PART IV
GARDEN MOODS
I
TOWN GARDENS
Few people will deny the peace of mind a sheet of green grass can give, but few people, one imagines, trouble to think how they are preserved in large Towns and Cities. If it were not for Societies many little open spaces would years ago have been covered with streets of houses, many fair trees have fallen, none have been planted, and those growing have been neglected and allowed to die. Of the many Societies whose work has been to preserve for the Public pleasure grounds, good trees, parks, and flower gardens, not one deserves such praise as the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, whose great work has been carried on since 1882.
When one considers that in Hampstead over six hundred acres have been preserved by energetic Committees from the hands of builders it is easy to see how great is the debt of London to those who voluntarily work for this and other Open Space Societies.
It is not, however, by these large tracts of open country that the towns and cities alone benefit. Seats, fountains, flower beds, and pavements have been placed in old church-yards and disused burial-grounds opened for the benefit of the public. One has only to look at the map of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association to see how wonderful their work has been and still is.
To dwellers in Towns the sight of flowers in the streets is like a breath of the country. The long line of flower-sellers in the High Street, Kensington, one group of women in Piccadilly Circus, in Oxford Circus, in other spots where the place of their flower baskets brightens all the neighbourhood, are doctors, though they do not know it, of high degree. They bring the message of the changing year. They are a perpetual flower calendar, people to whom a reverence is due. One looks in Piccadilly Circus for the first Snowdrops, the little knots of their delicate white faces peering over the edge of the flower baskets. From the tops of omnibuses the first Violets are seen. Anemones have their turn, and Mimosa, and Cowslips, and Roses soon glow in the midst of the traffic, and elegant Carnations in their silver grass, and great piles of Asters. So we may read the year. All through the grey and desolate Winter these flower women hold their own, through cold and rain, and pale Winter sun they keep the day alive with the glowing colours of flowers. I often wonder, as I see them sit there so patiently, if they know the joy they give the passer-by, or if they are more like the rocks on whom flowers grow by nature. They are a curious race, these flower-women, untidy, with a screw of hair twisted up under a battered hat of black straw, with faded shawls wrapped round them, and the weapons of their craft arranged about them—jam jars of water, wire, bass, rows of little sticks on the end of which buttonholes are stuck. And they have wonderful contrivances for keeping their money, ancient purses rusty like many of themselves, in which greasy pennies and wet sixpences wallow in litters of dirty paper. I would not vouch for the truth of all they say, for it would appear from their words that every flower in their baskets is but just picked, or only that second from the market. And they regard such evidence as withered and wet flower stalks with half-humorous scorn. For all they may not be well favoured, and a pretty flower-woman is as rare as a dead donkey, still, for me, they have a certain dingy dignity, or rather a natural picturesque quality as of lichen on the pavements.
These people are the town’s gardens of odd corners, while another tribe of them are perambulating gardens bringing sudden colour into the soberest of streets. There are those who carry enormous baskets on their heads, and cry in some incomprehensible tongue words intended to convey a message such as “All fresh.” To see a gorgeous glowing mass of Daffodils sway down the street borne triumphantly aloft like the litter of some Princess is one of those sights to repay many grey days. Then the brothers to this tribe are those who carry from street to street Ferns and Lilies on carts, drawn often by a patient ass. I own feeling a distrust for these men, they do not dispense their goods with much love. They are not eloquent, as are many flower women in praise of the beauties of the India plant, or the Shuttle-cock Ferns. I feel that they are interlopers in the business, and have failed at the hardware trade, or have no capacity for the selling of rush baskets, or the grinding of scissors. At the heels of all those who sell flowers in the streets are the out-cast members of the tribe, men with brutal faces who follow lonely women in unfrequented streets trying to thrust dead plants upon them, and cursing if they are not bought. And there are the aged crones who sit by the railings of little squares and hold out a tray of boot laces, matches, a few very suspicious-looking Apples, and, in the corner, a bunch of dead flowers—a kind of æsthetic appeal.
Your true flower-lover will search as carefully among their baskets for the object of his desire as will the collector the musty curiosity shops for prizes for his collection. There comes the time when the first Snowdrops, their stalks tied with wool, appear here and there and may be brought home as rare prizes. A word here of flower vases. Clear glass is the only form of vessel for any kind of flower. I feel certain of that. No crock, no form of pottery gives out greater the real value to your cut flowers. The stalks are part of the beauty of the flower, the submerged leaf as lovely as the leaf above. And, above and beyond all things, glass shows at once if your water is pure, and if your vase is full. Nowadays beautiful striped glass vases are made and sold so cheaply that there is no excuse for the old, and often ugly, pot vases so many people use. I own to a certain liking to seeing roses in old China bowls, but have a lurking suspicion that I am Philistine in this.
There is, of course, a distinction between Town Gardens and gardens in Towns. The one being the open free spaces dedicated to the pleasure of Duke and tramp alike: the other the hidden and hallowed spots where the town dweller fights soot, grime, smoke, and lack of sun, and fights them in many cases wonderfully well. One finds, though, that many people fancy that only Ivy, cats, and dustbins will flourish in the heart of a smoky City. This is not the case. Broom, Lilac, Trumpet Flower, Traveller’s Joy, many kinds of Honeysuckle, Passion Flower, Tulip Tree, many kinds of Cherry and Plum Trees bearing beautiful blossoms, Barberry, and Almond Trees—all these will grow well and strongly even in the worst parts of London. Five kinds of Honeysuckle will flourish; they are:
Lonicera Lepebouri „ Flexuosam „ Brachypoda aurea „ Serotinum „ Belgicum
Besides these, pink and white Brambles, Meadowsweet, Weigela, and Rhododendrons all grow fairly easily.
One of the first sights the traveller notices on approaching any large town is the numerous and gay back gardens of the little houses. The contents of these gardens are a true index to the inhabitants of the houses. Where one garden boasts little but old packing-cases, drying linen, a few stalks of hollyhocks, and one or two giant sunflowers, the very next will show borders full of all varieties of flowers in season, an eloquent picture of what may be done with a little trouble. The consolation and pleasure these little town gardens give is out of all proportion to their size. The man who can come home to a villa, however badly built and hideous, and it often appears that some competition in ugliness has won suburban prizes, can find a delight all good gardeners know in working his plot of land.
One thing we can see at a glance, that the good influence of one well-kept garden in a row will very soon have its effect. There is one street I know within the bounds of London, a street of new houses with little gardens in front of them running down to the pavement. I watched this street with interest from its very beginning. At first it was a thing of beauty, the men at work on the buildings, the scaffolding against the sky, the horses and carts waiting with loads of brick, the gradual growth of the houses from foundation to roof. Even the ugliest building is beautiful in the course of construction, the poles and ladders hiding the coarse design. Then there came a day when the street was finished. It is not an entire street, but about half, being a row of twenty or so houses built in flats, three flats in each house. When the men left and the houses stood naked, after the plan of the builder, looking pitiful and commonplace, the new red brick was raw, the little balconies very white and staring, the windows like blind eyes. Every ground-floor flat had the disadvantage of less light and air than the others, but it was the possessor of about nine feet of land between the door and the pavement. For a long time I waited to see what would become of this tenant-less row of houses. I gained a kind of affection for them, and walked past the white signboards once or twice a week reading always “To Let” written on the windows, painted on the notice board, pasted on papers across the doors. The melancholy aspect of these houses appealed to me; they had a look of dumb anxiety as if they longed to hear the sound of voices in their empty rooms. At last I saw one day three huge furniture vans drawn up in front of the houses, and during the next two weeks more vans arrived and there was a sound of hammering in the street, and a smell of unpacking. Men came there with boxes and parcels, and tradesmen began to drive up in carts and motor-cars. I felt that those houses still standing empty had a jealous look in their windows, like little girls who had been left to sit out at a dance. The notice boards were all shifted to their front gardens, their bell wires still hung unconnected from holes by the front door.
The thing I was really waiting to see happened at Number Two. The builder, after finishing the houses had, I suppose, come to the conclusion that a little help from Nature would do no harm. Some good fairy prompted him to plant Almond and May Trees alternately in the front gardens. To each house an Almond and a May. I had waited eagerly, determining by some fantastic twist that the spirit of the new houses would first make her appearance in one of these trees. So far the street had possessed no character except that vague rawness that all new places wear. The great event occurred at Number Two. Very delicately an Almond tree put out the first blossom. The life of the street began. I did not wonder about the favoured owners of the ground floor of Number Two. I knew.
Not long after the Almond tree had bloomed a cart drew up before Number Two, and three men began to wheel barrow loads of earth into the front garden. They were directed by a gentleman of some age, but of cheerful countenance. He smiled as each load of earth was neatly placed. He looked at the earth as if he already saw it covered with flowers. In his mind’s eye he was arranging a surprise for the street.
The next event of notice in the street was the appearance of Number Two garden, a blaze of flowers set in a desert of red brick. A balcony of Number Sixteen, far down the road, entered into friendly competition. Numbers Five and Nine worked like slaves. Three followed suit with carpet-bedding on a tiny scale. A Laburnam and a Lilac sprang like magic from the soil of Number Ten. Then, one day, the whole of Number One burst into flower from top to toe. The tenant of each floor having apparently been secretly at work to surprise the rest. Two, who had started, and was indeed the father of the street, put forth more strenuous efforts.
To-day I am certain of a pleasant walk, and can come out of a wilderness of bricks and mortar to my charming oasis flowering in the land. I wonder if the people who live in those flats and who compete with each other in a friendly rivalry of blossom realise what they are doing for the hundreds who pass by in the day and are cheered.
The Association I have named before, the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, give in their statement for 1907 a list of their window garden competitions for that year. One sees that many of the poorer parts of London have taken the idea, and this note I quote from South Hackney shows the result: “Twelve entries. Eight prizes of the total amount of One Pound, Ten Shillings. Remarks: Clean, fresh-looking, more creepers than last year; example set is improving character of roads, as others, not competitors, have started gardens.”
Any one who knows the dreary and desolate appearance of town streets, especially in those parts where life is lived at the hardest, and surroundings are of the most sordid, will encourage a work which induced in one year over five hundred people in London slums to take an interest in growing flowers.
The _Spectator_, of September 6, 1712, contains a charming essay upon the English Garden, and the writer draws attention to Kensington Gardens in the following words:
“I shall take notice of that part in the upper gardens at Kensington, which was at first nothing but a Gravel Pit. It must have been a fine Genius for gardening, that could have thought of forming such an unsightly Hollow into so beautiful an Area, and to have hit the eye with so uncommon and agreeable a Scene as that which it is now wrought into. To give this peculiar spot of ground the greater effect, they have made a very pleasing contrast; for as on one side of the Walk you see this hollow Bason, with its several little Plantations lying so conveniently under the Eye of the Beholder; on the other side of it there appears a seeming Mound, made up of trees rising one higher than another in proportion as they approach the Centre. A Spectator who has not heard this account of it, would think this Circular Mount was not only a real one, but that it had been actually scooped out of that hollow space which I have before mentioned. I never yet met with anyone who has walked in this Garden, who was not struck with that Part of it which I have mentioned.”
The writer finishes his essay with a simple and rather delightful passage:
“You must know, Sir, that I look upon the Pleasure which we take in a Garden, as one of the innocent Delights in human Life. A Garden was the Habitation of our first Parents before the Fall. It is naturally apt to fill the mind with Calmness and Tranquillity, and to lay all its turbulent Passions at rest. It gives us a great Insight into the Contrivance and Wisdom of Providence, and suggests innumerable subjects for Meditation. I cannot but think the very Complacency and Satisfaction which a man takes in these Works of Nature, to be a laudable, if not a virtuous Habit of Mind.”
Our opinion has not altered in these two hundred years. The enjoyment of a garden is certainly one of the most innocent delights in human life, the enjoyment of the garden he mentions in particular is one of the most innocent pleasures in London. Kensington Gardens have inspired many people, the classic of them is undoubtedly Mr. J. M. Barrie’s “Little White Bird.” The patron Saint of them is, and I think ever will be, “Peter Pan.” One has only to walk down the Babies Mile to hear games from Peter Pan going on in all directions. This peculiar spirit haunted the Gardens long before the days of Mr. Barrie, and whispered much of his charming story in the ears of a bewigged gentleman—Mr. Tickell, by name—who, in a poem of some considerable length, sang Kensington’s praises. Those tiny fairy trumpets sounding in the walks of Kensington sounded a tune which has never left the air, and one fancies the creator of Peter Pan catching sight of a dim ghost now and again, the ghost of Mr. Tickell, Joseph Addison’s friend, as he walks in full-bottomed wig, his wide skirted coat, and sees the fairies too. He begins:
Where Kensington high o’er the neighb’ring lands ’Midst greens and sweets, a regal fabric stands, And sees each spring, luxuriant in her bowers, A snow of blossoms, and a wild of flowers, The dames of Britain oft in crowds repair To groves and lawns, and unpolluted air. Here, while the town in damps and darkness lies, They breathe in sunshine, and see azure skies; Each walk, with robes of various dyes bespread, Seems from afar a moving tulip-bed, Where rich biscades and glossy damasks glow, And chints, the rival of the show’ry bow.
* * * * *
Their midnight pranks the sprightly fairies play’d On every hill, and danced in every shade. But, foes to sunshine, most they took delight In dells and dales conceal’d from human sight: There hew’d their houses in the arching rock; Or scoop’d the bosom of the blasted oak;
There is no doubt about it that these are the very same fairies who are still at work in the Gardens, and who have admitted Mr. Barrie into their confidence. All gardens have ghosts, and Kensington Gardens, I think, more ghosts than any other. What a club it must be to belong to, to visit when all London is asleep. Here’s Mr. Tickell with his version of the Peter Pan story:
No mortal enter’d, those alone who came Stolen from the couch of some terrestrial dame For oft of babes they robb’d the matron’s bed.
But beyond these, the vaguest hints, Mr. Tickell does not carry. His story has no likeness to the immortal tale of Peter Pan, but has, in common with it, the same knowledge that there are fairies in the Gardens living just as both he and Mr. Barrie know so well under the roots of trees. And then there are the children. It is they who are the sweetest flowers of the town gardens.
If any man wants an argument in favour of keeping every available space open in towns and cities let him go into some crowded neighbourhood and watch the children playing in the gutters of the streets. Then let him find one of those places, a disused burial ground, or the garden of an old square, which has been preserved, and kept open, and laid out for the benefit of the children, and he will see the difference at once. There are two such places easy for the Londoner to visit, the one Browning Hall Garden, now a garden, once the York Road Burial Ground, Walworth, the other Meath Gardens, eleven acres of public garden, once The Victoria Park Cemetery, Bethnal Green.
They say that one half of London doesn’t know how the other half lives. They do not know, but worse still they don’t care. It is equally true that half the people who profess to care for flowers are ignorant of the wonderful flower-beds carefully grown for their pleasure within a two-penny ’bus ride of most parts of London. The row of beds facing Park Lane; the flower walk (where the babies walk, too) in Kensington Gardens; the flower walk in Regent’s Park, the Houses at Kew, are sights as well worth an afternoon’s excursion as any other form of amusement. Most people almost unconsciously absorb the colour of cities, vaguely realising grey streets, red streets, white streets, spaces of grass and trees, big blots of colour—like the huge beds of scarlet geraniums in front of Buckingham Palace, but they do not trouble to get the value of their impressions. People look on the way from Hyde Park Corner to the Marble Arch as a convenient means of crossing London instead of one of the most interesting and delightful experiences to be had. They go crazy over trees and sky in the country, when they have at their doors sights the country can never equal. The sun in late autumn setting behind the trees of Hyde Park and glowing over the murky smoke-laden skies is a sight for the gods. Smoke has its disadvantages, but it certainly gives one æsthetic joys unknown in clear skies, for instance alone the reflection of the lights of Piccadilly on the evening sky.
After all, the time to see the wonder of town gardens is at night. The streets are empty of people. Here and there a few night workers walk the lonely streets, a policeman tramps his beat, the huge carts bringing the provisions for the city lumber along with sleepy carters swaddled in sacks perched high among the heaps of baskets. Here and there men with long hoses are washing down the roads. The Parks and Gardens lie bathed in peace, mysterious shadows make velvet caves sheltered by leaves. Those trees standing close to the road are lit by the electric lamps and fringe the street with vivid green. Only the flowers seem really awake, alive, in a tremendous dream city. Along the lines of houses, blinds down, shutters closed, a window box here and there breaks the monotony and seems to be the only real thing there. If it is Spring, then from Hyde Park Corner to the Kensington High Street, all along the side of the Park, behind the railings are regiments of Crocus flowers, spikes of Narcissus, and of Daffodil. Their sweetness fills the air, their very presence fills the town with gentleness, and purifies and softens its grimness. Far above, in some citadel of flats, a solitary light burns, some one is at work, or ill, or watching. Above all hang the blazing stars.
II
THE EFFECT OF TREES
Of the pleasure and affect of trees no one speaks so wisely as Bacon. Although those who have a feeling for garden literature know his essay on Gardens as the classic of its kind, still many do not recall his thoughts when the planning of a garden is on hand. Too much, I think, is given by the man who is about to make a garden, to his own particular hobby, and many a man wonders why his garden gives him not all the pleasure he expected. You will hear of a man talk of his new Rose beds, of the nursery for Carnations he is in the process of making, of the placing of his Violet frames, of his ideas for a rock garden (I think the distressful feeling for a rockery of clinkers is dead), but you will seldom hear of a man who deliberates quietly for effects of trees, or who thinks of planting fruit trees as ornaments, but always he places them in his kitchen garden, and ignores their value in their other proper places.
Bacon rejoices in his arrangement of gardens for every month of the year, and dwells, rightly, just as much on the pleasure of his trees as in the ordering of his flower beds. Naturally he had not such a large selection of flowers from which to choose as we have to-day, but to-day we neglect the beauty of many trees, and especially the beauty of hedges.
Are there sights in any garden more beautiful than the Almond tree and the Peach tree in blossom, or the sweet trailing Sweetbriar? Bacon would have us notice these, make a feast of these. Also he recommends the beauty of the White Thorn in leaf, the Cherry and the Plum trees in blossom, the Cherry tree in fruit, the Lilac tree, the wonder of the Apple tree, and the Medlar.
Then, again, Bacon touches on a point all too little counted: the perfume of the garden. He says: “And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the warbling of musick) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air.
“Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smells; so that you may walk by a whole row of them and find nothing of their sweetness; yea, though it be in a morning’s dew. Bays likewise yield no smell as they grow; Rosemary little; nor Sweet Marjoram.
“That which above all others yield the sweetest smell in the air is the Violet, especially the White Double Violet which comes twice a year; about the middle of April, and about Bartholomew-tide. Next to that is the Musk Rose; then the Strawberry leaves dying, which yield a most excellent cordial smell. Then the flowers of the Vines; it is a little dust, like the dust of a Bent, which grows upon the cluster, in the first coming forth: then the Sweet Briar, then Wallflowers, which are very delightful to be set under a parlour or lower chamber window. Then Pinks and Gilly-flowers, especially the matted Pink and Clove Gilly-flower: then the flowers of the Lime tree; then the Honeysuckles, so they be somewhat afar off.
“Of Bean flowers I speak not, because they are field flowers.
“But those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three, that is Burnet, Wild Thyme, and Water Mints. Therefore, you are to set whole alleys of them to have the pleasure when you walk or tread. I would add to these one or two more flowers whose perfume is easily yielded. The Heliotrope, which at night will scent a garden; and Stocks, very rich and sweet scented; Tobacco Plant, a heavy sensuous smell; Madonna Lilies, seeming almost to breathe; Evening Primroses; and, after rain when the sun is warm, the leaves of Geraniums, a faint musky smell, very attractive. But of all these the garden holds one perfume more delicious, a scent that, to me at least, is the Queen of Garden scents since it is the breath of the whole garden herself. After a Summer’s day when it has been hot and the lawn has been cut, and the Sun has well baked the earth, if there should come rain in the evening, a soft warm rain pattering at first so that it seems each leaf of flower and tree becomes a drum sounding with rain beats, then it seems the garden breathes deep and draws in great draughts of the delicious coolness. Then after the rain the night comes warm again, and all warm earth smells, and the new cut grass smells also, and every tree and flower join force upon force until the air is filled with a perfume which for want of better names I would call the Odour of Gratitude.”
Furthermore, Bacon speaks of the garden—“The garden is best to be square, encompassed on all four sides with a stately arched hedge.” One rich hedge is there at Bishopsbourne, which it is traditionally supposed was planted by Richard Hooker, of whom Walton writes: “It is a hedge of over one hundred feet in length, from twelve to fourteen feet in height, and some ten feet thick. It is one of the finest Yew hedges in England, a wonderful colour, an amazing strength and beautiful, when it is clipped and trimmed, to look upon.” Of the pleasure and comfort of such hedges, of the health to be gained by regarding them, many people have spoken. There is, surely, something in the tough green life of the Yew, something in its staunchness that conveys a feeling of strength to the mind. I feel this in different degree with every kind of tree, partly no doubt from moments of particular association, from memories that become attached to scenes as they will (curious how scents, arrangements of colour, outlines against a sky, will call up things and thoughts which for the moment have no connection with them. I never see Oranges but I think of a dark passage lined with books, and a cupboard built round with books in shelves. In the cupboard are dishes of fruit, and shapes, all tied up in linen, of fruit cheeses, as damson cheese, and crab-apple cheese, and a cheese made of Quinces and Medlars).
I remember a graveyard in a little Swiss village where every grave had a tiny weeping willow bending over it. It had, for us, infinitely more pathos than the sombreness of many English graveyards. There was a rushing torrent below, for the church and its graveyard was on a height over a river, and the voice of the river sang in the quiet graveyard, like a strong spirit singing in the pride of vigour to those asleep. The little willows bent and shivered in the breeze, looking small and pathetic against the strong small church. Outside the church, all along one wall was a seat very smooth and worn, it faced the graves and the tiny trees, and behind it, on the wall of the church, was a great Wisteria with clusters of pale purple flowers. There were no other trees there, or to be seen from the seat, but these little bending weeping trees. And close by, a hundred yards from the church gate, was the undertaker’s shop, part farm, part garden, part stocked with elm planks. As I passed by the son was making a coffin out in the middle of the road on trestles. Looking back one could see the young man bending earnestly over his work, the sound of his saw ripping the air. Behind him was the grey stone of the church and the forest of little shivering trees over the graves. A little below, just across the river over a covered bridge, was a beer-garden where a family was sitting drinking beer out of tall mugs. They sat, father, mother, sons and daughters, all dressed in black, under Chestnut trees cut down very close and clipped to make alleys of shade. And a little behind them was a forest rising on a hill with great masses of trees all shades of green, and glowing in the light of an afternoon sun. But of all this I carry mostly the memory of those little trees, quiet weeping sentinels, very pathetic.
* * * * *
Trees, especially isolated groups of trees, in towns and cities have a wonderful fascination. The very idea that they burst into bud and leaf in the midst of all the smoke and grime, and the noise and hurry, is health-giving. It brings repose, it brings hope. I believe the trees in town squares get more love than any country trees. They mean so much. It seems so good of them to fight, and to come out year by year clean and fresh and green, and in Winter when they are bare they make a delicate webwork of twigs against the background of soot-covered houses. Then in the Spring when they turn faintly purple there is a haze across the square, and it seems that even the pigeons and the horses on the cab rank feel it, but cannot scarcely believe it. Then, perhaps there is an Almond tree in the square and it will suddenly break out into the most exquisite finery, like the daintiest of women, making the square gay and full of joy. The Spring has come. It is almost unbelievable. And people passing through the square who have forgotten all about the Spring look up suddenly and smile, and say: “Look at the Almond tree. Spring is here.” Those who know the country turn their minds inwards and remember that the brown owls have begun to hoot, that the gossamer is floating, that, here and there yellow and white butterflies are flitting, looking strangely out of season, that the raven is building, and the rooks too, and that all sorts of birds they had forgotten are seen in the land.
After that the big trees in the square become hazy with bursting bud, and one morning, as if some message had been whispered overnight, the far side of the square is only to be seen through a screen of the tenderest green. Bit by bit the leaves comes out, get bright, clean washed by showers, get dingy with the soot. Then comes the fall of the leaf and the crisp curl of it as it changes colour, and the far side of the square begins to show again through bronze-coloured leaves. At last the Winter comes and all that is left is the tracery of boughs and twigs, and heaps of dead, beautiful-coloured leaves beneath the trees. These still provide an interest, for the wind comes and picks them up and whirls them right up into the air in all sorts of amazing dances and games.
In the Winter one last beauty comes. The day has been leaden, sad-coloured, bitterly cold. All the cabmen on the rank stamp with their feet, and swing their arms to keep themselves warm, and there is a little mist where all the horses breathe. And people coming through the square have forgotten the Almond tree, and the look of the big trees when the hot sun splashed gold on their leaves, and they say, looking at the sky, “See how dark it is, it is going to snow.” The snow comes; the sky is darker; the trees stick up looking black, like drawings in pen and ink. Flakes, white flakes, twenty, forty, then a rush—a thousand; the sky full of tiny white flakes, the air full of them whirling down. All sounds begin to be muffled. Horses hoofs beat with a thud on the ground. The sound of voices in the air is deadened. The voices of men encouraging horses sound sharp now and again, or a whip cracks like a shot. The square is covered with snow, every twig is outlined in white, black patches of bark show here and there, and emphasise the dead whiteness. When it has stopped snowing and a watery light comes from the sun all the trees gleam wonderfully, looking like fairy trees. And people passing through the square making beaten tracks in the snow saying, “It is Winter.”
* * * * *
In a country garden there is a tree stands on the end of a lawn. It is an Acacia tree, old, gnarled, and twisted, with Ivy round it, deep Ivy in which thrushes build year after year; there is a stone near by on which the thrushes break the shells of snails, the “tap, tap,” of the birds at work is one of the peaceful sounds that break the silence of the garden.
Under the tree is an oblong mark of pressed grass greener than the rest of the lawn, where the garden-roller rests. And there is a seat under the tree, and a wooden foot-rest by it.
Touch the tree and you go back at once to a picture of a boy, the boy who helped to plant it over a hundred and fifty years before. If you look from the tree across the lawn to the house you will see the very door by which he came out with his father to plant the tree.
The house and the tree have grown old together, both of them have mellowed with the garden and wear a look of old security and calm, and have an air of wise old age.
Up and down the five white steps from the garden path to the house more than five generations have passed, men in wide-skirted coats and full wigs hanging about their ears in great corkscrew curls, men in powdered wigs, rolled stockings, square buckled shoes, men in stocks and immense collars, and big frills to their shirts making them look like gentlemanly fish, down to the man who comes out to day who looks a little old-fashioned, and is square-built like the house, and who parts his hair like the men in Leech’s pictures, and who wears a rim of whisker round his face. And troops of ladies have passed out by that door into the garden in hoops, and sacques, and towers of hair, and crinolines. But no lady comes out now to cut the Lavender hedge, or snip at the Roses. The man is alone. But when he sits alone under the tree, with a spud by his side ready to uproot Plantains from his lawn, he can see troops of the garden ghosts sitting round him under the Acacia tree.
Sometimes there seems to be a sound of the ghostly click of bowls on the lawn, for it is a bowling-green banked up on three sides (the fourth bank has been done away with long ago), and there is a company of gentlemen in their wide shirt sleeves playing bowls. Above them, on the raised terrace next to the house where there is a broad path, a group of old people sit by little tables and drink wine, and smoke, and gossip. And behind them are tall Hollyhocks, and Roses and a tangle of old-fashioned flowers such as Periwinkles and Sweet Williams, and Pinks. The Acacia tree, which grows on the lawn beyond the bowling green, is quite small.
The old man who dreams of these ghosts in his garden recognises them readily because they have stepped out of pictures on his walls, and when they are not haunting the garden are demurely hanging on the oak panels in the old rooms.
Then he can see, if he chooses, a picture of the garden when the acacia tree is quite tall, but still elegant and slender, and in this picture an old, old lady walks down the garden paths. She is dressed in a large hooped skirt with panniers, and has high-heeled shoes, and a perfect tower of hair on her head, and over that a calash hood like the hood over a waggon except that it is black. She carries an ebony stick in a silk-mittened hand, a hand knotted with gout and covered with the mourning rings of her friends. She it was who added largely to the garden, and took in two acres more of land, and planted a row of Elms and Beech trees. She kept the garden as bright and gay as the samplers she worked herself. She had a mania for set beds, and her Tulips were the talk of the county. A long bed of them ran from the house along one bank of the bowling-green to the orchard, and it was arranged in pattern of colours, lines, squares, interlaced geometrical designs of flaming red and scarlet, pink and yellow and white and dull purple. She it was who caused the sundial to be placed in the garden and who found the motto for it, and designed the four triangular beds to go round it, and placed a hedge of Lavender and Rosemary all about it in a square.
The tap of her stick on the paths is one of the ghostly sounds that haunt the place, and sometimes it is difficult to know whether it is a woodpecker, or a thrush breaking open a snail, or her stick that makes such a sharp crisp sound on the Summer air.
There is another sound, too, that the Acacia tree knows well. It is the click of glasses under its boughs. On a table placed under the tree is an array of beautiful cut-glass decanters and a number of glasses which reflect in the polished mahogany surface. Round the table four gentlemen sit with white wigs and elegant lace falls at their throats, and ruffles at their wrists. It is a hot Summer afternoon, and so still that not a Rose leaf of those spread on the lawn stirs. A large white sheet lies on the lawn covered with thousands of rose petals left to dry in the sun, and when they are dry, and have undergone a careful mixture with spices, and have herbs added to them by the mistress of the house, they will be placed in china bowls in all the rooms, and will give out a subtle delicious odour.
The man who is dreaming in his garden can see the four gentlemen as plain as life raising their glasses and touch them before drinking the silent toast. And it is difficult to tell whether it is the gardener striking on his frames by accident, or the chink of glasses that sounds so clearly under the Acacia tree.
Now, in another picture the garden holds, things are somewhat altered. Instead of the big Tulip bed on the lawn there are a number of small cut beds with long beds behind them on either side of a new gravel walk. Instead of the older fashioned borders there are startling colour schemes of carpet-bedding in which the flowers are made to look more like coloured earths than anything. In the long beds, instead of the profusion of Hollyhocks, Sunflowers and bushes of Roses, a primness reigns. A row of blue Lobelia backed by a row of white Lobelia, then scarlet Geraniums, then Calceolarias, then crimson Beet plants, every ten yards a Marguerite Daisy sticks up out of the middle of the bed. Only one rambling border remains, and that is hidden from the view of the house windows, but can just be seen from the seat under the Acacia tree. In it Phlox and Red-hot Pokers, Asters, Anemonies, Moss Rose, and French Marigolds grow profusely, and some merciful sentiment has allowed an old twisted Apple tree to remain there.
The old bowling-green is still beautifully kept, the grass is smooth and fair, not a Daisy or Plantain is there to mar the splendour of the turf. The Acacia tree, now grown old and venerable, spreads out fine branches, and gives delightful shade. Here and there new arches of rustic woodwork, in horrible designs, stretch over the paths, their ugliness partly hidden by climbing Roses of the Seven Sisters kind, or Clematis, or Honeysuckle, or Jasmine. Many trees in the garden are old enough to exchange memories of a hundred years ago; the orchard alone boasts a venerable congregation of old trees, some grey with lichen, some bowed down with the result of full crops.
New ghosts walk the garden paths in crinolines and Leghorn hats, and side curls, talking to gentlemen with glossy side whiskers, peg-top trousers, and tartan waistcoats.
On the bowling-green the new game is laid out, and ladies and gentlemen talk learnedly of bisques, and the correct weight of croquet mallets. There is a fresh sound for the garden, the smack of croquet balls.
And now nearly all the ghosts vanish, and the old man who is sitting under the Acacia tree looks around and sees his garden as it is to-day, fuller of flowers than ever it was, with the hideous set borders done away with, with the little rustic arches pulled down and a pergola, properly built, in their place, and all of the horrors of Early Victorian gardening gone for good, the plaster nymphs and cupids, the tree called a “Monkey Puzzler,” the terrible rockery of clinkers and bad bricks. Here, as in the house, taste has triumphed over fashion. Inside the oak panels that had been covered over with hideous wallpapers are brought to light. The wool mats have vanished, the glass domes over clocks, the worsted bell-pulls, the druggets and the rep curtains all gone for good.
Outside, wonders have been worked in the garden. New beds filled with the choicest Roses and Carnations. Water is now properly conveyed by a sprinkler. The old water-butt, slimy and falling to pieces, gone to give place to a well filled concrete tank of water, kept clean and sweet.
One more ghostly sound left, a sound the lonely man unconsciously listens for as he sits under the tree. On one bough, low growing and strong, shows the marks deep cut where once depended the ropes of a swing. In his ears he can sometimes hear the shouts of children and the creak of the swing ropes, sounds he used to hear in his childhood. And mingled with the children’s laughter he can hear, very faintly, a boy’s voice, his own.
Such is the story of an hundred English Gardens, where trees will tell secrets, and the lawn holds memories, and the paths echo with footsteps out of the past.
* * * * *
The influence literature has on the mind is nowhere more traceable than in a garden. A dozen thoughts spring to the mind gathered out of the store cupboards of remembered reading at the sight of flowers, trees, sunlit walks, dark alleys. Trees call up romantic meetings, hollow trunks where lovers have posted their letters, dark shades where vows have been made, smooth trunks on which are carven twin hearts pierced by a single arrow and crowned with initials cut into the bark. Gloomy recesses under spreading boughs remind one of the hiding places of conspirators, of fugitives.
Sometimes, on a winter’s night, to look into the garden and see the trees toss and shake with an angry wind, or stand bare, bleak, and black against the sparkle of a frosty sky, some written thing comes quickly into the brain almost as if the printed letters stood out clear. There is one scene of winter and trees comes often to me very full and clear. It is from the beginning of “Martin Chuzzlewit,” and heralds the entrance in the story of the immortal Mr. Pecksniff.
“The fallen leaves, with which the ground was strewn, gave forth a pleasant fragrance, and, subduing all harsh sounds of distant feet and wheels, created a repose in gentle unison with the light scattering of seed hither and thither by the distant husbandman, and with the noiseless passage of the plough as it turned up the rich brown earth and wrought a graceful pattern in the stubbled fields. On the motionless branches of some trees autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels; others, stripped of all their garniture, stood, each the centre of its little heap of bright red leaves, watching their slow decay; others again still wearing theirs, had them all crunched and crackled up, as though they had been burnt. About the stems of some were piled, in ruddy mounds, the apples they had borne that year; while others (hardy evergreens this class) showed somewhat stern and gloomy in their vigour, as charged by nature with the admonition that it is not to her more sensitive and joyous favourites she grants the longest term of life. Still athwart their darker boughs the sunbeams struck out paths of deeper gold; and the red light, mantling in among their swarthy branches, used them as foils to set its brightness off, and aid the lustre of the dying day.
“A moment, and its glory was no more. The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt in everything.
“An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to its moaning music. The withering leaves, no longer quiet, hurried to and fro in search of shelter from its chill pursuit; the labourer unyoked the horses, and, with head bent down, trudged briskly home beside them; and from the cottage windows lights began to glance and wink upon the darkening fields.
* * * * *
“It was small tyranny for a respectable wind to go wreaking its vengeance on such poor creatures as the fallen leaves; but this wind, happening to come up with a great heap of them just after venting its humour on the insulted Dragon, did so disperse and scatter them that they fled away, pell-mell, some here, some there, rolling over each other, whirling round and round upon their thin edges, taking frantic flights into the air, and playing all manner of extraordinary gambols in the extremity of their distress. Nor was this good enough for its malicious fury; for not content with driving them abroad, it charged small parties of them, and hunted them into the wheelwright’s saw-pit, and below the planks and timbers in the yard, and, scattering the sawdust in the air it looked for them underneath, and when it did meet with any, whew! how it drove them on and followed on their heels!
“The scared leaves only flew the faster for all this, and a giddy chase it was; for they got into unfrequented places, where there was no outlet, and where their pursuer kept them eddying round and round at his pleasure; and they crept under the eaves of houses, and clung tightly to the sides of hayricks like bats; and tore in at open chamber windows, and cowered close to hedges; and, in short, went anywhere for safety. But the oddest feat they achieved was, to take advantage of the sudden opening of Mr. Pecksniff’s front door, to dash wildly down his passage, with the wind following close upon them, and finding the back door open, incontinently blew out the lighted candle held by Miss Pecksniff, and slammed the front door against Mr. Pecksniff, who was at that moment entering, with such violence, that in the twinkling of an eye, he lay on his back at the bottom of the steps. Being by this time weary of such trifling performances, the boisterous rover hurried away rejoicing, roaring over moor and meadow, hill and flat, until it got out to sea, where it met with other winds similarly disposed, and made a night of it.”
* * * * *
Is not this wonderful and immortal passage as much a part of the Charm of Gardens as the most delectable poetry on the perfumed air of a summer night?
Often, when the logs are crackling on the hearth, one hears those hunted leaves come banging on the window panes, those gaunt trees tossing in the wind. When all the garden lies cold and bare and stripped of green, the trees roar out an answer to the wind, an hundred garden voices swell the storm, and you sit happy by your fireside and dream new colours for the garden beds; and where a white frost sparkles on the earth, and trees lift up bare fingers to the sky, you see deep wealth of green, and jewelled borders brim full of spring flowers, and there a set of bulbs you have nursed, come out sweet in green sheathes, and here a tree, now naked, clothed in young green.
That for the night. For the morning, trailing clouds of mist over the trees like fairy shawls alive with dew-diamonds, each dew-drop reflecting its tiny world. The trees, the world, the garden still asleep, or half asleep, until the sun throws off the counterpane of clouds and springs into the skies.
It is at that time, before the sun is awake, the trees look strange as sleeping things look strange, with a counterfeit of death, so still are they. And in the Spring when the orchard is a pale ghost before the sun is up, a man would swear it had been covered up at night in silver smoke, or gossamer, or fairy silk that the sun tears into weeping shreds that drip and drip and give the grass a bath.
But of the effect of trees as a spiritual support no man is at variance with another. That they give courage, and help and hope, that the green sight of them is good as being reminder that Heaven is kind, and that the Winter is not always, no man doubts but, perhaps, fears to voice, feeling his neighbour will call out at him for a worshipper of Pan and of strange gods. But to the garden dweller, or to him who must perforce make his garden of one tree in a dusty court, and of one glass of flowers on his desk, these things have voices, and they are kindly voices, saying, “Despair not,” and “Regard me how I grow upright through the seasons,” and also “Give shade and shelter to all things and men equally as I do, without distinction or difference, and if the grass gives a couch, fair and embroidered with flowers, so do I give a roof of infinite variety, and a shade from the sun, and a shelter from the wind.” And again, “If a man know a tree to love it he will understand much of men, and of birds, and beasts and of all living things. And of greater things too, for in the branches is other fruit than the fruit of the tree. Just as the rainbow is set in the sky for a promise, so is fruit in a tree set there; and the leaves show how orderly is the Great Plan; and the branches show the strength of slender things, and of little things, so that a man may know how Heaven has its roots in earth, and its crest in the clouds. And a man who holds to earth with one hand, and reaches at the stars with the other, in that span he encompasses all that may be known if he but see it. But men are blind, and do not see the sky but as sky, and do not see the stars but as balls of fire, or the green grass but as a carpet, or the flowers but as a combination of chemical accidents. But over all, and through all, and in all is God, Who still speaks with Adam in the Garden.”
These things are to be learnt of trees both great and small, withered and young, sapling and Oak of centuries. And they are to be learnt also in the dust on a butterfly’s wing; or of a blade of grass; or of a hemp seed. But men are deaf, and hear no voice but the voice of water in a rushing stream; and no sound but the sound of leaves stirring when the wind rests in a tree; and no voice speaking in a blaze of flowers who sing praises night and day in scented voices.
A tree is not dumb, and the Creeping Briar is not dumb, and the Rose has a voice like the voice of a woman rejoicing that she is fair. But men are dumb, for though their hearts speak, all tongues are not touched with fire.
So may trees be a solace in trouble, and secrets may be whispered to bushes of Rosemary and Lavender, who will yield their secret solace of peace, as the tree yields strength. All these things are written in a garden in coloured letters of gold, and green, and crimson, in blue and purple, orange and grey, and they are written for a purpose. And a man may seek diligently for the secret of this great book and find nothing if he seek with his head alone. He will tell of the growth of trees, their years, their nature, their sickness. He will learn of the power of the sap which flows down from the tips of leaves to the great tree roots all snug in the soil; and he will learn of the veins in the leaves, and the properties of the gum of the bark, yet will he never learn that of which the tree speaks always, night and day—praising.
Of what is the colour of green that the earth’s best page is made of it? Of what is the colour of young green that it brings, unbidden, tender thoughts? It is more than the gold of Corn, and the brown of ploughed earth, and the glory of flowers. By it comes peace to the eyes, and through the eyes to the heart of man, so that men say of youth and the times of youth that they are salad days; and of old age, if so be it is a fine old age, that it is green. It is the colour of the body as blue is the colour of the soul. The sky and the sea are blue, and they are things of mystery, deep and profound, and because of their great depth and profundity they are blue. The grass and the trees, and the leaves of flowers, and blades of young Corn are green. They are mysterious things but they are nearer to man, and he has them to his hand to be near them, and get quick comfort of them.
And Daisies are the stars of the grass, as stars are the Daisies of Heaven; and if a man look long at the stars set out orderly in the sky he may become fearful, for God may seem far off and difficult; yet if he be near he may pick a Daisy and take his fill of comfortable things, for God will seem near and His voice in the Daisy.
Yet many a man will walk over a field of grass pressing the Daisies with his feet, and take no heed of them, or of the stars over above his head; and the night and the day will be to him but light and darkness, and the stars but lanterns to show him home, and the Daisies but flowers of the field. But if he be a man who sees all, and in everything can feel the finger and pulse of God, his staff will blossom in his hand, and he will go on his way rejoicing.
In this way can man regard the trees in his garden, and speak with them, loving them, and learning of them, for learning is all of love. And he may yet be an ordinary man, not poet, or artist, but he must be mystic because he has the true sight. Many a man, stockbroker, clerk, painter, labourer, soldier, or whatever he seems to be, has his real being in these moments, and they are revealed through love or sorrow, but not by hard learning or text-books.
III
A LOVER OF GARDENS
There are many who say this and that of Sir John Mandeville, his Travels; that he was not; that he was a Frenchman; that no one knows who he was. For years he was to me an English Knight who lived at St. Albans, and from there set out to travel over all the world seeking adventure, and relating the peculiarities of his journey in fascinating, if slightly imaginative, language. I rejoiced when he saw a board from the Noah’s Ark, when he talked with the Cham of Tartary; and told of the wonders of Ind. But comes along this and that expert who upset the figure of the gallant Knight, and heave him from horse to ground as a dummy figure, and burn him for firewood as a fallen idol. And why? It appears that Sir John is no more a real being than Homer, or Æsop, or any other of those personal names for great bundles of collected literature; and is a literature all by himself, and a series of impudent thieves who stole travellers’ tales and jotted them together in a personal narrative. For all that I believe in a figure of the blind Homer, and the impudent slave Æsop who played tricks on his master, and I firmly believe in a stalwart figure of Sir John Mandeville, Knight, “albeit,” he says, “I be not worthy, that was born in England, in the town of St. Albans, and passed the sea in the year of our Lord Jesu Christ, 1322, in the day of St. Michael.”
There is one thing, a touch of character, put in, maybe, by the skilful editor of these travels, that makes us lean to the man as being a real person. It is his love of Gardens, and his pains to tell of them, and the stories of trees, and legends. And whether one who confessed to the fraud of putting these travels together—Jean de Bourgogne, by name—was a keen gardener or herbalist, or whether it was a literary habit of the fourteenth century (which, when I come to think of it, is so), somehow I feel that there is a garden-loving spirit in forming the book, and for that I love the man.
In his wanderings Sir John meets many things, and of these I beg leave to choose here and there one or two of his anecdotes when they touch an idea such as gardeners love. The first is of the True Cross, and the story of its origin. All of Sir John I have read in Mr. Pollard’s edition, than which nothing could be more satisfactory and clear expressed.
OF THE CROSS
“And the Christian men, that dwell beyond the sea, in Greece, say that the Tree of the Cross, that we call Cypress, was one of that tree that Adam ate the apple off; and that find they written. And they say also, that their Scripture saith, that Adam was sick, and said to his son Seth, that he should go to the angel that kept Paradise, that he would send him the oil of mercy, for to anoint with his members, that he might have health. And Seth went. But the angel would not let him come in; but said to him, that he might not have of the oil of mercy. But he took him three grains of the same tree, that his father ate the apple off; and bade him, a soon as his father was dead, that he should put these three grains under his tongue, and grave him so; and so he did. And of these three grains sprang a tree, as the angel said it should, and bare a fruit, through the which fruit Adam should be saved.
“And when Seth came again, he found his father near dead. And when he was dead, he did with the grains as the angel bade him; of the which sprung three trees, of the which the Cross was made, that bare good fruit and blessed, our Lord Jesu Christ.”
IV
OF THE CROWN OF THORNS
“And if all it be so, that men say, that this crown is of thorns, ye shall understand that, it was of jonkes of the sea, that is to say, rushes of the sea, that prick as sharply as thorns. For I have seen and beholden many times that of Paris and that of Constantinople; for they were both one, made of rushes of the sea. But man have departed them in two parts: of the which one part is at Paris, and the other part is at Constantinople. And I have one of those precious thorns that seemeth like a White Thorn; and that was given to me for great speciality. For there are many of them broken and fallen into the vessel that the crown lieth in; for they break for dryness when the men move them to show to great lords that come hither.
“And ye shall understand, that our Lord Jesu, in that night that he was taken, he was led into a garden; and there he was first examined right sharply; and there the Jews scorned him, and made him a crown of the branches of the Albespine, that is White Thorn, that grew in that same garden, and set it on his head, so fast and so sore, that the blood ran down by many places of his visage, and of his neck, and of his shoulders. And therefore hath the White Thorn many virtues, for he that beareth a branch on him thereof, no thunder or no manner of tempest may dere him; nor in the house that it is in may no evil ghost enter nor come into the place that it is in. And in that same garden, Saint Peter denied our Lord thrice.
“Afterward was our Lord led forth before the bishops and the masters of the law, into another garden of Annas; and there also he was examined, reproved, and scorned, and crowned eft with a Sweet Thorn, that men clepeth Barbarines, that grew in that garden, and that hath also many virtues.
“And after he was led into a garden of Caiphas, and then he was crowned with Eglantine.
“And after he was led into the chamber of Pilate, and there he was examined and crowned. And the Jews set him in a chair, and clad him in a mantle; and there made they the crown of jonkes of the sea; and there they kneeled to him, and scorned him, saying, ‘Ave, Rex Judeoram!’ That is to say, ‘Hail, King of Jews!’ And of this crown, half is at Paris, and the other half at Constantinople.”
* * * * *
From these fanciful byways Sir John goes on his way looking, as before, for curious things, and for marvels of trees and fruits. He tells of the fine plate of gold writ by Hermogenes, the wise man who foretold the birth of Christ. He passes the Isles of Colcos and of Lango where the daughter of Ypocras is yet in the form of a dragon. And he goes by the town of Jaffa—“for one of the sons of Noah, that bright Japhet, founded it, and now it is called Joppa. And ye shall understand, that it is one of the oldest towns of the world, for it was founded before Noah’s flood. And yet there sheweth in the rock, there as the iron chains were fastened, that Andromeda, a great giant was bounden with, and put in prison before Noah’s flood, of the which giant, is a rib of his side that is forty foot long.”
Then he finds in Egypt some curious Apples.
V
OF APPLES
“Also in that country and in others also, men find long Apples to sell, in their season, and men clepe them Apples of Paradise; and they be right sweet and of good savour. And though ye cut them in never so many gobbets or parts, over-thwart or endlong, evermore ye shall find in the midst the figure of the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesu.
* * * * *
“And men find there also the Apple of the tree of Adam, that have a bite at one of the sides; and there be also small Fig trees that bear no leaves, but Figs upon the small branches; and men clepe them Figs of Pharoah.”
* * * * *
Sir John, on his constant look out lets no oddment pass him by, and the more peculiar the better. It appears he would rather see a well in a field—“that our Lord Jesu Christ made with one of his feet, when he went to play with other children”—than many things political or notable to the country. And he will never come to a country but he will mention the state of its trees and fruits, these, naturally, being important items to the traveller of his day who might at any moment have to fall back on the natural fruits of the field for his food. So, when he goes by the desert to the valley of Elim, he notes the seventy-two Palm trees there growing—“the which Moses found with the children of Israel.”
Then he comes by Mount Sinai, and there he finds the convent by the spot where was the burning bush; and the Church of Saint Catherine is there—“in the which be many lamps burning; for they have of oil of Olives enough, both to burn in their lamps and to eat also. And that plenty they have by the miracle of God; for the raven and the crows and the choughs and other fowls of the country assemble them there every year once, and fly thither as in pilgrimage; and everych of them bringeth a branch of the Bays or of the Olive in their beaks instead of offering, and leave them there; of which the monks make great plenty of oil. And this is a great marvel.”
VI
OF THE FIRST GARDENER
Now Sir John, who had a great feeling for our first father Adam, came frequently on stories of him and of places where he lived. And he went from Bathsheba, the town founded, as he says—“by Bersabe, the wife of Sir Uriah the Knight,”—and journeyed to the city of Hebron. “And it was clept sometime the Vale of Mamre, and sometimes it was clept the Vale of Tears, because that Adam wept there an hundred year for the death of Abel his son, that Cain slew.”
There, in this Vale of Hebron, where Sir John says Abraham had his house, and is buried, as are Adam and Eve, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Leah, and Rebecca, is also the first dwelling-place of Adam after the Fall.
“And right fast by that place is a cave in the rock, where Adam and Eve dwelled when they were put out of Paradise; and there got they their children. And in the same place was Adam formed and made, after that some men say (for men were wont for to clept that place the field of Damascus, because that it was in the lordship of Damascus), and from thence he was translated into Paradise of delights, as they say; and after that he was driven out of Paradise he was there left. And the same day that he was put in Paradise, the same day he was put out, for anon he sinned. There beginneth the Vale of Hebron, that dureth nigh to Jerusalem. There the Angel commanded Adam that he should dwell with his wife Eve, of the which he gat Seth; of which tribe, that is to say kindred, Jesu Christ was born.”
* * * * *
Here then is the legend of the first Garden in which Adam delved, and lived by the sweat of his brow. Again Sir John tells us of a place where he noticed the trees, especially the Dry tree, and it can be seen how much a lover of Gardens and of growing things he was, and how he looked for and noticed these things and set them down.
This Dry Tree was an Oak of Abraham’s time.
OF THE DRY TREE
“And there is a tree of Oak, that the Saracens clepe Dirpe, that is of Abraham’s time; the which men clepe the Dry tree. And they say that it hath been there since the beginning of the world, and was some-time green and bare leaves, until the time that our Lord died on the Cross, and then it dried; and so did all the trees that were then in the world. And some say, by their prophecies, that a lord, a prince of the west side of the world, shall win the Land of Promission, that is the Holy Land, with the help of Christian men, and he shall do sing a mass under that Dry tree; and then the tree shall wax green, and bear both fruit and leaves, and through that miracle many Saracens and Jews shall be turned to Christian faith; and, therefore, they do great worship thereto, and keep it full busily. And, albeit so, that it dry, natheles yet he beareth great virtue, for certainly he hath a little thereof upon him, it healeth him of the falling evil, and his horse shall not be afoundered: and many other virtues it hath; wherefore men hold it full precious.”
VII
OF THE FIRST ROSES
Then Sir John tells of a field nigh to Bethlehem, called Floridus, and here was a maiden wrongfully blamed, and condemned to death, and to be burnt.
“And as the fire began to burn about her, she made her prayers to our Lord, that as wisely as she was not guilty of that sin, that he would keep her and make it to be known to all men, of His merciful grace. And when she had thus said, she entered into the fire, and anon was the fire quenched and out; and the brands that were burning became red Rose trees, and the brands that were not kindled became white Rose trees, full of Roses. And these were the first Rose trees and Roses, both white and red, that every any man said; and thus was this maiden saved by the grace of God. And therefore is that field clept the Field of God Flourished, for it was full of Roses.”
* * * * *
And later Sir John tells how he saw the Elder tree on the which Judas hanged himself. And he tells of the Sycamore tree that Zaccheus the dwarf climbed into. And of a plank of Noah’s ship that a monk, by the Grace of God, brought down from Ararat.
Then Sir John comes to Java on his wanderings, and by that isle is another called Pathen, and here he saw wonderful trees, bearing bread, and honey, and wine, and poison. Of the tree that bears the venom he says:
“And other trees that bear venom, against which there is no medicine, but one; and that is to take their proper leaves and stamp them and temper them with water, and then drink it, and else he shall die; for triacle will not avail, ne none other medicine. Of this venom the Jews had let seek of one of their friends for to empoison all Christianity, as I have heard them say in their confession before their dying; but thank be to Almighty God! they failed of their purpose; but always they make great mortality of people.”
Yet again Sir John has marvels of other countries, where are men who—“when their friends be sick they hang them upon trees, and say that it is better that birds that be angels of God eat them, than the foul worms of the earth.”
And near by is the isle of Calonak, where gardeners would indeed be evily distressed by reason of the snail—“that be so great, that many persons may lodge them in their shells, as men would do in a little house.”
By taking ship Sir John goes from isle to isle discussing the sights, and arrives at length at an isle where—“be white hens without feathers, but they bear white wool as sheep do here”; and he passes by Cassay, of the greatest cities of the world, and goes from that city by water to an abbey of monks.
VIII
OF THE ABBEY GARDEN
“From that city men go by water, solacing and disporting them, till they come to an abbey of monks that is fast by, that be good religious men after their faith and law.
“In that abbey is a great garden and fair, where be many trees of diverse manner of fruits. And in this garden is a little hill full of delectable trees. In that hill and in that garden be many diverse beasts, as of apes, marmosets, baboons, and many other diverse beasts. And every day, when the convent of this abbey hath eaten, the almoner let bear the relief to the garden, and he smiteth on the garden gate with a clicket of silver that he holdeth in his hand; and anon all the beasts of the hill and of the diverse places of the garden come out a 3,000 or a 4,000; and they come in guise of poor men, and men give them the relief in fair vessels of silver, clean over-gilt. And when they have eaten, the monk smiteth efftsoons on the garden gate with the clicket, and then anon all the beasts return again to their places that they come from.
“And they say that these beasts be souls of worthy men that resemble in likeness of those beasts that be fair, and therefore they give them meat for the love of God; and the other beasts that be foul, they say be souls of poor men and of rude commons.”
* * * * *
Many other marvels did Sir John see, of which I shall not tell; but he writes always with his eye open and easy for miracles, and talks as a gardener talks of strange flowers and fruit, as of gourds that when they be ripe—“men cut them a-two, and men find within a little beast, in flesh, and bone and blood, as though it were a little lamb without wool. And men eat both the fruit and the beast. And that is a great marvel.” Then he writes of the wonders of the country of Prester John, and of trees there that men dare not eat of the fruit—“for it is a thing of faerie.”
Of Gatholonabes, he writes, and of the sham Garden of Eden he made, and of the birds that—“sing full delectably and moved by craft.” The fairest garden any man might behold it was. And of the men and girls clothed in cloths of gold full richly, that he said were angels.
And of Paradise he cannot speak, making towards the end of the book confession.
“Of Paradise ne can I not speak properly. For I was not there. It is far beyond. And that forthinketh me. And also I was not worthy.”
And so, after a little more, ends Sir John, and so I end, though I love him. Yet I doubt some of his stories.
IX
THE OLYMPIAN ASPECT
There are many ways of regarding a garden of flowers; from the utilitarian view it is a reasonable method of utilising a space of ground for horticultural purposes, but I prefer to take the Olympian view and quote from “The Poet’s Geography,” to the effect that a garden of flowers is—“A collection of dreams surrounded by clouds.”
At first sight the somewhat expansive imagery of this definition might appear over-vague and unsatisfactory where a very definite question, like a garden of flowers, is concerned. But, come to see it in a lofty light, and at once its truth stands clear. A garden is the proper adjunct of a house, and a house, fully said, is a dream come true, yet still surrounded by the clouds of infinite possibilities. It is always growing, is a true home. Like a flower it expands to every sweet whisper of the wind. Like a flower it shuts at night, or opens to accept the dew. It is something so elusive that only the garlands of love hold it together.
The garden, to the real house, is, like the dwelling, a place of the most subtle fancies. Every flower there, every tree and each blade of grass holds mystery and imagination. The Gods walk there.
The flower beds (accepting the Olympian idea) are not mere collections of flowering herbage, but are volumes of poetry growing in the sun. Take your hedge of Sweet Peas, for example, and tell me what they are—no—tell me who they are. There is a dream there if you like; and while you look at them, and sniff them delicately, is not the fussy world shut off from you by clouds. Sweet Peas are like a bevy of winsome girls all in their everyday frocks, scented by an odour of virginity, something indescribably refined after the manner of the flesh, and something lofty in their removal from the earth after the way of the spirit. I wonder how many people feel this.
Take it more broadly in the true Olympian spirit. Take it that a house and garden is an Olympus to each man and woman who is happy, and you will see that your heaven for all its head in the clouds has its feet upon the earth. Then what do the flowers mean? Lilies with pale faces like a procession of nuns. Roses all queens of regal beauty. Violets to whom the thrushes sing, deny it if you dare. Majestic Peonies. The plants of soft and courtly wisdom, Thyme, Rosemary, Myrtle. Lavender, the House-dame, prim, neat, beloved of bees and butterflies, Quakerishly dressed in grey with a touch of unsectarian colour, yet vaguely an ecclesiastical purple; rather slim, with full skirts, with the suggestion that Cowslips are her bunches of keys, and the Dandelion her clock.
One could go on for ever.
And then the gardener, like those half-immortals who worked for the gods, or some like a god of old, even, with god-like grumbles, and god-like simplicity.
They are a strange race, these gardeners, given to unexpected meals, and sudden appearances.
“Walter!”
And after that, from some fragrant bush, or waving forest of Asparagus, a bronzed man stands erect, as if he had sprung from the bowels of the earth, where he had been contemplating the mysteries of human weakness.
And how amazed they are with us and our foibles and follies. We remonstrate—a question of weeds, perhaps,—and are listened to with incredulous wonder.
“Weeds!” says the being, “weeds!”
He emerges more completely from the bush, showing a hand occupied with a lot of little twigs, and a knife rather like himself to look at—not too sharp.
As if a voice from the unknown had wafted over the desert, he stands in wonder, looking reproachfully at those who have interrupted his toil.
“The weather makes them grow.” Of course it does. We knew that. We did not come here to call Walter to ask him what made weeds grow, but to know why he had not weeded, at our special request, the Carnation border.
From a cavernous pocket in a much-mended pair of trousers of a shape never designed by mortal hands, he produces a quantity of felt strips, and some wall nails.
We repeat our original suggestion, that the Carnation border is choked with weeds.
“So it be!”
Then, after the great being has taken observations of the sky, causing him to screw up one eye and wag his head sagely as if he had communication with the unseen powers, he admits that he has been watering the greenhouse.
“The Vines take a deal o’time about now.”
It would be useless to remark to this calm person that we found, only yesterday, a dozen plants dying in the greenhouse, and all for want of water. But, from a sort of foolhardy courage, we do say as much.
“Yes,” says the immortal, “they need a power of water. A good drop is no good.”
We venture to remonstrate with him, saying, in a few well chosen words, that it would be useful of him, then, to give them “a good watering while he was about it.”
He agrees at once. “It would do them a power of good.”
Realising that we are drifting from the main grievance, we return hot to the bed of Carnations. We admit to having but just this moment come from weeding them ourselves, and in so saying we hope to make appeal to his better nature. Nothing of the kind.
“I noticed,” he says, “you sp’iled some of the layers where you’d a-been treading.”
When we have turned away defeated, he sinks again to his mysterious task, and it seems that the ground swallows him.
Then again, in the early morning, he seems to have had overnight talks with Mercury, or Apollo, or whoever it is who arranges the weather, as he invariably greets us with some curt sentence.
“Rain afore noon,” or “Wind’ll be in the nor’west afore night.” Thereby giving us to understand that he has been given a glass of nectar in some lower servants’ hall in Olympus, and has picked up the gossip of what Jupiter has decreed for the day. We feel, as he intends us to feel, vastly inferior. In fact we have given way to a habit of asking his advice on certain points, which has proved fatal.
He doles out our fruit to us just as he likes, and we feel quite guilty when we pick one of our own peaches from our own walls.
“I see you pick a peach last night,” he says. “’Tisn’t for me to say anything, but I was countin’ on giving you a nice dish NEXT week.”
What is there to do but hang one’s head, and plead guilty?
Boys are his pet aversion. Whether boys have in some way a fellowship with the gods (which I suspect), or whether they are victoriously antagonistic, it matters not. They are to the gardener so many creatures whom he classes along with snails, bullfinches, rabbits and wasps as “varmints.”
One can hear him sometimes invoking a god of the name of Gum. “By Gum! them young varmints a-been ’ere again. By Gum!”
He then makes an offering to this god in the shape of a bonfire, the smell of which is more than most scents for wonder.
It is when Walter makes a bonfire that he is more god-like than ever. He stands, a thick figure, deep in the chest, broad in the shoulder, by the pile of dead leaves, twigs, and garden rubbish, the smoke enveloping him in misty wreaths, and the sun flashing on his fork as he pitches fresh fuel on the smouldering fire. A tongue of flame, greedily licking up leaves and dry sticks, lights on his impassive face, and a quivering orange streak along the muscles of his arms. We are fascinated by his arms. They contain, I believe, the history of his mortal life and ambitions, and are a key to his hidden emotions.
On one arm is a ship under full sail, done in blue and red tattoo. Below the ship is the word “Jane”; below that is a twist of rope. On the other arm is a heart, the initials S.M., and an anchor.
When we were young these two arms of Walter’s were an entire literature to us. We read him first, I think, a pirate, very grim and horrible, and we translated “S.M.” as Spanish Main. A little later we dropped the idea of the pirate, and took to the notion that Walter had been (if he was not still) a smuggler who landed cargoes of rum from the good ship “Jane,” and deposited them with the landlord of the “Saucy Mariner.” It is noticeable that we left out the heart in all these romances. Then, at some impressionable moment, Walter became a seaman who had given his heart to Sarah Mainwaring, which name we got from a man who had given us a dog, and in spite of that we accepted it as fact. I think we once descended so low as to think that the whole thing had no nautical significance, and was a secret sign of some terrible society who met for purposes of revenge. This, of course, was the result of contemporary reading.
Then came the great day upon which Walter was definitely asked what the signs and pictures on his arms did mean.
“Mind out,” was all the answer we got, and Walter retired with the wheelbarrow to his citadel—the potting shed.
It was tried again a little later, and this time met with a little better response, because, I suppose, we had done more than half his day’s work for him.
“I had them done at a fair.”
“And,” we asked breathlessly, “what was the ship?”
“Two shillin’s,” he replied, “and I never regretted it. Money well spent.”
“Was she your ship?”
“Mine?” said the god.
“Was she the ship you were in when you were a sailor?”
“Me?” said Walter. “I aint never been a sailor.”
The blow was crushing. We retired hurt, amazed, incredulous.
One day we tried the remaining arm, the one with S.M., the heart, and the anchor emblazoned on it.
“What does S.M. mean?”
It was a moment of terrific suspense. We had drawn a mental picture of some wonderful creature, half Princess, half like a schoolgirl, we sighed after. The god was tying Carnations to wire spirals, and his expression was limited, since he had a knife in his mouth.
“S.M. on me arm,” he said, removing the knife.
We nodded mysteriously, full of breathless expectation.
Walter began to smile. He stood up and surveyed us with his face alight with the memory of some great day. To us he looked an heroic figure, even despite the pieces of old drawing-room carpet tied to his knees with string, and his very unkempt beard.
“You won’t exactly understand,” he said, mopping his forehead. “But I tell ’ee if you’ve got to mind some-at after a day at a fair, you’d be fair mazed. I give my word to my mother as I’d a-put sixpence in a raffle for to try to win her a sewing machine, and so when the fellow was making they images on my arm, I sed to un, I sed, put me S.M., I sed, so’s I’ll mind to put in the sewing machine raffle, I sed, or else if so be as I don’t I shall get a slice of tongue pie when I do get home along.”
Our faces fell. Our hearts, full of romance, now became like lead. In despair we put the last question, a forlorn hope in the storming of his heart’s citadel.
“And the other thing on your arms, Walter? The heart.”
“Cooriosity killed a monkey,” said he. “Mind out, I’m going round the corners.”
So was our romance killed. “Going round the corners,” was Walter’s sign that all conversation was closed.
If one followed him “round the corners,” talk as one might, Walter directed all his conversation to the flowers. To hear him address the plants in the green-house was to think him indeed a god, who by some magic spell turned the water in the can into a life-saving potion. To-day we think that much of the soliloquy was done for our especial benefit.
“Just a wee drop, my pretty,” he would say to some flower. “Just a drink with lunch. That’s right. Perk up now. By Gum, you do want your drop regular, you ’ardened teetotaler. Hello, hello, what’s up with you? Looks to me as if a snail had bided along o’ you too frequent.”
His great hand, covered with ancient scars, would lift the leaves tenderly, and search beneath for the offending snail which, when found, would be held up to view.
“Five-and-twenty tailors!” he would exclaim.
He would be instantly corrected. “Four-and-twenty.”
“You got your history wrong,” he used to say.
We repeated
Four-and-twenty tailors went to catch a snail, And the best man among them dare not touch his tail.
“Come the twenty-fifth,” Walter added. “That be I. So here goes, Master Snail.”
With that the snail was sharply crushed underfoot, and the soliloquy continued. He is with us still, older in years, younger than ever in heart, with the same immortal personality, the same atmosphere of friendship with the gods about him. He listens to orders with a smile of amusement, just as if he had been laughing about our ways only an hour before with some inhabitant of an unseen world. He carried his own peculiar atmosphere with him of indulgent superiority and warm-heartedness combined, just as the tortoise carries his house on his back. If that story is unknown by any chance, here it is.
JUPITER’S WEDDING
When the toy had once taken Jupiter in the head to enter into a state of matrimony, he resolved for the honour of his Celestial Lady, that the whole world should keep a Festival upon the day of his marriage, and so invited all living creatures, Tag-Rag and Bob-Tail, to the solemnity of his wedding. They all came in very good time, saving only the Tortoise. Jupiter told him ’twas ill done to make the Company stay, and asked him, “Why so late?” “Why truly,” says the Tortoise, “I was at home, at my own House, my dearly beloved House,” and House is Home, let it be never so Homely. Jupiter took it very ill at his hands, that he should think himself better in a Ditch than in a Palace, and so he passed this Judgment upon him: that since he would not be persuaded to come out of his House upon that occasion, he should never stir abroad again from that Day forward without his House upon his head.
* * * * *
This, as may be seen at once, is the Olympian aspect not only of the house, but of the garden as well. We mortals do carry our Homes with us, breathing a closer, less free air than the air of Olympus, when the reigning monarch has merely to take a toy in the head to enter into a state of matrimony. We, tortoise-like, are bound and tied by a thousand pleasant associations to our plot of earth and our patch of stars. Sooner than attend the ceremonies of the greatest, we linger by our house and in our garden, so that though we may not boast with the great world and say that we know “Dear old Jove,” or “that charming wife of his, Juno,” still we know that we live on the slopes of Olympus, and have a number of charming flowers for society.
X
EVENING RED AND MORNING GREY
Your old-fashioned man with a care to his garden will look through the quarrel of his window to spy weather signs. This quarrel, the lozenge-pane of a window made criss-cross, shows in its narrow frame a deal of Nature’s business, day and night. For your gardener it takes the part of club window, weather glass and eye hole onto his world. Through it day and night he reviews the sky and the trees, the wind, the moon and the stars. When he rises betimes there’s the sky for him to read. When he returns for his tea there in the pane is the sunset framed. When he goes to bed the moon rides past and the friendly stars twinkle.
No man is asked his opinion of the weather so much as the gardener, except, may be, the shepherd; both men having, as it were, a Professorship in weather given to them by the Public. It is they who have given rise to, or even, perhaps, invented the rhymes by which they go.
Evening red and morning grey, Send the traveller on his way; But evening grey and morning red, Send the traveller wet to bed.
There is a verse full of ripe experience. The evening sun glows red through the lozenge-panes and into the cottage, lights up with sparks of crimson fire the silver lustre ornaments, makes the furniture shine again, gives the brass candlesticks a finger lick of fire, shines ruddy on the tablecloth, and flashes back a friendly scarlet message from the square of looking-glass. On the deep window ledge stand a row of ruddled flower pots in which fine geraniums grow, behind them a tidy muslin curtain stretches across the window on a tape, on the sides of the window are hung a photograph or two, an almanac, and a picture cut from a seed catalogue, above hangs a canary in a small cage. Only the narrowest slip of window is clear, not more than one clear pane, and it is through this that the evening sun streams into the cottage room. In the morning when our friend rises, if he finds the room flooded with a clear grey light, a light matching the silver lustre jugs, then he quotes his verse, to be sure, and passing his neighbour says, “A fine day, to-day.”
2
A rainbow in the morning Is the shepherd’s warning But a rainbow at night Is the shepherd’s delight.
That sign is for the shepherd and the traveller by night, since no ordinary being is expected to watch for rainbows by night to the detriment of his night’s rest and his morning temper. But the shepherd must keep a keen eye to such signs, and marks, day and night, all the little movements of Nature, to learn her whims. As for instance, the signs of bad weather to come:
1
That swallows will fly low and swiftly when the upper air is charged with moisture for then insects fly low also.
2
That the cricket will sing sharply.
This last, of course, in wet countries, for in dry places, as in meadows under southern mountains, there is a perfect orchestra of rasping crickets in the grass. But in the north, on the most silent and golden days, they say that the chirrup of a cricket foretells rain. Just as they say:
3
As hedgehogs do foresee evening storms So wise men are for fortune still prepared.
This they say, because the story runs that a hedgehog builds a nest with the opening made to face the mildest quarter thereabout, and the back to the most prevalent wind.
Again, and this a sign everybody knows:
4
That distant hills look near.
As indeed they do before rain, and many times one hears—“such a place is too clear to-day”—or, “One can see such a land much too well,” and this means near rain.
Like the swallows so do rooks change their flight before rain, and so, also, do plover, for it is noticed:
5
That rooks will glide low on the wind, and drop quickly. And plover fly in shape almost as a kite and will not rise high, one or two of the flock being posted sentinels at the tail of the kite formation.
Then, if the shepherd is near to a dew-pit, or any water meadow, or passing by a roadside ditch he will notice:
6
That toads will walk out across the road. And frogs will change colour before a storm, losing their bright green and turning to a dun brown.
To all of these signs with their significance of coming rain your shepherd will give a proper prominence in his mind, marking one, and then searching for another until he is certain. His first clue on any hilly ground is:
7
That sheep will not wander into the uplands but keep browsing in the plain.
Having taken note of this he turns to plants, particularly to his own weather glass, the Scarlet Pimpernel, as he sees:
8
That the Pimpernel closes her eye. That the down will fly from off the dandelion, the colts-foot, and from thistles though there be no wind.
Of night signs there are many, but chiefly:
9
That glowworms shine very bright.
10
That the new moon with the old moon in her lap comes before rain.
11
That if the rainbow comes at night Then the rain is gone quite.
12
Near bur, far rain.
This of the bur, or halo, to be seen at times about the moon.
For a last thing they say:
13
On Candlemas Day if the sun shines clear, The shepherd had rather see his wife on the bier.
* * * * *
Our friend, the weather-wise gardener,—and, by the way, there is the unkind saying:
Weatherwise, foolish otherwise—
has several things in his neighbourhood to tell him of coming rain, as:
1
That heliotrope and marigold flowers close their petals.
2
That ducks will make a loud and insistent quacking.
3
That—so they say—the cat will sit by the fire and clean her whiskers.
4
That the tables and chairs will creak.
5
That dogs will eat grass.
6
That moles will heave.
In the garden he too will observe the birds, more especially that pert friend to all gardeners, the robin. For they say:
If the robin sings in the bush Then the weather will be coarse; But if the robin sings in the barn Then the weather will be warm.
I must confess that I have not found this come true of robins, any more than I have found waterwag-tails coming on the lawn to be a harbinger of rain, or that thrushes eat more snails than worms in the dry season. Of this last I get enjoyment enough, for there is a stone in my garden to which the fat thrushes come dragging snails. They give them a mighty heave, and down come the snails, “crack” on the stone, until the shell is burst asunder and the delicious morsel is down Master Thrush’s gullet in the twinkling of an eye. The thrush is certainly my favourite garden bird, both for his looks and his song, and the blackbird I like least, for they are bundles of nerves, screaming away at the slightest suggestion of danger. The robin is a fine impudent fellow and friendly in a truly greedy way, following the smallest suggestion of digging with an eye for a good dinner, so that if you are only pulling the earth up in weeding you will have the brisk little gentleman at your elbow, head cocked on one side, and an eye of the greatest intelligence sharply fixed on you. Pigeons I regard as an absolute nuisance, their voices sentimental to a degree, in this way quite at variance with their selfish, greedy and destructive characters. So they say:
If the pigeons go a benting Then the farmers lie lamenting.
Starlings are very handsome birds but as they live in congregations, or like regiments, one can have no personal feeling for them, though I love to watch them on winter evenings when they come in thousands from the fields and fly to their roosting place, making the air rustle with the quick beat of their wings.
The bullfinch is a gardener’s enemy, for he will strip the fruit buds from a tree out of pure wantonness, and yet he is a brave bird and nice to see about.
All the small birds give one joy though they be robbers or enemies to young plants, or bee eaters like the blue-tit, or strawberry robbers, or drainpipe chokers like the house-sparrows, or murderers of the summer peace like the woodpecker with his quick insistent “tap, tap.”
In royal and fine gardens, of course, one must have two birds; the peacock and the owl, for these two give all the air of romance needful, though I have never myself regarded the peacock as a King of birds, for he makes too much of a show of himself, and his wife is a humble creature. I feel, rather, that he is a courtier strutting up and down waiting the King’s pleasure; a place-seeker, one who will cheer the side that pays. As for the owl, that dusky guardian of secrets, he is a far more solid and trustworthy fellow than the gay peacock, and though he snores in the daytime, his great round yellow eyes are open at the least sound in his haunt.
This is far afield from the weather, so let us give the remaining saying of birds that the gardener may notice.
November ice that bears a duck Brings a winter of slush and muck.
That I hold to be very true.
There are still one or two rhymes that should be well noted, three of the rain.
1
When it rains before seven It will cease before eleven.
2
March dry, good rye April wet, good wheat.
3
If the ash before the oak Then we are in for a soak. But if the oak before the ash We shall get off with a splash.
Then they say:
Between twelve and two You’ll see what the day will do.
And again:
Cut your thistles before St. John You will have two to every one.
And,
The grass that grows in Janiveer Grows no more all the year.
And also:
That flower seeds sown on Palm Sunday will come up double.
* * * * *
These are all very well, and what with one thing and another will come true, at least as true as the rhyme that says:
A mackerel sky Is very wet, or very dry.
Still it is really to the wind that the gardener looks most, and if he have a weathercock in his garden (which with a sundial, a rain gauge, and an outside thermometer he should always have) he will note each turn of the wind. If he has no weathercock then he will read the wind by the smoke of chimneys, or the turn of the leaves of trees.
And, after regarding the wind, he may remember this:
When it rains with the wind in the east, It rains for twenty four hours at least.
And this also:
When the wind is in the south, ’Tis in the rain’s mouth; When the wind is in the east ’Tis neither good for man nor beast.
This weather lore is naturally gleaned out of many years, some of the sayings being of real antiquity, others, perhaps, newly coined, though I fancy not. In spite of them you will find every gardener has a different manner of reading the sky and the wind, some having it that mares-tails in the sky come after great storms, others that they are the portent of a gale. Some, if asked will reply to a question on the weather:
“With these frostises o’ nights, and the wind veered roun’ apint west, and taking into consideration the time o’ year, and the bad harvest”—then follows a long look into the heavens—“I don’t say but what ’er won’t rain, but then again, I dunno, perhaps come the breeze keeps off, us mighten have quite a tidy drop.” This you are at liberty to translate which way you choose, since the advice is generally followed by a portentous wink, or, at least, some motion of an eyelid curiously like it.
XI
GARDEN PROMISES
It is Winter, and when it is winter the earth is very secret, but it lies like pie-crust promises waiting to be broken. A little graveyard of the tombs of seeds and bulbs spreads before one’s eyes. Each tomb has a nice headstone of white with the name of the buried life below written upon it. The virtues of the buried are not written in so many words, but their names suffice for that. In my imagination I see my graveyard like this:
HERE LIES BURIED A ROSE COLOURED TULIP WHO CAME ACROSS THE SEAS FROM THE KINGDOM OF HOLLAND UNDER THIS EARTH SHE AND ONE HUNDRED OF HER SISTERS ARE WAITING FOR THE SPRING WHEN THEY WILL UNFOLD THEMSELVES FROM THEIR LONG SLEEP AND ADORN WITH THEIR PLEASANT FACES THE SOUTH BORDER FACING THE STUDY WINDOW
That I see most clearly written over the spot where I tucked the hundred and one beautiful sisters in their bed of rich brown earth, and I am looking for the time when the graveyard shall begin to be green with the shafts of their first leaves. Besides these, there are the headsticks to the Carnations, but this patch of the graveyard is different since the tufts of Carnation grass make long grey lines against the brown earth. Somewhere, in each of these grey tufts, is hidden the beautiful germ of life that is growing, growing all the time, and the wonderful chemical process is at work there (for all the plants look so silent and quiet), that is mixing colours and rejecting colours, and is secreting wax, and preparing perfume. Of all moments in a garden this is to me the most wonderful. No glory of colour or variety of shape; no pageant of ripe Summer, or tender early day of Spring appeals to me quite in the way this silent time does, when a thousand unseen forces are at work. I have often wondered (being quite ignorant of the chemical side of this) what happens to that drop of fresh colour the bee brings like a careless artist flicking a brush. Sometimes in a Carnation of pure white, one flower, or two, will show a crimson streak—a sport, one calls it. But more curious still is the fringe edge of the Picotee. How, I have often asked myself, does the colour edge find its way to its proper place? How does the plant manage to produce just enough of that one colour to go round each of its flowers? I have stood by a row of these plants that I have just planted in some new bed, and wondered at the amazing industry going on within them. They are fighting disease, supplying themselves with proper nourishment, mixing colours, and building buds and stems. It is a regular dockyard of a place except that there is no sound. I imagine (quite wrongly, but merely because an instinct causes me to do so) a lot of orderly forces like little drilled men hard at work in green-grey suits. Those who work underground are not in green but are in white, but should they go above the surface they would change colour owing to contact with the light, and this is due to the presence of a matter called chlorophyll in the cells which gives plants their green colour.
The underground workers are hard at it always, getting water from the ground, and in this water are gases and minerals dissolved. The workmen send this up to those in the leaves. Those who work in the leaves are taking in supplies of carbonic acid gas from the air, and the leaves themselves are so formed as to get as much light as possible on one surface. When the light meets with the carbonic acid gas in the leaves starch is formed. This is distributed through the plant to the actual builders.
You stand over the row of Carnations all silent, all still, and yet here is this tremendous activity going on, building, distributing, selecting, rejecting. A thousand workmen making a flower.
The two sets of workers, in the roots and leaves, the one sending up water and nitrogenous matter, the other making starch, are manufacturing albumenoids for more building material. And it is more easy to think of such creatures at work since a plant, unlike an animal, has no stomach, or heart, or bloodvessels, and its food is liquid and gaseous.
Now of these marvels the greatest is that of the existence of life in the plant on exactly the same initial principles as the existence of life in man. That is the substance known as the protoplasm. It is too amazing for me, and too great a thing to be dealt with here, but, as I look at my silent dockyard, there are these protoplasms, in the cells of these plants, dividing into halves and, so to speak, nestling with fresh cells in walls of cellulose.
Think of the work actually going on beneath our eyes in the one matter of the starch factory in the plant, where the chlorophyll (the green colouring matter) separates the carbon from the carbonic acid, returns the oxygen to the air, and mingles the carbon and the oxygen and the hydrogen in the water and so makes this starch.
All this goes on when we open our windows of a morning and look out over the garden and see just a grey line of Carnations we planted over-night. The workers at the roots who are so busily engaged in sending up water, are also sending with it all those things the plant needs that they can get from the earth. Thus the water may contain iron, nitrogen, sulphur, and potash. All that goes from the roots to the leaves is called sap. This, when it comes to the leaves and all parts of the plant exposed to the light, transpires, and so keeps the plant cool.
The stem, on which the supreme work, the flower, will be born, is, in the case of our Carnations, divided into nodes and internodes, the nodes being those solid elbows one sees. It is towards the supreme work that our eyes are turned. It is part, if not chief part, of the pleasure of our vigil to look forward to the day when the first faint colour shows in the bursting bud. It is for this moment that we wait and wear out the chill of Winter. It is towards the idea of a resurrection that our thoughts, perhaps unconsciously, are fixed, to the knowledge that our garden is to be born again, fresh and new in colour, in warmth and sunshine. The very secret workings going on before our eyes, all that Heavenly workshop where none are ’prentices and all are master-hands, where the bee, and the ant, and the unseen insect in the air, go about their exact duties, give one, as Autumn declines into Winter and Winter rouses into Spring, some vague conjecture of the mighty magic of the growing world, where no particle of energy is ever wasted.
Life in the Winter takes on this aspect of waiting wonderment. While the rivers are in flood, and the fields are ruled with silver lines where the ditches are full, and the Sun uses them for a mirror; while the gulls are driven inland and follow the plough, and the starlings congregate in the open fields, we prepare our pageant of flowers against those days when the slumber of the earth is over, and the now purple hedgerows are alive with tender green. St. Francis of Assisi impressed the very sentiment on his friars, in bidding them make scented gardens of flower-bearing herbs to remind them of Him who is called “The Lily of the Valley,” and “The Flower of the World.”
So goes my workshop through the winter days, while a few pale ghosts of late Roses linger on the trees, sighing doubtless to themselves, like old gentlemen—“Ah, I remember this place before Autumn pulled down all the green leaves, and long before all that ground was laid out for seed plots.” And all the while my Roses are growing and, could one see into the colour chambers of the trees, into those wonderful studios hidden in the tiny cells, one would see these artists at work rivalling the blush of morning, the flames of fire, the white soul of innocence, the crimson of king’s robes, and the orange flush of sunset. There are men, I suppose, who know to a certain extent how the secretion of these wonderful colours is arranged; why this or that colour runs to flush a petal to the edge, or stays to dye only the flower’s heart. But it will ever be a marvel to me to see how these veins flow crimson, those hold orange, and those again hold a rich yellow. The work that creates the colour of a Pansy, that gives to the Sweet Peas those soft tints, that shapes and colours the trumpet flower of the Convolvulus, and builds the long horn of the sweet-scented Eglantine, gives one a joy to which few joys are equal, and a feeling of security with the great unknown things by which life is encompassed.
Looking again at the garden of promises, and thinking of it still as a graveyard with headstones, I see one which is, to me, particularly pleasant. It is by an old bush of lavender, the mother bush of my long hedge; I read it to be written like this:
HERE LIES IMPRISONED IN THIS GREY BUSH THE SCENT OF LAVENDER IT IS RENOWNED FOR A SIMPLE PURITY A SWEET FRAGRANCE AND A SUBTLE STRENGTH IT IS THE ODOUR OF THE DOMESTIC VIRTUES AND THE SYMBOLIC PERFUME OF A QUIET LIFE RAIN SHALL WEEP OVER THIS BUSH SUN SHALL GIVE IT WARM KISSES WIND SHALL STIR THE TALL SPIKES UNTIL SUCH TIME AS IS REQUIRED WHEN IT SHALL FLOWER AND SO YIELD TO US ITS SECRET
There stands the bush all neatly tied, its venerable head at the moment covered with a powdering of fine snow, and round it the first sharp spears of Crocus leaves show, and the fat buds of Snowdrops, and the ready bud of the yellow Aconite. All the garden is waiting, the Pea-sticks are prepared, the paths have been cleaned, and I am waiting and watching the little things. The trees even now are whispering that it will soon be Spring, for all they look from a distance like a collection of dried and pressed roots sticking up in the air, how they are drawn in purple ink against the sky; but one day my eyes will see a faint haze over them as if a little mist hung about them and was caught in the branches, and then they will change so quietly that it is impossible to tell quite when they began to look like very delicate green feathers, and then they will change so suddenly that it is a shock to one’s eyes to find them in a full flush of sticky bud and leaf, and one says in accents of delighted surprise, “Why, the trees are out!”
Not every one takes pleasure in a garden during the Winter time, many regarding it as a chill and a desolate place in itself, and taking only an interest in the green-houses and the Violet frames; and few would find a pleasure in washing flower-pots by the dozen on a rainy day, and in putting fresh ashes on the paths, and in banking up Celery. But to the keen gardener every inch of work in his garden is full of interest, he realises the daily value of each thing he does, he knows of that great silent work that is going on so near him, and so enjoys even the burnishing of a spade, the rolling of lawns, and loves, as I think every one does, the surgical work of pruning the fruit trees.
Then, when the promise is fulfilled, and the world is full of green and colour, the wondrous alchemy of the Winter months shows its result in the glorious painting of the flowers of Spring and Summer.
XII
GARDEN PATHS
You can get no symbol finer than a path, no symbol is more used. Of necessity a path must begin somewhere and have a destination. Of necessity it must cross certain country, overcome obstacles, or go round them. By nature you come at new views from a path and so obtain fresh suggestions. A path entails labour, and by labour ease. It must have a purpose, and so must originate in an inspiration. And yet the man who makes a path ignores, as a rule, the high importance of his task.
It is a peculiar thing that paths made across fields, and made by the very people whose business it is to reach from point to point in the shortest possible time, are never straight. Their very irregularities reflect the nature of man more than the nature of the ground they cross.
So unmethodical is man by instinct that if he were to lay out a garden in the same frame of mind in which he crosses a field, that garden would abound in twisted, tortuous paths, beds of irregular shapes, spasmodic arrangements of trees, flowers, shrubs and vegetables, a veritable hotch-potch. To overcome that he imprisons the wanderings of his mind, divides his garden into regular shapes, and drives his paths pell-mell from point to point as straight as his eye and a line will allow him. This planning of a garden is an absorbing joy. To come new to a fresh place untouched by any other hand and to work your will on it gives one all the delights of conquest, and the pleasant fatigue of a war in which you are bound to win. You can make your own traditions, founding them for future ages—as, for instance, you may so plant your trees as to force one view on the attention. You can emulate Rome and carry your paths straight and level. In fact, that little new world is yours to conquer.
To me a winding path offers the more alluring prospect, just as it is more pleasant to walk on a winding road where each turn opens out a fresh vista, and the coming of every hidden corner is in the way of an adventure. I have just made such a path.
To be precise my path is eighteen feet long and two feet and a quarter wide. It curves twice, really in a sort of courteous bow in avoiding a Standard Rose tree, and begins and ends in a little low step of Box; this to prevent the cinders of which it is made from mingling with gravel of the paths into which it runs.
I began it on a Monday. It is made through a Rose bed that was too wide to work properly. At about nine in the morning the gardener and I stood regarding the unconscious Rose-bed with much the same gravity as men might regard a range of hills through which a tunnel was to be drilled.
I said, “This seems the best place to make a path through the bed.”
The gardener made a serpentine movement with his hand to indicate the possible curve of the path and replied, after an interval: that such a place seemed as good as any.
We then, with a certain lightening of heart after this tremendous thought, walked into the bed and surveyed it. This tree would have to be moved, and that one, and these half standards shifted. Good. It should be done.
It seems that the earth requires a little ceremonial even when the merest scratch is to be made on her surface. I am sure we wheeled a barrow containing spades, a line, and sticks with some feeling of processional pride. The gardener then, having come to a stop with the barrow, spat, very solemnly on his hands. It appeared to be the exact form of ritual required. In a few minutes we had pegged a way.
I suppose a spade is the first implement of peace ever made by human kind. It is certainly the pleasantest to hold. A rake is a more dandified affair, a hoe not so well-formed. The scythe and the sickle have a store of poetry and legend about them, but the rake and the hoe contain no romantic virtues. Although the plough is the recognised implement of peace in symbolical language, it joins hands with war in that same language—“turning their swords into ploughshares”—and so loses much of its peaceful meaning, but the spade remains always the sword of the man of peace, one weapon by which he conquers the ground and makes the earth yield her fruits. For me the spade.
The gardener, having spat upon his hands regarded the earth and sky as if to mark and measure the earth and the heavens, and them to witness his first cut. The spade, lifted for a moment, drove deep into the earth. The soil, pressed by the steel, turned. A new path was begun. How long is it to last?
There are garden paths, so commenced, have made history in their day, why not mine? Kings, Princes, Lords, Queens, Maids of Honour, spies and honourable men have trodden garden paths, measuring their small length and discussing everything in the states of Love or Country to come to some decision. The Poppies Tarquin slew gave their message. The Pinks that Michonis brought to Marie Antoinette grew by some garden path; that very bunch of Pinks in which lay a note promising her safety, brought her death more near. What comedies, what tragedies, vows made and broken, kisses stolen and repented, have not had for platform just such a path as mine.
At the first hint of broken soil a robin, pert and ready, took up a position on a bare limb of Penzance Briar, and began to eye us merrily just as if he, I and the garden were all out for a day’s worm hunting.
Said I, “Dick, we are out to make a garden path, incidentally to make history.” For I had my idea of the “History of Paths” well at the back of my mind.
The robin replied (or as good as replied), “If it’s history you’re after, it’s insects I’m here for, so we’ll come at a bargain.”
Meanwhile the gardener turned another clod.
Said the robin, “I never saw any one so slow.”
Slow as we might have been we were quick enough in imagination. For one thing there was the question of edging. Tiles, bricks, box, stones, which was it to be?
Half-way down the trench we had made, just at the acute point of the greater curve, the gardener propounded the question of the edging. He leaned on his spade, and turning to me asked if I had thought to something to edge the path with. Now my thoughts were far away from that idea and were hovering like butterflies over a vision of the Path Complete. I saw, for Springtime, a row of Daffodils nodding and yellow in the breeze. For Summer I saw Carnations gleaming richly, and the Roses all blooming. Overhead the driven sky hung out blue banners of distress as if signalling for fine weather. Plumb to earth my thoughts came.
“About something to edge with?”
Almost before I had time to speak, he continued. I had begun with the word, “Box.”
Every one knows what it is to come on the rocks in the soil of a gardener’s mind. It is, as a rule, some old idea taken deep root which forms a rock of resistance. Sometimes it is a rock idea about taking Geranium cuttings, sometimes an idea about the time for pruning fruit trees or the method of pruning them, sometimes it concerns certain plants which he refuses to allow will live in the garden and so lets them die. One is never quite certain when or how the objection will arise. I had sent out a feeler for Box and I struck a rock.
“Box!!” he said in a voice of awe, as if the gods overhearing would be angry. “Where am I to get Box from? And if I was to get Box, Box don’t grow so high,”—he held his hand a mustard seed height from the ground—“not in ten years. It’s awkward stuff, Box, to deal with. In a garden this size that needs an extra man—and plenty of work for a boy too, when all these leaves is about—growing hedges of Box or what not is not possible. Not that I have anything to say against Box, far from it. No. It looks well in some places, but if you was to ask me, sir, I think it’ud be the ruin of this Rosebed.”
Said the robin to me, “The man’s mad.”
I answered quickly, “It was merely a sudden idea of mine.”
He relapsed into silence for a moment. Then he said, “flints.”
I knew it was to be a battle. I hate flints. Nasty, ugly, tiresome eyesores. Gardeners love flints just as many of them love Laurels and Ivy.
I said very rashly, “But where are we to get flints?”
Of course I should have known that he had a cartload of flints up his sleeve. He scraped his boots, walked away, and returned with a jagged thing like one petrified decayed tooth of a mammoth. This he thrust into the ground, and then surveyed it with pride.
“That,” he said, “is something like.”
“Something like what?” said I.
“A double row of these,” he said, “with here and there one of a different colour would never be equalled.”
I agreed with him sarcastically. “Never,” said I, “would they be equalled for utter hideousness. Far be it from me,” I said, “to fill the hearts of my neighbours with envy of this border.”
“You don’t care for them?”
“Chuck it at him,” said the robin.
“I wouldn’t be seen dead in a path bordered with flints,” I said.
More in sorrow than in anger he removed the offending flint, and we resumed work. The last time we had used bricks for an edging they had all cracked with the frost, so that idea was left alone. Not, of course, that all bricks crack, but the bricks about here seem to be very soft.
I asked if we had any tiles.
He knew of some tiles, a lot of them, nearly buried in the earth and covered with Moss. They were an old line running by the path inside the wall by the paddock; the path by the rubbish heap.
“But,” he said, having the rout of the flints in his mind, “it would take a man all day to dig them up, and scrape them and wash them, and then he couldn’t say they would be any use when it was done. And in a garden where an extra man——”
“I will do it myself.”
“Fight it out,” said the robin.
More or less in silence, and really in excellent tempers, we finished the trench that was to receive the cinders and ashes.
I washed the tiles. There were exactly ninety of them required. I started to wash them in the cold water of a stable bucket, and I regarded each one as a thing of beauty as I did it. After having done forty I began to think it would be a good thing to give prisoners to do to teach them discipline. After seventy, I decided to recommend that particular form of torture to some Chinese official. By the time I had finished I felt that some medal should be struck to commemorate the event.
The gardener, at the close of that day, looked at my heap of tiles.
I said, “I have finished them.”
He replied, “I was just coming to lend a hand.”
To which, as I was not going to let the sun go down upon my wrath, I answered, “Thank you.”
I think an ash-heap is the most desolate object I know. The dreary remains of burnt-out fires make a melancholy sight, but I remember that as a child that corner of the garden where stood the heaps of ashes and ancient rubbish was as the mines of Eldorado to me. Here, if one dug deeply enough, one found pieces of broken pottery, in themselves equal, by power of imagination, to any discovery of Roman remains. To the whitened bones I found I gave names, building from them adventures more lurid than those of Captain Kydd. To the ashes I gave gold and jewels, delving as if in a mine, sifting, with childlike seriousness, the heap of fire slack, and coming on some bright bit of glass that shone for me like a kingly diamond, I held it to the light and renewed the ardour of my soul in its gleaming rays. After all, are not pieces of broken glass as beautiful as many jewels if they are self-discovered and lit by the light of joy? That corner of the garden, hidden by shrubs, by low-growing nut trees and shaded by ancient Elms, has been for me the Forest of Arden, of Sherwood, the deeps of the Jungle, an ambush, a hiding-place, a tree covered island, each in its turn absolutely satisfying to my mind. The sun’s rays shooting down through the branches have found me seated, dirty, dishevelled, but incomparably happy,—a King with an ash heap for a throne.
To an ash heap, then, I repaired on the following day, there to gather loads of cinders and slack for my garden path. Already in my mind the Roses bloomed by the path side; the tiles, evenly set, were leaned against by blue-eyed Violas; Carnations waved gorgeous heads at my feet.
My friend the robin was there betimes and took upon himself to sing a little song to cheer me. After that, with his bright eyes glinting, he hopped upon the bed and inspected my labours.
The gardener coming upon me glanced at the row of neatly placed tiles.
“I’m glad I thought o’ they,” he said.
“Hit him,” the robin chirruped.
“You think they look well?” said I.
“As soon as I thought of they tiles,” he answered, “I knew I’d a thought of a grand thing.”
So he took all the idea to himself, and went on solemnly pounding down the cinders with a heavy stone fastened onto a stick.
And now the path is finished, and curves smooth and sleek between the Rose trees, and answers firmly to the tread. All day long I have been planting cuttings of Violas alongside the path; and behind them are rows of Carnations.
I wonder who will walk upon my path in a hundred years time, and if by then they, whoever they be, will think our methods of gardening very old-fashioned and odd. And I wonder if we shall seem at all quaint to people who will come after us, and if our clothes will be regarded as odd and wonderfully ugly.
Once, I remember, I saw into the past in such a vivid way that I still feel as if I were living out of my date by living now. It was on the occasion of some fête in the country which was to be held in some big gardens. Certain ladies were presiding over an entertainment that set out to represent a series of Eighteenth Century booths. The daughter of the house where I was stopping had spent time, money, and taste in getting very accurate and beautiful dresses of about 1745. They wore these, powdered their hair, and placed patches on their cheeks, and prepared baskets of lavender tied up in bundles to sell at the fair.
I saw them one morning start for the place where the fair was to be held. They came into the garden all dressed and in white caps, and they walked arm-in-arm down a path bordered with Pinks and overhung with Roses, and the sun gleamed on their flowered gowns and on their powdered hair. I could almost hear them say—“La, Mistress Barbara, but I protest it is a fine morning.” There was nothing incongruous in sight, just these walking flowers passing the banks of Roses, pink as their cheeks, and the Pinks white as their powdered hair. I felt at my side for my sword, and put up my hand to my neck to smooth the fall of my lace ruffles, but, alas, nor sword nor lace was there.
In the ordering of paths such as I have written there are many ways, and some are for paths all of grass, and some for tiles, and some for flags of stone, some for gravel, and some for brick laid herring-bone ways. Each has its proper and appointed place, as, for instance, that flags of stone are proper by a balustrade where are also stone jars to hold flowers and stone seats arranged. And brick, which of all the others I most prefer, as it is more warm to look at and helps the garden by its rich colour, is good in intimate small gardens as well as in big, and gives a feeling of cosiness to old-fashioned borders, and is nice near to the house, and is good to set tubs for trees on, or tubs filled with gay flowers. Of grass paths, in that they are soft and inviting, I like them well enough, but they are wet underfoot after rain and dew, and need a deal of care and trimming; but in such cases as small set gardens with queer-shaped beds and low Box borders, I mean bulb gardens, to be afterwards used for carpet bedding or for a show of some one thing, as Begonias, or Zinnias, or Carnations, they are without equal. They should be kept very precious, and well free of weeds, otherwise their beauty is gone and they have a lack-lustre air, very uncomfortable. As for gravel, it is a good thing in place where the ground is low and moist, for it will remain dry better than anything if it is properly rolled and well made. Often it is not properly curved and drained, and Moss and weeds collect at the sides, whereby your garden will seem unkempt and dull. Indeed the garden paths are of supreme importance to the appearance of your garden, as if they be left dirty, or covered with leaves or moss they will spoil all the neat brightness of the flowers, and are apt to look like an unbrushed coat on a man otherwise well dressed. This is especially the case with broad paths and drives. How often one has judged of a gardener by the appearance of his drive! The first glance from the gate up the drive will give you a fair guess at the gardener and his methods, and you can tell at once if he be a man of decent and tidy habits, or a man to leave odd corners dirty and full of weeds. That last man is just such an one as will burnish up his place on the eve of a garden party, and give everything a lick and a promise, and will stand by his greenhouses with an expression on his face of an holy cherub when the visitors are being shown his stove plants. That man will be for ever complaining of overwork and will wear a face as long as a fiddle if he is asked pertinent questions of unweeded paths. “Such a work,” he will say, “should be done by an extra boy. As for me, am I not by day and by night protecting the peas from the birds, and the dahlias from earwigs, and the melons from the ravages of slugs?” And you may know from this that he is the type of man who loses grape scissors, and who leaves bast about, and mislays his trowel, and neglects to give water to your favourite plants, so that they wither and die. No. Look well that you get a man who is fond of keeping himself clean, and he will keep his paths clean, as is the case in a man I know who started a fruit garden in the country. He, it was, who showed me his men working on a Saturday afternoon at cleaning up the paths. And when I stood amazed at this he took me into the shed where the tools were kept, and there I saw spades shining like silver, and forks burnished wonderfully, and everything very orderly. I clapped my hands, and looked round still in wonder, for I marvelled to see such neatness and order in a place that is the shrine of disorder—as tool sheds, potting sheds, and the like, which are a medley of stick, earth, leafmould, old pricking-out boxes, tools, wire, and other miscellaneous objects. And I marvelled still more to see through the open door men at work—on the afternoon devoted to holiday—picking leaves from the paths, and setting the place in order.
I said, “This is well done indeed.”
And he answered, that this was the secret of all good gardening, pride and carefulness, and that now he had shown them the way his men were so proud of their tool-shed that they brought admiring friends to see it of a Sunday afternoon. Then I knew if there was money to be made growing fruit in England (which there is) then this man would make it (which he does).
Now this talk of paths gives one the idea that people do not here make enough of their paths, as the Japanese do, for there they are skilled in small gardens, and especially in landscape gardens on a tiny scale, making little hills and woods, and views, lakes, streams, and rock gardens in a space about the size of the average suburban garden. Then they are very choice of trees, and value the turning colour of Maples, and the droop of Wisteria, and the shape and blossom of Plum and Cherry trees as fine garden ornaments, while we grow our wonderful lawns. Our lawns, indeed, are remarked by all the world, and wherever you see the words “English Gardens” abroad you will know that the people have made a lawn and watered it, and are proud of its fat smooth surface of velvet. But we make the mistake, I think, of growing forest trees on the edge of our lawns and do not enough encourage the wonderful and beautiful varieties of flowering shrubs that there be. Above all we seem to have a passion for dank, black, lustreless Ivy, beloved only of cats, spiders and snails. I have seen many beautiful walls of stone and brick utterly destroyed and defaced by ill-growing Ivy, where the bare walls would give a fine warm background to our flowers.
The great thing in paths is to make them a little secret, leading round trees to a fresh view, and interlacing them in pretty and quaint ways, but we, a conservative people, are ill-disposed to cut new paths except in new gardens, and often leave badly designed paths for lack of a little good courage. But we are learning by degrees, and I think the abominations of gardening are leaving us, such as the monkey-puzzle tree in the centre of a round bed, and the rows of half-moon beds cut by the side of our lawns and filled with Geraniums and Lobelias, and the rustic seat (horror!), and the rustic summer-house made of rough pieces of tree limbs badly nailed together (horror of horrors!). Now we know more of the way to make pergolas, and terraces, and how to build summer-houses, and the curse of the Mid-Victorian gardening is come to an end with the antimacassar, and the wax fruit under a glass case, and the sofa with horsehair bolsters.
Of course, true gardening is the work and interest of a lifetime, like the collecting of objects of Art, and as such inspires much the same eager passion and healthy rivalry. Therefore let the setting of your collection be as perfect as possible, and those paths leading to the choice collections as fine as the velvet on which priceless enamels are laid. Indeed enamel is a happy word, for what do your flowers do but enamel the earth with their sweet colours, and in pattern, choice, and variety, will surpass all things made by man alone.
And here I take my leave of paths, that great subject that should indeed be a book to itself, for if a man sit down to think of paths he begins to follow one himself, and, starting from the cradle, ends at the grave, or, pursuing some path of history, comes into the broad high-road of all learning, or looking up and observing the stars finds a train of thought in following the path of a star. In a garden path, or from it, he may meditate all these things with right and proper circumstance of mind, for he has flowers at his feet full of the meat of good things, rare remembrancers of history, and exquisite things on which to base a philosophy; while, as for the stars, are they not the Daisies of the Fields of Heaven?
XIII
THE GARDENS OF THE DEAD
It is a beautiful custom that we put flowers on the graves of our dead, and is more fraught with meaning than many know, for it is as a symbol resurrection that they are so placed, inasmuch as the flower that seems to perish perishes only for a while but comes up again as beautiful, and though it die into the soil it reappears all fresh and lovely with no sign of the soil to mar its beauty. But it is more beautiful to plant the graves of those we love with flowers, as then we symbolise that they are alive in our hearts and for ever flowering in our thoughts. And the shadow of the church over them is but the shadow of the wing of sleep. All our lives, said a French King, we are learning how to die; and when the time comes we cannot help but think of that Garden of Sleep where we must be placed along with other sleepers, there to wait.
In England it has long been a habit to plant the more melancholy trees and shrubs in churchyards, as Yew trees, Myrtle, Bay, and the evergreen Oak. In this way a sense of gloom was intended, much at variance with the Christian doctrine that proclaims a victory over death. But instead of this effect of sombreness the presence of these evergreens gives an extraordinary air of quiet peace, of something perpetually alive though at rest. Often and often I have taken my bread and cheese into a country churchyard, and have sat down on the grass and leaned my back against some venerable monument, and there lunched. I take it that this is no disrespect to the dead, that the living should join company with them even to the extent of spreading crumbs of bread over their resting places. I take it that the smoke of a pipe is no sacriligeous sight in the neighbourhood of tombs; for it is but a friendly spirit prompts it, and no violation of the repose of these dead people. No; no more than does the distant roar of the ship’s guns at practice disturb these quiet souls.
In more than one churchyard there are the stocks remaining where malefactors were placed, and so seated were they that all the good folks passing in and out of church were forced to pass, almost to touch the feet of the wrongdoers as they trod the path to the porch. One place I know in particular where the stocks remain, and a goodly Yew tree having grown thick and strong behind the seat forms a fine back to lean against. From here I have surveyed the landscape over the tops of grey old tombs, now all aslant over the heads of the sleepers. Here the squire of 1640 rests facing the Cornfields once he cut and sowed and stacked. There a lady, Christabel by name, faces the flagged walk to the stone porch. There is grass over them now, and the merriest Daisies grow, and Moss covers the laughing cherubims, and Lichen has crept into the words that set forth their marvellous number of virtues. Spring comes here just as it comes to other gardens, and the trees bud just as daintily, and the young grass is every bit as green, and the first Crocus lights his lamp, and the Dandelion flares as bravely with his crown of gold.
There are these quaint quiet churchyards over the length and breadth of England, where the dead lie so comfortably under the fresh English grass. Some are full of flowers planted by loving hands; Roses grow beside the church and shower their petals over the grey stones of the tombs, and Spring flowers have been set in the grass to nod beside the headstones sleepily. Others are bare and bleak, standing exposed to wind and weather on a hillside, with stone walls about them, and a church buffeted by every storm; yet these are sometimes most peaceful gardens, and Ling and Gorse scent the air, and twisted Fir trees, and gnarled old Pines, all leaning over, wind-bent, stand guard over the sleepers; bees busy in the heather, lizards green as emeralds, and the bright butterflies give the feeling of incessant life; they give that glorious feeling that the great pulse still beats; that Nature all alive is yet at one with the dead.
The gardener of these our dead, what a queer man is he! What a peculiar profession he follows! To bury is but to plant the dead that they may flower into that new life. And he is usually a humorous character, a man of well-chosen words who surveys his garden of headstones and has a word for each. He is no respecter of persons, since in the tomb all are equal, and to see him at work preparing a fresh place for burial is to think that the gravedigger’s work is no melancholy task. In the heat of summer, half buried in the grave himself, he sings some old catch as he shovels up the earth. “Poor little lamb,” he may say of a dead child; “well, thee’ll bide here against our Lord wants ’e.”
I have seen such a man, his clothes brown with grave earth, a Daisy between his lips (something to mumble, as he does not smoke on duty), and watched his face as the lytchet gate clicks. His daughter, a flower herself, is bringing his dinner, which he eats cheerfully leaning against one side of the grave for support. This, with a thrush singing somewhere, and the wheeze of the church clock, and the frivolous screams of swifts make death a comfortable picture.
Here we have Nature triumphant, the Earth with her children asleep in her lap. But a monstrosity has crept into our graveyards—God’s Gardens—and in place of flowers with their joy, their symbolical message of resurrection, one sees ghastly things of bead work and of wax, enclosed in hideous glass cases with a mourning card in the centre of them. This is not seemly nor decent in a place where the Earth reclaims her children, where nothing ugly should be. It is within the reach of everyone to buy fresh flowers and to renew those flowers from time to time, and they should be left, if they are placed there, to die. Away then with glass jam-jars filled with water, with bead wreaths, and all ill-taste and hideous distortion of grief, and let us have our offerings made as if to the living, for our dead live in our hearts, nor torture them with horrid and distressing objects on their graves. I would have every churchyard a garden kept by the pence of those who have laid their dead there to rest; and I would have flowers and shrubs planted and paths made, and seats placed, so that all should be kept fair and bright.
In Switzerland, where I was once, I saw the most delightful graveyard I have ever seen. The church stood on a bluff overlooking a river, a swift running noisy river that sang songs of the mountains and of the big fields and of the bustling towns, a dashing river alive with music, loving the sound of its own voice. Above was this church and its yard, and a little below, the village. The church was low-built and old, with a wooden tower on which a cock stood guard; and it was whitewashed, and toned by sun and rain, and a clock in the tower marked the passage of time, solemnly, “tick-tock; tick-tock.” Along the south wall outside the church was a bench, and a Wisteria over the bench, and a little jutting roof over the Wisteria. This bench, time-worn as all else was time-worn (as the wall was polished by several generations of backs), faced the graveyard. If you sat on this bench you might take a glance at a man’s life there in one long look, for there was a mill near by, and an Inn, and a shoemaker’s, and a forge—the blacksmith was the undertaker, too, any one could see from the fact that he was making a coffin. Besides these you could see mountains covered with snow and wreathed in clouds; great stretches of country, a wood, and the river. What more can there be, saving only a sight of the sea?
But what struck me most forcibly was the appearance of the graveyard, for each grave had flowers growing by it, and a little weeping willow planted to hang over it, and there was something so pleasant to me in this that I was filled with delight of the place as I sat there. It was a real garden, so fresh and bright with flowers and with ugly bead-wreaths as are so usual in foreign countries, and now, alas! in our own. And it was so homely to think of the elders of that place who sat looking at the graves and meditating—very likely—on the spot where they themselves would lie. I remembered then, as I sat there, the description of the graveyard in David Copperfield, and the words came almost exact into my head.
“One Sunday night my mother reads to Peggotty and me in there, how Lazarus was raised from the dead. And I am so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon.
“There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, ‘Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?’”
Even as I remembered those words I looked up and noticed a sun-dial on the wall of the church just over my head, and, curiously enough, just that peace that those words give to me seemed to come to me from the sight of the sun-dial, and the repose of the scene before me.
It is good, I think, to meditate on these things, and all who garden, who are, as it were, in touch with the soil, must sometimes let their thoughts linger over the other gardens where the dead are, and where Spring comes as blithely as in any other spot.
Although the gardens that are what are called “show-places,” tended and nursed by a staff of men, do not bring one into such close contact with earth as earth, still in the greater garden is a peace no other place knows but the graveyard. This is no morbid thought, nor over introspective, but, I think, makes me feel more sanely and not so fearfully of death. In the same way do the poor keep their grave clothes ready and neat in a drawer, with pennies sewn up in linen to put over their tired eyes, and everything decent for the putting away of their bodies. So does the wood of trees enclose them, and good and polished wood in the shape of coffin-stools is there to bear them up. And I have heard many talk of how they wished to lie facing the porch of the church; and others who wished they might be near by the gate so that folks passing in and out might remember them.
This may seem a subject not quite fitted to a book which is to tell of the Charm of Gardens, and yet I am sure lovers of gardens will know just what I mean. To think of and know of the peace and beauty of certain graveyards is to gain consolation and quietude such as the knowledge and thought of all beauty gives. What a wonderful thing it is that we can paint the earth with flowers, set here crimson, and there orange, here purple, and there blue; range our colours from white to cream, to deep cream, to all the shades of all the colours, to deep impenetrable purple, more black than black, like the dusky eyes of anemonies.
When it is night, and “the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon,” the thousand thousand Daisies of the fields have closed their eyes, and the Buttercups’ golden glaze is mellowed by the moonlight, still there are flowers gay in the sunshine somewhere in the world. Though the garden is chequered in the blue-green light and heavy shadows, and the owls hoot in their melancholy voices, still there are birds somewhere in the world singing. And though, across the way behind the wall, white in the moonlight, lies the dark churchyard, and all is very still there, still, I think, they, whose names are carved there on the stones, are not in the dark, and do not know the damp and mouldy earth, but are somewhere in some world more light and beautiful than this.
The solemnity of this type of thought is seldom given to me by flowers; it is more the breath of trees, and the deep places of a wood, that gives one this feeling of hush and peace. Flowers are gay, stately, exuberant, simple, but always joyous, as witness the pert questioning faces of Pansies, and the languorous droop of Roses, the stately propriety of Lilies, the romantic splendour of purple Clematis, and the passionate beauty of the coloured Anemonies. In a garden are all moods, from that given by a school of white Pinks, to the masterly exactitude of the Red-Hot Poker, or the limpid and very virginal appearance of Lavender. Youth itself comes in full blood with the blossom on fruit trees; the slim elegance of childhood with the Narcissus and the Daffodil. Daintiness herself is in Columbine; maidenly virtue is in the hang-head Snowdrop. Zinnias have the melodious colours of the East; Jasmine and Honeysuckle hold the spirit of the porch. Sweet Peas, all laughing and chattering, are like a bevy of young girls; while the proud Hyacinth, erect up his stem, his hair tight curled, his breath strong and sweet, is to me like some hero of the days of William of Orange, a hero in a curled full-bottomed wig. The Iris has the poetry of river banks; the Sunflower peering over a cottage garden wall, spells rustic ease. Fuschias I count very Victorian, like ladies in crinolines; Geraniums also are prim and most polite. Wallflowers I place as gipsy-like, a scent somehow of the wind on the road; while the Snapdragons have a military spirit and grow in brightly uniformed regiments. Carnations are courtiers, elegant, superbly dressed, yet with a refinement all their own; and Larkspurs, like charity schools of children, all dressed alike and out for a walk, on the tall stalk. Primulas, deep-coloured or pale, I feel somehow to be the flowers of memory; and Sweet Sultans are like Scots lords in foreign clothes. There are a hundred others, all with some little fanciful meaning to those who grow them, but all, I think, are full of joy; no flower is sad. It is the trees, the voices whispering in whose leaves bring deeper thoughts.
There are those who say that happiness would come could we but find the Blue Rose; and others that there are places one must need find like El Dorado; and others that a magic charm will bring us the joy we desire. They are all wrong. Happiness lies in the Rose at your hand, El Dorado is at your door, the magic charm!—listen, there is a thrush singing.
THE END
PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE & CO. LIMITED, LONDON
OTHER BEAUTIFUL BOOKS ON FLOWERS & GARDENS
EACH CONTAINING FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
THE FLOWERS AND GARDENS OF JAPAN
Painted by ELLA DU CANE
Described by FLORENCE DU CANE
Containing 50 full-page Illustrations in Colour. Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top. Price 20s. net (_by post_ 20s. 6d.)
NOTE.—Japan has often been called the Land of Flowers, and to judge from the beautiful illustrations in this volume, it is aptly named. The artist may be said to have given us a diary of the year’s flowers from the opening of the first plum blossom to the falling of the last maple leaf, and all are depicted in their natural surroundings. The illustrations also include flowering trees amid old temples, charming landscape gardens, flower feasts, and many natural scenes of great beauty. The author, who has spent two floral seasons in the country, not only gives an attractive description of the flowers as they appeal to the eye of the foreigner, but has also collected and reproduced in the book many of the native legends which show that sentiment and tradition play a large part in the feelings with which the Japanese regard their flowers.
“This ‘gardening’ book is one of the most fascinating that has ever been published, and is worthy of its most fascinating title.”—_Morning Post._
“A charming volume, one of the most satisfactory of its kind that has appeared for some time.”—_Pall Mall Gazette._
“The book has the best account we have seen anywhere of the way in which Japanese gardens, including the landscape garden, are planned, planted, and made effective.”—_Outlook._
THE FLOWERS AND GARDENS OF MADEIRA
Painted by ELLA DU CANE
Described by FLORENCE DU CANE
Containing 24 full-page Illustrations in Colour. Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top. Price 7s. 6d. net (_by post_, 7s. 11d.)
NOTE.—From the title of this volume it will be seen that it is not intended as a guide-book to the island. Its aim is to help those lovers of flowers who are fortunate enough to spend a winter in Madeira to appreciate the very varied vegetation of that flowery land. From the author’s description of the never-ending succession of floral treasures, it would appear to be perpetual summer in that favoured island, while the so-called winter is almost the best time of year to see the gorgeous creepers for which Madeira has long been famous.
The illustrations suggest warmth, sunshine, and flowers, and should tempt many a wanderer to escape from the cold grey skies of an English winter, and spend his time basking in the sun, and enjoying the succession of flowering trees, shrubs, and plants which are gathered together from every part of the New and Old World.
“A charming book.... The coloured illustrations are not only instructive, but gems of their kind.... Should be in every library.”—_Garden._
“No one knows better than Miss Du Cane how to paint flowers.”—_Standard._
GARDENS OF ENGLAND
Painted by BEATRICE PARSONS
Described by E. T. COOK
Containing 20 full-page Illustrations in Colour. Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top. Price 7s. 6d. net (_by post_, 7s. 11d.)
NOTE.—“Gardens of England” does not follow the conventional lines of recent works, but is descriptive of the modern development of the love of picturesque horticulture. All who have a love of the garden and the country in their hearts are aware of and welcome the intense interest that has been slowly asserting itself in this fair land of ours, and this, surely, is of physical advantage to the race. In this book the sketches show the beauty of the modern rose garden when planned with taste, the flood of colour that comes from rambling roses over the pergola, and the brilliancy of the herbaceous border in summer. The text follows the same lines, and, as indicating the character of the book, there are chapters on “Cottage Gardens,” “Rosemary and Lavender,” “The Rose Garden,” and the four seasons in the garden.
“A book of very great value.... Highly deserving of a place in the country-house.... It is instinct with the spirit of the garden, and no one could turn its leaves, or look at the pictures, without obtaining many a hint that could be put to practical purpose.”—_Country Life._
“Miss Parson’s pictures are almost fragrant, so truly does she realise the atmosphere of her subjects. The volume is one which the garden lover ... will find full of delight.”—_Truth._
ALPINE FLOWERS AND GARDENS
Painted and Described by G. FLEMWELL
Containing 20 full-page Illustrations in Colour. Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top. Price 7s. 6d. net (_by post_, 7s. 11d.)
NOTE.—This is an attempt to present, in word and picture, a broad and general view of the Swiss Alpine flora in its wild home and in the gardens established for it in the Alps. It is an attempt to break away from the mass of specialist literature on the subject, and to depict, not merely something of the floral wonders themselves, but something also of the unique and fascinating atmosphere which surrounds them—something which will appeal both to those who know the Alps and to those who know only of them. To quote from the Preface contributed by Mr. Henry Correvon, one of the greatest living authorities on Alpine plants: “The Alpine flora has never yet been described or offered to the public at the angle at which it is here presented to us. Here, then, is a profoundly original work which lovers of beauty and truth cannot but applaud.”
“Mr. Flemwell’s paintings will at once attract those who open this book, for he has accomplished with singular skill the difficult task of making the Alpine air breathe round Alpine flowers. And lovers of Alpland who do not look for a specialist technical work on the flowers will be pleased with his letterpress, which, though botanical lore is not lacking, studies them from rather a new angle.”—_Times._
DUTCH BULBS AND GARDENS
Painted by MIMA NIXON
Described by UNA SILBERRAD and SOPHIE LYALL
Containing 24 full-page Illustrations in Colour. Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top. Price 7s. 6d. net (_by post_, 7s. 11d.)
NOTE.—Miss Una Silberrad has had exceptional facilities for studying life in the Bulb Fields in and around Haarlem, which has been the centre of the industry ever since its first introduction, and here sets down for us the quaint customs of the growers, and their manner of life. Miss Sophie Lyall treats of the Hyacinth; her chief authority being St. Simon, a learned Frenchman of the eighteenth century. Garden-lovers will appreciate his enthusiasm, and the loving exactness with which he describes the life of the plant, its treatment, and the environment best suited to its needs.
“Over the pictures in this book it is difficult not to wax enthusiastic, for they are veritable triumphs of colour-printing.”—_Globe._
“Her pictures as a whole are as successful as the subject and the letterpress in helping to endow this volume with a unique charm which no flower- or garden-lover can fail to appreciate.”—_World._
BY THE POET LAUREATE
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE
Containing 16 full-page Illustrations in Colour by GEO. S. ELGOOD, R.I.
Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top.
Price 7s. 6d. net (_by post_, 7s. 11d.)
FROM THE AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION. “What!” said Lamia, “_Another_ Illustrated Edition!”
“I believe so,” I replied, trying to look as meek as I could, but betraying, I fear, that special kind of hesitation which proceeds less from conscious guilt than from embarrassment.
“Have you consulted Veronica?” she asked. “If you have, I am sure she must have informed you ‘The Garden that I Love’ will soon be as hard to put up with as the Fiscal Question.”
Despite the opinions of Lamia and Veronica the publishers believe that this edition will be welcomed by many who have read the book with pleasure, but have never had an opportunity of seeing the beauty of the Garden itself.
“The illustrations are worthy of the book, which is one of the most charming books about a garden in the language.”—_Daily Chronicle._
“This sumptuous edition will enhance the appreciation even of this much appreciated book.”—_Aberdeen Free Press._
BRITISH FLORAL DECORATION
By R. F. FELTON, F.R.H.S., F.N.C.S. &c.
FLORIST TO KING EDWARD VII AND MANY COURTS OF EUROPE
Containing 26 full-page Illustrations (12 in Colour). Square demy 8vo, cloth. Price 7s. 6d. net (_by post_, 7s. 11d.)
NOTE.—It has been felt for some time past that owing to the vast strides which are yearly being made in Floral Decoration in Great Britain that there was need for a book on so highly interesting a subject. The publishers have been fortunate in securing the co-operation of Mr. R. F. Felton to write such a book and to select and supervise the preparation of the illustrations.
As Mr. Felton’s art brings him in touch with the Courts of Europe, he is able to give examples of many important and interesting floral works with which he has been professionally associated.
An important feature of the book is a complete and carefully compiled list of the best varieties of all flowers to grow for cutting and decorative purposes. The work has been largely subscribed by many influential people in this country.
“Flowers play such a large part now in the decorations of the home that the many useful hints given here will prove widely acceptable.”—_Evening Standard._
“THE PASSION FOR FLOWERS.—Every phase of the subject has received attention in these pages and the book provides many valuable hints. Especially interesting are the chapters on certain flowers such as Roses, Orchids, Tulips, Lilies and Violets, Sweet Peas, Daffodils, &c.”—_Daily Mail._
KEW GARDENS
Painted by T. MOWER MARTIN, R.C.A.
Described by A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF
Containing 24 full-page Illustrations in Colour. Large crown 8vo, cloth, gilt top. Price 6s. net (_by post_, 6s. 4d.)
NOTE.—Kew Gardens contain what seems the completest botanical collection in the world, handicapped as this is by a climate at the antipodes of Eden and by a soil that owes less to Nature than to patient art. Before being given up to public pleasure and instruction, this demesne was a royal country seat, especially favoured by George III in days when it would be almost as rural as now is Osborne or Sandringham. This homely king had two houses here, and began to build a more pretentious palace, a design cut short by his infirmities, but for which Kew might have usurped the place of Windsor. For nearly a century it had a close connection with the Royal Family, as the author illustrates in his story of the village and the gardens, while the artist has found most effective subjects in the rich vegetation gathered into this enclosure and in the relics of its former state.
“Mr. Martin’s drawings add much to the value of this fascinating book.”—_T.P.’s Weekly._
“Mr. Martin’s pictures are charming.”—_Pall Mall Gazette._
PUBLISHED BY ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
Transcriber’s note:
Headings and subheadings in the Kalendarium, pages 108-148, have been regularised.
Variations in spelling in the Kalendarium have been retained.
Illustration captions have been regularised.
Page 21, full stop inserted after ‘light,’ “in a fluster of bright light.”
Page 38, double quote inserted after ‘madam,’ “this is why, madam,” I could”
Page 55, full stop inserted after ‘Head,’ “from some once lovely Head.”
Page 62, comma inserted after ‘led,’ “me, willing to be led,”
Page 62, comma inserted after ‘thread,’ “Though by a slender thread,”
Page 76, ‘Falerian’ changed to ‘Falernian,’ “sat drinking Falernian wine poured”
Page 82, ‘glimmmering’ changed to ‘glimmering,’ “glimmering amidst their greenery”
Page 102, ‘Orgilly’ changed to ‘or Gilly,’ “Clove Pink, or Gilly-flower, a variety”
Page 116, ‘Minabile’ changed to ‘Mirabile,’ “Flos Africanus, Mirabile Peruvian”
Page 126, ‘alter’ changed to ‘after,’ “Ranunculus’s after rain (if it come”
Page 129, ‘Paterre’ changed to ‘Parterre,’ “In the Parterre, and Flower”
Page 133, ‘Michaemas’ changed to ‘Michaelmas,’ “Malacoton, which lasts till Michaelmas”
Page 134, ‘Candi-tufts’ changed to ‘Candy-tufts,’ “Larks-heel, Candy-tufts, Iron-colour’d”
Page 139, ‘Cand-tufts’ changed to ‘Candy-tufts,’ “Delphinium, Nigella, Candy-tufts”
Page 144, comma inserted after ‘Cabbages,’ “Parsneps, Turneps, Cabbages, Cauly-flowers”
Page 151, colon struck after ‘GARDENS,’ “TOWN GARDENS”
Page 163, ‘that’ changed to ‘than,’ “more beautiful than the Almond tree”
Page 176, ‘wheelrights’ changed to ‘wheelwright’s,’ “into the wheelwright’s saw-pit”
Page 186, ‘Aglantine’ changed to ‘Eglantine,’ “was crowned with Eglantine”
Page 206, full stop inserted after ‘grass,’ “crickets in the grass. But in”
Page 212, ‘er’ changed to ‘’er,’ “but what ’er won’t rain”
Page 222, ‘vitual’ changed to ‘ritual,’ “the exact form of ritual required”
Page 232, ‘antimaccassar’ changed to ‘antimacassar,’ “end with the antimacassar, and”
Ad page 3, ‘Full-page’ changed to ‘full-page,’ “Containing 16 full-page Illustrations”
Ad page 3, comma inserted after ‘Lamia,’ ““What!” said Lamia,”
End of Project Gutenberg's The Charm of Gardens, by Dion Clayton Calthrop