Part 13

We are again gnashing our teeth over the Blue Border. The fact is, we suppose, it is too much to expect beauty all the year round, no matter how boastfully garden writers inform you of their artifices in that direction: how cleverly, for instance, the annual Gypsophila will bury the unsightly decay of the Iris leaves, or how you can pull branches of “Miss Mellish” down over the Delphiniums.

Why do not our Delphiniums bloom twice? Every garden book and every catalogue cheers your heart by promising a handsome second bloom to the industrious clipper-off of seed-pods. But never a Delphinium has responded to our kind attentions in that direction. Perhaps our soil does not give them strength enough for such exertion. But it is idle speculating. One must learn what one’s garden will do and what it won’t do—and make the best of it.

* * * * *

The greatest of all the tragedies that have befallen us lately is indubitably the passing away of poor old Tom. We are now catless!

Poor little friend! Where has that quaint, faithful, dutiful identity gone to? Juvenal says Heaven would not be Heaven to him if he were not to meet his own dogs there—a sentiment which we have, we believe, ourselves set down elsewhere. St. Francis the Poverello saw God in all His lesser creatures. It is not possible to think that we shall lose anything in a completer world.

Tom was the most conscientious of cats. He now lies beside Susan. We are going to get two little tombstones made for us by the Watts Settlement at Compton. Susan’s epitaph has already been mentioned. Nothing more to the point could be imagined:

“Here lies Susan, a good dog.” “Here lies Thomas, for eighteen years our faithful cat-comrade.”

So shall it stand recorded over the new grave.

XXVIII

Mid-August and the lists beginning to come in! Mr. Eden Phillpotts, in his delightful garden book, says that no one is a true garden lover who is not instantly lost in every nurseryman’s list, who does not immediately draw out orders far beyond his means, and spend his time in plans and combinations that shall transcend Kew as well as Babylon. What garden lovers are we in this respect! It is only when the orders are written out and the prices totted up that sober reason obtrudes its forbidding countenance—and then the painful process of “knocking off” begins. Nevertheless we are becoming adepts in combining lavishness with economy. There are delightful firms whose plants are literally to be had at a quarter of the price of others, with results quite as happy.

There is the Dutchman who sends us our bulbs. He has grown to be a friend, and his English letters are charming, “Dear Mrs.,” he wrote when Gladioli, “The Bride,” arrived in a state no Bride should be in, really without a wedding garment—“Dear Mrs., She is a flower the most agreeable in the garden, but she is very unpleasant to travel.”

His catalogue makes equally fascinating reading. The quaint spelling and phraseology are more than attractive. Who, for instance, would not wish to invest in Narcissus, thus described:

“Astrardente, white and apricot orange, edged fiery scarlet magnificent and nice flowers.”

“Nothing,” says another grower, “can equal, much less excel, early single Tulips.”

“Pottebakke White,” cries a third, “is a very large pure white flower, and not to surpass better.”

“Of snow-like variety and delicious fragrance a most beloved flower,” thus our special Hollander labels Lilium Longiflorum Takesima, in words that have a certain charm of poetic simplicity which would not have misbecome the artistic Japanese himself.

[Sidenote: DUTCH BULBS]

However tempted by other nationalities, we choose to be Dutch in our bulbs. This is the list we have just dispatched to Haarlem:

“600 China blue single Hyacinths. 1 dozen Cavaignac pink Hyacinths. 1 dozen Fabiola blush Hyacinths. 50 Roman Hyacinths. 100 Scarlet Duc van Thol Tulips. 50 Rose Duc van Thol Tulips. 300 Thomas Moore Tulips. 1000 Darwin Tulips, best mixed. 500 Parrot Tulips, in the finest mixture, bright colours. 100 Gladiolus Brenchlyensis. 100 Gladiolus Hollandia. 1000 mixed striped Crocus. 1000 Scilla Siberica praecox. 1000 blue Grape Hyacinths. 1000 Snowdrops Elweseii. 1000 Poeticus recurvus Narcissus. 100 Hyacinthus Candicans. 1000 Single Trumpet Daffodils mixed. 500 Double Daffodils mixed.”

Of these some of the scarlet and rose “Duc van Thol” Tulips, and all the “Cavaignac” and “Fabiola” Hyacinths are for forcing; and, of course, the Roman Hyacinths also. The other bulbs are destined for the open ground.

Gladiolus Hollandia is described as the “Pink Brenchlyensis,” and is much recommended. We have never grown her yet, but her scarlet cousin is a great success in our garden. We find our Gladioli do so much better when planted in the spring, that we are asking the firm not to send them to us for another seven months. But they are included in the autumn list so that he may reserve us good sound tubers.

It is evidently against garden decorum to mention the name of a horticulturist, for some garden writers make a point of assuring the reader that they will never be guilty of such an indiscretion; but we see no harm at all in paying, by the way of this discursive pen, a tribute to the perfect satisfaction hitherto afforded us by our chosen bulb grower, Mr. Thoolen, of Haarlem. His Tulips, Hyacinths, and Narcissi have stood the test for three years. Of course, in our soil we cannot expect more than one good season out of anything except Crocus, Scilla, and Narcissi.

Daffodils, which up till now have been unaccountably absent from our garden plans, are to be heavily indulged in this year. Besides what appears in the above list we are venturing on another thousand from a certain Mr. Telkamp, likewise in the land of windmills.

[Sidenote: MORE DUTCH BULBS]

The following is the order which we have just dispatched to him:

“1000 Daffodils for naturalization. 100 Retroflexa Tulips, soft yellow. 100 Bouton d’Or Tulips, deep golden yellow. 100 Caledonia Tulips, orange, dark stems. 100 Golden Eagle Tulips, fine yellow. 200 Count of Leicester, yellow orange tinted.”

He advertises a thousand Daffodils for ten shillings—two and a half dollars! Miraculous, if true! It is worth the plunge.

* * * * *

We have decided to take a slice off the kitchen garden to be kept entirely for bulbs and tubers for cutting. There a hundred “Madonna” Lilies, three dozen Auratum, a hundred Tigrinum, and a few hundreds of other kinds shall be given all the chances that completely fresh soil and good exposure can afford. Five hundred Parrot Tulips, three hundred “Thomas Moore,” and a hundred “Bizarres” are to make a field of glory for the harvest. The hundred Gladiolus Brenchlyensis and the hundred Hollandia will rear their scarlet and pink spears; and Iris shall stand in ranks.

The Mistress of the Villino has still an hour of bliss before her in picking out Iris for her list. The “Florentina” shall certainly be largely of the company, and preference is to be given generally to the misty blue and purple kinds. Then the speculation in cheap bulbs provides a thousand mixed May flowering Tulips.... Adam’s face will be a study when he finds how much of his cherished potato and cabbage land will be required. But what a span of beauty it will make; and what sheaves of delight for ourselves and our friends!

[Sidenote: FOND DREAMS, AND MISDOUBTS]

Every year the extravagant woman above mentioned, who has got the vice of garden-gambling into her very system, extends her ambitions. But how much is there not still to be accomplished before she is satisfied, if ever a garden-lover is satisfied!

For a long time she has dreamt of a shady pool—somewhere. And, after beholding the adorable vision before described in Messrs. Wallace’s exhibit at Holland House this summer, she had been quite sure that it would be difficult to exist another year without a nook with Irises about it and a sunk basin, and a little statue mysteriously contrived in the green. Coming across an advertisement in _Country Life_, where an artistic firm of garden-decorators offers just what she wants, a small round stone pond with a Faun sitting cross-legged on the brim of it, it becomes quite clear to her that there are cravings which must be satisfied. She is willing to give up the vision of a new Azalea dell ‹for this year only, of course› and of a paved walk with Cypresses on each side, ending in a _rondpoint_ hedged about with more Cypresses, with a stone bench in the middle, for the more immediately alluring claim. But, O, ye gods and little fishes, how insatiable are still the needs of the Villino on the hill!

There is the orchard for the slope above the sunk tennis court; to be a glory some Spring with Apple and Pear blossom, while Daffodils, Narcissi and Scilla riot underneath. And there is the round Autumn Garden to be dug out and levelled in the wood, where Sunflowers, Michaelmas Daisies, “Fire King” Antirrhinums, Nasturtiums and flaunting orange and saffron Dahlias are to make a rim of splendour against a cropped green hedge. The centre of this blazing circle is to be flagged and consecrated to “Herbs.” That will be something to live for; to see accomplished some golden autumn of the future!

So much has already been done in what was, most of it, a mere sodden tangle, impenetrable not only to human beings but even to the light of heaven, that it gives one heart for what may be achieved in the future. Yet never does the Grandmother of Loki feel the uncertainty of life more keenly than when she is in the midst of her garden dreams. Every winter indeed, when the bulbs are planted, she wonders, with a pang, if she will see them come up in the Spring; how much more does she now ask herself whether the hidden Autumn Garden, or the Italian walk, or the Bowery Orchard, or even the Sunk Fountain, are ever destined to rejoice her.

Well, after all, she gets an extraordinary amount of pleasure out of the mere mental picture, and who can say if the very uncertainty of all things here below does not add to their zest?

XXIX

[Sidenote: DAWN OVER THE MOOR]

This morning, waking at dawn, the Padrona was impelled to roll out of bed, and look out of both her windows. The one over her balcony gives down the valley and the one opposite her bed affords her vision of the moor rolling away beyond the Dutch Garden and the terrace corner. If she had been but a woman of moderate vigour, she would not have gone to bed again till the whole pageant of mysterious glory had fulfilled itself before her eyes. For what a sight it was! First of all, the whole garden, woodland and heather hills were steeped in a translucence for which there is no name. It is a virgin hour, and its purity no words can describe. The Ling, in full bloom, was silver and amethyst on the rise, misty purple and blue in the hollows. Behind the shouldering hills a rift of sky was a radiant lemon-yellow, a kind of honey sea of light. And above that, again, little drifts of cloud had caught a wonderful orange-rose glow like the wings of cherubim about the Throne. Down the valley there were silver mists against the most tender, clear horizon; and all along the Lily Walk the clumps of Tiger Lilies seemed to be like little Fra Angelico angels, holding their breath in adoration!

Everything lies, after all, in the point of view. The dawn was decidedly too pink for safety, and the clumps of Lilies that looked so pious and recollected have got “the disease” badly in their stalks. Yet realism can never blight that exquisite hour of breaking day in her thoughts!

The only time we degenerates ever really see the dawn is coming home from some London ball; or again, travelling. The dawn in London often gives an impression of extraordinary blue in atmosphere and heaven, we suppose because it is seen contrasted with artificial illuminations. But that sapphire blue, when it permeates park and streets, when the sky seems to hold unplumbed depths beyond depths of the same wonderful colour, is a thing to dwell in the memory likewise, though travellers have the better part. Dawn in the Alps! A night not to be depicted! Such vastness of tinted heights; such black chasms where the pines hang; spume of waterfalls all golden crimson, and deep rivers, green and terrible and beautiful with a glint on them as they rush!

One of us ‹the fourth in the lucky clover leaf at Villino Loki; one who is poet and musician besides many other things, and sometimes poet and musician together› has defined the indefinable. It is not the dawn of the day she hymns, but the dawn of the young Spring.

Though the poem is printed in a recently published volume, it seems to fit naturally into this page.

_THE ST. GOTHARD_

_April and I— Each with each greeting amid tumbled ice, Travel these wastes of frozen purity. Here the wild air above the precipice E’en tasteth sweet, and hath a delicate scent As of faint flowers unseen—the flower of snows Massed peak on peak in slumber yet unspent, But dreaming of the Rose._

_Here the great hills wear silence as a seal— April and I, Listening can hear the loosened snowflake steal Down from the burdened bough that slips awry; Here the long cry of water-nymphs at play Freezes upon the iced lips of fountains, And their sweet limbs’ arrested holiday In crystal carved engarlandeth the mountains._

_Through such vast fields of sleep how dare we roam, April and I, And from its eyrie bid the torrent foam, And virgin meads grow starrier than the sky With scattered cowslip and with drifted bell? Or where austerely looms an Alpine giant Set a young almond rosily defiant To be our sentinel?_

_Whence are we victors, chanting as we go, April and I. “Be free, ye tumbling streams, awake O snow— Ye silver blooms increase and multiply?” What is our spell?—The singing heart we bring, And lo! that song that is the core of earth Leaps in reply, and children of the Spring Into the light come forth._

[Sidenote: THE DAWN OF YOUNG SPRING]

Then there was a dawn over the Campagna, seen from the train that was speeding us towards Rome. A ball of red fire hung over the horizon. The sea lay silver and grey; and misty silver the Campagna.... “God made himself an awful rose of dawn,” as Tennyson sings. He did that morning: awful, yet full of a glorious comfort. The sea just caught the great reflection on its bosom.

A little later, when we came to the first ruins that precede the aqueducts, there were the white cattle, stepping about among the broken pillars, with their huge spreading horns all gilded. These had not changed since the days when the sun gleamed on the grandeurs of classic Rome. Only then yonder building—temple, or tomb, or villa—fronted the morning with a forgotten stateliness, a lost grace.

Is anything comparable to the scene that meets the traveller on his entry into Rome? Alas! St. John Lateran no longer stands like some titanic splendid ship about to slip her moorings and sail away into the wild, lonely sea of the Campagna. New walls have sprung up without the noble ancient walls; sordid disjointed lengths of streets, mean houses with blistered, leprous plaster; and evil-looking little wine-shops. Nevertheless, nothing can spoil the moment when the Lateran Church first gathers shape against the sky. All those statues with tossing gesture against the faint blue of the new day, heroic figures with outstretched arms seeming to gather pilgrims into the city; and in the midst of them the Saviour uplifting the Cross of Salvation! To the believer what a welcome! And it is Rome herself at a glance, too; for if the Church stands here beckoning between earth and sky, she is jostled below and round about by the still speaking wonders of old Pagan Rome.

XXX

One of the advantages of being “little people in a little place” is the pleasure small things can give one. The Duke of Devonshire has seventy men in his garden. Is it possible to imagine taking an interest in anything conducted on so enormous a scale? It is not gardening, it is horticultural government! There can be no individual knowledge of any “beloved flower,” as our Dutch friend has it. Outside a millionaire’s greenhouse we once beheld regiment after regiment of Begonia pots. It made one’s brain reel. How insupportable anything so repeated would become!

Even in small gardens there is too much of a tendency nowadays to overdo garden effects. The flagged-path effect can certainly be overdone. We were tempted to visit a farmhouse the other day, adorably placed on a high Sussex down just where a stretch of table-land dominates an immense panorama of undulating country, and a vast half-circle of horizon. With a few more trees no situation could have been more beautiful.

“It was a party of the name of Mosensohn” who had taken the old farmhouse, we are told, and they were transmogrifying it according to the most modern principles of how the plutocrat’s farmhouse should look.

In some ways it was very well done. The fine old lines of wall and roof were carefully preserved; the high brick wall with its arched doorway and door with the grille in it, were quite in keeping, and gave one a sense of comfortable seclusion as one stepped in off the high road.

But the square court, once the farmyard, divided by two different levels, was completely flagged. Only a few beds against the wall, and a strip of turf on the lower level under the house, afforded any relief to the eye. There was a sunk garden beyond which was turfed, and the sense of rest it instantly afforded made one realize what the incoming family will suffer on a scorching August day from the glare and refractions of the flags in a space so hemmed in. In the right spirit of garden mania, we were not above taking what hints we could. And some were very good. All the beds on that first level were planted with cool-looking blue and purple flowers—a happy thought where there was so much hot stone. And the old cow stables had been very cleverly converted into a most Italian-looking brick pergola which ran the length of the sunk Rose Garden, and ended in a round summer-house with a window. From there, as well as from the Rose Garden, the wide view over the Downs met the gaze. Vividly coloured herbaceous borders ran along the side nearest to the sudden slope of the hill. There is something very pleasing to the senses when the glance passes from such an ordered kaleidoscope of colour to the misty vastness of a far-reaching view.

In the middle of the Rose Garden was a sunk fountain in a long narrow basin.

A batch of pinewood, dark and shady, would have saved the situation; one sought everywhere for the comfort of real shadows.

We went into the house, which was in the act of being papered and painted for the millionaires. Delightful in theory as such old buildings are, we were seized with doubt from the moment of crossing the threshold whether any sense of quaint antiquity would compensate one for beams on top of one’s head, for bedrooms the size of a bath-towel, and a general feeling of having one foot on the hearth and another in the passage. We thought the newcomers had shown more taste outside, and came to the conclusion that some one else’s taste ruled in the garden, but that they had allowed their own ideas free scope indoors. These ideas were monotonous. The parlour that gave on the little orchard had a paper all over green parrots; the best bedroom upstairs had a paper all over blue parrots; and the second best bedroom was adorned with terra-cotta parrots. The only chance for a conglomeration of rooms so hopelessly low and contracted, would have been a plain distemper of no tint deeper than cream, or at the outside butter colour. Then the old beams would have had a chance, and one might have felt able to draw one’s breath.

‹Fancy waking in the morning to the dance of all the little parrots on top of one’s eyelids!›

Then, out of a small space, the shapes of trees and flower-beds beyond come upon the vision with no sense of effect if the space within is tormented. Neither can anyone have any proper appreciation of the joy of a bunch of flowers, or a vase of spreading boughs, who has not set them against plain walls where their shadows have play.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: CONVERTING A COTTAGE]

Another little house near here—set down in the valley this, on the edge of a hamlet, overlooking a wide pond—has been to our thinking more successfully dealt with. Three very old cottages have been knocked into one, and the whole little rambling up-and-down dwelling-place thus produced has been boldly distempered white within from roof to kitchen. The round black oak beams are delightful in these little white rooms, and the pretty, blue-eyed, still youthful spinster who owns them has been content with a short pair of clear white muslin curtains in every window; not, be it understood, the London bedroom kind that cuts across the pane ‹an abomination difficult to avoid in towns›, but proper curtains hanging over the recess. Nothing more suitable could be devised, and it took a “real lady,” in the sense of Hans Andersen’s “Real Princess,” to be content with such fresh simplicity. But attractive as her furnishing is, and full of genuinely beautiful things, there our tastes slightly diverged.

[Sidenote: COTTAGE FURNITURE]

The largest sitting-room has a set of black lacquer furniture inlaid with vivid mother-of-pearl; it is deliciously gay in this gay cottage parlour, and certainly no one who possessed these early Victorian treasures could bear to put them on one side. We think if we had been the lucky owner, however, we would have eschewed coupling them with velvet—or, indeed, brought velvet at all under those weather beaten tiles. The mistress of the Villino had a vision—a daring vision—of printed linen with scarlet cherries and impossible birds pecking at them; something with a true Jacobean angularity in it, to link the centuries together, and an uncompromising vividness of tint. That for cushions and sofa-covers. On the floor then, no bright carpet would be admitted. We should have enamelled that floor white, and cast a few rugs down on it, with no more colours in them than faint lemons and greys or creams.

To complete this discursion on cottages, some of us visited the other day a tiny house, where all the downstairs rooms, except the kitchen, had been thrown together, making a charming, long, low living-room with one great black beam across the ceiling. On the walls was a perfect cottage paper, with isolated pink rose-buds well-distanced from each other: a pink rosebud chintz and black carpet dotted with faint stiff roses, made quaint and unusual but very satisfying arrangement. The windows looked out on a pine wood across a hedge of rampant pink Dorothy Roses. Gazing out on the dim, dark green grey aisles of the fir trees one would want the gay note within; and the little Rose-strewn paper was perfection.

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