Part 5

Does the wall face a sunless north? Very well; out come the ferns and up creeps the ivy; the Rock Stonecrop, with its blue-green stems and leaves (looking almost like a huge moss) fills every shady spot it can find, seemingly appearing from nowhere.

Is the wall sunny? All right; the wallflowers laugh at you, pinks climb over the top edge, just to see what is going on down below; one baking spot supports a mass of sage about a yard and a half in diameter, a smother of blue flowers in the summer; no one planted it, it just came! A red ribis has hooked itself in at one spot; what it lives on I don’t know; while white, mauve and purple Honesty seeds itself everywhere, making a brave show of colour in the spring. In fact, white and mauve are the prevailing colours on the walls in April.

Later on you may expect—and will find—anything; for annuals and bi-annuals seed themselves, continually dropping the seed to a lower level; hence there is always a self-planted garden bed at the base of each wall, reminiscent of what was growing above the season before.

On the shady side of one wall, we have made a moss garden—it was Virginia’s idea, and she takes a very special pride in it, adding new sorts whenever she finds them. Hence you will sometimes find her coming home from a ramble, carrying a huge stone with her, or lugging along a veritable boulder. In this way she brings the moss home, local habitation and all, annexing any stone she sees (a wild stone, of course, not a tame one from someone’s garden wall) that bears a promising crop of some new variety.

As a result, she fairly bulges with pride whenever she exhibits the moss garden, and explains how much of it is her own particular handiwork.

We have not yet settled whether she ought to pay me rent for my wall that she uses for her moss garden, or I ought to pay her wages for moss-gardening my wall.

One characteristic of this garden is an ever-changing show of colour. It varies according to the season, but whatever the time of year there are usually gorgeous splashes of colour that make you stand and wonder.

Do not forget that this is only a cottage garden, even though it is a roomy one. I hope you are not picturing to yourself an orthodox country-house garden, with expanses of well-kept lawns, with proper-looking beds of geraniums, and lordly pampas grass at intervals, and well-groomed rose-bushes in tidy beds, and correct herbaceous borders, and beds of begonias and heliotropes planted out from the greenhouses, and all the other nice-mannered, polite flowers that every well-paid, certificated gardener conscientiously insists on planting in exactly the same way all the country over.

This garden grows a little of everything, and a great deal of some things, and when you look at it you might easily imagine that everything had planted itself just where it pleased. The garden is not tidy, for the things are constantly growing over each other, and then out across the paths. Moreover, it lacks someone there all the time to keep it tidy; the ministrations of the handy man are decidedly erratic. But at least it is bright, always bright, and you can pick as many flowers as you please—handfuls, armfuls, apronfuls—with no fear of an autocratic gardener glaring at you; and the flowers will never be missed.

In the spring wallflowers predominate, every colour that the modern varieties produce. Ursula’s remark that she had planted over nine hundred seedlings was well within the mark. A thousand or two of wallflower seedlings do not go very far in this garden, because at one time of the year the place appears to be a waving mass of wallflowers from end to end.

And have you any idea what the scent is like when you have thousands of wallflowers smiling on a sunny spring morning?

But there are all sorts of oddments, some things you do not expect and some things you do. The cowslip bed is very pretty. Here are yellow, orange, copper-coloured and mahogany brown cowslips; pale-coloured oxlips, and polyanthuses in as many shades as the wallflowers, from rosy red to dark purple-brown with every petal edged with bright yellow as though they had been buttonholed round.

There is no need to cultivate primroses in the garden beds, for the two orchards are thick with them; where there are also large patches of wild snowdrops with crowds of wild daffodils, and dancing wind-flowers—or wood anemones; while tall spikes of the pale mauve spotted orchises grow in the grass around the edge near the walls.

Before the wallflowers have finished flowering the tulips are out, the old-fashioned “cottage tulips,” many of them, tall and with large cup-like flowers—pink and crimson, brown and yellow, showy “parrots,” and delicate mauve feathered with white, purple-black, deep maroon; such a brilliant army those tulips make, with hundreds of them in bloom at once.

Before the tulip petals have fallen, the peonies have opened out great heavy heads of flowers that can’t keep upright. The scarlet oriental poppies with their blue-black centres make masses of colour that have to be kept very much to themselves or they kill every other flower within reach; these are therefore planted near the clumps of white irises, and the deep blue and pure white perennial lupins, that make a beautiful show all down one border.

Speaking of lupins reminds me of the tree-lupins. Virginia brought some harmless-looking little plants with her one year, remembering my love for lupins.

“These are tree-lupins,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t know what they will grow into, but the man said they were just like lupins, only much more so; therefore I bought them. Don’t blame _me_ if they die.”

She planted them comfortably and cosily in a bed along with white foxgloves and pink pentstemons, all the members of this happy family looking about the same size.

The following year when Virginia visited the cottage she asked, “Where are my tree-lupins?” She was shown great bushes each the size of a round dining-table, and each holding aloft hundreds of yellow spikes, and filling the air with the scent of a bean-field. There were the tree-lupins all right! But where were the foxgloves and pentstemons?

* * * * *

Perhaps you think there must be large, dull spaces when the wallflowers cease blooming, but in between the wallflower plants are others coming on, and by the time the wallflowers have finished—and are ready to be pulled up—these beds are filling with sweet williams and snapdragons. The young plants were there, and they come into bloom as the wallflowers finish. And then, where only a short time before there were beds all purples and yellows and browns, you have now reds and pinks and every shade of rosy tint that the bright eyes of the sweet williams can produce.

The snapdragons once played a joke on the garden. I was ordering some seeds from Sutton’s, and said, “I want some very hardy snapdragons, that will stand being planted in the windiest part of the garden where nothing of any height will grow.” The seeds were guaranteed to grow in the most uprooting of hurricanes.

In due time the seedlings appeared above ground, and Ursula devoted several back-aching evenings to planting them out into the windswept beds. By the middle of the following summer those jaunty snapdragons had each grown six feet high, and there, waving in that exposed place, where any well-conducted plant would have sternly refused to grow more than a foot high, was a plantation of great flowers, each tied to a stout stake like hollyhocks, and the blooms seemed to have outgrown their normal size just as the rest of the plants had done.

Of course, people came from ever so far to gaze at these snapdragons; and unbelievers surreptitiously pulled out tape-measures and two-foot rules, and one and all, after meditating seriously on the subject, and looking at it from all points of view, would finally shake their heads and say, “Well, I’ll just tell you what it is—the place evidently suits them.” We never got any further than that!

By every law and reason known to properly-trained gardeners and horticulturists, this garden ought to be able to produce nothing but low-growing flowers and shrubs. Every local resident kindly volunteered this information directly he or she set eyes on the cottage; they said it was too high up, too bleak in winter, too exposed, too dry, too rocky, or too glaringly sunny—for anything above six inches high to have a chance in it.

And yet Nature goes on laughing at the pessimists, and so do those who tend this flower-patch. And the columbines, yellow, pink, pale blue, purple, and white, send up tall heads of flower. The coreopsis plants grow so big and bushy they have to be staked. The cornflowers, a streak of blue at the end of the cabbage bed, are taller than the broad beans adjoining. Then there are the hollyhocks and the larkspurs—these hold their heads as high as anyone could desire, and the tall red salvias are not far behind. The foxgloves are also a brave sight (though I do not include in this category those that are buried under the tree-lupins!).

Of course, there are low-growing things in the garden as well as the more lofty-minded. There is one bed that is a ramping mass of giant mimulus of various colours. Convolvulus minor spreads about the ground in one of the white lily beds; and eschscholtzias cover the earth for another row of lilies. Pansies rove about at their own sweet will in this garden, and the old-fashioned white pinks and the pink variety spread themselves out over the big stones that edge the borders.

The mignonette bed has a row of lavenders at the side, and mounds of nasturtiums grow where the earth is too rocky and barren to support anything else.

Naturally, there are hedges of sweet peas; sometimes they are heavy with flowers, sometimes the slugs or birds settle the matter at the beginning of the season. One hedge runs along at the back of the herb garden, and the herbs have so spread themselves out that the sweet peas were getting swamped. Virginia has been cutting them back.

Do you know what the scent of cut herbs is like on a hot summer day, with sweet peas in the background? In this herb garden there is sage, with its lovely blue flowers, lemon thyme, silver thyme, savory, hyssop, lavender, rosemary, rue, balm, marjoram, black peppermint, spearmint and parsley.

In this bed also grows the old-time bergamot, with its heavily-scented leaves and lovely tufts of crimson flowers.

But though one part of the garden is set apart for herbs and another for vegetables, you must not imagine that they are only to be found there. Fine clumps of parsley have planted themselves in among the annual larkspurs; mint persists in running riot among the pink and white mallows (but the mint family never remains quietly at home); a sturdy scarlet runner comes up, year after year, beside a great bush of gum cistus, which makes me think it might be treated as a perennial; it seems impossible to get the artichokes to part company with the Michaelmas daisies, while raspberry canes shoot up among the old-fashioned red fuchsia bushes; radishes are flourishing like the green bay-tree underneath the sweetbriar; a regiment of pickling onions is living on most neighbourly terms with a row of cup-and-saucer Canterbury bells; and as for rhubarb—well, what can you expect when one man, whom I employed for a brief spell, remarked:

“You’ll see where I’ve put in that thur special rubbub, miss, because I’ve planted a traveller’s joy a-top of he to mark the spot.”

* * * * *

Cupid’s Border is another section of this garden that may interest you. Here you naturally find Love-in-a-mist and Love-lies-bleeding. The flowers which the country folks call Love-lockets dangle pink and white from their graceful curving stems; (alas, in catalogues and places where they know, this plant is merely regarded as dielytra). In this border you of course find forget-me-nots “that grow for happy lovers”; bachelor’s buttons, too, hold up their heads in a very sprightly manner, and please notice that they are getting nearer and nearer to the clump of Sweet Betsy. But the bachelor’s buttons have a rival, for the other side of Sweet Betsy stands lad’s love—and though not so showy as the bachelor’s buttons, lad’s love claims to be of more solid worth. I leave them to settle the matter between themselves, however; I’m not one to interfere in such affairs.

At the other side of the border stands a maiden’s blush rose, and gallantly waving beside it is a clump of Prince’s Feather (sometimes referred to in common parlance as “they laylock bushes”). At the edge of the border you naturally find heartsease, not the stiff, over-developed article of modern flower-shows, but the old-fashioned sort, all streaks and splashes of rich purple and yellow.

There is no time now to go round the vegetable garden—not that this can be regarded as an entirely separate part of the estate, for the vegetables have got mixed up in a terribly haphazard way with the rest of things, as I hinted just now. The potato-plot, for instance, has a border of golden wallflowers all round and double daisies at the edge, with a row of giant sunflowers, hollyhocks, and clumps of honesty at the back.

This mixture is partly in the nature of a compromise. The gentleman who wields the spade has to be taken into account. No matter who he is, no matter how often he discharges me and I have to beg yet someone else to “oblige” me, it is always the same, the tiller of the soil regards space given over to flowers as a grievous waste, not to say an indication of feeble-mindedness! Therefore he inserts a row of vegetables or seeds whenever I happen to have cleared out some flowering plants and left a morsel of space _pro tem._ It seems a prevailing idea among the non-qualified working classes, in rural districts, that the cultivation of flowers ranks about on a level with doing the washing—work derogatory to a man and only fit for women!

To the credit of the handy man I must say that on one occasion he did kindly present me with a load of pig manure. He put it on the flower garden the day before we arrived, as a pleasant surprise, which it certainly was! Next day we all had relatives with broken legs, who needed our immediate return to town.

* * * * *

Nevertheless the vegetables play their part, and assume no small importance, in due course; for it is another unwritten law of this cottage that visitors shall go out and select the day’s vegetables, and cut them with the dew on; of course, if they are superlatively lazy, they can meanly get some early riser to do it for them; also they can confer together, or each can gather her own choice.

Hence you will see Virginia or Ursula in a large hat that is all brim, with basket on arm, and wearing an apron (not a lacy, frilly muslin thing, but a good-sized, well-made, old-fashioned lilac print apron), going up the garden and gathering broad beans, cutting young cauliflowers, or “curly greens,” or turnip tops, or a marrow, forking up potatoes, pulling carrots, collecting lettuces, spring onions, cress and other salading—all according to the season.

And if it should chance that you have never yourself put on a big apron, and cut your own vegetables before the dew is off them, then Virginia will be truly sorry for you.

* * * * *

There is plenty of time to be lazy, however; and a hot summer day means long leisure in this garden; for when the sun is high the brown pitcher rests (though the brown teapot does not) until the fir-trees throw shadows from the west.

All day you can sit in the shade at the bottom of the garden, looking up the hill at the wonderful mass of colour before you. Along the ridge of the cottage roof perches a row of swallows, chirping and chattering in their usual way. The starlings, who have built under the tiles, are ordering their respective families to cease clamouring for more, explaining that hunting caterpillars is hot work. Most other birds are quiet when the sun is fiercest, but over all the garden there is the hum, hum of thousands of industrious bees, while literally hundreds of white butterflies keep up a perpetual flutter over the tall blue spikes of bloom on the lavender bushes.

Even the small white dog with the brown ears ceases to tear about the garden, and bark at nothing in a consequential way; he just lies down on the edge of somebody’s dress, and hangs out a little pink tongue for air.

This is the time when the flower-patch among the hills spells REST.

An old woman passing up the lane a few nights ago paused at the gate. “How them pinnies do blow, miss!” she said, gazing admiringly at a clump of peonies. Then she added—

“Ain’t it strange, now, that it do take a woman to make a flower garden? A man ain’t no good at that; he simply can’t help hisself a-running to veg’tables!”

But after thinking this over, and despite all that strong-minded womankind tells me to the contrary, I cannot really believe that there is such total depravity in the other sex!

VI

That Jane Price!

WHEN Abigail announced, “Mrs. Price says can you spare a minute to see her, please, ma’am,” you would have known by the toss of her nose that the lady-caller was not very _nearly_ related to the aristocracy.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Price, or “that Jane Price,” as she is more usually styled, is held in no great esteem in our village. Yet everything is said to fulfil some useful purpose, and if Mrs. Price does nothing else, at least she and her family serve as conspicuous moral warnings and give us something to throw up our hands about at intervals, when we exclaim:

“_Did_ you EVER!!”

She is a widow of ample and well-fed proportions, owning her cottage, some bees and a pig, and apparently getting a fairly good living out of doing remarkably little sewing. If, under a mistaken sense of duty, you strive to encourage local industry, and seek to engage her services, she has to consider before she consents to undertake the bit of sewing you offer her to do, at three times the amount you would have to pay for having it done in town. And as often as not she replies that she “really _can’t_ oblige you” this time, as she’s got a “spell” on cruel bad, that has gone all down her back to her knees, making her head feel nohow.

You turn away not even worried about her condition, since she seems as cheerful as a daisy and as comfortably complacent as a cow. And you also know, even though you may have been acquainted with the lady only a few months, that however cruel the spell may be, and however long it may last and prevent her working, her children will be some of the most elaborately dressed in the Sunday school, and from the cottage door there will radiate the most appetising of odours as regularly as the mealtimes come round.

How it is that she manages to do so well with so little visible means of subsistence, only a stranger would stop to inquire. The residents know only too well that her pockets are large; that the shawl she invariably wears on weekdays has voluminous folds; that her carrying and stowing-away capacity is almost worthy of a professional conjurer. Kleptomania (to give it as refined a name as we can) is her besetting sin. Unfortunately her family follow in her footsteps.

Mrs. Price seems to have a positive gift for turning everything to profitable account; and her methods of raising money are as ingenious as they are varied.

Knowing her idiosyncrasies, I asked Abigail where she was at the moment.

“In the kitchen, sitting in my wicker easy-chair,” Abigail replied, still with elevated nose. “She just walked right in and plumped herself down.”

Whereupon I indicated, by dumb pantomime, that she was on no account to be left there without personal oversight; and Abigail intimated, by means of nods and becks and wreathèd scowls, that she was keeping her left eye on the visitor, over her shoulder, even while she was talking to me. We both knew that all was fish that came to Mrs. Price’s net, and she would negotiate with absolute impartiality a piece of soap, a duster, or a half-crown, should they lie in her way.

* * * * *

Not long before, Miss Bretherton, the Rector’s niece, a middle-aged lady who keeps house for him, had tried to give one of the Price girls—Esmeralda by name—a good start in life, taking her into the rectory kitchen. But things disappeared with such alarming rapidity during the first month she was in residence, that she had to be sent back home again.

She left on a Saturday after middle-day dinner. In the afternoon the house was observing the all-pervading quiet that was customary on Saturdays while the Rector was in his study preparing for Sunday.

Miss Bretherton, requiring something in the dining-room that adjoined the study, went in on tiptoe so as not to disturb him, when, to her amazement, she came upon the discharged Esmeralda sitting on the floor beside an open sideboard cupboard where some jars of pickles were stored, ladling out pickled walnuts as fast as she could into one of the maternal pudding basins. Seeing Miss Bretherton, she just picked up her basin, walnuts and all, and hastily retired the same way that she had come, through the French window.

Now, obviously her ex-mistress—over fifty years of age and liable to rheumatism—couldn’t chase after her in house-slippers and minus a bonnet, seeing it was raining; so the bereft lady just closed the sideboard door and communed with her own feelings, womanfully stifling her desire to burst into the study and tell the Rector about it, even though it was his Saturday silence time.

Next morning, Sunday, just as she was buttoning her gloves, preparatory to crossing the rectory lawn by the short cut to the church, the cook came to her with the agitated inquiry: Had the mistress done anything with the leg of mutton left by the butcher yesterday morning?

No, of course not! Why should she? etc.

Well, they hunted high and they hunted low, and the church bell gave its final peremptory clang when they were still hunting, but no leg of mutton was found either in the master’s boot cupboard, or under the bed in the spare room, or in the bookcase in the library, or in the woodshed, or in any other of the equally likely places which they searched. Indeed, no one had ever expected that it would be found once its absence was discovered; they just looked darkly at each other and murmured, “That Esmeralda, of course.” Cook declares that her mistress added “the good-for-nothing baggage” under her breath; but I can’t credit that of Miss Bretherton, who always manages to maintain a wonderful calm and self-restraint under the most trying circumstances.

At any rate, she told cook they must have fried ham and eggs for dinner—if you ever heard of such a thing on a Sunday at the rectory! and the Archdeacon of Saskatchewan preaching in the morning on behalf of the C.M.S. too!

Moreover, Miss Bretherton was ten minutes late for church, a thing never known before in the memory of the oldest inhabitant; and then, still more remarkable, instead of waiting to speak to people after church, she set off at a terrific pace for Mrs. Price’s cottage, and walked in to find the kitchen full of a delightful aroma, and a fine leg of mutton just being taken from the roasting-jack by Esmeralda and placed on the table, which was already adorned with a saucer containing pickled walnuts.

Miss Bretherton knew better than to say, “That’s my leg of mutton.” Our village understands all about “having the law on ’un,” if anyone upsets their feelings in any way. Therefore, swallowing hard, and determining for the hundredth time not to lose her temper, she said, “Where did you get that leg of mutton from, Mrs. Price?”