Part 6

We say these things, not to discourage farming, but to dissuade the annual host from going out to make their fortunes on a farm, who, in five years, will come back stripped bare of everything but disgust—not of that. No man would think of going from the law, or from a store, into a mechanical trade without having served an apprenticeship, or having become in some way familiar with it. Lawyers do not set up at cabinet-making, nor go into steel works, nor set up for builders or painters. But when business is dull, and health delicate, many a professional man, many a clerk or unsuccessful merchant, concludes to buy a “snug farm,” and retire from the cares of the town or city, to lead the joyous life of a farmer. He has no knowledge of farming; but it requires none! Farming is simple. You rise with the dewy morn; you go forth to your prodigal acres; you rest under the trees bending with fruit; you eat from your bountiful table the food that sprung from your own soil,—and ever so much more romance of the same sort.

Prosperous farming requires knowledge, tact at managing men, skill in laying out work, incessant industry, very close calculations, good judgment in buying, and a good capacity of selling. In short, the qualities which go to make up a good merchant, a good manufacturer, and a good scientist ought to be combined in a first-class farmer. There are more passable orators born every year than there are first-class farmers. If any one doubts the truth of these views, let him try a farm for a few years!

XVI.

GARDENING UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

It is not every one who can toss off his provocations with so good a grace as our correspondent, whose letter we insert:—

NEW YORK, _April 19th_.

DEAR MR. BEECHER: Suppose you were fond of flowers and shrubs, and that the plat of Mother Earth allotted you was at the back of your city house, say about seventeen feet square,—the most of it occupied by the space for drying clothes; the rest a hard clayey soil, baked by the sun so quickly that you wish the Israelites might have had it to make brick, and one that no amount of foreign admixture improves.

Suppose the florist came every spring, hoed and raked, and distributed roses, verbenas, geraniums, and the like, at regular intervals, also sticks, bare evidence of the burial-place of various cherished bulbs that never come up, but seem, like your carnations, to disappear with the wheelbarrow.

Suppose the occupants of the tenement-house close to your rear fence,—who always, _in all the stories_ of the day, nurse a geranium in a cracked pot,—instead of thanking you for the pleasant sight under their windows, garnished your bed with egg-shells, old paper collars, rags, bones, empty spools, and other _débris_ handy for the purpose.

Suppose the nine thousand and ninety cats and their families roosted on the fence in the twilight, and tried their claws on your shrubs, and the softness of your soil generally, in the small hours of the night.

Suppose, with the first green leaves, the worms came also, and the green lice, and the ants, and made your bushes a sorrow and a vexation.

Suppose the hoop of the laundress was over it all, so to speak, and the hose always burst when the weather was dry, and your watering-pot held about a teacupful.

What would _you_ do, Mr. Beecher? Would you give over the space to old shoes and ugliness, or would you fly in the face of _manifest destiny_ and cultivate?

Dejectedly yours, BREEZE.

The very first thing to be done with a tenacious and obstinate clay soil is to have it dug out and carted away bodily, and its place supplied with good fresh loam. This would be a serious job if there were several acres. But when there is but a plat of seventeen feet square, and the larger part of that reserved for laundry purposes, only borders being used for flowers, the amount to be removed would be comparatively small, and the satisfaction would be ample repayment. Any one with a cart can carry off the clay, but not every one can get good soil. An honest florist or garden jobber could put you in the way of that.

If you will have a garden, it is best to be your own gardener. Adam and Eve set the example.

The cats may be managed in various ways. A black-and-tan terrier kept in the back yard has a wonderful influence on cats, arousing in them a strong local prejudice. If the boys in the neighborhood knew that a premium were offered for cat scalps, it would be found greatly to interest the cats. At any rate, their number would grow less.

As to worms and aphides, no one is fit to own flowers who, in so small a space as seventeen feet square, cannot exterminate them,—worms by hand picking, and aphides by whale-oil soapsuds. A vigorous fidelity will in a short time put the last worm _hors de combat_. The whale-oil soap may be had at any large seed-store,—directions for use accompanying the little jar. A tin garden syringe may be had at the same place, costing but little, lasting, with care, twenty years, and carrying the soapsuds like spray over every leaf and twig.

We, too, in Brooklyn have _lawn dresses_ with equatorial hoops, and yet manage to have many a charming patch of flowers. But, of all things in this world, a garden needs the presence of its owner. If you do not love it enough to care for it as you would for a baby, better let it alone. Flowers know who love them. They will not be put off with arm’s-length cordiality. But, if you love them, you will easily overcome a hundred obstacles, and rejoice in your flowers all the more because they are the trophies of your patience and industry.

XVII.

CORN.

_September 19th._

We have artists who give themselves to specialties. One delights to know fruits. Another loves architecture, or landscape, or figures, or animals, or grasses and flowers. Now it has always seemed strange that the noblest of all grasses, maize, or Indian corn, has never found an enthusiastic lover. It has been painted often, but never yet interpreted. No one has done by it what has been done by the lily, the rose, the convolvulus.

And yet, where shall we find any union of strength and grace more perfect among herbaceous plants? The jointed stem, robust and stiff, gives off at each articulation the most gracefully curved sword-leaves, which diminish in length as the plant goes up to its fimbriated top, forming a symmetrical whole not to be equalled among field plants.

If one will wander along the edges of a cornfield, he will often see an exquisite picture, such as Nature loves to make. The wild convolvulus, which often fills the fence corners, has crept out of the grass into the furrow and twined around the corn, climbing to its very top, and, having power yet to grow, returns upon itself and fashions festoons of exquisite leaves and white blossoms, which hang down in every negligent form of beauty. Other vines too, besides the convolvulus, try their arts, and none fail; but none succeed so charmingly as this queen of twining vines.

A specialist might devote himself to corn without fear of exhausting the subject. Of all the grains it is the true type of republicanism. It knows how to live in the community without losing its individuality. The smaller grains—wheat, barley, and such like—produce their effects only in masses. Individual stalks are quite insignificant. It is the community, and not the individual, that is beautiful. But a field of corn does not swallow up in itself the stems which form its mass. Every plant yet retains it nobility. If corn is sown so thickly that it cannot find room for development, the whole degenerates into mere grass, and loses its proper force and beauty. But the husbandman has found out what rulers yet but slowly learn, and reluctantly,—that the force and beauty of the whole is to be sought in the development and strength of each single plant. Individuality and community are not only compatible, but each is the indispensable factor of the other.

Or, turn the subject in another light. Each stalk of corn is a father and mother. It does not live for itself. When it hastens on in the hot days of July, it is not its own beauty that it seeks. It takes that on the way to a higher end. In the cool juices of that polished stem glows the sacred fire of parentage. The arched and rustling leaves borrow of the sun and air food for the coming brood. No sooner does the tassel break forth at the top, than out peer the infant ears nestling at the side of the noble stem. Nor does the parent blossom into its final beauty until the exquisite silk hangs from the nascent ears of corn to feed upon the parent’s life, and in that find its own.

No sooner do the new-born kernels swell, than the parent bequeaths itself and all its inward stores to its offspring. The long leaves swing idly in the air, as things that have nothing more to do. Every day the winds evoke a shriller sound from their motions. When the cob has covered itself with golden kernels, rich and ripe, the parent dies,—dies mourning sadly, shall we think? What though it shall live a hundred-fold in its children? All memory or consciousness will be gone. It has spent its life and beauty for others. But how strong, how fresh, how full, how beautiful its life, while doing its appointed work! How little does it really care to live when the end of living is accomplished! It did the work at hand, and drew all its beauty from that doing, then took its place in the great economy of nature, falling back to nothing.

With such thoughts men looked upon the fields thousands of years ago, and sighed, “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.”

It was thousands of years afterward that one said, “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly…. Death is swallowed up in victory.”

The grass of the field may image forth the secular side of human life, but it can go no further than the grave. Beyond that it cannot point. Only one garden ever was that set forth the sure hope of immortality. “In the place where He was crucified, there was a garden…. There laid they Jesus.”

XVIII.

DANDELIONS.

_June 8th._

There are many charms connected with the ideal life of the tropics. The chief drawback is, that _manhood_ deliquesces and runs out under the equator. This is not paid for by luscious bananas, oranges, orchids, or ever-blooming vines and trees. Enjoyment palls when it flows unceasingly and without break. To live in summer forever, without one ungarlanded hour in the year, might, for aught we know, sate us with sweetness.

The tropics were not made to live in all the year. They are a refuge for one or two months. After frost and snow have had their full meal, and the northern winds have by familiarity bred contempt and influenzas, it is a good thing to go to sleep on the good steamer Moro Castle, and wake up in Cuba, or Jamaica, or to go on through the Gulf of Mexico to the Magdalena valley in Northern South America, which the painter Church once told me he regarded as the most perfect climate that he had ever found in all travels.

But as soon as the contrast is satisfied, we are sure that one in the tropics must long for the northern zones, northern fruits and northern flowers; for calm days without pestilent insects; for _grass_, and for DANDELIONS!

Now I have got upon my real subject. The foregoing sentences were in the nature of a rhetorical introduction,—a sly and adroit way of getting people to listen to the praises of one of the brightest charms of our northern spring days.

I am moved to celebrate this brilliant, and yet, I fear, not much-prized flower, from the glory of my morning view. Out of my back windows I look down on four or five grassy yards, all well kept and lying well open to the sun. Soon after the grass springs you may see such a gorgeous array of dandelions as might make a florist fairly envious! They jut out from the edges of the walks, they crowd the narrow strips of grass at the lower end, they fairly jostle each other like a crowd pouring out of a public hall, in their strife to get into the light and open their golden crowns to the sun.

So brilliant are they and so hardy, that we are apt to miss the sentiment that lives in them. They are not of the flowers that impudently push themselves forward, demanding us to look at them whether we will or no. With all their amazing brilliancy, they are still coy love-flowers, that wait for the sun, as a bride for the bridegroom. For dandelions do not wake up in the morning before we do. They wait till the sun has long called them, and then they fling open their golden disks, and shine with a real delight of existence, with a cheer and abundance which ought to strike joy into the heart of a misanthrope.

Soon after noon is at its highest, the dandelion, thinking that the world is bright enough, and that the sun can manage the rest of the day, folds itself up, laces the golden filaments with the green lepals, and retires to meditation. Thus it plays courtier in the morning, and nun in the afternoon.

But what a name! _Dens leonis!_ or _Dent-de-lion!_ Or, if you fly to the systematic name,—the harsh _Taraxacum!_ Shall such a home-loving, radiant creature be called _Lion’s Tooth_, because some impertinent, prying botanist fancied that he had espied the shape of a lion’s tooth in its minor forms?

Just as soon as we have got politics settled, business reformed, and human nature elevated, I am determined to form a society for the reformation of botanical names. Botany has been the Noah’s Ark of pedants. Every absurd whim of every pragmatical professor has been turned into Greek or Latin, and hung about the neck of unhappy flower. One might as well hang a dictionary around a child’s neck by way of ornament, as to impose on flowers such outrageous and outlandish names as now defend the science of botany from all approach, as a fort is defended by a line of _chevaux-de-frise_.

But blessings on those cheery children of the sun! They are born of brightness; their whole life is like a smile of love. They are not a flower for the hand; they are not to be worn in the bosom. They do not love the house, or the pressure of a close bouquet. Their life is in the free open air. They shine out on you along your daily walk. They crowd your yard with golden coin, which, good for nothing in the market, may yet have the power to confer more enjoyment than could golden dollars or ducats.

This is my annual tribute. To-day I look out of my window, and thank God for the gifts which he sends me by the hand of Dandelions! Do they know my thoughts as I gaze on them? Is there not some sympathy between things in nature which wake up the soul to delight, and aid the soul thus aroused? Behind signs and signals, back of all articulate utterance, may there not be a subtler relationship which will yet be discovered, as connecting the inward and the outward with a living relationship?

XIX.

HOW TO BEAUTIFY HOMES.

_August 25th._

No one needs to be told how much a house is adorned by _vines_; and yet many are averse to their liberal use from the impression that they make a house damp. It is true that they _may_, but it is not necessary that they should. Vines do not _collect_ dampness. If any part of the house wall needs the sun to warm it, and is covered by a vine from its influence, it may favor dampness. But an ivy vine, on the other hand, is reputed to make a wall dry, and has sometimes been employed to correct the undue moisture to which certain portions of a dwelling are subject. A grape vine, trained upon slats, which shall have a few inches of air-space underneath it, will not injure the house. Upon porches, over trellises, vines may be trained with charming effect, and without offending those who are superstitiously prejudiced against vines on the house.

The kinds of vines must be left, in the case of thousands, to accident. Men that are obliged to count the very last penny in their expenses cannot send many orders to florists for beautiful things, but must take what they can get in their own neighborhood. We will mention a few things now generally diffused.

The _Glycine_, or _Wistaria_, is one of the noblest. It will run a hundred feet or more, and grow in time to have a trunk like a small tree. Nothing can surpass it at its blossoming period. It is like a vision of the garden of heaven. It may be raised by _layers_, but will be found somewhat slow in taking hold after transplantation. Its arms may be carried out in tier above tier to cover the whole side of the house, when economy of space is no object; but where one desires to spare for other things, the _Wistaria_ may be trained upon a corner, or along the eaves.

There is nothing more beautiful in its summer greenness or gorgeous in its autumn reds and purples, than the Virginia Creeper—_Ampelopsis hederacea_. There is a variety called _Ampelopsis Veitchii_, or Veitch’s, which is extremely beautiful. It clings to wood or brick with as much tenacity as the ivy. Its foliage is fine, and its habit fits it to fill small spaces. It is a plant that, having once owned, no one would part with.

If one wishes a dense screen, there is no vine that grows more rapidly or that is more hardy than the _Aristoloicha sipho_, or Dutchman’s pipe. One might as well attempt to look through a brick wall as through the opaque mass made by its enormous leaves. But its coarseness fits it chiefly for hiding ungainly things or shading from the light.

The _Trumpet Creeper_ is effective at a distance, but its coarseness excludes it from familiar nearness.

Few people are aware of the vast improvements which have taken place in the _Clematis_. Every one knows the wild white clematis, which is beautiful in blossom, and almost as fine when its seeds are ripened. It abounds in our fields, and bears transplantation easily. The new kinds, or those comparatively new, deserve to be better known. Fortune’s, Henderson’s, Jackman’s, the Prince of Wales, Standish’s, together with Helena, Sophia, Lanuginosa, are obtainable at our first-class nurseries, and may be easily propagated. Besides these, there are every year new varieties introduced. There is no vine that we should spare with more reluctance. The sheets of gorgeous bloom, which, by judicious selection of kinds, will last from June to September, the perfect hardiness of the plant, and the ease with which it is trained, fit it eminently for small places and sunny spots. For it loves the full blaze, and will not flourish well even when planted with other vines that at all shade it. Indeed, to have the best effect of clematis, it should be trained in a clear and open space to a trellis of its own.

But, of all vines, none is more popular, and deservedly so, than the honeysuckle. The kinds are numerous. But if but one can be had, let it be the _Halleana_, or Hall’s Japan honeysuckle. It cannot be distinguished from the _Brachypoda_, in leaf or blossom; but it excels that immeasurably in the habit of blossoming all summer. The _Flexuoso_, or Chinese, is fine, but we consider it second to Hall’s, which ought to be better known and more widely diffused than it is. By planting it on open soil, without support, it spreads over the ground, and roots at every joint, so that hundreds of new plants may be gained every year.

There is a beautiful golden honeysuckle—_aurea reticulata_. This ought not to be planted by the side of green-leaved varieties. It produces the effect of a diseased or weak branch, rather than of contrast and variety. But the golden-leaved, if planted by itself, and well grown, is gorgeous. It is perfectly hardy, and is of good growth and constitution. If one has a yard of ground, he may have a vine which will give unfeigned pleasure through the whole summer.

XX.

BIRCH AND ASPEN.

_September 28th._

Looking out from my window upon the dark sides of the mountains, upon the massive clouds, upon the wind-blown trees, I see my pet, the birch, all in a shiver with each blast. The American white birch has all the grace and delicacy of its European namesake, and, besides, a sensibility which it borrows from the aspen, or shares with it.

One should have, on every side of a country house, a group of aspens and birches. Planted together, they will give you motion in charming variety. On other trees the leaves are so rigid in the stem, that a wind strong enough to set them in full activity is strong enough to set all the branches in motion. We recognize the force, and, in large trees, the grandeur of motion. When a strong wind moves the whole tree, it swings its great boughs hither and thither, all its leaves and twigs utter their voices, which in chorus often rise to a roar. Yet, though the whole tree is agitated, and seems convulsed, one sees that it is only upon the exterior; while the top and sides are in full motion, the trunk stands firm, and seems motionless. Not till its very roots give way will it move, and then it does not bend, but goes down with stiff trunk.

The elastic birch, with long and slender limbs, avoiding horizontal positions and aiming at the zenith, flexible to the last degree, moves in the wind with a grace and elasticity which has no parallel.

The American aspen has a shivering leaf upon a rigid branch. It stands quite stiff and motionless in bough, while its leaves are quivering and shivering in the most industrious manner. Right over against the east door of the Twin Mountain House, New Hampshire, at a little distance, is a group of aspens, which are my perpetual delight. They are my wind-meters, or, rather, zephyr measurers. On a hot noon, when no air seems stirring, and the trees about them doze and slumber, like good men at church, these twinklers, like roguish boys, are dancing in an imaginary breeze, and playing with themselves, without a particle of wind, so far as I can perceive. Now a shiver runs over them from head to foot; then the topmost leaves shake and swirl, while the bottom rests. Gradually the motion dies away all over, and the frolic ends. No, a single leaf begins to wag; it goes on in single blessedness, with accelerated pace, up and down, round and round, until, for the life of me, I cannot help bursting into a fit of laughter at this solitary dance.

At times, in certain moods, one cannot help thinking that the aspen is striving to communicate something. It seems so sigh and pant. It supplicates as one that suffers. Then, changing suddenly, it coaxes and winks and blinks at you as if it was only in fun. It will stand perfectly still a minute as if looking to see what you will do, and then a laughing ripple runs all over it. It frolics with the same tireless grace as a kitten. Indeed, it is a kind of compound kitten-tree, each particular leaf a kitten, all frolicking together; though there is not one of them, if the rest won’t play, that is not ready, kitten-like, as it were, to chase its own tail.

Why have landscape gardeners done so little with birches and aspens? Maples, oaks, ashes, and evergreens are well; but in what other direction shall we look for such grace in form, such susceptibility to aerial influences, and such exquisite motion both of branch and leaf, as we find in the aspen and birch? The birches grow rapidly, are extremely hardy, and will flourish upon poor soil, though loving a generous soil better. In ten years, with birch and aspen, one may rejoice in a thick grove. If the yellow locust be added to these, and the silver maple, one who plants at sixty may hope to see high over his head a respectable young forest, dense enough for shade and high enough to begin to comfort the imagination.