associations
which reach into a much more remote past.
Living or dead, it is eminently a flower of
sentiment and of refinement, qualities recog-
nised in that verse of Bret Harte's " Newport
Romance " which appeals more perfectly to
the ear than to the eye.

" The delicate odour of mignonette
The remains of a dead and gone bouquet
Is all that tells of a story : yet
Could we think of it in a sweeter way ?"

It is impossible for a garden to be over-
crowded with mignonette, and as for the helio-
trope, the turnsole, no planting could be
lavish enough to satisfy its lovers. Nor could
there be too much of another most scentful

i8o A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

treasure of old gardens — the citronella, or
lemon verbena. It is rarely seen ; it does not
grow for everybody, and it has its own high
reserves. I have long had a fancy that it
would only content itself under the care of those
gentlewomen whose lives are spent in the quiet
and fragrant corners as yet untouched by what
we call " the world." Engaged in the cares
of their well-ordered households ; remember-
ing the Sabbath and the poor ; careful ; frugal
toward themselves, yet royal in their generous
thought of others ; fresh with the dainty fresh-
ness of well-laundered linen — in a word, the
pure in heart, who see God everywhere, are the
ladies for whom the citronella grows. They
grow other things also, these lovely types of
gentle womanhood — lilies-of-the-valley, little
double white daisies, myosotis, clove-pinks,
little pink Hermosa roses, little white violets,
rose geraniums, and small-flowered pink and
white and yellow chrysanthemums ; but they
always have a bed of mignonette, and a plant
or two of heliotrope, and always, always, when
they say good-bye to a guest, at the doorway
to which their old-time courtesy has attended
her, they stoop down and break off a twig of

AUGUST 1 81

citronella, which she carries with her as the
sweetest benediction.

I should like it if one corner of the White-
paper Garden could be set solely as a place for
scents ; to have a garden which should rival
that most fragrant spot which Hawthorne
describes as Wordsworth's garden. Words-
worth, we know, said :

" I believe that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes."

Why not gather together those heavenly
breathings into a new small paradise? It
need not be a task of so great difficulty as to
discourage even those happiest of all gardeners,
who beg clips, and exchange roots and seeds,
and wait for years for the coming of a certain
iris, or the flowering of a tardy shrub, and it
could be arranged in even a small enclosure.
That it be enclosed, I take it, is a necessity.
To expect the full charm of even the hardiest
plants set out in the unfriended open, with
boys and cats and dogs and rough winds to
visit them at will and to harry them at pleasure,
is as foolish as to ask a child to carry the
bloom of its babyhood through a youth passed
in a hotel. First, last, always, I cry out for

1 82 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

barriers, fences, hedges, walls, anything that
will give the flowers the privacy, the reserve,
the protection which it is their mission to
teach a world in danger of forgetting the
lovely ideals that made the old days dear and
sweet.

Here, in the sheltered spot, the plants and
shrubs must be massed to secure what, for
a better word, we may call volume of
odour, and there must be careful grouping,
that those coming into bloom about the same
time may blend their fragrance. Under that
lonicera,1 which flowers before the leaf buds
start, and that Daphne, whose purple blossoms
open before the last long wreath of snow is
melted, white and purple violets must be
planted. Dig in fresh soil every second year,
divide and reset the violets, and leave the rest
to April. Under the lilacs lily-of-the-valley
may be left to its own devices, and under the
early, sweet Philadelphus, commonly called
mock-orange, small white and mottled pinks
will be glad to grow, and, on the sunny side,
clumps of yellow day-lilies. It would be a
pity to leave out the calycanthus, or strawberry
1 Fragrantissima.

AUGUST 183

shrub, dear to children, and place must be
made for the clethras. If there is room for
a tree, let it be a crab-apple tree, and if there
is a wall, plant sweetbriar and the evergreen
honeysuckle beside it. Roses should be
chosen solely for their odour-giving properties,
and lilies will care for themselves. So will the
sweetpeas, if they have a string lattice to
cling to. By midsummer the air is full of the
wine brewed by the precious mints, the pinks
— all kinds of pinks — heliotropes, some peonies,
some phloxes, mignonette, " the bee-alluring
thyme," rose geranium, one of the clematis,
and certain green things, angelica, artemisia,
marjorum, rue, rosemary. Earlier have been
the tall heads of an old favourite, called Greek
valerian, and a rocket called hesperis, which
with small flowers and sweet alyssum make a
sweet trio of cruciferous bloom much to be
prized. Some pale-coloured verbenas are of
a most refreshing and vernal sweetness, and
there are citronellas and certain musky-leaved
plants not to be found in any catalogue, but
which I would search for in forgotten corners
where I know they still cling to life. Always
the garden may hope for the shy flowering of

184 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

an occasional rose, even after rose time is
over, and as the year grows old we are
strengthened and prepared for the bitter
pungency of marigolds and chrysanthemums,
and far into the days whose morning grass
is grey with frost, and in the gardens are
desolate

" Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,"

the violets are faithful in their blossoming.

This is the month of the night garden. It
is the time for fireflies ; those ascending stars
which glow in the almost tropical twilights
that are ours. To sit in the warm silence and
watch the momentary upward gleaming of
these living candles, is a pleasure not to be
lightly held. As they flame out against the
mellow darkness, the young moon shows us
the steadier lamps held up by the night-loving
plants that lure the night moths with their pale
radiance and their heavy scents. The moon-
flower on the lattice is whitened over with
broad discs of honeyed sweetness ; the nicotina,
a disconsolate thing enough by daylight, rouses
itself at sundown, and opens its five-pointed
stars with much the same coquetry that a

AUGUST 185

grand dame of fashion prepares for the opera
or for a ball. The evening primrose is one
of the most interesting of American plants,
and white and yellow four-o'clocks are most
satisfactory. White petunias are at their best
after the shadows begin to fall, a certain
plebeian quality innate to the flower vanishing
with daylight. "A candlelight beauty" was
the phrase once used to describe a woman
whose charms were beginning to fade, and it
is not a bad one to use with respect to the
petunia. There are, it is most true, many
other white flowers which are almost more
lovely in the soft, silvery moonlight than in
the full noontide, but they do not belong to
August.

If, after all this special pleading, the August
gardener cannot be content without colour,
there is a full palette for him to choose from.
It is the fashion to decry the so-called " foliage
plants," for which I have a small liking myself.
Yet, why? The yellow-leaved things always
suggest decay, it is true, and the parti-coloured
ones blight, and the spotted-leaved ones
various insects or unwholesome soil ; but
there are white, woolly-leaved centaureas,

186 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

which are really beautiful, and there are self-
coloured coleus whose deep wine-crimson are
lovely. There could be no place in garden
of mine for stonecrops and alternanthias and
achyranthus, but there would be sure to be
places where a hedge of tall, bronzed cannas
would be both useful and imposing. The
green varieties, and those bearing flamboyant
red and yellow flowers, I should always class
with caladiums, and salvias and red geraniums,
but if I were careful to clip off the flower
stalks before they had a chance to show their
pitiable red petals I would be sure of a good
background for my dahlias and for the hardy
chrysanthemums — in August only a bushy
promise.

Can I have forgotten the morning glories
which are at prime when the dew-drenched
mornings begin to have a feeling of the coming
fall in the air ? Gay gossips in pink and blue
sunbonnets, eager to see, to show, they climb
the fences and laugh out their sunward greeting
in a way to banish sorrow from the saddest
heart. Theirs is the song of Pippa —

" God's in his Heaven
All's right in the world,"

AUGUST 187

And theirs a divine commission of cheerfulness.
But for an hour, truly, yet into that hour how
much good will and sweet friendliness, how
much brave beauty and helpful service !
There are convolvulus and ipomeas by the
score — lovely almost all of them, but the best
of all are the old, cool friends who won their
pretty name long years ago.

Snapdragons are true Augustians, and are
of a most lavish and gorgeous flowering. Blue
is the only colour absent from a bed of these
plants, whose season of flowering is longer than
that of any other plant of importance. The
gardeners have so improved the varieties that
there are more and more shades and combina-
tions of shades in the spikes, that lengthen
and ever lengthen.

Better than the snapdragons are the phlox,
now in their splendid prime, and better than
the phlox are the hollyhocks, towering impos-
ingly at the end of the paths, and along the
edges of the shrubberies. Here, again, we may
look for every colour but blue — white, blush-
rose, red, crimson, prune, yellow, copper, and
a dozen shades for which we have no really
descriptive names. Set on tall spires of pale

1 88 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

green, with calyx and leaves of a most effective
woolliness — there is small wonder that the
hollyhock is ever the painter's flower. None
composes better, and none, it seems to me,
gives a more comfortable sense of home. Yet
it does not care overmuch for culture, growing
quite contentedly in deserted corners. Indeed
the finest display of any flower I ever saw was
in the yard of an abandoned stone tenement
house in an old mill-town. Perhaps they had
had things their own way for a dozen years ;
perhaps for twenty. Certainly they had made
the most of their liberty, and the yard was a
condensed flame. With the snapdragons and
the larkspurs and the phlox the mere thought
of the hollyhock is a joy to the heart of every
garden-bred child.

And every child should be garden-bred, and
no child should be cheated out of his heritage
to garden joys by any pretext whatever.
Nothing can make up to him what he loses if
he loses that : nothing is of any value compared
with the treasures enjoyed and laid up in the
long hours spent in that one companionship
which can never harm nor pall. In after years,
in alien places, next to the thought of our

AUGUST 189

father's face and our mother's smile, it is the
old garden where we played to which the soul
looks backward — and forward, since that which
hath been shall be.

When I think of children in gardens, it must
be confessed that I think of little girls. Boys
belong to the larger world of fields and woods
and the hardier joys of trapping and nutting
and fishing. Orchards belong to them, but I
do not think that the smaller, more orderly
domain which fills the common idea of a garden
appeals seriously to a healthy-minded boy.
In the cherry-trees, among the strawberry beds,
or the melon patch — or even in a turnip field —
there is something to be done by way of
gratifying that perpetual hunger which is a part
of being a boy, and to which nothing comes
amiss. Flowers, however, mean but little to
them. They like to go for water-lilies, because
there is the water, there is the boat, and there
is an almost certain opportunity to become
both wet and dirty. They like to go for ferns
or laurel, because there are the woods and the
rocks against which to try their strength, and
there is the absolute necessity of tearing their
clothes in getting the armsful of fronds or of

1 90 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

blossoms which ministers to the primal acquisi-
tiveness of their race. A garden however
means restrictions and limitations, scorned by
boys, but accepted by little girls as a part of
the eternal feminine.

If any proper garden such as everybody's
grandmothers and aunts used to love, the
whole summer was none too long for the things
small hands found to do. There was a tree,
always a tree, there, with low-hanging branches,
under which the little women kept house, and
there they lived that mimic life which, to such
little women, is so absorbing and so real. Bits
of gaily painted crockery were hoarded there,
and perhaps some fragments of a broken mirror.
Some snail shells, some bits of quartz, or
lichened rock, some sods of dark green moss —
that was all, except the imagination, that con-
verted these properties into an adequate setting
for whatever game might be in hand —

" A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral."

" If there are no games, what is left? " cries
Tolstoy, but there are games in plenty. Violets
are turned into soldiers or duellists by inter-
locking their heads, and having a tug-o'-war

AUGUST 191

with their stems. This is the one flower game
that I can remember in which boys ever en-
gaged, and this only, I fancy, because of the
shuddering horror of the little girls at their
blood-thirstiness. Boys never cared to hold
buttercups under each other's chins to see if
they were fond of butter — they knew that
already ; nor did they puff themselves black
in the face to learn from a dandelion ghost if
their mothers wanted them — that they would
learn all too soon without questionings. But
with the aid of these golden fancyings, which
are a part of children, the little girls found
whole summersful of things to do in the garden.
If dandelion stems are split back to the blossom,
and the bitter strips are warmed for a moment
in the mouth, curls can be made which will
instantly transform copper-brown heads into
blonde curly ones. Months later, much finer
wigs may be made of cornsilk, and the striped
grass called gardeners' garters will always turn
one into a mermaid, if the drama in hand be
Hans Andersen's Little Mermaid. A basin
of water tinted to a proper blue by the sur-
reptitious borrowing of the family indigo-bag
is ocean enough for the fairy shallops made

192 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

from the petals of the iris, the fall making the
hull, you know, and the standards, with a thorn
or two, acting as sails. The hulls of milkweed
pods, being much stronger, may be driven about
in the wilder waste of waters found in the
watering troughs by the gate. The finest
balls in the world are those of which the holly-
bush ladies dance minuets, and fandangoes, to
the delight of the chaperons, who sit about in
the full dress of a larkspur bonnet, or a hood
made from a four-o'clock. Four-o'clocks them-
selves make most beautiful ladies, by pulling
the skirts of half-a-dozen over the little green
seed ball which makes such a satisfactory head
for the chosen one. Balsam parties are not
to be despised. The guests do not long retain
the cool freshness of their petticoats, it is true,
but long enough for a dance or two and the
serving of the banquet laid on acorn plates,
and poured from rose-hip tea-things. Wafers
made from the silken inner tissues of honesty
and mallow cheese were their favourite dainties
in the long ago garden days that were mine, and,
if the occasion were a patriotic one, torpedoes
were ready to hand in a crumpled rose petal,
and cannon in the spent tubes of the morning

AUGUST 193

glory, or the elastic pods of the lady's slippers.
I wonder if such delicate feasting is still to be
found, and if little girls themselves dress for
paying visits as in the old days ? Do they link
together the blossoms of the phlox into neck-
laces, and earrings and bracelets ? Do they
wear gloves made of trumpet-creeper flowers ?
Do they sew with foxglove thimbles, and
drink tea from Canterbury bells? Can they
fashion delicate wreaths of pink, or white, or
blue from the slender horns of the larkspur?
Have they patience to separate the fine mem-
branes of the "live-for-ever" leaves, and then
fill the little purses so formed with water?
They are good for nothing, it is true, for they
will not stand upright, and the water spills out
if they do not, and if it did stay in, what would
that avail ? In a garden there is time aplenty,
thank God ! and in the morning glow no one
asks that a thing be useful to be worth while.
There is leisure even for the blowing about
of thistledown, or for tracing the flight of the
fairy sails that carry the seeds of the milkweed
far through the unhasting air.

SEPTEMBER

In fallow fields the goldenrod

And purple asters beck and nod.

The milkweed launches fairy boats,

In tangled silver the cobweb floats :

Pervasive odours of ripening vine

Fill the air like a luscious wine.

The gentian blooms on the browning waste

With coral chains is the alder laced

The blackbirds gather, and wheel and fly,
The swallows twitter a low " Good-bye ! "

GOING TO MEETING

SEPTEMBER

THE HARVEST MOON

" I "HE garden keeps up a lifelong quarrel
with the calendar men. They say that
June, July and August are the summer months :
it says that summer begins when the first
snowdrop hollows out a silver vase for itself
in the snow, and begins to ring that chime
whose music only the purest hearts can know,
and which even they cannot share with another,
and that summer ends when the last chrysan-
themum is gathered. September, therefore,
is a summer month, with a perfect right to its
wealth of flowers. For her the June dawns
and July twilights were planning, for her the
hot August nights were at work, as well as
for the Indian corn, which the farmers say they
can hear growing while the moon, dimmed by
sultry vapours, goes languidly from sky to
sky.

The Indian corn! Mondawmin, mahiz,
maize — how the beautiful, generous plant lives
197

198 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

in these names ! Where did they come from ?
What did they mean to the first red-brown men
who spoke them ? There must be many lovers
of our America who regret that so few such
links are left to bind us to the old races who
were here before us. It was a most pathetic
and tender trait in our ancestors which led
them to try to see in the wild growths of the
land of their exile some likeness to the flowers
of the old gardens and old fields and copses
they had left behind them, and so to perpetuate
the old names. It is a pity, beyond words,
that they overlooked the opportunity, which
can never come again, for knowing the
aboriginal names, and that the little knowledge
that we have is so widely scattered that no full
or convenient lists are to be found. Perhaps
we exaggerate the probability of the existence
of a full vocabulary of plant names among the
Indians. If we ask one to-day for the name
of a flower, it is ten to one that he answers
" wauwausquane — not good for anything," and
we learn our first lesson : a plant not to be used
as a dye, or a food, or a medicine, is nothing —
only a flower.

Such of the old names as are left have been

SEPTEMBER 199

subjected to the fate of the words of all un-
lettered peoples, and were reduced to writing
in such form as were suggested by their sound
to English, French or Spanish ears, and were
often made unnecessarily clumsy by their spell-
ing. A certain wild beauty clings to the
syllables, properly inflected. It is easier to
say pond lily than 6kundunm6ge, but the
older word has a cool, marshy sound quite
in keeping with the still, shadowy waters,
haunted by heron and by kingfisher, in which
the white flowers open to the sun. The
" mountain-strolling lilies " of Meleager carry
their orange-coloured flame with the same
wild grace as the American musk6tipineeg,
and the word inninautig, the tree of trees, is
a delightful name for the sugar maple. Wild
strawberries have a most delicate flavour if we
call them ohdamin, and those dear little pink
blossoms, so loyal to the woods that they
almost always perish if taken from their
shelter, are sweet as spring beauties, but
sweeter far as miskodeed.

Four aboriginal words have been adopted
by the scientific world in naming our native
plants — catalpa, maize, or mahiz, yucca and

200 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

Sequoia, the latter in honour of a Cherokee
who invented an alphabet and taught it to his
people. Popularly, many words are happily
retained, as catawba, and scuppernong for
certain grapes, and, used as adjectives, we
find the Chickasaw plum, the Atamasco lily,
the Missouri currant and aster, the Osage
orange, the Seneca snake-root, and so on.
Over our heads as we walk in the budding
woods the soft fringes of the tamarisk are
trembling, and the tupelo is unfurling its flat
fans ; under our feet the aromatic, gummy
leaf scales of the tackemehack are fallen.
The silky dogwood is the kinnikinnick, and the
movre wood of the main coasts, and the
willow herb of those hideous charred deserts
which follow the footsteps of the murderers
of our primeval forests, share the odd word
wykopy.

The white fruits — black-eyed, with a certain
jewel-like quality — of the cohosh shine above the
mossy banks on which the fragrant pipsissiwa
is blooming. The yellow puccoon or alkanet is
abloom on the prairies — and when fall comes
the wood's edge will blaze out with the scarlet
wahoo — or Indian arrowwood. From the

SEPTEMBER 201

berries of the black holly, or yaupon, the famous
black drink was brewed, and although tobacco
is tobacco the world over, to Hackluyt it was
vpponoc. The persimmon holds fast to its old
name, and so does the chinquapin, while pecan
is a pure Indian word for which no interpreter
is needed by any Greek or Italian fruit- vendor.

Only one plant, a reed-grass, ever achieved
the dignity of becoming a token, or tribal sign,
but it was while I was making sure of this
that I came upon this charming pet name for
a baby, " gohana " (" a hanging flower ").

Of very many plants the word Indian is used
compounded with another noun in our common
speech. The opuntia is Indian fig, the wild
arum, called by New England children Jack-in-
the-pulpit, is the Indian turnip, and the canna
is Indian shot. One of the few scarlet flowers
is a dianthus known as Indian pink, and the
painted trillium, least balmy of flowers, is
Indian balm. Why other tobacco than real
tobacco should be called tobacco at all I do
not know, but one of the lobelias is Indian
tobacco. One of the groundsels is called
squaw-weed, and one of the broom-rapes is
known as squaw-root. The blue cohosh is also

202 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

called papoose-root, and the plantain is still
often called by the phrase of ill-omen to the
red man's ear, " the white man's foot."

Two shy woodlanders come last, as in a
great pageant the post of honour is reserved
for the man held in highest esteem. The sight
of either may well dignify a day, so entirely
do both belong to the highest aristocracy.
The cyprepediums of our bluest June weather,
swaying their white, or pink, or yellow, or
purple slippers, with fluttering untied laces,
are the Indian moccasins of long-vanished
races, and in the deep August woods are
those pallid ghosts ; those austere and solemn
blossoms ; those flowers of wonder and of fear
— the Indian pipes !

So far has one thought of the September
cornfields, glistening, rustling, waving, opulent,
led me.

The moment the air holds a touch of what
Hawthorne calls " the Septemberish feeling,"
we are intensely aware of an overpowering
sense of yellow. Before the month has
touched the first ripening leaves with a warning
finger, she throws down armsful of flowers with
such royal prodigality that the fields and way-

SEPTEMBER 203

sides, the edges of the wood, the marshes, and
men's limited gardens may all take what they
will. There is enough for all, and it is a pretty
greed that makes the whole world open its
arms to be filled. The sun shines down with
redoubled glory because of the floods of sun-
colour he sees below, and his happiness is like
that of an earthly father who loves to see his
own likeness in the faces of his sons.

More and more, it is to be hoped, gardeners
will specialise, and more and more the garden
will be as carefully considered as if it were a
picture, in which every bit of colour must tell
not only of itself, but of the harmony of the
whole. People will think ; will choose ; will
reject. Everything will have its meaning
and the result will be, ah ! what will it not
be?

A yellow garden would be the easiest of all
gardens to arrange, since Nature has made more
of her experiments with that colour than with
any other, and the plants which bear yellow
flowers are far more robust and easily entreated
than those whose blossomings are pink or
white or blue. It could be made to be a joy
while March winds are blowing, and a greater

204 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

joy when the Thanksgiving fires are lighted.
Here is what I should have if the Fates were
kind.

There should be a background of irregularly
planted conifers — white pines, firs, and hem-
locks— which should have grown for many years
just beyond a high brick wall, which should
have gotten that mellow tone and roughened
texture which lends itself to all sorts of colour
schemes with a good will that is almost human.
If I could not have this I should like to shut
out my neighbours by a thicket of high shrubs,
the quick-growing elder or the slow-growing
dogwood, or the middle-growing sumach, — if I
went to the woods for my things, — with a spice
bush or two, for the sake of the yellow tufts of
aromatic florets which come before the snows
are fairly gone. Coeval with this are the
Forsythias, Fortunii, suspensa, viridissima,
quick-growing, clean-leaved, insect-free, and so
in haste to greet the returning sun, with their
joy-peal of yellow bells, that the stars have
not fallen from the hardy jessamine before
they begin to sing. While they are playing a
triple bob major, the crocus are abroad, at
their best if planted in thick mats close, but

THE NORTH MEADOW BROOK

SEPTEMBER 205

not too close, to the Forsythia roots. Before
they are gone the daffodils are here, and

" The slim narcissus takes the rain "

in all the lovely variants of the type which
men have loved so long and so well. The
yellow tulips begin to glow like fire before

" The shining daffodil dies."

And while they are in their splendid prime
the Crown Imperials hang out their pearly
diadems. No one will care to cut it, but its
decorative value is very great if it is seen
marching along the brick wall, behind the
tulips, and well beyond the border of yel-
low primroses. The common cowslip, the
common primrose, the delicate hose-in-
hose, no one ever yet had a border of
them too long, nor ever will — since, if one be
not the veriest of Peter Bells, a primrose is
not a primrose at all, but is, as saith the golden
sentence of True Thomas of Ecclefechan, "a
beautiful eye, looking out on us from the great
inner sea of beauty."

A good shrub that is being forgotten in the
modern rush for new things is the Corchorus
or Kerria. Its foliage is exceedingly pretty,

206 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

and its angular green stems give it an all-
the - year round usefulness shared by few
bushes. Once I saw it at its best, trained
up the sides of a long arbour whose top was
a heavy thatch of wisteria. The sunlight
played through the purple blossoms where
the bees were humming. The Kerrias, like
hidden princesses in old fairy tales, tossed
their deep orange-coloured balls into the air,
which was filled with the clamour of nesting
martins. The tiny mistress of the garden
stepped daintily along under the gold and
purple canopy, nodding her grey curls appre-
ciatively at our praise. "A pretty place," she
said. "A very pretty place."

Now come the iris in all their lovely tones
of yellow and of brown. So many of them !
So free with their gifts ! I shall always care
more for these imprisoned butterflies since I
have read in " Mes Origines," of Mistral's pas-
sion for a colony which grew in a ditch in the
Provence of his childhood. Twice, within one
fateful half-hour, he fell into its muddy depths
in vain endeavour to reach the blossoms.
Twice he received whippings and change of
clothes, but his "hands still itched so to clutch

SEPTEMBER 207

some of those beautiful bouquets of gold " that
he went back to the forbidden spot for the
third time ; for the third time he fell in, after
which he was sentenced to bed.

"And what do you think I dreamed? Of
my yellow irises, pardi! In a beautiful stream
which wound about the farmhouse, limpid,
transparent, azured like the fountains of
Vaucluse, I saw magnificent tufts of great
green flags which flaunted in the air ; a veri-
table kingdom of flowers of gold. Dragon-
flies with blue silk wings alighted on them,
and I swam about nude in the laughing water.
I seized the fair-haired fleurs-de-lis by handsful,
by double handsful, and by armsful, but the
faster I plucked the faster they grew."

What could be more charming than that
phrase "the fair-haired fleurs-de-lis"?

There is a shrubby tree which would be
glorious in June, when it hangs out long
clusters of yellow papilionaceous flowers. In
Austria they call it the golden rain — perhaps
remembering how

" Danae in her tower
Where no love was, loved a shower."

There are also tall composites which make

208 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

fine backgrounds if the space given be large.
It should be very large indeed to find room
for the ubiquitous golden glow ! The old-
fashioned sunflower was a most honest soul.
It was not his fault that certain soulful verse-
makers a generation ago cried its praise in the
market-place with such zeal that a weary world
begged for peace, and it should not be blamed
for their lack of discretion. Its corona of
cheerful ray-flowers and its broad tanned face
long ago became an integral part of September.
To us now also belong by right some prim
yellow dahlias, and the whole great world of
goldenrod. I was not surprised to read that
with the grasses and sedges it was the fav-
ourite plant of Thoreau, or to hear him say
that they "expressed all the ripeness of the
season and shed their mellow lustre over the
fields as if now the declining sun had be-
queathed its hues to them. It is the floral
solstice a little after midsummer, when the
particles of golden light, the sun dust, have,
as it were, fallen like seeds on the earth and
produced these blossoms." On every hillside
and in every valley stand countless asters,
coreopsis, tansies, goldenrods and the whole

SEPTEMBER 209

race of yellow flowers, true sun-loving de-
votees, turning steadily with their luminary
from morning till night. Happily, much as
they love to gad along the highways, or to
celebrate their souls in fallow fields or beside
stone walls, they are quite willing to fill in
angles of your garden with their bright wands
of gold, and so restrained, are of great colour
value.

Long before the day of the goldenrod is the
day of the yellow day-lily and the small-leaved,
four-petalled yellow rose, which almost never
finds its way into a catalogue, but lives on the
gift of friend to friend, in farmyards and cottage
garden spots, one of the most beautiful of
roses. Thorny, scentless, blooming for a week
or a fortnight at best, it belongs to that precious
sisterhood of which we think when we read of
roses in the old poets. And that is, I take it,
the highest test of true rosehood.

When these little roses are covering long,
bending wands with their shining gold, the
yellow pansies are at their zenith. Nothing is
better than to plant in many, many yellow
pansies between your narcissus, which will, if
you chose them carefully, and see that the soil

2io A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

has plenty of sand, plenty of bonemeal, and
plenty of sunshine, give you six good weeks
full of bloom. The pansies will not only bear
them company, but will cover their ripening
leaves with a fair pall of laughing colour and
cheerfulness, which will last far into the hot
weather, and will begin to laugh again when
the autumn dews fall on them. Among them
have some bulbs of the auratum lilies, I beg
you. They will grow quite unperceived until
the day of their gorgeous tropical flowering
and, that over, they will withdraw quietly, and
with dignity. Auratum lilies are most beauti-
ful, also, planted about with yellow Spanish iris,
who go the way of all things bright and fair
before lily time, after which, if you have a small
bed for reserves, you can fill in the bed with
any one of half-a-dozen yellow-flowering things
— Michaelmas daisies, calendulas, marigolds, or
even zinnias, which can now be had in lovely
shades of pale yellow and burnt orange. The
yellow columbine must have its honoured place
in the hardy border beside the wallflower, and
a small very double, shining ranunculus, which
used to bloom in long ago Mays, snap-
dragons, nasturtiums, escholtzias, coreopsis —

SEPTEMBER

these are the things that must be renewed year
by year. The dandelion will take the grass
under their protection if you will let it, and the
moth mullein, and common velvet mullein, will
make you glad if you spare their chance-sown
seeds,

Americans of the generation after the next
will have forgotten that there was ever a need
for the naturalisation papers now carried by
the broom, which is making itself very much
at home in some favoured places. I wish we
could have the gorse too — or whin — and I
devoutly wish every American who has a bit
of wood to guard and hold for posterity would
set out some witch-hazel. If we were obliged
to send to Japan for this beautiful siren, how
eagerly we would offer it the highest seat in our
plantations ! And as for the mate to the
witch-hazel, the dear, common, hardy old yellow
chrysanthemum, it were worth while to have
no garden at all until its day, so well is it
worth waiting for.

Blue gardens have been planned often, and
with great success. There are, it is true, no
blue flowering shrubs in our temperate climate,
but white ones answer excellently. Have

212 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

spireas, have Madame Plantier roses, have
Madonna lilies, have tall spikes of valerian,
and low borders of double daisies, and mats
of the perennial candytuft. Have plenty of
white asters and chrysanthemums ready for the
days when blues are not, and above all have
plenty of soft grey-green leafage to set off the
blues — moss-pinks, lavender, centaurias. Your
garden will be then a parure of jewels, sapphires
of every sparkling, palpitating, ineffable blue,
set in the silver that befits such gems.

For earlier blooming the scillas are incom-
parable, and the grape hyacinths, if closely
planted and left to themselves for a dozen
years before dividing and replanting, are very
delightful. Blue hyacinths are altogether
desirable, but need an abundant high light of
white ones adjacent to give their best effect.
Personally I care most for a small single variety,
seen in old gardens, which throws up many tall,
few-flowered stalks from a nest of leaves.
While they are here the woods are offering us
those charming blues which are so distinctively
American, and so easily transplanted. The
violet, which is the violet par excellence to the
world at large, spreads fairy wreaths of deep

SEPTEMBER 213

blue above its heart-shaped leaves, and a
polemonium called, as so many plants are, blue-
bells— or Jacob's ladder — flowers for nearly a
month. Drifts of exquisite phlox — the " Sweet
William " of the children — blow about in the
undergrowths like bits of vagrant clouds, having
an extraordinary change and play of colour,
and a fragrance as distinctly vernal as that
of the primrose itself. The tiny Quaker ladies,
or bluets, or innocence, or Houstonia, camps
down among the grasses, having a lesson of
its own to tell of the value of even the smallest,
least assertive plant when shown in masses,
and there is a Collinsia, which is innocence
also in some places, which is a lovely thing.
Other American blues are the mertinsias,
hepaticas, tradescantias, the viper's bugloss,
and the chicory, whose colour Mrs Clarke
most felicitously called "the Wedge wood blue."
Blue morning glories and ipomeas will reflect
the sky upon your lattice all summer long.
Campanulas will give you six weeks of flowering,
and the monkshoods can be depended on for a
grand showing, the depth of their colour being
that of deep water touched by some hidden
undercurrent, which produces no waves, but a

2i4 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

slow heaving which gives the light a chance to
work marvels in its bosom — vincas, Veronicas,
the tall blue Lobelia, and the pretty little brown
varieties of the same plant, plumbagoes, Brow-
alias, are all good blues, and good bloomers.

"The blue
" That never shone in woman's eyes "

glorifies the larkspurs into the best of garden
blues, quite another thing from the cold
flower of thirty years ago. They have been
hybridised and cultivated until the tall spires
of quivering blue flame are often six feet high.
Their great hardiness and duration of bloom
give them a most honourable place in the
world. Again I am indebted to Mrs Clarke's
penetration when she says, " they give one of
those invaluable inflections of colour which are
like the grace-notes in music."

It must be accounted a virtue in two of the
most exquisite of blue autumnal flowers that
they resist all attempts at cultivation, and stead-
fastly hold to their inviolate freedom. There
have been a few successes in the long list of
efforts to conquer the fringed gentian and the
harebell, but they are not flowers which bloom
to order. They choose for themselves, these

SEPTEMBER 215

flowers of the sky, these reincarnations of
maidens

" Who would be wooed, and not unsought, be won,"

but who, in spite of the wooing, elect the
solitary way. Who would care for gentians
set in a garden bed, or for harebell nodding in
a window box? They belong to the rusty
sedges of brimming September uplands, to the
silence in which one can hear the leaves breath-
ing, softly, as a shower comes down the hills,
deeply, as the rain drifts down the valley, and
the silver bells of the water-drops come from
farther and farther distances. The gossamers
are abroad in gentian days, lacing the grasses
with cordages of fairy spinning for the dew to
thread with pearls, and there are faint, delicious
breaths of song from small unknown birds who
take the place once filled by the blessed
choristers of May. They are too small, too
shy and too alert to be readily identified by
the aid of the how-to-know books, where, no
doubt, the colour of the upper mandible and
secondary wing coverts are duly set down for
the enlightenment of the student armed with
a rifle. How can there be rifles, when rifles
mean the taking away of the life of a bird!

n6 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

How many generations of song and move-
ment and usefulness, and beauty and pure
delight are lost when one of them falls !

And as for recognising them by the attempts
to reduce their songs to musical notes, or to
syllables ! The one perfected effort I now
recall is Emerson's starling phrase,

" The starling flutes his O-ka-lee,"

as sweetly in the printed page as in the March
marshes. And yet even this must be heard
by that inner ear which remembers.

I do not like red — a red flower is like a
coarse voice or an ungentle hand : it hurts ;
and in my garden I will have none of them.
There is, however, a single exception, and
that is a part of the pomp of September —
the favoured Septembers in which one's good
fortune shows us this special bit of splendid
colouring. There is a scrap of verse some-
where about the cardinal flower, which shows
it not ineffectively — verses which, I think, run
somehow thus :

" Oh ! Bumble-bee, revelling in the sweets
September has stowed away
In the heart of the wayside clover bloom,
Don't you know 'tis the Sabbath Day ?

BROUGHTON'S POND

SEPTEMBER 217

" Do you not know, you wicked Bee !
That the days of the week are seven :
Six long days for work and play,
The seventh for rest and Heaven ?

" I know, but even on Sabbath days
A hungry Bee must dine,
And so I must work for my dinner sweet
Of honey and clover- wine.

" Beside, I have been to the forest church,
Where the great pine-trees form aisles,
And with their branches weave the roof
Through which the glad sun smiles.

" On pine-leaf organ the west wind played,
While birds, a tuneful throng,
With brook and insect and whispering reeds,
Carry the psalm along.

" The Cardinal Flower, in crimson dressed,
His hands in prayer did raise
And in his sermon did repeat
Our great Creator's praise.

" ' What was his text ? ' The words that I
To the clover blooms sing low,
That the Summer winds to the rushes tell,
That I hear in the brooklets' flow :

" That the waves lisp murmuring to the shore
In a dreamy soft refrain ;
That the snowflakes tell to the winter woods,
That the flowers learn from the rain.

" The same glad words that the calm stars sing
In the quiet skies above,
In one grand chorus, ' Life is sweet
And God is Eternal Love.' "

OCTOBER

The bright-eyed squirrels, furry, fleet,

A gleaming go on pattering feet.

Brown nuts, polished by early frost,

On the moss below by the winds are tossed.

Maple and hickory, ash and oak

Each has donned a gorgeous cloak.

Red haws gleam the hazels near

Dry grass waves in the uplands sere,

The year's at rest in the mellow haze,
That crowns with gold these royal days !

OCTOBER

THE TRAVELLER'S MOON

" " I "HE year's grown old," we cry with
Perdita. It is not any the less worth
while for that, even in our gardens, perhaps
better, if we have acquired the habit of thought
that permits a cheerful contemplation of

" The last of life, for which the first is made,"
and

" Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither ! "

A garden, you know, is traversed by paths
suited to the Seven Ages of Man impartially,
and from the high, sunny alley of roses of
noon, the quiet vistas to be travelled later in
the evening, and even the dusky groves where
it seems to be always night, beckon, not always
to unresponding heart.

The anxieties of seedtime are over ; fear of

221

222 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

drought or flood, or insect or mildew are past.
The spendthrift summer is gone, but it is a
poor story if we cannot find in the careful
hoardings of the autumn a beauty which the
prodigal June had not. A hedge of roses
on St John's Eve is a glorious sight, but a
handful of the pointed buds of the China
roses, set about with the crimson and purple
shoots which September has provided, is far
more precious. They have the added grace
of that pathos which envelops everything for
which we plan, and hope, and which, coming
at last, comes so late that Farewell treads close
upon the heels of All hail.

Now that it is October in all the gardens
that the sun shines in ; the friendly sun, to
whom, says Thoreau, "the earth is all equally
cultivated, and a garden," we are inspired
with new virtues, and make haste to gather
up the fragments that remain, that nothing
be lost. We watch the skies for signs of
rain or frost. We are abroad both early and
late, because we know that idleness now
means that there will be no flowers for us
next spring. There is a touch of chill in
the air ; a prescience of coming change in the

OCTOBER 223

delicate withdrawal of familiar objects behind
the thin veil woven from the smoke of countless
fires of fallen leaves. Tenderly, but with
certainty, we are told that the time for rest
is drawing near, and, as in the last dear
moments that go before all partings, we
linger among the yet familiar friends, seeing
beauties unguessed in richer days ; giving
praise begrudged aforetime, and trying with
futile pains to make up for past indifference
or blindness by a too brief arduous love.

In sweetpea time, how little we cared for the
nasturtium ! We recognised their usefulness
and good will. We bade them hide a fence,
and it vanished behind a wall of green. We
told them to cover an unsightly heap of waste,
and it was done. We asked them to take
charge of the window boxes, and they over-
flowed with obliging leaves and bloom ; but a
careless nod was as much as they got for
their pains. But now! How glorious we
find their play of colour, and the arch postur-
ings ordered by their pliant stems. True
coquettes, we cannot be sure to-day what
forms or colours they will assume to-morrow,
nor can we master their pretty secrets of

224 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

movement, or their tricks with beads of dew
and drops of rain. Did they frolic thus all
the summer, or have they waited for cool
nights for their madcap pranks?

In August we scorned the salvias. Now
they find their place — if they are planted in
our neighbour's garden, and the neighbour
keep at that discreet distance which allows
the planes of air to do their task of blending
and softening. It is a shame to think so ill
of the good-natured braggart who makes so
fine and quick a growth, and who is so lavish
with his spires of scarlet bloom. No doubt
he comforts many a heart with his cheerful
bravado, and as he is an adaptable creature,
asking little and giving much, he has his own
large uses, and it is as little as we can do to
ask his pardon for our ungracious thoughts.
Not everybody likes scarlet, that is all.

Zinnias are the best October flowers. There
are now strains that rival the rose in the depth
of their crimson and the form of their flower-
heads. There are oranges and yellows, and
ochres and dull whites, which are most satisfy-
ing— planted against a background of spirea
prunifolias and Thunberg's barberry, which

OCTOBER 225

colour so early, and in tints so nearly the same.
I had almost used a word commonly reserved
for homespun stuffs or for certain paints, and
had said that the zinnias were durable flowers.
Let the word stand ! In the garden they last
for weeks, and if they be placed in a jar big
enough to hold them loosely, and a drop or two
of camphor be added to the fresh water every
day, and the ends of the stems be clipped often
— ands enough, to be sure ! — a cluster of them
will keep for a fortnight. Zinnias are rather
coarse, it is true, and fastidious persons do not
like to touch their stems. They would not be
at all satisfactory as spring flowers, but now
they are all one could wish.

In early October the African marigolds make
a fine show. Their rank scent has the same
tonic quality as the frost-presaging morning
air, and their colour is magnificent — sulphur,
orange and copper. The first touch of frost
kills them, but it does not kill the cosmos which
is the hardiest of all the composites, except
the chrysanthemums. Trained to a wire net-
ting, and kept in place by lacings of raffia, the
cosmos makes an uncommonly pretty, feathery
green background for summer flower-beds, and

226 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

comes surprisingly into full blossom after the
swallows have left, and when the blackbirds
are making ready for flight.

Dahlias are for October, although they have
been making themselves felt ever since Sep-
tember came in. They used to be found only
in the out-of-the-way and rather humble places
whither so many old time-ities (to use Frank
Stockton's word), have fled during the reign
of the red geranium,1 but now it has come to
its own in popular favour, and is in danger of
becoming that unbearable thing, a fashionable
flower. If the soil be not too rich ; if the
season be not too damp ; if a little judicious
staking and a great deal of judicious pruning
be done, the dahlia will make a fine show
of velvet heads. They try to make it look
like a cactus nowadays — but why ? Why
try to make anything or anybody resemble
anything but itself or himself? The world
has outgrown grained woodwork, and imi-
tation marble walls and chimney-pieces ;

1 The story of the Red Geranium is thus told to Joseph
Vance. " What's a Wilier ? It's a 'ouse with stables for a one-
'orse shay, and a green'us, and a gardener, and some scarlet
geeraniums. And what's geeraniums? Well — geeraniums'
what they sells on the barrers."

OCTOBER 227

why should it encourage a masquerade of
flowers ?

Pansies are incomparably finer now than
they have been since early May, and the sweet-
scented purple violets are again in bloom.
Tiny seedlings of ladies' delights are beginning
to bloom, and young English daisies have de-
cided that they cannot wait for their first spring
to know how it feels to offer the guardian sun a
little garland of their white and pink blossoms.
It is yet possible to gather a handful of the
cornflowers, and perhaps the mignonette may
still have blossoms to give away.

There is an old-fashioned flower which I
long to see restored to its old place in October
gardens, and that is the white and purple
gomphrena. It is one of the many flowers
known as bachelor's button, and because of the
stiff bractlets which protect the life organs of
the plant it is often called a strawflower.
The white heads have a nacre-like purity which
I have not seen in any other blossoms, and the
crimson-purple ones cover cheerful little bushes
with very prettily graded balls. They were
much esteemed in the good old days of genuine
country parlours, where stiff bunches of these

228 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

everlasting flowers, interspersed with the silken
flakes of the honesty filled the painted vases
on the high mantel shelves just above the row
of miniatures or silhouettes of slim-necked
grandmammas, and perruqued grandpapas.
Patriotism strikes its roots deep in the soil
whereon the strawflowers grow.

On walls and trellises the cobeas are
beginning to be worth while, and the Madeira
vine, which has woven such a thick curtain of
leaves, is threaded over with sweet white
stitches of bloom. The evergreen honey-
suckle thinks well to offer a last garland, and
at its feet the Hermosa roses smile undismayed
in the eyes of the frost. There may be other
roses, a few hybrids, and teas, but it is always
the delicate silvery-pink Hermosa that seems
the true October rose.

In every shrubbery I would plant as many
Japanese anemones as I could find room for.
So placed, the summer growth is unobtrusive,
and the white showers of bloom which come
on the breath of the autumn winds make them
among the most invaluable of our hardy plants.
There is always the charm of the unexpected
in an anemone. One cannot be quite sure

OCTOBER 229

how many sepals it will have, or what disposi-
tion it will make of them. The thing one can
be safe to look for is the great, golden constant
heart.

The October stone is, rightly enough, the
opal, its pearly lights and pale amethystine
shadows are her late dawns, and her early,
haunted dusks. Its blues are her skies, its
greens her young springing wheat, and its reds
and pinks and yellows are those of her ripened
leaves. And since this is true, the October
garden must have plenty of lawn and plenty
of shrubbery, and a good background of trees.
For once I will not beg for white pines, but will
have red oaks and black oaks, and a hickory,
and one or two purple ashes, and a distant
row of maples. Rock maple for yellow, and
soft maples for the reds that outblush the sun
that now sets in so dense a bank of smoke that
we can look into his eyes unharmed. Between
the trees and the zinnia beds sumachs shall
grow ; the tall ones which colour orange and
pink ; the short ones whose crimson leaves are
stained with purple and olive. Both of these
fine natives carry stiff cones of claret-coloured
fruit far into the winter, and both have tropical

230 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

suggestions in their pinnate leaves. I do not
know why a divided leaf always has this sub-
conscious meaning, but it has.

Dogwoods, which were the glory of the May
woods, are equally glorious now. Sassafras is
a close second, and even a small planting should
contain it, and under the sassafras there must
be plenty of pennyroyal, which is to me a herb
of matchless potency in the evoking of old and
beloved memories. Of common garden shrubs
I have already spoken, my especial favourites
being the white snowberry, and the barberries.
With these are still late asters, pale purple,
like drifts of smoke, among the withering
leaves, and a small-flowered white variety that
grows in the unnoted way certain asters affect,
as if fern seed were sown about them, yet which
at the right moment, doff their cloaks of dark-
ness, and stand forth in a robe of silver
embroidered with seed pearls. For once I
wish I knew the scientific name of this fairy
princess, so great a favourite is she with me,
and gladly would I herald her praises. For
all her finery she is a very democratic princess,
and strolls along dusty highways and ragged
fences like any gypsy.

OCTOBER 231

To men, in whose hearts the ancient land
hunger of the Aryan aches unsatisfied by all
the white paper ever bleached and pressed,
the true October is not red, but brown, the
colour of

" The good gigantic smile of the brown earth;"

There can be nothing more subtle than the
mellow tones of a freshly ploughed field,
velvet black if we look across them sunward ;
brown and grey with silver lights and purple
shadows if we face the pole star. Horses seem
glad to turn the furrows, and the farmer, cast-
ing the seed into the loam, is performing the
highest and most symbolic of all human
labours. Fellow - worker, he, with the sun
and the wind and the rain and the frost,
marrying the potent germ of the bread that
is to be, with the dark secret forces, for ever
working together with the awful First Cause,
to care for that which, in its turn, must go
back to the elements again and again in
endless cycles.

Elizabeth, who needs no other name to the
guests who flock to her German garden, tells
us how she longs to imitate her servants and

232 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

to put her hands into the dirt itself. The
change would be but a poor one to me if I
had to barter the friendly, homely contact
with the pleasant earth for the dignity to
which so great a solace was denied. If I
had a real garden, with real soil in it, nothing
should keep me from going down on my
knees and getting every one of my ten fingers
as black as black could be. I would dig. I
would plant. I would weed: oh, with what joy !
Before the latter rains come, and while the
chrysanthemums are budding, is the time for
garden-making. There is not the constant
hindrance of showery weather which April
brings, and instead of courting rheumatisms
and influenzas by bending over soaked bor-
ders, across which chilly winds are blowing,
here is the golden haze of the ripened year
to envelop us like a garment ; comforting,
strengthening. Leisure is abroad, a wide
sense of duty accomplished inspires to new
effort, and

" Hope smiles enchanted, and waves her golden hair."

Already there must have been long hours
of careful planning : already the changes

OCTOBER 233

which unmake the mistakes of the past have
been decided upon. Already the bulb cata-
logues and the tree and shrub books, and the
hardy plantsmen's lists have been committed
to memory, and the processes of selection,
revision, addition and elimination have been
gone through time and again. Already the
orders have been placed, and the express
has brought those boxes and parcels whose
opening means pure joy. The polished brown
tulips ; the fat, glossy daffodils ; the rough-
coated hyacinths ; the slender Spanish iris ;
the little crocus buttons which set one guess-
ing as in the old game of head-or-tails —
the twiggy shrublets and the rough - looking
perennials — ah ! what equals these sights for
suggestion, and for the fair, unseen beauty
that hovers over them before the trained
vision ? Here is a true Shekinah, since
wherever is beauty there is God.

The old borders must now be carefully
spaded. If old clumps are to be divided, or
transplanted, take them up tenderly, lift them
with care, and, behold, one is many ! Phlox
roots are shifted, primroses are cleft and
replanted, doubling and trebling the row that

234 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

so rejoiced all eyes last spring. New violet
beds are to be started from the strong seed-
lings that grow in between the old plants.
New pansies must be taken from the cold
frame and set out between the fresh plantings
of daffodils. The Madonna lilies which were
reset in August now show fine tufts of root
leaves between which young plants of English
larkspur show their cleft leaves. Rows of
Canterbury bells, mats of pinks and sweet
williams and columbines — where is the time
to come from in which to get everything in
order ? What will happen if we have failed
to hoard every flake of ashes from the hearth
fire ? What shall we do if we have forgotten
to bring home from every outing a pailful of
sand for lightening the soil, or for sifting under
and over every Dutch bulb ? Which is better
worth while, a new coat or some loads of earth
from the depths of a swamp ; from the woods
or from the stableyard of some farmer too
careless to know that he would do better to
give away his best cow than the rich composts
to which he is so indifferent ? There is a
constant opportunity for choice on garden
days, and a better school for developing the

OCTOBER 235

ideal and for learning to rate lower things
at their true value can nowhere else be
found.

I think I once said that in all my life I
had never read a page from a printed book
out of doors. Nor ever will ! Books are
for winter — for nights, for stormy days, and
for times of ailing health. Why spend time
in reading, when we might be seeing? And
are not our eyes to be trusted as well as
another's ?

There is no prohibition, however, against
thinking in the open that which has been
learned by the study fire, and he walks
through a garden but poorly fitted for its best
enjoyment who has not the companionship of
the thoughts other men have had there. The
eyes of Richard Jeffries, of Thoreau, of
Burroughs and of Bradford Torrey ; of Izaak
Walton, of Dean Hole, and Canon Ellacombe,
of Maeterlinck, and of White of Selborne —
to name a few favourite out-of-door observers
who write what is called prose, but which is
often the highest poetry — open our own to a
thousand things unnoted before. There are
some precious books by women — Mrs C. W.

236 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

Earle, Mrs Alice Morse Earle, Miss Jeykll,
Mrs Clarke, Miss Blachjen, Mrs Thaxter, Mrs
Wright and the charming Elizabeth, which
seem, indeed, to make it idle for another
woman to write down the garden thoughts that
grow in the shadowy White-paper Country
where her possessions lie. More precious
still are the old herbals and travellers' journals
and early handbooks, and best of all are the
worn old poetry books, with dried violets
between their leaves, and pencil marks and
dates along their margins, from which we have
learned the singing words that lighten our
garden days. I could not have the best of
October if I could not repeat Keats' "Ode to
Autumn " as I walk through the golden after-
noons, and over and over I repeat these
perfect lines of Emily Dickinson :

" These are the days when birds come back,
A very few : a bird or two
To take a backward look.

" These are the days when skies put on
The old, old sophistries of June —
A blue-and-gold mistake.

" O fraud that cannot cheat the bee !
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief.

OCTOBER 237

" Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.

" O sacrament of summer days,
O lost communion of the haze,
Permit a child to join.

" Thy sacred emblems to partake
Thy consecrated bread to break,
Taste thy immortal wine ! "

I have not been quite able to guess out Miss
Dickinson's favourite flower, and so to win
one more point in a little game of solitaire, at
which I sometimes play on rainy nights, when
I like to think of the flowers my forerunners
have found to be worthy of their best love.
I am almost sure, however, that it must have
been the Indian pipe — that illusive yet most
alluring mystery of the deep woods, which
beckons you with a promise of spiritual unfold-
ings which our minds are, alas ! too gross to
perceive !

Of English writers, the daisy is for Chaucer.
We have no other view of the poet of the
dawn so intimate as that in which we see him
in eager flight across the dewy grass of that
long-ago morning when the virgin daisies
were opening their golden hearts to the sun.

238 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

Wherever he could plant a daisy in the fair
gardens of his verse there shine these

" Pearled Arcturii of the Earth,
The constellated flower that never sets."

Daisies were dear to Shelley and to Keats
as well as to Burns, to Goethe also (English, by
right of translation), but I cannot but think
that he cared more for the more sophisticated
myrtles and laurels !

For Spenser, who loved all loveliness, I
cannot find any distinctive favourite : that a
flower was fair to look at and sweet to breathe
was enough for him. Shakespeare wove many
garlands of English blossoms, but most of all
he loved the cowslips of the Avonside fields.
The footsteps of Johnson's " Gentle Shep-
herdess " were blotted out by the field-flowers
that sprang up wherever her light steps
passed ; and the best gifts which Sir Walter
Raleigh's shepherd could offer to his dear, came
from the hedgerow.

In Milton's " Lycidas " he gives one perfect
characterisation :

" The pansy freaked with jet."

Otherwise his botany is that of one of those

OCTOBER 239

rather unobservant townsmen who would never
have found a four-leaved clover, lived they
ever so long. And that, by the way, is my
test of a careful and accurate observer — the
finding of these luck-leaves, which are really
not at all uncommon.

Herrick loved all flowers equally — apple
blossoms, tulips, carnations, primroses gilly
flowers. To him they were smiling and
innocent maidens, whose charms the free-
spoken old divine was never tired of praising.

We think of Addison and the London of
his brilliant day together, but for all that he
knew of the manners of the great world he
knew this also: "There is not a bush in
bloom within a mile of me, which I am not
acquainted with, nor scarce a daffodil or
violet that withers in my neighbourhood with-
out my missing it. I walk home in this
temper of mind through several fields and
meadows with an unspeakable pleasure, not
without reflecting on the bounty of Provi-
dence which has made the most pleasing
and the most beautiful objects the most
common," and " I value my garden more
for being full of blackbirds than of cherries

A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

and very frankly give them fruit for their
songs."

Wordsworth, we know, kept such trysts
with plants, and in our own land Hawthorne
knew when to go to the haunts of bogarethums
almost as surely as Emerson's feet were led to
the rhodoras. Thoreau knew by high instinct
as well as by long experience when and where
to find every growing thing in that wonderful
little world about Concord in which, he tell us,
11 1 have travelled a great deal," and of which
he has made citizens every one who loved his
mistress Nature.

Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth had
each a golden word for every flower they
knew. The daisy belonged to them and to
Burns, as I have said ; and to Sir Walter the
bracken, the harebell and the heather were a
part of the caller air of Scotland. Miss Austen
had a quiet liking for the trim Georgian gar-
dens, walled in and sweet with roses and laven-
der but she, as well as her sprightly sister, Miss
Ferriers, were too busy with men and women
to care overmuch about things inanimate, a
trait showed by Miss Bronte and George Eliot,
in a degree. So was Thackeray, who had

OCTOBER 241

small patience with the "faded vegetable"
once a rose and so always a rose to poor
Maria Esmond, and aside from an occasional
bouquet from Covent Garden Market no flowers
to speak of grow on his pages. Dickens will
always be associated with the ivy and holly of
his favourite season.

Edward Fitzgerald was passionately fond of
nasturtiums. Ruskin loved lilies, and great
Florentine iris, and vine leaves, but indeed his
was a taste so catholic as to include the little
brunella, which he called a " brownie flower."
Hunted from lawns, crowded away into waste
places, and forced to find foothold by dusty
waysides and foul ditches it is curious that this
little self-heal should have been praised by
men so different, temperamentally, as Ruskin,
Thoreau, and Emerson. Like Thoreau,
Tennyson loved blue flowers. The Brown-
ings, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Morris,
Austen were all garden lovers. Longfellow
and Whittier were loyal to the New England
flora, and Lowell was at his best when he
wrote of the dandelion. Bryant was the
gentian's friend, and Hawthorne that of the
arethusa, as might have been expected of his

242 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

solitary and reserved nature. Dr Holmes
chanted the praise of box, and next after this
cared for the little grape hyacinths or " blue
bottles " that lurk about in gardens made in
colonial days. A book might easily be written
about the flower-loves that have cheered men
devoted to letters, to music and to painting,
and almost without exception it would be found
that they centred about

" the good old week-day blossoms
I used to see so long ago
With hearty sweetness in their bosoms
Ready and glad to bud and blow."

By the time October is well on her way, the
most stupid person will have learned at least
one garden lesson, and that is that Nature
loves to plant in masses, and with an eye to
the effect of the flower upon the landscape.

By landscape we may mean — we always do
when we can — the wide sweep of hills and
valleys, or rolling fields and orchards which
lose themselves in a far horizon, or we may
mean the sheltered spacelet which lies between
a tiny cottage and its neighbour. If Nature
has a spray of ladies' tresses she sets it where
its beauty is supreme — at the edge of a ferny

OCTOBER 243

hollow. If she has a spire or two of cardinal
flowers, she gives it into the care of a grey-
bouldered brook, which nourishes some special
mosses and tall sedges to give it companion-
ship, or coaxes a hemlock-tree to spread its
drooping boughs near by. To find one of
these jewels in its appointed setting is always
an event of moment, and introduces one to a
most beautiful planting secret. For everyday
work, however, she trusts to the effect invari-
ably produced by the flowering together of
many plants of the same species, the whites of
a daisied hillside ; the purple-rose of a heathery
moor, the yellows of a marshland of golden-
rods and tiny sunflowers. These are the open
pages on which can be read at a glance what
she wishes us to do if we are willing to work
with her. So planted one flower protects
another, thus winning the cross fertilisation
essential to the transmission of many species,
and so arranged there is always possible the
full gratification of colour - sense which no
solitary flower can ever give.

The second lesson is that of succession.
What is the good if your garden is aglow at
opentyde with all the tulips that ever came

244 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

out of the East with the sunlight in their veins,
if there be no answering loveliness of mid-
summer lilies, or late autumn asters ? A pause
of even a week between the flowerings of your
garden-beds means that you have been faithless
to the highest teachings, and careless of their
offered bounty.

Perceiving these truths, living them and
showing them to others, the garden may
become a little centre of civilising influences
from which peace, and order, and contentment
irradiate — who can say how far ?

NOVEMBER

Over the night's low clouds, the flare
Of burning marsh throws a ruddy glare.
Blue mists cling to the distant hill ;
The flowers are gone, and the woods are still
Where dry grass bends neath the fox's tread
The weird witch-hazel's bower is spread.
Across the sunset sky, the crows
Cawing fly, in wavering rows:

Slowly and sadly the daylight dies
The wind is bleak, it sobs and cries I

LATE AFTERNOON

NOVEMBER

THE BEAVER'S MOON

"HT^HERE are as many kinds of gardens as
-*- there are of poetry," says The Tatler,
and among them all there can never be one
that is commonplace.

The very word garden implies much —
space set apart with a definite purpose of add-
ing to the world's stock of beauty ; labour,
time and money consecrated to the same high
intent ; learning, experience and the long, long
thought of the faithful men who have devoted
themselves to the calling of

" The grand old gardener '-'•

to whom the first garden was given to dress.
One may look at the story of Adam from many
points of view, but the garden background is
always insistently present.

When all the gardeners win home to Para-
dise at last what a gathering it will be ! From
247

248 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

what most ancient Indias and Chinas and
Persias and Egypts will they come ! From
what Spains, and Low Countries ! What
Italys and what Englands ! How will kings
be abased before the patient husbandmen who
added a new grain to man's store of food ; and
how will the greatest soldiers be forgotten in
the presence of the unpraised courage of tra-
vellers who have brought garden tribute from
farthermost isles to our shores ! How will the
wealth that ordered vast pleasaunces pale before
the love that kept a geranium alive in the base-
ment of a city's slum ; or the blended thoughts
that sanctify the bit of flower-bed in front of the
hut of an Iceland fisherman ! How we shall
rejoice to see the old herbalists, whose books
are such mines of delight, and how we shall
honour the monks and nuns who kept the
gentle art alive through warring ages !

Now that the nights are long again I begin
to feel anew how great is my debt to the writers
of the "books on gardening" which are so
many that in any well-ordered library they
require a department all to themselves. There
has never yet been one that was wholly stupid,
nor will there be, since how can a book be

NOVEMBER 249

wholly dull whose pages are set with the words
which must be set there over and over — lily,
rose, shadow, sunlight, April, September !
It makes me have but scanty patience until
my book too is admitted to the outermost
fringes of so delightful a companionship, and
I set forth my white-paper thoughts all the
more confidently and gladly because between
them lie so much that I have inherited from
their store.

In the twilight the Pleiades are shining, and
the great suns of Orion are rising, so that I
know November is here. I make haste to
blot out all that I said of the other months,
save April only, and declare that this is the
year's high holiday. Its colours alone will I
wear, as I set forth to do battle in its praise.
" November hath an evil name in sooth ! "
cries one, " and as for its garden — it hath no
garden." The more need of a champion, dear
and true ! — since thou art so belied !

When we look back to May we remember
the haste we made to be glad because of the
perfecting of young leaves. Why is there not
an equal rejoicing in the first days of the bare
boughs ? We realise with a shock of remem-

250 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

brance how infinitely beautiful they are, and
how again all things are become new, now that
the ripened leaves have fallen, and the trees
stand forth against the sunset in all their simple
dignity and strength.

"There it stands," said the Autocrat, "leaf-
ing out hopefully in April as if it were trying
in its dumb language to lisp ' Our Father,' and
dropping its slender burden of foliage in
October as softly as if it were whispering
' Amen ! ' ' The temptation to quote men's
tributes to trees is very strong. They are God's
kindly thoughts written in green for summer
to spell out, and drawn in brown and grey lines
for easy reading lessons against the snows.
November trees are neither, taken as a whole,
for while most of the deciduous brotherhood
have accepted the warnings of the frost, the
oaks are in their glory, enriching the garments
of the ripened year with a stiff embroidery of
splendid colouring, as the vestments of some
great ecclesiastic are heavy with bullion-work
and pearls.

These are the days of the frank avowal of
the secrets of the nests of birds. Who knew
that on the tip of the maple bough hung the

NOVEMBER 251

cuplike nest of the vireo? Who guessed
that high in the elm the oriole had hung his
tossing cradle ? A walk across the lawn will
convince one that he is not its only tenant,
nor has he the fairest lodging or the nimblest
air.

It is in the early November that we recover
our joy in the forgotten beauty of the ever-
greens. When beechen leaves were unfolding
we did not notice how the pines were pushing
out whorls of delicate needles ; and when we
were absorbed in the waving of green birch
boughs we did not mark the firs or the hem-
locks. Now they are old friends, welcomed
back, and richer for the experience of another
summer.

There is no need to care if the garden is
hidden by the fallen maple leaves, for the day
of the red oaks is not here until All Saints'
Summer has come. Then what compares with
the soft reds and crimsons and purples and
browns, softened and mellowed by the ineffable
haze of Indian summer ? Seen across a marsh,
all brown with wasted grasses, or grey with
plumes of seeded goldenrod, and below a sky,
soft, distant, pale, there is no vista more to be

252 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

desired as closing out the world at the orchard's
end.

" One thousand of delytes are in an orchard,
and sooner shall I be weary than I can reckon
the last part of that pleasure which one that
hath and loves an orchard may find therein,"
wrote William Lawson three hundred years
ago. And he would have men follow the
custom which yet obtains in the Tyrol, and
order all newly married pairs to plant trees.
A very paradise his orchard must have been,
for he would have in it beside apples and
cherries, medlars and apricots, bees, "cleanly
and innocent bees," and he would have birds
and running water — " And in mine opinion I
could highly recommend your Orchard if
thorow it or hard by it should runne a pleasant
River with silver stremes. . . . And one chief
grace that adorns an Orchard I cannot let
slip, a broode of nightingales, who, with
their several notes and themes, with a strong
delightsome voyse out of a weak body will
bear you company night and day."

I think Izaak Walton would have loved this
garden, and Sir Thomas Overbury and Sir
Thomas Browne, who were I am sure good

NOVEMBER 253

gardeners, as all good men would be if Fates
were kind.

The "broode" of nightingales would doubt-
less be silent when November came, even in
nightingale land, but for us, who can say

" I am at one with all the kinsman things
That e'er my Father fathered,"

it is no bad exchange to see the blue jays
flitting among the moss-grown boughs, or to
see a small owl fare forth into the silent dusk.
An owl belongs to an orchard. I can think of
them as being nowhere else. Perhaps that is
because there were owls complaining to the
moon that shone through the orchard trees at
grandfather's, and because to that lost Eden
my homesick thoughts so often fly.

" Was it always Spring in the long-ago,
At grandfather's ?

Was the orchard hid always in rosy snow ;
In its shades did the violets always grow,
While blackbirds paced, with crests aglow
Under the pines where softest winds
Rocked the cradle of baby bird,
To tunes the sweetest ever heard ?
Tunes that come to my longing ears,
Over the silence of many years,
From grandfather's !

254 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

" Was it always Summer, there, of old,
At grandfather's?

Were wheatfields always a sea of gold ?
Were meadows but carpets gay, unrolled
For the frolic winds to toss and fold ?
'Mid oat-sheaves ripe, did shy quails pipe
While shadow and sunshine went and came,
With a glory that never was twice the same ?
On grateful leaves were the warm rains wept
While over the prairie the dim dusk crept
To grandfather's ?

"Was it always Autumn in those fair days
At grandfather's ?

Were the woods for ever a golden blaze
Of light, half-hidden by amber haze,
Through which we walked enchanted ways,
Over grasses green, over glistening sheen
Of fallen leaves, where the cup-moss grew,
And the crisp rime lay in the place of dew ?
Were there always scents as of ripened stores
Of corns and fruits, from the granery doors
At grandfather's ?

" Was it always Winter — cold and white
At grandfather's ?

Did suns set always in crimson light,
And stars come, silent, far and bright
To make more fair the cloudless night ?
Where pine-trees bold fenced out the cold
Was there ever a light like the light that glowed
From the ruddy pane down the snowy road,
Where the warm fire touched the welcoming face,
That gave to winter its tenderest grace
At grandfather's ?

NOVEMBER 255

" Are those days all past, or all before
Us, Grandfather?

Where you are now — on that blessed shore —
Do they wait with you, those days of yore —
In the Land where change comes never more ?
Shall we find them stored, that precious hoard !
Summers and winters, falls and springs,
Snowfalls and harvests and blossomings —
Babyhood, childhood, budding youth,
Innocence, happiness — love and truth,
And you, Grandfather?"

I seem to have come to the farthermost metes
and bounds of the garden since I have planted
a red-oak forest beyond a stretch of marshland,
and a deep-bosomed orchard, and not a word
have I said of my flowers. And even now I
can come no farther than the hedge, since I
must have a hedge of the native thorns which
were white in May and now are red with the
small sour haws beloved by boys and birds.
Over certain haws the feathery clematis must
toss her grey seed clusters, and over others
the bittersweet must twist his tight cordage
covered with brilliant berries. Some wahoos
must grow in the corner, because of their gay
three-cornered hats, and there must be some
barberries threaded over with jewels. On one
side of the place tall privets must shut out winds

256 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

that freeze and thaw ; arches may be cut in
these, to give views across the orchard, and
to admit more clearly the singing of the
orchard brook. Another opening, carefully led
up to by a path, parts the thorns to show
the rounded purple woodland beyond the fields.

Now is the solitary reign of the chrysan-
themum, the golden flower which art has
coaxed into wearing many colours beside the
name one. It is the glory of the mighty race
of the composites, and it seems as if man and
nature had conspired to make the year's last
flower the crown of all flowerings. I do not
care for the great overgrown, florist's chrysan-
themum, those fringed and curled darlings of
the urban heart. In my garden I would not
even plant those half-tender varieties which
in some long-deferred Indian summer perfect
themselves in the open brook. Plants, as
well as men, are noble only in proportion to
their trustworthiness, and good intentions not
rounded into fulfilment are as fatal in the
vegetable kingdom as elsewhere.

The praises of the chrysanthemums that
I love are not sounded in floral catalogues,
nor have the flowers themselves ever thought

NOVEMBER 257

of showing their faces among the ruffling
gentry of a show. Creped, cupped, quilled,
curled, frosted, inverted, reverted — I had
almost said perverted — the florists have done
their best — or their worst — for the chrysan-
themum of Commerce, but there is, happily,
another type, which belongs to older, simpler
days, untouched by the modern spirits of
greed and ostentation, and sweet with a
tender idealism. These are the true golden
flowers.

Under sunward eaves of grey farmhouses,
along the grape arbours of village yards, close
to boundary fences, and in country burying
gounds, everywhere where a certain unworldly
kind of women yet linger, the hardy old friends
still thrive. All summer their grey leaves
have grown unnoticed among the poppies and
cornflowers, and suddenly, after the marigolds
have been touched by the first light frost, the
little bushes announce an uncounted store of
tight little buds which grow and grow through
the long, still, hazy days, as if they and the
frost were running a race for some unseen
goal. How we used to lean over the borders
and watch them ! Was the mercury falling ?
R

258 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

Were there clouds in the evening sky, or was
there that frost-presaging clarity of the
atmosphere through which Aldebaran seemed
but a light on a watch-tower and Vega, far
westering, a sapphire which an earthly king
might almost seize and wear ? Shall we stretch
a length of cheese cloth on some light poles
to protect our loved ones ? The friend who
gave me that yellow flower tipped with bronze
used always to pin newspapers over hers on
threatening nights, and many a time, in old
village gardens, I have seen enswarthements
of blue gingham aprons about the bushes,
which would, I know, far gladlier have died
in a valiant hand-to-hand encounter with the
advancing foe than to have their lives pro-
longed by such humiliating means. It is an
involuntary tribute to its value that so many
pains are taken to prolong the day of the
flower.

In almost every year there comes a day,
well on in November, when the garden is again
the haunt of perfect loveliness. From many
other gardens where the loose-petalled beauties
have dwelt from time out of mind, the feast has
been gathered. There are yellow flowers,

NOVEMBER 259

great, soft yellows, of the colour no other
flower ensnares, and a bitter pungency all its
own. There are pinks, soft, dull pinks, with
white or grey in their high lights and copper-
red in their shadows. There are browns which
are orange also, when we come to the last
analysis, and whites which are greys, and
greens, and yellows as well. Ah, what colour !
what fragrance ! And what abundance ! Not
a stalk can be found which would think of
offering a single niggardly flower. Threes,
sixes, or even tens, that is their idea of a
proper stalk. It is true that they have a trick
of lolling, face downward, on the grass, which
is annoying when we feel that the loss of even
a single blossom from the garden picture is an
appreciable one. It is not hard to train them
against some simple lattice, or to unpainted
stakes so slight that they need not suggest a
lumber yard. They do best laced back to a
hedge or a shrubbery, but they also grow
excellently close to the foundations of a house,
and they are inconceivably lovely when they
overhang a bank, or tumble like a fountain of
coloured fire down a little hill slope. The
main point is to have enough of them ; to

i6o A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

plant them in masses, and in places where the

sun,

"the gardener of the world,"

can visit them all day long.

If I complain of the languid airs of these
larger flowered varieties, no fault can be found
with the pompons. Strong, soldierly fellows,
in gayest uniform, with every button polished,
and every buckle bright, they march through
the breach made by the falling of their summer
comrades, and literally keep their colours flying,
and the bright music of their cheers ringing
until they are overborne at the last, and die
the death of heroes. There is no flower so
courageous except the snowdrop.

As the chrysanthemums open, and we realise
that they are the last flower we can hope to
gather, unless it be a handful of Christmas
roses, we begin to plan how best to prolong
their life after cutting. One way is to clip off the
long stems of buds, plunge them in deep, wide-
mouthed jars filled with water, and placed in a
cool, well-lighted room. Here the flowers will
perfect themselves a week or ten days after
those left uncut in the garden, and from this
store vases can be arranged at leisure.

NOVEMBER 261

The Japanese have an elaborate system of
flower arrangement; one so complicated indeed,
and so far-reaching in its relation to the life
and religion, the history and the poetry of the
people, that a course of study in the art covers
at least two years. Volumes have been written
to explain the theories and to illustrate the
rules which govern the disposition of cut
flowers, which rules are, after all, only a
comprehension and application of what is
everywhere an open secret. The Japanese
have made so close a study of Nature that
they have necessarily come into especially
intimate relations with her, and a certain grace
and poetry which is evident in everything they
touch has taught them to use common things
in uncommon ways, and so makes them the
teachers of our less sensitive selves.

In a very true sense, according to the inter-
preters of Dai Nippon, a flower suffers loss
and even degradation by being cut at all, and
is much better seen in the open. Hence the
high holidays of the cherry-viewing, and the
feasts in honour of the iris, the scarlet maple,
and other queens-regnant of summer. Since
habit has given leave to cut them, and certain

262 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

domestic occasions seem to demand their
assistance, it is permitted to use them only
under conditions best suited to them, and
hence the elaborate ceremonial attending the
placing of a single flower.

To the sick it is permitted to send a blossom
having strong growth, preferably one having
a woody stem, such being symbolic of health ;
of longevity.

Flowers to be used on occasions of farewell
must be chosen from those bearing blossoms
oftener than once a year, thus implying a
speedy reunion.

A costly flower, or one whose possession
necessarily indicates wealth, is not desired.
A blossom is a thing too sacred to be as-
sociated with money, or ostentation, nor may
" the foot of pride come near it."

Only seasonable flowers may be used : those
forced at great labour or cost are, in spite of
their loveliness, touched by vulgarity, and
anything like the use of flowers in masses is
distinctly to be avoided.

If a flower is particularly choice, no other
may be displayed in the same apartment.
Only inferior sorts may be used together, and

NOVEMBER 263

there is never even a suggestion of what is
occidentally known as a bouquet. All of the
refinement and fastidiousness of the orient
would shrink from the display of our western
dinner or ball, our church festivals, and still
more, from our funerals.

The stem is considered to be of equal de-
corative value with the flower. Is it not curved
and tinted and branched, and set with buds
or thorns or tendrils, with a care equal to that
given to the blossom ? And does not Nature
know best what foliage is suited to it ? There-
fore let none but its own be placed near the
flower, unless one is chosen for the frank
reason of contrast.

The blossoms of a hardy or woody stemmed
plant are never to be associated with those of
a tender or succulent stemmed variety.

Flowers of hill and valley may never be com-
bined, nor may a water plant and a shore plant
be brought together.

Under no circumstances may exotic and
native flowers be used together.

Colours and textures must be thoughtfully
studied.

The vase or jug in which the flower is to

264 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

be displayed is to be carefully chosen with re-
lation to the position, and space it is to occupy,
and the blossom is to hold. There can never
be an excuse for the use of a vessel of choice
porcelain or glass. Such things are works of
art, and must never be degraded from their
own high mission. Besides, to use would be
to endanger such possession, and it is desecra-
tion to ruin the work of an artist. Coarse
pottery, good in shape and colour, may under
certain conditions bear some simple suggestions
in line by way of decoration, but plain surfaces
are in better taste. Vases of clear, heavy glass
are desirable as giving the beholder the added
pleasures afforded by stems and water. This
glass must be extremely plain in design.
Metal holders are to be used for boughs, never
for delicate flowers.

The surface of the water in the receptacle is
imagined to be the soil from which the flower
is growing, and nothing but the close observa-
tion of the living plant will give the student a
sympathetic understanding of the direction and
height to be given the cut flowers. Nothing
may be left to chance, and so many devices
have been thought out by which exact position

NOVEMBER 265

can be obtained and kept. Coils of lead cut
into spirals and dropped into the jar give it
weight, and offer many interstices for the stems.
Little lattices, curved or in squares, are made
of bamboo splints, sunken just below the water
line, then drawn up to it, and held in place,
while the swelling caused by the water wedges
them safely into place. This treatment would
be unsafe for anything but thick pottery or
glass. Pieces of wood, bored with holes of
irregular sizes, are wedged into the jars by the
same means. A device of Miss Jeykll's has
given us the same solidity and support, with
no danger or trouble, she having invented a
thick disc of very heavy glass, pierced with
holes, into which the stems may be readily
inserted. A piece of wire netting is often laid
over the top of a broad bowl, and for temporary
use, and very small flowers, a circle of paste-
board pierced by a stiletto holds its frail
burden prettily.

Plants with pendulous blossoms must be
hung, or placed on a shelf from which they
look down upon the beholders. Small and
delicate flowers must be placed on low tables
or stools, so that they can be gazed at from

266 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

above. If the room contain a particularly fine
painting or hanging, the principal lines of the
flower-arrangement must point toward it.

The height of the cut bough must exceed
that of the holder, one and one-half times if a
tall jar and long branches are to be used. For
a low bo vl, the bough bearing the blossom
chosen must exceed the width of the holder
one and one-half times. No more flowers may
ever be used than can be displayed as indi-
viduals, although it is of course permissible
and even desirable that one or more be placed
in perspective to suggest mystery, distance,
reserve.

See how much poetry as well as how much
sound sense lies in this brief summary of the
easiest of those golden rules that have been
thought out so patiently and so long ago !
Blessings without number are promised those
who practise them, and why not ? Economy,
humility, patience, reverence — these are the
virtues they teach. Taste, grace, ideality of
form, appreciation of colour, knowledge of the
habits and habitats of plants, delicacy of
perception — these are the pleasant fruits of
the study.

NOVEMBER 267

I like to keep my own flower holders on a
shelf of their own, and am always on the look-
out for recruits, although these are chosen
slowly, as I choose my friends. There is an
ancient bowl of Russian copper-work which
has nothing to do until nasturtiuns are in
bloom, and then it overflows with them until
the last one falls before the frost. There is a
tall brass jug for Queen Anne's lace, and for
wild asters. Winter boughs of red or black
berries go into it, and it has seen daffodils.
A tall Chinese cylinder of dull pink and
green holds sometimes white chrysanthemums,
and sometimes some wild grasses, and the
dark pods of the false indigo ; and a turquoise-
blue ginger jar overlaid with coarse bamboo-
work comes down when the poets' narcissus
calls for it, and again when China asters are
gay in September. Roses and daffodils glow
and burn in tall glass vases, and I miss no
glimpse of their stems or stalks, and a coarse
Mexican pitcher in dull orange lives only to
hold marigolds. There is a little blue-and-
grey Flemish mug which never held anything
but the pink polyanthus of April, and a tall,
flaring vase of Allerdale ware in soft green

268 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

which is sacred to violets. Tall glasses which
come from that haven of thrifty poverty, the
ten-cent store ; a Grueby bowl, a Dedham
plate for the flat bouquets I love to arrange
in hollyhock time, all these stand on the shelf.
None of them have any special value, but all
are good work-a-day friends, giving me service
when I ask it, and keeping fresh and fair the
remembrance of the blossoms they have held,
long after the blossoms themselves are gone,
in a way no vase could possibly do were it
used indiscriminately for whatever flower might
chance to be mine.

After all, our gardens mean more or less to j
us as we have more or fewer associations
connected with them and their fair denizens.
I have long held a most unorthodox pity in
my heart for Adam and Eve, since in Eden
there was no chance for him to ask, " Do you
remember?" or for her to question, "Have
you forgotten ? " Roses were only roses to
them, not links with that which had been.
Violets and lilies were nothing but lilies and
violets, not personalities who had known love
and death, and so not a part of their inner-
most selves. The walks were not haunted

NOVEMBER 269

by beloved wraiths, and the shaded glades
held no memories, sweet or bitter. What if
our own gardens were effaced each year by
the snows, and bore each spring new flowers ?
What if there were no daffodils, no lilacs,
but only gorgeous scented strangers ? No one,
I take it, would then care to plant even a
White-paper Garden !

-

DECEMBER

With whisper and rustle, and start and hush,

The dry leaves murmur in tree and bush.

On sombre pines, with boughs bent low,

Forsaken nests are piled with snow.

The chick-a-dees, alert for seeds,

Chatter and cling to the swaying weeds.

The snow drifts deep in the country ways ;

And short and cold are the dreary days.

Yet fair on the brow of the frozen night

The Christmas Star gleams large and bright !

DECEMBER
THE HUNTER'S MOON

TT is the Shortest Day. It is Sunday also.

Even in the farthermost solitudes the day
announces itself by the strange harmony into
which the light blends all that is of earth with
all that is not. The whole world takes on a
softer aspect, as if it knew that some gracious
and beautiful gift were being given to all
created things. The sky takes on a more
benignant aspect than on other days, the wind
speaks with a gentler voice, and has a gentler
touch. Fields stretch away to far blue hills as
if a deeper peace lay upon them, and the trees
stand in more solemn patience, as they submit
to the Over Fate which has taken away their
leaves and bidden them make ready for storm-
time.

On the grey boughs empty nests are swing-
ing. The last thistle-plume eddies through the
hollow at the will of a vagrant wind, in whose
s 273

174 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

spiral dance wise eyes can read a change of
weather. The last red leaf drifts helplessly
hedgeward and is lost in the briary tangle
already full of those lightly blown grasses
known to country folk as " Limber Well."
Everywhere there is snow. The lightest-
footed bird has left the imprint of his presence
upon it ; the slenderest bent-grass has cut its
shadow there with a line so fine and clear that
no modern painter could ever hope to repro-
duce it, and which leads us back to the days
when the missal painters sat humbly at the
feet of the Teacher of the grasses ! Under
drifts blue caves allure the fancy. Evergreens
are heavy with the same white burden of trans-
figuring purity that curves the furrows in the
field into a resemblance too poignant to be
ignored.

" Once for each Son the kind Earth-Mother grieves :
For each, one soft sigh shudders through her breast
Once for each one : and every low sigh leaves
Another grave wherein is perfect rest."

The year's work is over at last. There is
nothing to do, even in a White-paper Garden.
Through the long day we have toiled, and
now the night is coming, when Mother Nature

DECEMBER 275

will gather us into her arms and croon a bed-
time song. Softly, gently, almost impercept-
ibly she has already gathered the greater
number of her children in, and has tucked
them away under the white blanket. She has
given each one a dream for company, and now
she is waiting to hear what I have done in my
garden days with my one poor little talent,
before I, too, get the kiss and the dream and
go to sleep.

To begin with the Omissions.

I have not said a word about a water
garden, and yet I have known all along that
nothing is more satisfactory than even a little
pool in which the birds may bathe and drink,
and wherein the blue sky, looking down
between the leaves, may peep at the reflection
there half hidden by the lilies. As perfume is
the soul of the flower, so water is the soul of
the landscape, and its presence in the garden
is an unalloyed delight. A cemented pool
need not overtax a very modest purse, and
there are so many lovely water lilies and lotus
and bamboos ready to grow in it, and so many
obliging minnows and goldfish ready to keep
it sweet, that it seems a pity that instead of

276 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

providing one, now that the eleventh hour is
long past, I am not now describing the twelfth
of a series. The chief precaution to be taken,
if stones or mortars be resorted to, is that there
be no regular shape to it and no sharply defined
outline. There are ferns enough, and iris
enough, and grasses and trailing things enough,
to make the garden and the pool themselves
unconscious where one ends and the other
begins. Here, as everywhere, the absolute
necessity of a background of shrubs presents
itself, and perhaps near here, if ever, a formal
seat may be admitted. I like the garden
furniture which can be easily moved about,
wicker chairs and tables, camp-stools, and so
on, and have never yet found pleasure in the
ordinary garden seat, which has usually a bit
of bare ground in front of it, a most uncom-
promising back, and a very unfortunate habit
of being in the sun just when shade would be
particularly agreeable.

I have not said a word about the way in
which the house should be made one with the
garden. Houses we must have, whether we
like them or not, and although they often take
up space which it would be very agreeable to

DECEMBER 277

devote to other uses, and since they are here,
it is a matter of first importance to make them
agree with the more important part of the
place as best we can. A house needs the re-
fining and softening effect of creepers and
trailers almost as much as it needs a roof, and
there are happily so many to choose from that
no wall need be left to the barren ugliness of
plain brick or boards. For stone walls the
English ivy is by far the best cover, and there
is a climbing euonymus which is also ever-
green. The Japanese ampelopsis is the third
perfect adornment for brick or stone. It is
useless to try to grow it against wood, for
which the native grape, the Virginia creeper,
Hall's honeysuckle and wisterias are admirably
adapted. There is a papilionaceous trailer or
climber, the kudzu vine, which makes the most
surprising growth, and is entirely satisfactory.
The Dutchman's pipe is good, and better far is
the native bittersweet, which has the cleanest
possible habits. There is a wild solanum which
will cover a lattice with its pretty purple
flowers, and its clusters of brilliant red berries,
but it must not be used if there are children
about, who might be tempted to eat the glowing

278 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

fruit. Cobeas, Madeira vines, moonflowers,
and all the beautiful ipomeas and clematis,
with such roses and jessamine as endure the
cold, aided by a few lengths of the wire netting
whose invention was such a benefaction to the
world, these are all so easy to get, and so easy
to grow that it ought to be as impossible to
find a house without its covering of vines, as a
child barefoot in the winter snow.

The walls being taken care of, the angle
formed by the foundation stone and the lawns
must be blotted out by shrubs and small trees.
The taller ones are to be placed in the corner,
and against such portions of the wall as are
windowless, the lesser to stand under the win-
dows. The list to choose from is exactly as
long as the plantsman's announcements of the
wares he has for sale. In semi-rural com-
munities there are often good bushes to be
had for the asking, and these are usually much
larger than can be bought, but if one must
buy, field-grown roots at least two years, old
should always be chosen.

For the northern exposures, laurel and
rhododendron should be planted in an irregular
bed, well spaded and well fertilised. A few

DECEMBER 279

low junipers may be grouped with these, and
between the corner of the house and the lawn
or garden, three or four hemlocks, to ensure
privacy, and against the hemlocks a cluster of
white birches. Tall ferns grow excellently as
neighbours to these shrubs, and the ground
beneath them may very well be covered by
the myrtle, which is the best substitute for the
undergrowths of the woods.

On the eastern side the Japanese euonymus
and the Andromedas are charming, with Thun-
berg's barberry, and a privet or two for height.
Again ferns and myrtle for ground cover.

On the south and west set the flowering
shrubs, with chrysanthemums set in clumps
between them, and peonies wherever there is
a place for one. Roses trained to the wall are
best seen in such positions, and if the shrub
bed be large enough to let some foxgloves or
hollyhocks be set between the bushes, the
effect will be pleasant. Cannas are very often
planted close to the walls, and while they do
not give the idea of permanence, which is one
of the things best worth striving for in all
planting, they are better than nothing.

In a world where change is a too insistent

28o A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

life-factor, I wish it could enter into the heart
of every householder that it is his duty to plant
as if change were the one thing that would
never come, and that to make the outside of
his house attractive is as much his duty as
to pay his water-rates or poll-tax. What if
the house is only a rented one ? An ampe-
lopsis may be pulled up in an afternoon's
ramble, which will change the whole aspect
of the porch against which it is set, and turn
the house into a home. If I were a Society
for the Improvement of Public Morals I
should issue as Order No. i, an edict com-
pelling every citizen of the republic — without
any of the exemptions of women and idiots
which our polite laws sometimes make — to
plant a tree or a shrub every year of their
lives. If I were the Autocrat of all the
Russias, a ukase should go forth that, under
pain of banishment to some desert in which
no scantiest herbage would grow, every
second tree should be a pine : every third
tree an oak, and no woman should be con-
sidered marriageable until she had six hem-
locks and six birch - trees to her credit.
Legacies from lost uncles in India should,

DECEMBER 281

moreover, be forfeited unless the family record
in regard to orchards was quite clear.

I have not said a word about window boxes,
which are often the only gardens possible to
the cliff dwellers of modern cities ; and yet
no one can think better of them than I.
Little restful oases to the tired eyes lifted
toward them from the pavement ; little play-
grounds for imagination ; little ports for gentle
thoughts and memories for exiles borne like
thistledown on the winds of fate, who would
not see their tribe increase until there were
no boxless windows in all the waste of brick
and mortar !

The best boxes are those which hold many
trailing and creeping plants. The worst ones,
the impossible ones, the unpardonable ones,
are those painted scarlet or green. I do not
know why it has not been set down in the
Acts of Congress that makers and vendors
and buyers of certain paints should not be
sentenced to whatever answers to the galleys
in modern penology. The makers of iron
urns and animals should be sentenced, like-
wise ; but to-day my business is with window
boxes, and the impossibility of having an

282 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

artistic effect given them unless the box itself
recede into its proper place by means of a
coat of soft sage-colour or dull brown, or
grey earthy colour, and so ordained to ac-
company the living greens for which the box
is made.

It is hard to tell one whose soul longs for
lilies that it will be wasted time and mis-
employed talent which tries to grow them in
the window garden, but it is true, and he
would do better to acknowledge his limita-
tions and plant in the large white petunias
which adapt themselves so admirably to the
place the lilies scorn. White feverfews are
good box - plants : so are the impatiens ; so
are single geraniums. Rose geraniums thrive
well, so do the coleus, and the pretty
Maurandyra. If a hanging basket or two be
suspended above the box it is very easy to
coax the trailers above and the climbers
below to combine their attractions, and the
effect is sure to be pretty. For northern
boxes the Boston ferns, asparagus Spren-
gerii, the Tradescantias, and almost all of the
begonias will be good. Tropaeolums make
good boxes if nothing else be expected to

DECEMBER 283

share the soil and the water, and for a short-
lived joy pansies will answer. This list of
the plants which can be grown successfully
in boxes includes almost evey available name.
I would have been glad to make it fuller if
I could truthfully have done so.

And I have said nothing at all about that
very fascinating form of gardening known in
rural or semi - rural communities as raising
house plants. As the world grows sadly
wiser in its own conceits, many gentle old
habits are laid aside, or are left for a few
quiet people here or there who have not for-
gotten the old ways. To make ready for the
long winter indoors, during the long summer
outdoors, is with them a lifelong practice, and
not the gayest June parade of roses can make
them forget the shelves set advantageously in
a sheltered corner, where certain plants are
carried over from season to season, and where
fresh cuttings are making ready for winter
bloom. Slips, the cuttings are called. To offer
a slip is a token of the highest regard : to
ask for one a sign of the closest intimacy, if,
indeed, it be not an intrusion bordering on
rudeness. To exchange slips is to enter into

284 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

a solemn league and covenant, and to inquire
after the welfare of these offshoots of one's
own fuchsias is as much a part of good manners
as to ask after Aunt Anne. There is, more-
over, no better way to court a disfavour which
may amount to social ostracism, than to neglect
the cuttings once they have been accepted.
Candid persons may declare their utter in-
ability to make anything grow, and so escape
with pitying incomprehension, but to take
upon oneself the obligation a slip imposes,
and then to fail !

I am sorry that I said I did not like red
geraniums when I think how cheerfuHy they
have smiled at me across the snow from many
a cottage window ! I wish I had left unwritten
those ungracious lines about the coleus, when
I remember into how many starved lives they
bring the colour of the stained glass of old
cathedrals as they spread their branches across
the pane. The little crab-cactus that seemed
such a bore — what gay little lamps he has
lighted now ; and as for the cyclamen (" with
their mitrelike flowers they resemble an oecu-
menical council of fairy bishops," said Dean
Hole), how could anyone begrudge the three

DECEMBER 285

years of waiting between seed and flower when
once they lift up their lovely heads ! The
Chinese primrose and the primula obconica
are good indoor flowers, and if there be no gas
about the house, all of the begonias are inter-
esting— now. I used to think them great bores !
By December, however, if one have a fairly
open mind, one has grown humble, and humi-
lity is so great a virtue that by its aid one may
come, in time, to bow before an abutilon.

Calla lilies, impatiens, and Dutch bulbs,
grown in pots or in water, as you will, belong
to the indoor garden, but palms do not, nor
crotons, nor Norfolk Island pines, nor carna-
tions, nor roses, except a small pink one, and
the old crimson Otaheit, nor most emphatically,
india-rubber plants. These are either green-
house things or decorative plants that can
have nothing whatever in common with the
tender old friends for the sake of whose green
leaves and infrequent bloom so much care is
lavished. How they are shielded from frosts
and draughts, how they are sprayed and
watered and turned sunward, how are all the
pretty devices love can offer lavished upon
them ! The house plants always belong to a

286 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

woman, and almost always to a woman who
has known sorrow.

It is when the lamps are lighted that the
indoor garden shows its most poetic side.
Against walls and curtains they cast their
shadows of waving frond, and swaying tendril,
and wide leafage, a fantastic company to which
guests might will be bidden as to a feast.

Where are they gone, the shadows that I
used to know ? Where is the old firelight, and
the old lamplight which called them into life ?
Where are the eyes which once looked upon
their beauty, and the voices which once praised
their fitful loveliness ? Shadows also ? Or is
there another World, where the Realities are,
and is it I who am a shadow waiting to be
born?

The best winter gardens at our command are
those laid down on the lines dear to our
ancestors of Colonial days. By what sense of
fitness they chose the style of architecture best
fitted to the uses of the States that were not but
were to be, and the gardens best suited to the
architecture, the climate, and what ought to be
the dominant American ideal, I cannot tell,
nor can I divest my mind of an earnest belief

DECEMBER 287

that much that was direct and honest and
broad in the words and deeds of their day, and
the day of the young republic, was learned in
the stately box walks that led up to the statelier
homes which the men of the eighteenth century
loved. The aristocratic principle noblesse oblige
is the insistent note in those houses and
gardens, and for that reason they were the
most perfect exemplification of the democratic
ideal.

A man never plants a red-oak for himself.
It is his hostage to a fortunate posterity,
and a good deed done without thought of
personal benefit. He does not set out his
box, or laurel, or holly without thought of
others. Every one he plants is a silent affirma-
tion in his belief in many things — faith in the
unseen Power which has directed all things
from the beginning, and which will not fail
in oversight of the tree ; faith in the sun and
rain, and all of the marvellous forces without
which no smallest seed could germinate ; faith
that those who come after him will have his
own need of shade and fuel and refreshment
and beauty, and faith in the dignity and
stability of his country. In a wide and deep

288 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

sense, the credo of the tree planter includes
much of the highest religion.

It is only when trees are bare that we can
see how beautiful are these types of man,
when stripped of the garments by which so
many of their most distinctive characteristics
are hidden. Were the leaves always here,
we should know little of the structure of the
trees themselves, and our acquaintance with
them would be exactly as accurate as if we
recognised our closest friends by certain of
their coats or ribbons, and did not know them
if they changed their fashion. Half of the
beauty of the beech is gone when we cannot
see the lichens painted on her grey bole, or
the network of her delicate branchings. The
rugged corrugations of the sassafras - trunks
tell quite a different story from that of their
leaves and fruits, and are wholly unlike the
grey flakes which cover the hickories, and
the rough sheathings .of the oaks and walnuts.
The shredded purple integuments of the wild
cherries are not at all to be confounded with
the uninteresting garb of maples, and lindens
and ashes, and the sycamores have a world-old
tale printed in their pale faces. One lady

DECEMBER 289

birch, like the pure goddess that she is, cares
so little for her raiment that we can always
have glimpses of the warm loveliness of her
satin skin and the soft tremblings of her breath.
Springing in clusters from old roots, white
and slender, she carries us back to the old, old
days and the old free forest life as no other
tree can do, and we see her giving herself to
the lost builder who formed from it the one
perfect achievement of man — the canoe — that
lay on the breast of forgotten waters

" Like a yellow leaf in autumn
Like a yellow water-lily."

Beech and birch — the one holding the pallid
sunshine in her unfallen leaves, the other
white and swaying — are the high lights of the
winter-garden picture, which require other
senses than were needed when leaves were
green.

If I could have choice of but one thing to
look at in December, it should be a hemlock-
tree. It should have grown in a space large
enough to let it do what it liked with its
boughs ; and toward the south there should
be a slope beneath it, where some of the

2 90 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

limbs might trail low for the snow to rest on,
and for the wild things to creep under. I
would not ask it to thread itself with cones.
It would do that of itself, for pure love of
the tiny drops which are the jewels of the
cone -wo rid.

After choice has been made of the conifers,
and the box — the shrubs which bear persistent
berries are most to be desired now : privet,
Thunberg's barberry, black alder, and a few
roses. In climates favourable to the hollies,
there is no need to go further than their
shining treasures, and where the English
ivies will cling to wall and to tree trunk,
knotting their own stems into little trunks,
as age comes on, and spreading their thick
clusters of green atop, no one need ask for
more. And yet, these do not hold the snow
as well as the old mock-oranges — whose
brown calyces hold the cold white crystals in
a thousand urns. Any shrub whose stems are
flexible and much-branched is an invaluable
asset when morning dawns after a stormy
night.

There is a never-cloying pleasure in the
buds in which next year's flowers are hibernat-

DECEMBER 291

ing. The dogwood bears a great treasure of
these, and there is much to think of in the way
in which the magnolias hold up the furry
tapers which are to flame out in white fire
before April goes. Maples make no secret of
their buds, which are ready for the first warm
day in March, nor dees the horse-chestnut deny
what it means to do with its large pointed tips.
The Andromeda is the most alluring of all
winter-budded growths ; and one of the jessa-
mines is so full of heavenly innocence that
three warm days will make her smile out,
goldenly, as if indeed the winter were past
and gone, and the time of singing birds had
come. So in reality, in bud and berry or
brown receptacle, we have always two joys
with us — the promise of the year to come, and
the reminders of the year that is gone and a
beautiful and convincing argument for that
unbrokenness of life which we call Immor-
tality.

The sun of the Shortest Day has set. The
old Earth, faithful and true, turns summerward
once more. The Book of the White-paper
Garden is full, and there must be new pages
for new days. Thank God for the beautiful,

29 2 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN

beneficent planning which makes room for
even the smallest seed, of living plant or of
loving thought, and keeps safe and warm the
germ which aspires !

As with the year, so with man. As he
grows older his thoughts reach out to farther
horizons, and the love which once burned in
a single, central fire now broadens into a
flame that would gladly envelop the whole
world. He outgrows much, and into what
remains of the youth behind him he reads far
higher meanings as he advances toward the
youth that lies before him. He loved a flower
once — now he grows into conscious relation
with the immeasurable truth, which is taught
nowhere else so clearly as in a garden, that
all he has had, all he has desired, of any
good is his. Not to touch, perhaps, or to
see, but to remember and to wait for, secure
in the faith that the Paradise which lies just
beyond Calvary needs every leaf and every
blossom that ever cheered the longing soul
on its pilgrimage thither.

THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED. EDINBURGH.

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