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OUT OF THE GATHERING BASKET

mee OF THE
GATHERING

Ses KET

A Series of Sketches on
Gardens and Books
by
GRACE GOODMAN MAURAN

Published by

RALPH FLETCHER SEYMOUR
Chicago

Mone Ra LE

Copyright 1921
by
Ralph Fletcher Seymour

JUL 19'21

©1.A622397
J ti mT

To C.S.M.
Who Made My Garden Possible.

CONTENTS.

The Gathering Basket

The Garden in Books
Flowery Traits |

Bach Among the Madonnas
Rosy Reflections

The Picked Flower

The Child in the Garden
A Ghostly Garden Party
The Plush Pansy

The Garden as a Social Centre
Cosmos, Cats, and Coyotes
A Shredded Day
Architectural Blossoms
Souls, Seeds and Forsythias

OUT OF THE GATHERING BASKET

THE GATHERING BASKET

——=

Scr URING a memorable conversa-
BS) tion between Bazarov, the hero
ezze(3) of Turgenev’s Fathers and Chil-
dren, and his fascinating friend, Madame
Odinstov, the subject of happiness is
introduced, and Madame Odinstov ques-
tions: ‘Tell me why it is that even when
we are enjoying music, for instance, or a
fine evening, or a conversation with sym-
pathetic people, it all seems an intimation
of some measureless happiness existing
apart somewhere rather than actual hap-
piness such as, I mean, we are ourselves
in possession of?”

This is profoundly and sadly true, but .
perhaps the fault is our own, perhaps we
do not know how to “burst joy’s grape
against our palates fine,’ or perhaps our
palates are not fine enough. Yet if ever
this realization of happiness was ours, if
ever there came a moment when we
might pause in our enjoyment and say:

il

4 THE GATHERING BASKET

2

““this is true happiness,’ we would wish
to make of the thing that gave us such
delight a life-long pursuit. But of course
it would be one thing for you and another
for me; happiness, as we know, being an
individual as well as a relative matter;
it is the old case of one man’s meat being
another man’s poison, and even the
music, the fine evening and the sympa-
thetic conversation which touched so
nearly Madame Odinstov’s ideal of hap-
piness might mean boredom to others.
In the concluding essay in Pater’s vol-
ume on The Renaissance the author
refers to what he considers the most
beautiful passage in the writings of Rous-
seau, the passage in which is described the
awakening in the great Frenchman of the
literary sense. ‘‘An undefinable taint of
death had always clung about Rosseau,”’
says Pater, ‘and now in early manhood
he believed himself smitten by mortal
disease. He asked himself how he might
make as much as possible of the interval
that remained; and he was not biased by
anything in his previous life when he

THE GATHERING BASKET 5)

decided that it must be by intellectual
excitement—”’ And Pater goes on to say
that we are all condemned, all under the
sentence of death but with a sort of
indefinite reprieve. ““We have an inter-
val, and then our place knows us no more.
Some spend this interval in listlessness,
some in high passions, the wisest at
least among the children of this world in
art and song.” We should get as many
pulsations as possible into our given time,
says the essayist, and we may get them
through great passions, or by means of
the various forms of enthusiastic activity,
disinterested or otherwise, which come
to us.

A form of ‘‘enthusiastic activity”? which
seems to me worthy to fill at least a part
of the space of the indefinite reprieve,
and which comes the nearest to affording
the tangible happiness for which
Turgenev’s heroine sighed, is gardening.
Though we might wish to extend that
reprieve indefinitely, and desire, as Mon-
taigne confessed he desired, to banish the
king of terrors altogether, still if he must

6 THE GATHERING BASKET

come, let us say, with Montaigne, that
he may come and find us planting our
cabbages. For to work in mother earth,
to help plants to grow, and to assist
flowers in reaching the full perfection of
their beauty are tasks which to the
garden-lover bring as rich and deep a
happiness as can fall to the lot of mortal
man or woman. There is true adventure
for the spirit in the planting of a seed,
there is something akin to maternal
tenderness in the feeling with which one
watches the young plant grow, and there
is a joy not unlike the creative pleasure
of the artist in seeing the result of one’s
labor and painstaking.

Of course gardeners are like geniuses,
they are born, not made, and one might
say to the would-be gardener: “If your
love of the soil is not deep enough, and
your desire to cultivate growing things is
not great enough to make you suffer and
endure for the sweet face of a flower, why
there is no use in your following this pro-
fession, you will not find your happiness
in a garden.” As Kipling has said:

THE GATHERING BASKET eae

“gardens are not made

By singing :—‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sit-
ing in the shade

While better men than we go out and
start their working lives

At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with
broken dinner knives.

There’s not a pair of legs so thin, there’s
not a head so thick,

There’s not a hand so weak and white,
nor yet a heart so sick,

But it can find some needful job that’s
crying to be done

For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth
every one.”

No, the garden does not glorify those
persons who work in it from a sense of
duty rather than love, or the Peter Bells
of the world who fail to see the poetry in
primroses. It is not unusual to hear some
luke-warm cultivator of plants say: “I
never have any luck with flowers, they
simply will not grow for me.” This may
be quite true, though it is not a question
of luck but one of genuine, and some-

8 THE GATHERING BASKET

times secret sympathy between plant and
gardener.

In his essay on Nature, Emerson says,
**Flowers belong so strictly to youth that
we adult men soon come to feel that their
beautiful generations concern not us, and
we are old bachelors with our ridiculous
tenderness.’ Ridiculous tenderness, in-
deed! Was Wordsworth’s tenderness for
the meanest flower that blows, and
Tennyson’s for the flower in the crannied
wall, and Burns’ for the daisy that fell
under his plough, ridiculous? And though
Huxley’s interest in the gentian was partly
scientific was there not a sentimental
quality in his feeling for this particular
flower? And Emerson refuted his own
assertion, for it is said that during the
last years of his life he loved to look upon
the little blossom called self-heal which
crept into the grass before his study win-
dow, and whose very name suggests the
idea that it was the floral expression of
one of the theories of the great essayist.

Yet it is my conviction as a gardener
that in order to enjoy the occupation of

THE GATHERING BASKET 9

gardening to its fullest extent one must
be a book-lover as well as flower-lover,
for literature and flowers seem to be so
intertwined as to appear almost to grow
on the same stem. We like, while reading
in our libraries, to glance from the printed
page to the bowl of flowers on the table,
and the pleasure is equally great if, while
weeding in our garden, we may look up
to see, lying on a nearby table, or chair,
or reposing in the gathering basket by the
side of the scissors, or clipped blossoms a
beloved book-friend, communion with
which is to be the crown and the reward
of the morning’s work.

And so this being my conviction it 1s
seldom that I enter the garden unaccom-
panied by a book, and it affords genuine
satisfaction to see before me The Mer-
chant of Venice, or The Idiot, or The
Princess Cassimassima, or Richard Fev-
erel, or. The Mayor of Casterbridge, and
to know that they are respectfully wait-
ing there among the flowers the moment
when I can give them attention and >
interest. And just as I like to have in

10 THE GATHERING BASKET

the garden one particular bed devoted to
the old-fashioned flowers, the sweet-
williams, and lantanas, and bouncing bets
and four o’clock’s and butter-cups, so do
I frequently choose as garden companions
such well-tried flowers of fiction as Eve-
lina, Cecilia, Emma, Shirley, Henry
Esmond, and David Copperfield. Some-
times I commune with these well-loved
friends, but frequently it is enough
merely to know that they are there, ready
to cast their spell and to recall, if desired,
the memorable days of our first meeting.

And when I return to the house, with
gathering basket filled to the brim with
the flowers destined for indoor decoration,
there seems to be within my brain a kind
of mental receptacle into which have
been gathered small nosegays of thought
that promise to give color and beauty
to life. The essays within this little
volume are made up of such nosegays, and
if they fail to attract other visions than
my own, at least I have had the pleasure
of gathering them.

THE GARDEN IN BOOKS

[ay OOKS, as I have said, should form
2 Eas part of the accessories of a gar-
S=—<4)} den, but not necessarily books on
country life, for as it has been said that
the country is for the benefit of those
born in town, so it might be stated with
equal truth that books on out-of-door
life are most enjoyed by readers sitting
in city library chairs.

The English critic, Leslie Stephens,
belongs to this class, and in his delightful
essay on Country Books, he freely ad-
mits that though a cockney in grain, he
loves to lean upon the farmyard gate of
literature, “‘to hear Mrs. Poyser give a
bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled
into a placid doze by the humming of
Dorlecote Mill, to sit down in Dandie
Dinmont’s parlour and bestow crumbs
from his groaning table upon three genera-
tions of Peppers and Mustards.” But
when he lifts his eyes from these imagi-

12 THE GATHERING BASKET

nary scenes, Mr. Stephens confesses that
he is not adverse to gazing across the
street where he can “dimly descry his
neighbor behind his looking glass, adjust-
ing the parting of his back hair, and
achieving triumphs with his white tie
calculated to excite the envy of a Brum-
mel. And then,” says Stephens, “in order
to annihilate this neighbor and his even-
ing parties, it is pleasant to take down
one of the magicians of the shelf, and to
wander off through quiet country lanes
into some sleepy hollow of the past.”’
There are many who share this critic’s
views, who enjoy breathing the country
air through books, but who in reality
choose always to be where they may
catch glimpses of their neighbors’ back
hair and ties.

But if I wanted to enjoy this book-
country in its purest essence, its keenest
reality, it would be neither George Ehot
or Scott that I would choose as a guide,
but rather that greatest of all interpre-
ters of rural scenes, Thomas Hardy. I
would stand on Norcombe Hill with

THE GARDEN IN BOOKS 18

‘Gabriel Oak, and watch this shepherd
tend his sheep and young ewes; I would
wander over that “great inviolate plane,”’
Egdon Heath, with its unsympathetic
habitant, Eustacia Vye, and I would
stand beside Giles Winterbourne while
he planted the young firs. “He had a
marvelous power of making trees grow,”
had Giles Winterbourne. ‘“‘Although he
would seem to shovel the earth in quite
carelessly, there was a sort of sympathy
between himself and the fir, oak or beech
that he was operating on, so that the
roots took hold of the soil in a few
days.”

Our cockney critic believes that poets
are not to be trusted as potent weavers
of this magic, this power to make one
enjoy country air while seated in a town
library, for the poets are too much given
to sermonizing. Shelley’s Skylark, and
Keat’s Nightingale are equally deter-
mined, he avows, that we shall indulge
in meditations upon life and death, and
the mysterious meaning of the universe,
while Matthew Arnold’s Gipsy Scholar,

14 THE GATHERING BASKET

instead of lulling the reader into delicious
dreams and longings to become a gipsy,
cause him to worry over this strange
disease of modern life, and about “our
brains o’ertaxed and palsied hearts.” 3

But there are two books concerning —
whose potency in this matter of magic-
weaving Mr. Stephens has no doubts, and
in which a happy combination of circum-
stances has provided us with true country
idylls fresh from the soil. One of these is
Izaak Walton’s Complete Angler, a
volume which if read at all by anglers 1s
read I fancy only by the literary ones,
and the other is Gilbert White’s Natural
History of Selbourne, a classic of the
garden of which the same might be said,
that if read by gardeners is read only by
the bookish ones. Of the quaint sim-
plicity and charm of this latter volume,
Stephens has much to say, as has also
James Russel Lowell who thus delight-
fully writes of it: “Open the volume
where you will, it takes you out of doors.
In our broiling July weather one can
walk out with this genially garrulous

THE GARDEN IN BOOKS 15

Fellow of Oriel, and find refreshment
instead of fatigue. It is a book,” he goes
on to say, “that has also the delightful-
ness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems
never to have had any harder work to do
than to study the habits of his feathered
townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of
the peaches on his wall. The natural
term of a hog’s life had more interest for
him than that of an empire, and he writes
gravely of making the acquaintance in
1770, of an old family tortoise with whom
he evidently fell in love at first sight.”
*‘There are moods,’’ continues Lowell,
“in which this kind of history is infinitely
refreshing. These creatures whom we
affect to look down upon as the drudges
of instinct are members of a common-
wealth whose constitutions rest on 1m-
movable bases. Never any need of
reconstruction there! They never dream
of settling it by vote that eight hours are
equal to ten, or that one creature is as
clever as another and no more. They do
not use their poor wits in regulating
God’s clocks, nor think they cannot go

16 THE GATHERING BASKET

astray as long as they carry their guide-
board about with them—”’

The essay of Lowell’s from which these
quotations are made is said by Stephens
to be one of the most charming essays on
gardens ever written, and one has but to
dip into it to realize the truth of this
statement, and yet both White and
Lowell seem to have confined their garden
acquaintance almost wholly to birds and
insects and to have ignored those equally
beautiful and responsive habitants of a
garden, the flowers. Lowell’s essay bears
the title My Garden Acquaintance, but
what kind of a garden could it have
been that yielded friendship only with
birds and none with growing plants.
And in White’s History, which frequently
takes the form of letters, the flowers are
but minor characters and not to be put
on the same plane with the British
hirundines, the sand-martins, and swifts.
“Dear sir,” he characteristically writes
to the Honourable Daines Barrington,
“Your observation that the cuckoo does
not deposit its eggs indiscriminately in

THE GARDEN IN BOOKS ie

the nest of the first bird that comes in its
way, but probably looks out a nurse in
some degree congenerous with whom to
intrust its young is perfectly new to me;
and struck me so forcibly, that I naturally
fell into a train of thought that led me to
consider whether the fact was so, and
what reason there was for it.”’

There are indeed moods, as Lowell has
said, in which this kind of history is
infinitely refreshing, and the reader. is
quite in sympathy with the author's
conviction, expressed in the opening lines
of his “‘advertisement,” that “if station-
ary men would pay some attention to the
districts in which they reside, and would
publish their thoughts respecting the
objects that surround them, from such
material might be drawn the most com-
plete county-histories which are still
wanting—”’

So in spite of what Leslie Stephens has
said regarding the sermonizing habits of
poets, when writing about nature, it is
to the poets we must turn for a true
interpretation of the soul of a flower.

18 THE GATHERING BASKET

To Emily Dickenson’s description of the
may-flower:

‘Pink, small, and punctual,
Aromatic, low,

Covert in April
Candid in May,

Dear to the moss,

Known by the knoll
Next to the robin

In every human soul.”

And to her interpretation of the char-
acter of an anonymous blossom in the
following lines:

“So bashful when I spied her,
So pretty, so ashamed!

So hidden in her leaflets,
Lest anybody find;

So breathless till I passed her,
So helpless when I turned

And bore her, struggling, blushing
Her simple haunts beyond!

THE GARDEN IN BOOKS 19

For whom I robbed the dingle,
For whom betrayed the dell,

Many will doubtless ask me,
But I shall never tell!’

And every gardener loves Miss Dicken-
son’s tribute to that constant friend of all
out-of-door workers, the grass.

“The grass so little has to do,
A sphere of simple green,
With only butterflies to brood,

And bees to entertain,

And stir all day to pretty tunes
The breezes fetch along

And hold the sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything;

And thread the dew all night, like pearls,
And make itself so fine—

A duchess were too common for such a
noticing

And even when it dies, to pass
In odors so divine

As lowly spices gone to sleep,
Or amulets of pine.

20 THE GATHERING BASKET

And then to dwell in sovereign barns,
And dream the days away,

The grass so little has to do,
I wish I were the hay!’

It is this way of treating the flower,
and all growing things, as individuals, or
as playing their parts in the lives of
individuals that delights the gardener
who rejoices to know that the influence
of her floral friends is recognized and that
they are permitted to take their rightful
places in the human drama.

What would poor mad Ophelia be
without her rosemary that’s for remem-
brance, and her pansies which are for
thought? And who could think of the
lovely Perdita without her garden, her
marigolds “that go to bed with the sun
and her pale primroses that die un-
married.”’” And to speak of primroses is
to recall another of Shakespeare’s im-
mortal women, Imogen, whose face was
like that flower, whose veins recalled the
azur’d harebell, and whose breath out-
sweetened the eglantine leaf.

THE GARDEN IN BOOKS 9)

One might write a literary history of
the violet, hiding beside the mossy stone,
springing from the pure and unpolluted
flesh of the dead Ophelia, and comforting
the dying Keats who declared that he
could almost~feel it growing over his
grave. Burns atoned to the “‘wee, modest
crimson-tipped”’ daisy that fell a victim
to his plough by writing an unforgettable
poem about it, and though he sermonized,
as Stephens says is the way with poets,
and compared his own fate to that of the
flower, we are grateful for the sermon.
William Vaughn Moody immortalized a
youthful love in his Heart’s Wild-Flower:

*‘But where she strays, through blight or
blooth, one fadeless flower she wears,

A little gift God gave my youth,—whose
petals dim were fears,

Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesi-
tancies, and tears.”

And who that has loved and wept over
Tennyson’s Maud can forget the way in
which the flowers sympathized with the

QQ THE GATHERING BASKET

lover as he waited in the garden for the
_ coming of his adored one:

“The red rose cried, ‘she is near, she is
near.’

And the white rose weeps, ‘she is late;’

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’

And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’ ”

It is in lines like these that flowers
come into their own, and every gardener
knows that they can thus sympathize
with moods and feelings. But she knows
too, that one must live with them long
and love them truly before they will
yield this lovely blossom of understand-
ing.

FLOWERY TRAITS

Rice) N THE introduction to her illumi-
¥abe/| nating book on Japanese Flower
ese] Arrangement, Mary Averill says
that she believes that flowers are a greater
factor in the life of the Japanese than in .
that of any other nation. She even goes
so far as to state that, having followed

this art of arranging flowers from their ~~

youth up, the Japanese have gained
thereby ideas of proportion, powers of
concentration, and some of their finest
traits of character.

High praise this for so seemingly simple
a thing as a flower, but if it be true, if
the love of flowers and the study of their
formation and characteristics do leave
their impress upon character, then the
American people have too much neglec-
ted a valuable aid to education and cul-
ture. For although we recognize gardens
and flowers as ornamental adjuncts to
life we are inclined to look upon the

94 THE GATHERING BASKET

garden enthusiast as upon the ardent
golfer, as one engaged 1 in a harmless and
healthful pastime.

And there is no doubt but what be
among and working with flowers does
affect character; florists seem to have a
certain gentleness and kindliness not
betrayed by other tradesmen, and one
can more readily‘ imagine a_ butcher
committing murder than a gardener.

And then too, flowers have strong
characters of their own, and just as with
people, there are some to whom you
surrender your heart at the first meeting,
and others with whom you could never
wish to be on terms of intimacy. Who,
for instance, could be intimate with a
canna or a begonia, and what flower-lover
could ever grow sentimental over a salvia,
or a cock’s-comb?

And there are flowers possessed ‘of
certain contrary ways which beget in
those who live with them a kind of
horticultural irritation. For example,
there are what might be called floppy
flowers, such as the larkspur or gladiolus,

FLOWERY TRAITS 25

flowers which seem to possess no back-
bone and require constant bolstering on
the part of the gardener. There are
people like that, people who seem to have
no self-reliance, who demand frequent
proppings, and whe if left to themselves
would be in a drooping condition most of
the time. After one has given frequent
assistance to such flowers, and finds them
evading the prop, one is inclined to say
to the leaning larkspur, or reclining
gladiolus: ‘“‘Well, fall where you will, I
am done with you,” just as one says to
their human counterparts: “If you can’t
take care of yourselves you ought to fall.”
And then there are flowers which fail to
fulfill their promise, which go, as we say,
all to leaf, and after raising hopes of
gorgeous blossomings, put forth a few
meagre blossoms and are done. We have
all known people like this, people who
make a great show of their leaves of
promise, who dazzle us with prospects of
great achievements, and in the end
amount to no more than that despised
habitant of a garden, a hill of beans.

26 THE GATHERING BASKET

And some flowers go too early to seed,
they fill the gardener’s soul with beauty
one morning, and a few days after have
retired into a premature state of seediness.
Of course the day-lily confesses its brevity
by its name, but in the case of this flower
when one blossom fades there is another
to take its place so that you may be on
with the new love as soon as you are off
with the old. There are people who
wither too early in their lives, who are
always confiding to you that they have
outlived this pleasure or that, and who
unlike the day-lily fail to replace the old
blossom of pleasure by a finer new one.

It was said of Balzac that he accepted
the theory that a man’s name influences
his character, and that even the initial
of a name held within it great power for
good or evil, a man afflicted with the
tortuous letter Z being foredoomed to a
life of torment. If this were true it
might be well to name children after
flowers, avoiding of course the ill-named
zinnia, though experience has proven
how very unlily like girls named Lily

FLOWERY TRAITS Q7

often are, how human Roses frequently
but little resemble in character the
Queen of flowers, and how the Violets
are sometimes known to be characterized
by the most worldly ideals and self-
seeking ways. The mother of one of
Meredith’s heroines who was possessed
of the poetic passion for flowers gave her
heart to dahlias, ‘“‘and Dahlia was the
name uttered at the christening of her
eldest daughter.”

But this custom of naming children
after flowers has one drawback: the
name while suiting the child seems un-
suited to the elderly woman. Violet,
Daisy, and Dahlia are names eminently
appropriate for the day of christening,
but grandmother Violet, great aunt
Daisy, and old-maid Dahlia sound to
some ears absurd. Yet why should this
be so? The violet goes to seed, but
retains within that seed the qualities of
unobtrusiveness and modesty for which
it is admired; the daisy may preserve its
freshness and innocence when externally
it is dried and faded and the dahlia’s

25 THE GATHERING BASKET

glorious color is not altogether at the
mercy of time. As Professor Santayanna
has more gracefully expressed it: ““Even
under the inevitable crust of age, the soul
remains young, and wherever it is able
to break through sprouts into something
green and tender.” And he might have
added that these elderly human sprouts
sometimes reveal a beauty unknown to
those of the younger plant, the kind of
beauty of which Pater speaks in describ-
ing the charm or La Giconda: “‘A beauty
wrought out from within, the deposit,
little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”

As a gardener I am sometimes drawn
into idle and fanciful meditations con-
cerning the origin of certain names of
flowers, and I should like to know some-
thing of those daring individuals who
presumed to bestow these names. It
would delight me, for instance, to know
what lover of good eating ventured to
perpetuate his fondness for butter and
eggs by calling a flower by such a mate-
rialistic name, and what lonely bachelor

FLOWERY TRAITS 29

consoled himself for the absence of but-
tons, and a sewer-on of buttons, by
naming a flower a bachelor’s button.

Did certain English flowers so resemble
the bells of Canterbury cathedral as to
be deemed worthy of the name of canter-
bury bell? Was there a time when foxes
wore gloves and larks had spurs that two
of our most popular flowers should be
called foxgloves and larkspurs? Of course
we understand how the bloodroot, the
solomon’s seal, and the milkweed got
their names, and it is obvious that the
daisy is the day’s eye. And then there
are flowers like the hyacinth which have
a mythical origin and which are asso-
ciated with some romantic legend, but
in the cases of most flowers there is no
accounting for the name, and no way of
tracing its history.

Some one, I think it was Miss Wilkin-
son, once wrote.a charming poem about
that quaint and old-fashioned habitant
of both wild and cultivated places, the
bouncing bet, and the writer intimated
that this flower having been originally

30 THE GATHERING BASKET

wild, had one day bounced into a garden
and taken to cultivated ways. It must
have been a part of Betty’s system of
culture to forego bouncing habits for in
the garden she is all too much inclined
to lie prostrate instead of living up to her
reputation for action, such no doubt
being one of the evil consequences of
cultivation.

That delicate little garden flower called
love-in-a-mist was evidently named by
some man who had been disappointed in
love, for it bears another name which is
in itself a sad revelation of this lover’s
disillusionment. It is sometimes called
devil-in-a-bush, and it is all too evident
that this unhappy man after groping
about ‘in the tantalizing mists of love,
discovered at last that love was not there
at all, but only some horrid evil creature
that was lying in wait for his soul.

Poets seem to love the mere names of
flowers and often by a simple enumera-
tion of these names conjure up a picture
and produce a spell. In the second verse
of William Vaughan Moody’s beautiful

FLOWERY TRAITS 31

poem, Gloucester Moors we have such
an instance:

*“Jill—o’er the ground is purple blue,
Blue is the quaker-maid,

The wild geranium holds its dew
Long in the boulder’s shade.

Wax-red hangs the cup

From the huckleberry boughs
In barberry bells the gray moths sup,

Or where the choke-cherry lifts high up
Sweet bowls for their carouse.”’

One can hardly read this poem without
experiencing a desire to depart at once
for Gloucester Moors, in order to make
the acquaintance, or to renew an ac-
quaintance with two such charmingly
named flowers as jill-o’er-the-ground, and
the quaker-maid.

These idle fancies, thrown hap-hazard
into the mental gathering basket prove
one thing at least, that whether we
accept or not the belief of the Japanese,
that the study of flowers influences
character it is certain that living and

32 THE GATHERING BASKET

working among them does indeed color
one’s thoughts and create certain flowery
fancies.

BACH AMONG THE MADONNAS

Bessza| USIC came to me this morning
dba in the garden, and it was high
ws] time that it did so, for had I
not all my life gone to music. Had I not
arrayed myself in my best garments,
offered my money at a box-office, sat
among those who knew so much more
about music than I did, or so much less,
and in fact done everything possible to
desecrate this greatest of the arts in
order to “enjoy” it. And now it was time
that music came to me, if for nothing but
to save myself, and itself, from the dese-
cration.

I think it was a Bach fugue that chose
to thus honor me and my garden, though
I don’t know exactly what a fugue is, and
I am not altogether sure that it was
Bach. But the music harmonized so
well with the madonna lilies whose
roots I was cultivating that I like to
think it was Bach. And it was pleasant

34 THE GATHERING BASKET

to have this music disembodied, unas-
sociated with a personality who asks a
price for his art. To be sure I am dimly
aware that I owe these out-of-door
harmonies to a noted violinist who has
rented my neighbor’s house for the
summer, and I have been informed that
it has been made financially worth his
while to play in a nearby famous summer
garden, but these material details are
lost sight of among the lilacs and haw-
thorns, and I choose to be only conscious
of the glorious fact that a garden becomes
a heaven when it is filled with the music
of the great composer. And yet one can
hardly associate Bach with rural life, and
scenes, though it is said that he has
written a sonata which concludes with a
fugue suggested by the cackle of a
barnyard hen. Who knows but what this
was the fugue that came to me this
morning, and that my neighbor, in-
spired by the sight of a gardener in soiled
cotton morning dress, and shabby tennis
shoes, cultivating her madonna lilies that
grow in close proximity to the chicken

BACH AMONG THE MADONNAS'- 35

yard, had been reminded of this fugue
and had chosen it for his morning exer-
cise.

But what does it matter? I am not
quite sure that music that expresses love
of nature and gardens would sound better
here than in a concert hall. Of course
Mendelsohn’s famous Spring Song is
spring itself, the very soul of a garden
and of the flowers that grow therein, and
that part of Goldmark’s Country Wed-
ding which is named In the Garden, is
flowers turned into notes, but who would
care to listen to McDowell’s lovely com-
position entitled To a Wild Rose, while
picking wild roses, or to his exquisite To
a Water Lily when in the act of plucking
one of those flowers? And if that beloved
operatic image of my youth, Martha
should step from the stage into my garden
and choose to sing, among my roses, her
famous Last Rose of Summer I am sure
that I should feel like driving her from
the garden.

Many music lovers confess that they
are quite ignorant of the technique of

36 THE GATHERING BASKET

music, and that what they really do care
for is its poetry, its flower-like quality,
its power of stimulation, and what Pater
calls its perfect identification of form and
matter. And belonging to this class it
makes no difference to me whether the
morning recital among the madonnas was
made up of Bach compositions or those of
a less reverent spirit. But had Turgenev’s
Madame Odinstov been present at this
morning entertainment in a garden she
might have approached very near to the
actual happiness for which she yearned.
And I know too that this form of a
musical has forever spoiled me for the
kind that requires for its enjoyment,
prosaic dressings up and sallyings forth to
a conventional gathering place.

ROSY REFLECTIONS

HEN the gathering basket is filled
1 with roses, cut from the rose
madi) carden, it seems as if history and
fee met in a fragrant and fasci-
nating jumble. There is General Jacque-
minot and Meg Merrilies, Paul Neyron,
and Dorothy Perkins, Caroline Testout
and Charles Lamb, Madame Plantier
and John Stuart Mill, Papa Lambert
and The Prairie Queen. And as I gather
this oddly assorted company into sepa-
rate bouquet groups I find my spirit is
humbled by my unfamiliarity with the
historical personages whose names have
been given to the roses, and rendered
proud by my ability to attach a quota-
tion to every flower.

But who was General Jacqueminot, and
what did he do to merit the high honor
of having a rose named after him? And
who was Paul Neyron, and Mrs. John
Laing, and Caroline Testout, and Captain

38 THE GATHERING BASKET

Christy? I have always loved Madame
Plantier as a rose that embodies the pure
essence of June, but I haven’t an idea who
the lady was, or whether she was as
lovely as the flower that immortalizes
her name.

On the other hand I cannot glance at
these bouquets of freshly gathered roses
without plunging at once into poetry. I
usually begin by bidding the General:

““Goe, happy rose, and enterwove
With other flowers, bind my love.
Tell her too she must not be
Longer flowing, longer free,

That so oft has fetter’d me.”

And then I remark to Papa Lambert
that the roses of Herrick’s time brought
quite different thoughts to the mind of a
poet from those suggested by the modern
rose to a modern poet. To a Herrick the
flower was but a messenger of love, but to
a George Meredith it suggests in the
way it unfolds itself in “‘ugly mold”’ the
manner in which the soul unfolds “‘through
blood and tears.”

ROSY REFLECTIONS 39

And the rose has always been con-
sidered as the most consolatory of flowers;
according to Keats it was a cure for “‘the
melancholy fit,” and Sidney Lanier
prayed:

‘‘Would that my songs might be
What roses make by day and night—

Distillments of my clod of misery
Into delight.”

It was “roses, roses, with never a spray
of yew,” that Matthew Arnold would
strew upon the dead heroine of his
exquisite dirge, Requiescat, and Roses
in the Subway, inspired Dana Burnet to
write:

‘‘A wan-cheeked girl with faded eyes—
Came stumbling down the crowded car
Clutching her burden to her heart
As though she held a star—

Roses, I swear it, red and sweet
And struggling from her pinched white
hands
Roses like captured hostages
From far and fairy lands.”

40 THE GATHERING BASKET

And there are heroines in prose who

seem, in the memory of readers, to be
always associated with this flower: ‘‘Oh,
may I get this rose?’ questioned Maggie
Tulliver of her would-be lover, Stephen
Guest, as they stood together in the con-
servatory, “I think I am quite wicked
with roses—I like to gather them and
smell them till they have no scent left!”
Poor Maggie! There were so few roses
in her brief life. Hardy’s Eustacia Vye
had a face that recalled Bourbon roses,
and yellow roses served as a medium of
expression for the thwarted passion of the
lovers in Mrs. Wharton’s latest novel,
The Age of Innocence.

“He who would have beautiful roses in
his garden must have beautiful roses in
his heart,’’ writes Dean Hole, in that
classic of the rose-bed, A Book About
Roses. And the author goes on to state.
‘He must love them well and always.
To win he must woo, as Jacob wooed
Laban’s daughter, though drought and
frost consume. He must have not only
the glowing admiration, the enthusiasm,

ROSY REFLECTIONS 41

and the passion, but the tenderness, the
thoughtfulness, the reverence, the watch-
fulness of love. And as instance of love’s
watchfulness, in this matter, he cites the
case of some professional rose-growers of
whom it was said that they employed
hundreds of young men with “gig-um-
brellas to stand over the roses when the
rain was too heavy.” Such an anecdote
does not sound absurd to the garden
enthusiast who would readily shield a
favorite rose with her best umbrella if
any good to the flower could be gained
thereby.

One might slightly change Dean Hole’s
lines and say that he who has beautiful
roses growing in his garden is bound to
have them growing in his heart, for there
is something in the mere presence of this
Queen of flowers that puts one in harmony
with the universe. And it is not mere
poetry, when Keats advises the victim of
the blues to glut his sorrow on a morning
rose, or when Lanier declares these flowers
to be “‘distillments of misery into delight.”
It is truth won by experience.

THE PICKED FLOWER

rales F WE accept the Wordsworthian
ae faith that every flower enjoys

<0] the air it breathes, and add to
this the gardener’s conviction that flow-
ers are grateful for care, and conscious
of cultivation, then as gardeners we owe
a certain duty to the picked flower. Or
rather does our obligation begin before
the picking, and ere we shorten the days
of a flower by removing it from its native
spot we should ask ourselves whether we
are justified in such an act, and whether
the friends, or occasions for whom the
sacrifice is to be made, are altogether
worthy.

Only yesterday I picked a bunch of my
fairest mourning brides for a gardenless
city friend, and consoled myself for thus
shortening their existence, and depriving
myself of some lovely companions by
thinking of the joy they would bring to
my less fortunate friend.

4d THE GATHERING BASKET

“How lovely,’ she said, as she lifted
them out of the wet box, where I had so
carefully laid them, and then, alas! for
my lovely brides, she proceeded to place
them on a table at her side while she
plunged at once into a conversation
regarding her new and taxing duties as
an officer in some society for the protec-
tion of wild flowers. And coward that I
was, I never had the courage to ask:
“‘and will you not care for these cultivated
blossoms, and see to it that they are
comfortably placed?” And all through-
out my visit I could feel the reproachful
eyes of those withering brides upon me,
and never once did I venture to intercede
for their lives, but went away, hoping
against hope, that after my departure
they might enter the watery haven that
they so well deserved.

And I was not altogether sure that even
were my mourning brides fortunate
enough to reach at last the desired resting
place that it would be a place altogether
worthy of their charms. I said to myself,
in malice no doubt, that any woman who

THE PICKED FLOWER 45

was capable of keeping flowers out of
water was quite equal to permitting them
to be choked to death in some tight-
necked vase or bowl.

There are women who have a perfect
genius for arranging flowers, who can by
pure instinct tell the proper receptacle
for each blossom, and which of these
receptacles will most enhance their beauty.
It does not seem too much to say that
you can tell a woman’s character by the
way in which she arranges her flowers, or
that it would be well to beware of one
who puts them to death in tight-necked
vases. I am quite sure that Mary
Averill, the author of Japanese Flower
Arrangement, would bear me out in such
statements, for she says that the Japanese
schools where the art of flower arrange-
ment is taught are based on the Buddhist
desire to preserve life. “‘From the desire
to preserve animal life,” says this author,
“came the wish to preserve plant life,
and it came to be one of the occupations
of priests to arrange and care for those
plants and flowers which were the most

46 THE GATHERING BASKET

$9

popular offerings to the gods.”” For a long
time the art had no particular meaning,
but gradually there grew up a system and
a school each of which had its promoters
and followers. The idea of good and evil
fortune governs both selection of mater-
ial and form of arrangement. The color
of some flowers are considered by the
Japanese as unlucky. Red flowers which
are used at funerals are undesirable, not
only for that reason, but also because
red is supposed to suggest the red flames
of a fire of which these people stand in
terror. An odd number of flowers is
lucky while even numbers are unlucky.
For a house-warming white flowers are
used, and to celebrate an inheritance all
kinds of evergreens or chrysanthemums,
or any flower which suggests long life are
used. All of Japan’s most celebrated
generals have been masters of this art
of flower arrangement, declares this au-
thor, for it was found that such study
calmed their minds and made clear their
decisions for the field of action.

THE PICKED FLOWER 47

It is pleasant for an American gardener
to know herself to be backed in her
theories and ideals by the Japanese
generals, and although we will not yield
to this nation in our love of flowers, we
might learn from it a more scientific and
artistic treatment of the picked blossom.
To us a flower in a vase is merely a flower
in a vase, to the Japanese it is a symbol of
life and death. Yet we gardeners who
work constantly among the flowers soon
come to realize that their mere compan-
ionship is a solace, that it calms the mind
and makes clear our decisions for the
field of action.

THE CHILD IN THE GARDEN

@ jen HIS morning I had a visitor, an

4,1] uninvited guest who, strange as
&—S]] it may seem, was a welcome one.
I don’t know his name, I purposely re-
frained from asking it, and it appeared
as if he as purposely refrained from giv-
ing it. But I learned these facts about
him: that he was four years old last
May, that he lived in a city apartment,
and that this was his first visit to a
garden.

A little white booklet containing Pater’s
sketch of The Child in the House lay
on the table in the summer house, and I
recalled how this Pater child had
wandered one evening through a garden
gate which was usually closed, but on this
occasion stood open, inviting his presence.
‘And lo! within, a great red hawthorn in
full flower, embossing heavily the bleached
and twisted trunk and branches, so aged
that there were but few green leaves

50 THE GATHERING BASKET

thereon—a plumage of tender, crimson
fire out of the heart of the dry wood
Was it some periodic moment in the
expansion of soul within him, or mere
trick of heat in the heavily-laden summer
air? But the beauty of the thing struck
home to him feverishly; and in dreams all
night he loitered along a magic roadway
of crimson flowers which seemed to open
ruddily in thick fresh masses about his
feet, and fill softly all the little hollows
in the bank on either side. Also then
for the first time, he seemed to experience
a passionateness in his relation to fair
outward objects, an inexplicable excite-
ment in their presence, which disturbed
him, and from which he half longed to
be free.”’

Had my morning visitor sprung up out
of the earth he could not have seemed
more a part of the garden, so thoroughly
in harmony with the place was his bright
presence, and so like unto the flowers was
his gay little face. After I had finished
with the asters I gave myself up to the
novel pleasure of introducing my guest to

THE CHILD IN THE GARDEN 51

the flowers, and of noting the impression
that these habitants of a garden made
upon his horticulturally unsophisticated
nature. At first he only stared at them
and was silent, but this was partly
because of his shyness of me, and when
the human ice was melted the floral ice
as quickly gave way, and my guest
appeared as one brought up among
primroses and pinks.

He liked best those flowers whose
names conveyed some meaning to his
mind: the johnny-jump-ups, bouncing
bets, sweet williams, and job’s tears,
and he laughed aloud at the stories I
told about these blossoms. There was
the fading remnant of a jack-in-the-pulpit
in one of the beds and I assured my visitor
that this was the preacher of the woods
who was wont to preach only to the
trilliums, violets, adder’s tongues, and
other habitants of wild places, but that
in order to keep peace among my johnny-
jump-ups, and bouncing bets I had intro-
duced this minister from the wilds into
my cultivated garden where he delivered

52 THE GATHERING BASKET

sermons not only to wayward blossoms,
but to those ruthless pickers of wild
flowers who seemed bent upon robbing
the world of much of its beauty.
Together we watched the bees disap-
pear into the hallways of foxgloves, and
waited at the entrances for them to come
out. We made poppy-shows that were
innocent of any poppies and _ pressed
small wreaths of larkspurs in Pater’s
Child in the House. We sailed lady’s
slippers in the bird’s bath, set the table
for a company of robins and thrushes
under a hawthorn tree, and sat breathless
while a humming bird secured its lunch-
eon from the blossom of a honeysuckle.
I explained to my visitor that there
were certain flowers that marked the
time of day, that the morning glory
appeared in the early hours, that
other flowers unfolded during the middle
of the day, and that promptly at four
o'clock the flower of that name revealed
its homely beauty. Of course my guest
announced his intention of remaining
until four, but as it was but eleven then,

THE CHILD IN THE GARDEN 53

and charming as he was I would not wish
to entertain him for a whole day I was
beginning to wonder how I might grace-
fully dismiss him when a voice from the
other side of the lilacs summoned him
back to the home of my neighbor.
“Well, next time I'll come at four,”
were his last words, and I knew that even
if there never was a next time he would
not soon forget this first visit to a garden.
And as I again took up my trowel I fell
to wondering what the coming child,
born and reared in an apartment or hotel,
and knowing flowers only from seeing
them as part of the domestic decorations,
or from observing them in florists’ win-
dows, would be like. He would not be at
all like Pater’s child whose house of
thought was composed so largely of
memories of gardens, of trees, of a
window “across which the heavy blos-
soms could beat so peevishly in the
wind.” And will he not, I asked myself,
be defrauded of his birthright in being

54 THE GATHERING BASKET

thus deprived of a flowery background
to life, and the memory of some opening
garden gate?

A GHOSTLY GARDEN PARTY

SqjF COURSE it is quite in the
nature of things that having a

ats ly {|

£.

—}] garden one should give a garden
party, a garden party such as one used
to read of in English fiction, where
heroes and heroines met against a
lovely floral background, and fell in love
at first sight. Was it not at a garden
party that Gwendolen, the heroine of
George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, first
became conscious of the admiration of
Mr. Grandcourt, and where her beauty
dazzled all who beheld her? But on
second thought I believe it was an
archery meeting, though it doesn’t mat-
ter, at least I know that it was an out-of-
door affair, that the English estate where
the meeting occurred afforded a beautiful
settings for the flower-groups of ladies,
“moving and bowing and turning their
necks as it would become the leisurely
lilies to do if they took to locomotion,”

56 THE GATHERING BASKET

and lastly that Mr. Grandcourt was bored
by the whole affair.

But American garden parties are not
like English ones, though they may be
said to resemble them in one particular,
that of being considered bores by the
men. And somehow even my flowers
have always seemed to disapprove of
these gatherings, and to appear to the
least advantage when acting as silent
spectators of such functions. Perhaps
they were jealous of the “‘flower-groups”’
of ladies, or resented the appearance of
artificial blossoms on hats and gowns;
but at any rate they have invariably
presented wan and wilted countenances
at these functions, and no doubt this
fact was responsible for the presence of
ghosts in my garden.

I hit upon the idea of evoking my
guests instead of inviting them, evoking
them from the pages of the novels I had
loved in my youth, and crowding my
garden paths and benches with loved
but imaginary personages. There are
certain advantages about an imaginary

A GHOSTLY GARDEN PARTY 57

garden party: you don’t have to ask
your guests whether they will have lemon
or cream in their tea, and then too you
may invite the men without fear of boring
them.

No, it wouldn’t do to leave the men
out for I could hardly imagine many of
my beloved heroines unattended by their
adorers. So, walking beside Cecilia, Ce-
cilia of “upright mind,” “great purity”
and “‘virtue’”’ was Mortimer Delvile, and
accompanying the sprightly and _ high-
spirited Elizabeth Bennet came the digni-
fied and haughty Mr. Darcy. I was
almost ashamed to summon Jane Eyre,
and her beloved Mr. Rochester, for only
recently I had been rereading Professor
Saintsbury’s Corrected Impressions, and
had learned that Jane was something
of an underbred hussy, and that Mr.
Rochester’s rudeness and ugliness were
made altogether too much of. Of course
Maggie Tulliver must be present, but
when it came to asking her lover, Stehpen
Guest, again Professor Saintsbury re-
strained me, with his assertion that

58 THE GATHERING BASKET

Stephen was a mere “counter-jumping
cad,” and wholly unworthy of Maggie.
So I asked Philip Waken instead, and
determined to consult the Professor no
further as to who was who in literature.

It was a rather mixed company of
imaginaries that gathered in my garden,
for besides those already mentioned were
Catherine Lytton, Becky Sharp, The
Lady of the Aroostook, Bathesheba Ever-
dene, Gabriel Oak, Lord Ormont and his
Aminta, Daisy Miller, and Anna Karen-
ina. And over in one corner of the
garden, on my favorite bench by the rose
bed, sat three women who came unat-
tended by men, and who were invited
solely because of the soulful quality of
the beauty bestowed upon them by their
creators. First among these ladies was
Mona Lisa, seemingly much out of place
in an American garden, but invited
there on the strength of Pater’s memor-
able word-picture of her beauty. “‘Set it
for a moment beside one of those white
Greek goddesses or beautiful women of
antiquity, and how would they be

A GHOSTLY GARDEN PARTY 59

troubled by this beauty into which the
soul with all its maladies has passed.”
Beside Mona Lisa was seated Eleonora
Duse, the one guest who lives outside of
books, introduced by Arthur Symons,
who has this to say of the beauty of the
great Italian actress: “She is a woman
always, but she is a woman almost in the
abstract; the senses are asleep, or awake
only to give passion and substance to the
disembodied energy of the _ intellect.
When she speaks of beautiful things her
face takes light as from an inner source;
the dark and pallid cheeks curve into
sensitive folds, the small thin-lipped
mouth scarcely touched with colour,
grows half tender, half ironical, as if
smiling at its own abandonment to
delight; an exquisite tremor awakens in
it, as if it brushed against the petal of a
flower, and thrilled at the contact; then
the mouth opens, freely, and the strong
white teeth glitter in a vehement smile.”
The third guest in this group was a
modern American girl, Ellen Olenska, who
owed her ghostly presence in my garden

60 THE GATHERING BASKET

to Edith Wharton’s unforgettable analy-
sis of her strange charm: “For she had
a mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic
and moving possibilities outside the daily
run of experience. She had hardly ever
said a word to him (Newland Archer), to
produce this impression, but it was a
part of her, either a projection of her
mysterious and outlandish background,
or something inherently dramatic, pas-
sionate and unusual in herself.”’

These three notable women were my
most distinguished guests, but I could not
but entertain some misgivings as to how
they would get on together, and in fact
I was troubled on this score in regard
to all of my famous imaginaries. How
could I dare to introduce Becky Sharp to
Lord Ormont or Anna Karenina to Mr.
Darcy? Gabriel Oak could never find
anything to say to Aminta, I was sure,
nor would he be any better off with Daisy
Miller, or the Lady of the Aroostook.
Yet I was quite sure that most of these
old friends were flower-lovers, and in the
presence of these, my assistant horticul-

A GHOSTLY GARDEN PARTY 61

tural hostesses, they might be trusted to.
find some common ground for conversa-
tion and some justification for my evoca-
tions.

THE PLUSH PANSY

iersq) COURSE a garden has its gray
(Caen) days, its seedy days, its down-at-
2) the-heel, gone-to-mold-and-rust
days. At such times every flower that
you put in your basket has first to be
rid of some enemy in the form of bug or
caterpillar, and even the thoughts and
quotations with which your mind has
been freshly filled seem worm-eaten and
worthless. As you languidly take up
the trowel prepared to loosen the earth
about some shriveled asters you ask
yourself whether after all a garden is
worth while, whether it is a wise invest-
ment of one’s time to spend a morning
digging in earth that is sure to return to
a cement-like condition as soon as your
trowel has left it, or removing dead
blossoms and seeds from plants that are
predestined to seediness and death.
Bugs and caterpillars are not suitable
society for an active-minded person, you

64 THE GATHERING BASKET

say to yourself, and the appearance of
so many seed pods is depressing to the
spirit of one who would forget the dreari-
ness of decline. Lamb was right after
all; it is a peopled solitude that one
should have, or as Emerson has put it,
‘Solitude is impracticable and _ society
fatal. We must keep our head in the
one and our handsinthe other.” And the
city, you say to yourself, is where one may
keep one’s hands in society, and it is the
proper place in which to spend the declin-
ing days of summer. Instead of decline
and decay there is rebirth and renewed
life. The shop windows are all abloom
with seasonable fineries, and the streets
are gay with the early appearances of fall
fashions. And there are musicals and
matinees where one may go and forget
the seediness, the bugs and the cater-
pillars, and all the dreary panorama of
this season of mists.

You put down the trowel and consult
the time table and within a couple of
hours you make one of the vast throng
that is crowding the walks and peering

THE PLUSH PANSY 65

in the shop windows. These windows are
indeed fascinating, and that wreath of
purple pansies in a milliner’s showcase is
worth all your rusty asters and drooping
cosmos. How well would these plush
reminders of spring look upon your fall
hat, and inspired by this thought you go
in and buy them, and in fancy see your
face under its artificial wreath as a type
of arrested springtime. Instead of gather-
ing rosebuds while we may, you say to
yourself, it is better to gather plush
pansies for your hat and all the fripperies
and fineries you can afford, and adorn
yourself with them, for how long will it
be before even a bit of finery will have no
longer the power to move you?

But how wearisome it is looking into
shop windows and what a sameness to
all the gew-gaws that they reveal. Bead-
bags, gauzy blouses, startling ball-gowns
soon begin to lose their charm and you
find yourself wishing that they were
subject to the onslaughts of bugs and
worms, while the sight of elegant high-
heeled shoes causes your mind to revert

66 THE GATHERING BASKET

to your beloved garden foot-gear. Thank
heaven, you say to yourself, that you
did not yield to the temptation of buying
a matinee ticket. Fancy sitting in a
stuffy theatre watching some sordid
human drama when you might be an
onlooker at nature’s fall performances.
You again consult the time table; it is
but a little over an hour since you reached
the city and yet already you are weary of
the peopled solitude, and eager to keep
both your head and your hands among the
asters and cosmos. Only eleven minutes
before the next train leaves; if you take
a taxi you may catch it and be rid of all
these city horrors. You are in the taxi,
and later on the train, before you have.
really made up your mind about the
matter, but how good it seems to be
moving marigoldwards. In a little more
than an hour the tennis shoes are treading
the familiar paths, the plush pansies are
placed where they may blush unseen, and
you are gazing in admiration at a rose
that has unfolded during your absence.
And the nice thing about the marigolds

THE PLUSH PANSY 67

and asters is that they don’t ask you why
you returned so soon, or why on earth
you went at all.

Sees

*

THE GARDEN AS A SOCIAL
CENTRE

3 ¥) SUPPOSE,” I remarked to a
es ee.) noted landscape gardener, who
Bese}) in visiting my garden was in
reality visiting one of his own children,
the offspring of his own poetic horticul-
tural fancy, “that every garden must
have its evil genius, and mine has
one in the form of a plain black snake,
now hiding in the strawberry bed.”
“He fills my soul with terror,” I went
on, “and I would be grateful to any bold
spirit who would venture to rid me of his
presence.’

“You should thank God for him,”’ said
my visitor, “for he is one of the most
valued friends of a garden, ridding it of
hundreds of destructive enemies and
making it more habitable for the flowers.”’
I never arrived at the point of being
grateful for the snake, who was a very
well-mannered reptile, always withdraw-

70 THE GATHERING BASKET

ing into one of the beds as soon as I made
my appearance in the path, but this
remark of my visitor set me to thinking
of the hosts of habitants and visitants of
the garden who are forever working for
its betterment, but who never receive any
credit for what they do. And in time a
true gardener grows to love many of these
unobtrusive, silent companions, and to
find pleasure in observing their ways and
habits. Was it not poor Clym Yeobright,
the hero of Hardy’s Return of the
Native, who when threatened blindness
compelled him to engage in the humble
occupation of furze-cutting found delight
in the companionship of creeping and
winged things:

‘““Bees hummed around his ears with an
intimate air, and tugged at the heath
and furze-flowers at his side in such
numbers as to weigh them down to the
sod. The strange amber-coloured butter-
flies which Egdon produced, and which
were never seen elsewhere, quivered in
the breath of his lips, alighted upon his
bowed back, and sported with the glitter-

THE GARDEN AS A SOCIAL CENTRE 71

ing point of his hook as he flourished it
up and down. Tribes of emerald green
grasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling
awkwardly on their backs, heads or hips,
like unskilful acrobats, as chance might
rule; or engaged themselves in noisy flir-
tations under the fern-fronds with silent
ones of homely hue. Huge flies, ignorant
of larders and wire-netting, and quite in
a savage state, buzzed about him without
knowing that he was a man. In and out
of the fern brakes snakes glided in their
most brilliant blue and yellow guise, it
being the season immediately following
the shedding of their old skins, when
their colors are brightest. Litters of
young rabbits came out from their forms
to sun themselves upon hillocks, the hot
beams blazing through the delicate tissue
of each thin-fleshed ear, and firing it to
a blood-red transparency in which the
veins could be seen.”

Impertinent, destructive creatures,
these last-named habitues of a garden,
and one of the problems that confronts
every gardener is the getting rid of such

42 THE GATHERING BASKET

troublesome neighbors. But I was will-
ing, on this warm summer morning, to
forget these enemies and even to put
aside Mrs. Asquith’s Autobiography
which for several days had shared with
The Return of the Native, the honor
of being my only literary companions in
the garden, in order to watch some bees
which had taken up their residence in an
old tree trunk. Yet before I laid down
the story of this fascinating woman I had
gathered some grist for my literary gar-
den-mill from some lines written to her
by her friend, Lord Pembroke:

**Keep the outer borders of your heart’s
sweet garden, free from garish flowers
and wild and careless weeds, so that
when your fairy god-mother turns the
Prince’s footsteps your way he may not,
distrusting your nature or his own powers,
and. only half-guessing at the treasures
within, tear himself reluctantly away,
and pass sadly on, without your ever
knowing that he had been near.’ Rather
an irrevelant quotation is this, having
no bearing on the garden as a social

THE GARDEN AS A SOCIAL CENTRE 73

centre, but it is one more proof of the
great debt that the pen owes to the
garden. And as I said the bees drew me
away from the brilliant Englishwoman,
and caused me to takea seat by the side of
an old tree trunk in which they had taken
up their residence, in order that I might
better study their actions. I could think
of nothing but the lobby of a fashionable
hotel as I noted their hurried comings
and goings, only the bees appeared to
have the advantage of the hotel guests
inasmuch as they were unincumbered
with luggage, and not so perseveringly
bent on pleasure-seeking. And quite close
to this home of the bees was a large ant-
hill and when I grew weary of watching
the bees I transferred my attention to
the energetic ants. A number of air-
ships passed over my head as I sat there,
and I wondered whether their occupants
did not look down curiously upon us
gardeners in much the same way as we
gaze upon the bees and ants. So much
depends upon the point of view, and the
views of aviators must be so very exalted!

TA THE GATHERING BASKET

It would be interesting to keep a kind
of garden register, in which could be
inscribed the names of all these winged
and creeping creatures, famous or humble,
useful or harmful that find their way to
a garden, and take upon themselves the
duty of either helping to preserve or to
destroy its beauty. A look at such a
volume would convince the gardener of
one thing at least, that there is no such
thing as complete solitude in a garden.

COSMOS, CATS AND COYOTES

@xj | HE act of propping up the cosmos
(e-|| this morning drew my thoughts

i—58)) to big things, and I turned my
kok on The Idiot, and The Princess
Cassimassima, as mere fiction-folks who
were not calculated to afford me the
inspiration that I needed, and that would
be in keeping with the cosmos. In reality,
however, I should have been particularly
kind to The Idiot and the Princess for
I had left them out all night in my
garden, and a shower had not added to
their external appearance. Some one
ought to get out garden editions of
popular works, editions that would stand
exposure to the weather, and could lie
about in gardens, awaiting the pleasure
of the gardener.

But it was yesterday that I had sum-
moned these two old acquaintances for
brief moments of communion, and this
morning it was not fiction but philosophy

76 THE GATHERING BASKET

that my soul desired. So I determined
to put into the gathering basket three
favorite philosophers, Montaigne, Scho-
penhauer, and William James, or as much
of the philosophy of the latter as could
be extracted from his letters, now being
published in the Atlantic Monthly.

But when I[ went in search of the gath-
ering basket I discovered that three
kittens had taken possession of that
receptacle, and were lying asleep, beside
the trowel and scissors. I was obliged
to eject them in order to make room for
my philosophers, but I am not altogether
sure that I did not turn out the greater
philosophers, in order to make room for
the less, so thoroughly in possession of
the secret of happiness does a kitten
seem to be. ‘“‘Wonderful, wonderful, is
our life and that of our companions,”
wrote Thoreau. ““That there should be
such a thing as a brute animal, not
human! that it should attain to a sort of
society with our race! Think of cats, for
instance; they are neither Chinese or
Tartars, they neither go to school or read

COSMOS, CATS AND COYOTES 77

the Testament. Yet how near they come
to doing so, how much they are like us
who do so.”’

At the roots of some lovely pink cosmos
I planted such thoughts from Montaigne
as these: “True solitude is not to be
found by mere withdrawal from a crowd;
all the evils of a crowd—ambition, avar-
ice, irresolution, fear, inordinate desires
may pursue us even into solitude. Our
disease lies in the mind and the true
solitude which can be enjoyed in cities
and courts though not so commodiously
as apart is attained only when the soul
enters into real possession of itself. A
wife, children, worldly goods, and more
than all else, health are precious gains of
existence, but our happiness must not
depend on these, we must reserve a
back-shop wholly our own, wholly free,
wherein to maintain our true liberty and
possess our impregnable retreat. Great-
ness of soul consists not so much in
mounting and pressing forward as in
knowing how to range and circumscribe
one’s self.”’> Quite in line with these

78 THE GATHERING BASKET

thoughts are Schopenhauer’s assertions
that the happiest man is one who has
enough in his own inner wealth, that
what one human being can be to another
is not a very great deal, that the happiest
destiny on earth is to have the rare gift
of rich individuality.

There was room for no more of Mon-
taigne and Schopenhauer in my bed of
cosmos, and I opened at random the last
installment of William James’ letters, and
came upon this one, written while on a
vacation in the mountains, to his seven-
year-old son at home. :

“IT saw a moving sight the other morn-
ing before breakfast, in a little hotel
where I slept in the dusty fields. The
young man of the house had shot a little
wolf called a coyote in the early morning.
The heroic little animal lay on the ground
with his big furry ears, and his clean
white teeth, and his jolly cheerful little
body, but his brave little life was gone.
It made me think how brave all these
living things are. Here little coyote was,
without clothes or house, or books, or

COSMOS, CATS AND COYOTES 79

anything, with nothing but his own naked
self to pay his way with, and risking his
life so cheerfully and losing it—just to
see if he could pick up a meal near the
hotel. He was doing his coyote business
like a man hero, and you must do your
boy-business, and I my man-business like
a hero, or else we wont be worth as much
as that little coyote.”

When I had supplied props for the
cosmos, and had pondered over all these
philosophic props for my soul, I picked
some of the handsomest of the blossoms
for the gathering basket, and placed them
beside the Princess, The Idiot, and the
philosophers. An oddly assorted com-
pany they seemed, and yet they had one
thing in common, they taught the same
lesson, the lesson that Professor James
learned from the coyote, that whatever
we have to do in life, whether it be culti-
vating the roots of plants or working for
daily bread it behooves us to do our
work like heroes, ‘‘or else we wont be
worth as much as that little coyote.”

A SHREDDED DAY

ae: Ag WAS late when I entered the
yee ty | garden this morning, and I re-
aa) marked to the early-morn petu-
nias with whom I had a weeding engage-
ment, that really the egotism and in-
considerateness of some women was past
comprehension, and I was glad that it
was my destiny to live among plants
rather than among people. The occasion
of these unoriginal observations was a
morning call of which I was the victim,
the caller being a former resident of our
suburb who had returned a few weeks
ago to her city apartment which had been
rented furnished for the summer. The
condition in which Mrs. Gray had found
her apartment, and the damage for which
her tenant was responsible made up the
subject of her morning discourse, and
was repeated I fancy in many a suburban
home during the course of this day. It
seems that her rolling pin had rolled

82 THE GATHERING BASKET

away into oblivion, that her lemon
squeezer was nicked beyond further use,
‘and my dear I just wish that you could
have seen my double boiler!”

But I had no wish to see her double
boiler, and a very ardent desire to be
among my double dahlias, and it was hard
to forgive a morning visitor who could
not realize her own unwelcomeness and
the preciousness of her hostess’ time.
When I returned to the petunias after
my guest had carried her rolling pin and
double boiler to another house I took
up a small volume of Emerson which is
usually to be found on the table in my
summer house, or under it in a rain-proof
shelter, and read for a few minutes in
order to quiet a disturbed mind. “Society
is frivolous,” says Emerson, “and shreds
its days into patches.” Yes, this is true,
and the longer I live the more am I im-
pressed by the value and dignity of
solitude, and the more am I shocked by
the daring of those who would venture to
violate this solitude. What right have we
to presume that people are willing to give

A SHREDDED DAY 83

up to us a tithe of anything so precious as
time? And who are we that we should
venture to think that we have attractions
that would justify the sacrifice of duties
on the part of an unwilling hostess?

Of course there are visitors whom we
would welcome at any time, who reveal a
beneficent power that calms the troubled
waters, and smooths out the wrinkles from
life. But how many people like this do we
know? and besides a gardener has no
troubled waters or wrinkled life.

But my petunias, gay and cheerful
companions though they always are, did
not look quite so gay or so cheerful as
they would had not this morning visitor
taken the bloom from my thoughts, and
even Emerson failed to restore this bloom.
I found that my mind would wander
away from the petunias to the subject of
friendship, and I insisted upon putting
that old banal question to myself as to
whether there was such a thing, and
whether in fact we had any need of
friends in these days. Did not the tele-
phone now take the place of those inti-

84 THE GATHERING BASKET

mate personal notes we used to exchange
with so-called friends, and did not motors
and movies afford the distraction that
we were wont to demand of friendship?

Literature, of course, offers many inspir-
ing instances of devoted friendship: there
is that of Amis and Amile in one of the
early French stories which Pater recalls
in the opening essay of the collection
entitled The Renaissance. “‘Amis and
Amile, then, are true to their comrade-
ship through all trials; and in the end it
comes to pass that at the moment of great
need Amis takes the place of Amile in a
tournament for life or death. After this
it happened that a leprosy fell upon Amis
so that his wife would not approach him,
and wrought to strangle him; and he
departed from his home, and at last
prayed his servants to carry him to the
house of Amile.’’ Amile was equal to
this test, and to the still greater one
demanded by the angel Raphael that he
slay his two children in their sleep and
wash his comrade in their blood, that
he might be made whole.

A SHREDDED DAY 85

No, we don’t hear of such acts of friend-
ship these days, though perhaps the true
story of the great war may relate instances
of comradeship and self sacrifice quite as
edifying. Then of course there was the
friendship between the Merchant of Venice
and his friend Antonio that is lovely to
contemplate, and there is Diana of the
Crossways’ devotion to her invalid friend,
Emma, Lady Dunstane. When Percy
Dacier met Diana, by chance, early one
morning on a mountain walk, that lady car-
ried a bunch of pale purple meadow-crocus
in her hand and in response to his exclama-
tion of pleasureat thesight of themshe said:
“These are plucked to be sent to a friend;
otherwise I’m reluctant to take the life of
flowers fora whim. Wild flowers, I mean, I
am not sentimental about garden flowers:
they are cultivated for decoration, grown
for clipping.”’ To a gardener, of course,
this is the supreme test of friendship: to be
willing totakethelife of a flowerforafriend.

Yes, there are endless examples of fine
friendships in literature, but in one’s own
humdrum life where do we find them;

86 THE GATHERING BASKET

they are dreams and fables as Emerson
says. And how very botanical Emerson
becomes when writing of friendship: “I
have often had fine fancies about persons,
which have given me delicious hours,’’
he writes, “but the joy ends in the day;
it yields no fruit.”” And again, in warn-
ing us not to shun any of the realities of
the plant of friendship: ‘The root of the
plant is not unsightly to science, though
for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem
short.”” And again: “Almost all people
descend to meet. All association must be
a compromise, and, what is worst, the very
flower and aroma of the flower of each of
the beautiful natures disappears as they
approach each other.”’

I was so grateful to Emerson for these
unconscious tributes to the garden, and
for his dependence upon flowers and
fruits for literary symbols that I turned
to the rosy morns with restored good
humor, and although my mind as well as
my morning had been unpleasantly shred-
ded, the afternoon was still before me.

ARCHITECTURAL BLOSSOMS

BR eesyA OST of the arts may be enjoyed
Psa) in a garden; literature may be
2 Sai) brought there, along with the
garden tools, painting one can very well
do without, for has not every gardener a
private gallery of her own? and music
may be enticed there, or will come steal-
ing across the lilac hedge uninvited. But
architecture you must go forth to seek,
and if you be one who regards the arts
as one distinguished family made up of
wholly different, but equally beautiful
individuals then you must feel that you
cannot afford to forego intercourse with
a single fascinating member of this
remarkable group. For as Pater has said:
“‘the sensuous material of each art brings
with it a special phase or quality of
beauty, untranslatable into the forms of
any other, an order of impressions dis-
tinct in kind.” A greedy gardener who
is a lover of the arts, and no true flower-

388 THE GATHERING BASKET

lover can be indifferent to them, longs
sometimes for the peculiar kind of impres-
sions that only architecture can give,
and she is ready then to neglect her
cosmos and to go forth to seek a Gothic
cathedral.

Of course it is almost like planting a
Gothic cathedral in one’s garden to read
again that inspiring essay of Ruskin’s:
The Nature of the Gothic, that mine of
philosophy as well as of architecture
which is said to have set fire to the
enthusiasm of William Morris, and to have
kindled the beliefs of his whole life. ‘““To
my mind,” says Morris, “this chapter is
one of the most important things written
by the author, and in future days will be
considered as one of the very few neces-
sary utterances of the century.”

Time has born out this statement of the
poet-socialist, and to read to-day of the
nature of the Gothic, is to read at the
same time some noble truths about the
nature of man.

For man, like Gothic Architecture, 1s
essentially imperfect, says Ruskin. “In

ARCHITECTURAL BLOSSOMS 89

all things that live there are certain
irregularities and deficiencies which are
not only signs of life, but sources of
beauty. No human face is exactly the
same in its lines on each side, no leaf
perfect in its lobes, no branch in its
symmetry. All admit irregularity as they
imply change; and to banish imperfec-
tion is to destroy expression, to check
exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things
are literally better, lovlier and more be-
loved for the imperfections which have
been divinely appointed, that the law of
human life may be Effort, and the law of
human judgment Mercy.”

These are comforting thoughts for the
gardener’s mental gathering basket, and
here is another intellectual blossom:
“Now it is only by labour that thought
can be made healthy, and only by thought
that labour can be made happy, and the
two cannot be separated with impunity.”
Here Ruskin has expressed the secret of
the happiness of a book-loving gardener,
who has learned by experience that it is
her labour that has made the thoughts

G0 THE GATHERING BASKET

that come to her through books healthy,
and that this labour could not bring the
joy that it does were it not for such book-
inspired thoughts. And she feels that for
the restlessness that sometimes besets
her, even while digging, there is a justi-
fication, for is not disquietude the key
to the Gothic spirit, and does she not
therefore toil with the restlessness of a
Goth? “That restlessness of the dream-
ing mind, that wanders hither and thither
among the niches, and flickers feverishly
around the pinnacles, and frets and fades
in labyrinthine knots and shadows along
wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied nor
shall be satisfied. The Greek could stay
in its triglyph furrow, and be at peace,
but the work of the Gothic spirit is fret-
work still, and it can neither rest in, nor
from its labour, but must pass on sleep-
lessly, until its love of change shall be
pacified forever in the change that must
come alike on them that wake and them
that sleep.”

It is almost like wandering in a garden
to allow one’s mind to “‘flicker feverishly”’

ARCHITECTURAL BLOSSOMS 9]

through this remarkable essay, for the
reader is made to realize how much
architecture owes to nature, to flowers
and trees, for its inspiration: for ex-
ample, there are the rose windows, the
Venetian flower-orders, the lily columns
of St. Marks, the flowering plants carved
in the Veronese niches. Yes, Architec-
ture had to go to the garden for much
of its material, and Ruskin is the one to
analyze its methods of using this material.
And for a type of the life of this world the
great author turns to our beloved fox-
glove blossom: “a third part bud, a
third part past, a third part in full
bloom.” I had always resented the
third part that is past, both in the fox-
glove and in other flowers of a similar
nature, but after reading Ruskin’s essay
I learned to accept such blossoms and to
respect them as symbols of our imperfect
life.

SOULS, SEEDS AND FORSYTHIAS

Cyl SEEMS as if there is not
a )/ enough cheerful literature in the
ees} whole world to fortify the urban
spirit of a country gardener against the
depression produced by these days of
decline and decay. And although I filled
the gathering basket, on this dreary
November morning, with all the pleasant
things about autumn that I knew, I
could not but feel that odes to melan-
choly and dejection would be more in
keeping with my mood, and with the
appearance of the garden.

Of course I know that she is no true
gardener who permits her spirit to droop
at the sight of the first frosted four
o'clock, or whose heart sinks at behold-
ing the blackened foliage of her marigold
plants, but on the other hand she is an
unnatural mother to these foster children
whom she has watched and cared for
throughout the summer if she does not

94 THE GATHERING BASKET

mourn over their decay. It is in vain
that I assure myself that the perennials
go to sleep only for the winter, that many
of the annuals are self-seeders, and have
some unanticipated blossoms up their
sleeves with which to surprise their care-
taker during the coming summer. For
I know only too well that perennials fre-
quently belie their names and are annual
in their characters while the self-seeders
are often self-deceivers as well. To be
sure there is a certain satisfaction in put-
ting the perennials to bed for the winter,
in tucking the blankets of leaves about
the cherished roses, and in putting out
the lights on the pinks, but these are
melancholy satisfactions at best, and not
calculated to raise the gardener’s spirit.

So while I paused before some withered
hollyhocks, and gathered the last of their
seeds, I repeated to myself Emily Dick-
enson’s gay verses on Autumn:

‘The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,

SOULS, SEEDS AND FORSYTHIAS 95

The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.”

But I did not feel in the least like put-
ting a trinket on, and besides, these lines
were written about an autumn that the
frost had not yet touched to decay. And
the same might be said of the lines in
which Henry James gives his impression
of a New England autumn which was a
part of the American Scene revisited
after many years of absence. Autumn
was likened by the great novelist to a
kind of imprisoned painter, “‘a Bohemian
in rusty jacket who had broken out with
palette and brush.” ““Yet the way the
color begins to be dabbed,”’ wrote James,
“the way here and there for a start, a
solitary maple on a woodside flames in
single scarlet recalls nothing so much as
the daughter of a noble house dressed for
a fancy ball, with the whole family gath-
ered round to admire her before she goes.”

96 THE GATHERING BASKET

But nature, this morning, presents
an after-the-ball appearance, and the
daughter of the noble house, as well
as her whole family, look dingy and
faded.

So even Henry James failed to console
me for the loss of my beloved flowers,
among whose faded remnants I now sadly
wandered. A few ugly yellow stalks are
all that is left of some gay sweet-williams,
the dried and withered skeletons next to
them were once the brightest of blue
bachelor buttons, and those prostrate
brown stems in the bed beyond, early in
the season, answered to the name, if not
the nature, of bouncing bets. All things
of the past now, mere misty objects of
memory. And it is the same with the
literary flowers that have graced my
garden during the summer. Evelina and
Emma, Catherine Lytton, Henry
Esmond, Diana of the Crossways, The
Idiot, The Princess Cassimassama, all
gone, while their creators, along with my
beloved poets and essayists, live only in
the memories of their readers.

SOULS, SEEDS AND FORSYTHIAS 97

Then I took from the gathering basket
a volume of Keats, and turned to that
verse in the ‘Ode to Autumn,’ of which
Sidney Colvin said that “‘it expresses so
transparently and so directly the pen-
siveness of the season that we almost
forget that they are words at all and
nature herself and the season seem speak-
ing to us.”’

““Where are the songs of Spring? Ay
where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy
music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft
dying day,
And touch the stubble fields with rosy
hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats
mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from
hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with
treble soft

98 THE GATHERING BASKET

The redbreast whistles from a garden-
croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the
skies.”’

Yes, Keats is one of the perennials, and
as I proceeded to uproot some shriveled
asters, and to gather seeds from their
dried stems I recalled other literary per-
ennials that had been my close compan-
ions during the summer and I quoted to
myself the comforting things they had
said concerning dissolution. There was
Montaigne whose essay entitled That to
Philosophize is to Learn to Die, contains
such unforgettable seeds of thought as
these: ‘Your death is a part of the order
of the universe, ’tis a part of the life of
the world. The utility of living consists
not in the length of days but in the use
of time. There is nothing evil in life for
him who rightly comprehends that the
privation of life is no evil.” |

These, I said to myself, are seeds worth
preserving, and so are some of Pater’s
philosophical reasonings: ‘“‘Not to dis-

SOULS, SEEDS AND FORSYTHIAS 99

criminate every moment some passionate
attitude in those about us, and in the
brilliancy of their gifts some tragic divid-
ing of forces on their ways, is, on this
short day of frost and sun, to sleep before
evening.” And again Emerson’s analysis
of the method of Nature brings some
autumn consolation: “We cannot de-
scribe the natural history of the soul, but
we know that it is divine. I cannot tell if
these wonderful qualities which house
to-day in this mortal frame shall ever
reassemble in equal activity in a similar
frame, or whether they have before had a
natural history like that of this body
you see before you; but this one thing I
know, that these qualities did not now
begin to exist, cannot be sick with my
sickness, nor buried in any grave; but
that they circulate through the Universe;
before the world was they were.”

Yes, these are great thoughts, and
applicable to plants as well as to persons
though perhaps it may be stated with
greater certainty in the case of the plant,
for do I not hold in my hands the seeds

100 THE GATHERING BASKET

whose qualities will reassemble in similar
frames? Yet nevertheless, if autumn has
its music and its musings they are tinged
with sadness, and a gardener is peculiarly
sensitive to this autumn melancholy.

And then as I wandered towards the
end of the garden I came upon one of
nature’s phenomenons: a forsythia in
flower. Now every one who is familiar
with this bush knows that it is almost
the first of our cultivated, flowering
shrubs, to announce the arrival of spring
and that its blossoms, golden bells they
are sometimes called, appear before the
leaves. But here was a bush, whose
leaves had turned to a beautiful autumn-
ish old rose, putting forth delicate yellow
blossoms that were smaller, but far more
Jovely than those of Spring. I could but
recall the words of Santayanna, quoted in
a previous essay: ‘Even under the in-
evitable crust of age the soul remains
young, and wherever it is able to break
through sprouts into something green
and tender.”’ The forsythia seemed to be
the very floral embodiment of this senti-

SOULS, SEEDS AND FORSYTHIAS 101

ment, the symbol of the soul’s power to
defy age and the season, and break into
the greenness and tenderness of spring on
a day in late autumn.

And I was half angry with myself that
on my way back to the house with the
gathering basket, in which, beside a sprig
of the forsythia, lay Montaigne and Pater
Keats and Emerson, on my arm, I should
find myself quoting Kipling (who had
never been among my close garden inti-
mates), and repeating to myself another
of his verses on the garden:

“Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who

made him sees

That half a proper gardener’s work is
done upon his knees,

So when your work is finished, you can
wash your hands and pray

For the Glory of the Garden that it may
not pass away!

And the glory of the garden it shall never
pass away!”

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