37607	----	GARDEN DESIGN BY THE SAME ALPINE FLOWERS for English Gardens. Second Edition. THE SUB-TROPICAL GARDEN; or, Beauty of Form in the Flower Garden. Second Edition. HARDY FLOWERS. Description of upwards of 1300 of the most ornamental species, with Directions for their Arrangement, Culture, etc. Fourth and Cheaper Edition. THE WILD GARDEN; or, Our Graves and Gardens made beautiful by the Naturalisation of Hardy Exotic Plants. Illustrated by ALFRED PARSONS. Second Edition. John Murray. THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN: Style, Position, and Arrangement. Followed by a Description of all the best Plants for it--their Culture and Arrangement. Second Edition, 1889. John Murray. GOD'S ACRE BEAUTIFUL; or, The Cemeteries of the Future. Third Edition. With Illustrations. London: John Murray. New York: Scribner & Welford. Published in a cheaper form and with additions under the name-- CREMATION AND URN-BURIAL. Cassell & Co., Limited. THE PARKS AND GARDENS OF PARIS. Considered in Relation to the Wants of other Cities, and of Public and Private Gardens. Being notes made in Paris Gardens. Third Edition. Illustrated. London: John Murray. JOURNALS THE GARDEN. An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Gardening in all its branches. Vol. XL. GARDENING ILLUSTRATED. For Town and Country. A Weekly Journal for Amateurs and Gardeners. Vol. XIII. FARM AND HOME. A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Agriculture in all its branches. Stock, Dairy, Tillage, Stable, Pasture, Orchard, Market-Garden, Poultry, House. Vol. X. WOODS AND FORESTS. A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Forestry, Ornamental Planting, and Estate Management. Vols. I. and II. 1885. GARDEN DESIGN AND ARCHITECTS' GARDENS Two reviews, illustrated, to show, by actual examples from British gardens, that clipping and aligning trees to make them 'harmonise' with architecture is barbarous, needless, and inartistic by W. Robinson, F.L.S. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street 1892 To Sir Philip Currie, K.C.B. PREFACE That we might see, eyes were given us; and a tongue to tell accurately what we had got to see. It is the alpha and omega of all intellect that man has. No poetry, hardly even that of Goethe, is equal to the true image of reality--had one eyes to see that.--T. CARLYLE, _Letters to Varnhagen Von Ense_. _The one English thing that has touched the heart of the world is the English garden. Proof of this we have in such noble gardens as the English park at Munich, the garden of the Emperor of Austria at Laxenberg, the Petit Trianon at Versailles, the parks formed of recent years round Paris, and many lovely gardens in Europe and America. The good sense of English writers and landscape gardeners refused to accept as right or reasonable the architect's garden, a thing set out as bricks and stones are, and the very trees of which were mutilated to meet his views as to "design" or rather to prove his not being able to see the simplest elements of design in landscape beauty or natural form. And some way or other they destroyed nearly all signs of it throughout our land._ _In every country where gardens are made we see the idea of the English garden gratefully accepted; and though there are as yet no effective means of teaching the true art of landscape gardening, we see many good results in Europe and America. No good means have ever been devised for the teaching of this delightful English art. Here and there a man of keen sympathy with Nature does good work, but often it is carried out by men trained for a very different life, as engineers in the great Paris parks, and in our own country by surveyors and others whose training often wholly unfits them for the study of the elements of beautiful landscape. Thus we do not often see good examples of picturesque garden and park design, while bad work is common. Everywhere--unhappily, even in England, the home of landscape gardening--the too frequent presence of stupid work in landscape gardening offers some excuse for the two reactionary books which have lately appeared--books not worth notice for their own sake, as they contribute nothing to our knowledge of the beautiful art of gardening or garden design. But so many people suppose that artistic matters are mere questions of windy argument, that I think it well to show by English gardens and country seats of to-day that the many sweeping statements of their authors may be disproved by reference to actual things, to be seen by all who care for them. We live at a time when, through complexity of thought and speech, artistic questions have got into a maze of confusion. Even teachers by profession confuse themselves and their unfortunate pupils with vague and hyper-refined talk about art and "schools" and "styles," while all the time much worse work is done than in days when simpler, clearer views were held. To prove this there is the example of the great Master's work and the eternal laws of nature, on the study of which all serious art must be for ever based. Beneath all art there are laws, however subtle, that cannot be ignored without error and waste; and in garden design there are lessons innumerable both in wild and cultivated Nature which will guide us well if we seek to understand them simply._ _These books are made up in great part of quotations from old books on gardening--many of them written by men who knew books better than gardens. Where the authors touch the ground of actuality, they soon show little acquaintance with the subject; and, indeed, they see no design at all in landscape gardening and admit their ignorance of it. That men should write on things of which they have thought little is unhappily of frequent occurrence, but to find them openly avowing their ignorance of the art they presume to criticise is new._ _A word or two on the state of architecture itself may not be amiss. From Gower Street to the new Law Courts our architecture does not seem to be in a much better state than landscape gardening is, according to the architects to whom we owe the "Formal Garden" and "Garden Craft"! It is William Morris--whose "design" these authors may respect--who calls London houses "mean and idiotic rabbit warrens:" so that there is plenty to do for ambitious young architects to set their own house in artistic order!_ _As regards "formal gardening," the state of some of the best old houses in England--Longleat, Compton-Wynyates, Brympton, and many others, where trees in formal lines, clipped or otherwise, are not seen in connection with the architecture--is proof against the need of the practice. As regards the best new houses, Clouds, so well built by Mr. Philip Webb, is not any the worse for its picturesque surroundings, which do not meet the architect's senseless craving for "order and balance"; while Batsford, certainly one of the few really good new houses in England, is not disfigured by the fashions in formality the authors wish to see revived, and of which they give an absurd example in a cut of Badminton. There is, in short, ample proof, furnished both by the beautiful old houses of England and by those new ones that have any claim to dignity, that the system they seek to revive could only bring costly ugliness to our beautiful home-landscapes._ W. R. July 1, 1892. CONTENTS PAGE GARDEN DESIGN 1 NATURAL AND FALSE LINES 5 "UNCULTIVATED NATURE" 8 THE TRUE LANDSCAPE 13 BUILDINGS IN RELATION TO THE GARDEN 16 TIME AND GARDENS 20 TRUE USE OF A GARDEN 23 FORMAL GARDENING 25 "NATURE," AND WHAT WE MEAN BY IT 31 "ALL OUR PATHS" ARE CROOKED! 35 "THE ONLY GARDEN POSSIBLE!" 40 "NO DESIGN IN LANDSCAPE" 43 NO GRASS IN LANDSCAPE GARDENING! 46 "IMPROVING" BATTERSEA PARK! 50 NATURE AND CLIPPED YEWS 53 NO LINE IN NATURE! 62 "VEGETABLE SCULPTURE" 66 ILLUSTRATIONS RHIANVA To face page 2 GROUP OF TREES ON GARDEN LAWN AT GOLDER'S HILL, HAMPSTEAD Page 4 WAKEHURST To face page 6 GILBERT WHITE'S HOUSE AT SELBORNE " 10 EXAMPLE OF FORMAL GARDENING Page 12 LONGLEAT To face page 16 OLD PLACE, LINDFIELD " 18 ARUNDEL CASTLE " 20 TAILPIECE Page 22 WEST DEAN To face page 24 ATHELHAMPTON HALL, DORSET " 26 THE VICARAGE GARDEN, ODIHAM " 30 UNCLIPPED TREES AT THE LITTLE TRIANON Page 34 WESTONBIRT To face page 36 THRUMPTON HALL " 40 TAILPIECE Page 45 GOODWOOD To face page 46 AVENUE IN PARIS " 50 CLIPPED TREES AT THE LITTLE TRIANON Page 52 THE "GRANGE," HARTLEY WINTNEY To face page 54 A YEW TREE ON MOUNTAIN, N. ENGLAND " 56 BUILDING IN PARIS " 58 BROADLANDS, HANTS " 64 WARREN HOUSE, COOMBE WOOD " 66 DRUMMOND CASTLE " 68 MADRESFIELD " 70 TAILPIECE Page 73 "The number of those who really think seriously before they begin to write is small; extremely few of them think about _the subject itself;_ the remainder think only about the books that have been written on it."--ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER. GARDEN DESIGN[1] [1] _The Formal Garden in England._ By Reginald Blomfield and F. Inigo Thomas. London: Macmillan and Co. A beautiful house in a fair landscape is the most delightful scene of the cultivated earth--all the more so if there be an artistic garden--the rarest thing to find! The union--a happy marriage it should be--between the house beautiful and the ground near it is worthy of more thought than it has had in the past, and the best ways of effecting that union artistically should interest men more and more as our cities grow larger and our lovely English landscape shrinks back from them. The views of old writers will help us little, for a wholly different state of things has arisen in these mechanical days. My own view is that we have never yet got from the garden, and, above all, the home landscape, half the beauty which we may get by abolishing the needless formality and geometry which disfigure so many gardens, both as regards plan and flower planting. Formality is often essential in the plan of a flower garden near a house--_never_ as regards the arrangements of its flowers or shrubs. To array these in lines or rings or patterns can only be ugly wherever done! That men have never yet generally enjoyed the beauty that good garden design may give is clear from the fact that the painter is driven from the garden! The artist dislikes the common garden with its formality and bedding; he cannot help hating it! In a country place he will seek anything but the garden, but may, perhaps, be found near a wild Rose tossing over the pigsty. This dislike is natural and right, as from most flower gardens the possibility of any beautiful result is shut out! Yet the beautiful garden exists, and there are numbers of cottage gardens in Surrey or Kent that are as "paintable" as any bit of pure landscape! [Illustration: _Rhianva. Terraced garden, but with picturesque planting and flower gardening_] Why is the cottage garden often a picture, and the gentleman's garden near, wholly shut out of the realm of art, a thing which an artist cannot look at long? It is the absence of pretentious "plan" in the cottage garden which lets the flowers tell their tale direct; the simple walks going where they are wanted; flowers not set in patterns; the walls and porch alive with flowers. Can the gentleman's garden then, too, be a picture? Certainly; the greater the breadth and means the better the picture should be. But never if our formal "decorative" style of design is kept to. Reform must come by letting Nature take her just place in the garden. [Illustration: _Group of trees on garden lawn at Golder's Hill, Hampstead; picturesque effect in suburban garden_] NATURAL AND FALSE LINES After we have settled the essential approaches, levels, and enclosures for shelter, privacy, or dividing lines around a house, the natural form or lines of the earth herself are in nearly all cases the best to follow, and in my work I face any labour to get the ground back into its natural level or fall where disfigured by ugly banks, lines, or angles. In the true Italian garden on the hills we have to alter the natural line of the earth or "terrace" it, because we cannot otherwise cultivate the ground or move at ease upon it. Such steep ground exists in many countries, and where it does, a like plan must be followed. The strictly formal in such ground is as right in its way as the lawn in a garden in the Thames valley. But the lawn is the heart of the true English garden, and as essential as the terrace is to the gardens on the steep hills. English lawns have too often been destroyed that "geometrical" gardens may be made where they are not only needless, but harmful both to the garden and home landscape. Sometimes on level ground the terrace walls cut off the view of the landscape from the house, and, on the other hand, the house from the landscape! I hold that it is possible to get every charm of a garden and every use of a country-seat without sacrifice of the picturesque or beautiful; that there is no reason why, either in the working or design of gardens, there should be a single false line in them. By this I mean hard and ugly lines such as the earth never follows, as say, to mention a place known to many, the banks about the head of the lake in the Bois de Boulogne. These lines are seen in all bad landscape work, though with good workmen I find it is as easy to form true and artistic lines as false and ugly ones. Every landscape painter or observer of landscape will know what is meant here, though I fear it is far beyond the limits of the ideas of design held by the authors of the _Formal Garden_. Also, that every charm of the flower garden may be secured by avoiding wholly the knots and scrolls which make all the plants and flowers of a garden, all its joy and life, subordinate to the wretched conventional design in which they are "set out." The true way is the opposite. We should see the flowers and feel the beauty of plant forms, with only the simplest possible plans to ensure good working, to secure every scrap of turf wanted for play or lawn, and for every enjoyment of a garden. [Illustration: _Wakehurst. Elizabethan house with grounds not terraced_] "UNCULTIVATED NATURE" Such views I have urged, and carry them out when I can, in the hope of bringing gardening into a line with art, from which it is now so often divorced. It is natural that these views should meet with some opposition, and the consideration of the _Formal Garden_ gives the opportunity of examining their value. The question, briefly stated, is this: Are we, in laying out our gardens, to ignore the house, and to reproduce uncultivated Nature to the best of our ability in the garden? Or are we to treat the house and garden as inseparable factors in one homogeneous whole, which are to co-operate for one premeditated result? No sane person has ever proposed to ignore the house. So far from ignoring the house in my own work, where there is a beautiful house it tells me what to do! Unhappily, the house is often so bad that nothing can prevent its evil effect on the garden. "_Reproducing uncultivated Nature_" is no part of good gardening, as the whole reason of a flower garden is that it is a home for cultivated Nature. It is the special charm of the garden that we may have beautiful natural objects in their living beauty in it, but we cannot do this without care and culture to begin with! Whether it be Atlas Cedar or Eastern Cypress, Lily-tree or American Mountain Laurel, all must be cared for at first, and we must know their ways of life and growth if we are to treat them so that they will both grow well and be rightly placed--an essential point. And the more precious and rare they are the better the place they should have in the flower garden proper or pleasure ground,--places always the object of a certain essential amount of care even under the simplest and wisest plans. If we wish to encourage "uncultivated Nature" it must surely be a little further afield! A wretched flowerless pinched bedding plant and a great yellow climbing Tea Rose are both cultivated things, but what a vast difference in their beauty! There are many kinds of "cultivated Nature," and every degree of ugliness among them. Sir C. Barry's idea was that the garden was gradually to become less and less formal till it melted away into the park. Compromises such as these, however, will be rejected by thoroughgoing adherents of the formal gardens who hold that the garden should be avowedly separated from the adjacent country by a clean boundary line, a good high wall for choice. (_The Formal Garden._) Would any one put this high wall in front of Gilbert White's house at Selborne, or of Golder's Hill at Hampstead, or many English houses where the erection of a high wall would cut off the landscape? Not a word about the vast variety of such situations, each of which would require to be treated in a way quite different from the rest! There are many places in every county that would be robbed of their best charms by separating the garden from the adjacent country by a "good high wall." [Illustration: _Gilbert White's house at Selborne. Example of many gardens with lawn coming to windows and flowers on its margin_] The custom of planting avenues and cutting straight lines through the woods surrounding the house to radiate in all directions was a departure from that strictly logical system which separated the garden from the park, and left the latter to take care of itself, a system which frankly subordinated Nature to art within the garden wall, but in return gave Nature an absolutely free hand outside it. (_The Formal Garden._) Nature an "_absolutely free hand_"! Imagine a great park or any part of an estate being left to Nature with an "absolutely free hand"! If it were, in a generation there would be very little to see but the edge of the wood. Callous to the beauty of English parks, he does not know that they are the object of much care, and he abuses all those who ever formed them, Brown, Repton, and the rest. [Illustration: _Example of formal gardening, with clipped trees and clipped shrubs in costly tubs_] THE TRUE LANDSCAPE Mr. Blomfield writes nonsense, and then attributes it to me-- that is to say, we go to Claude, and having saturated our minds with his rocks and trees, we return to Nature and try to worry her into a resemblance to Claude. I am never concerned with Claude, but seek the best expression I can secure of our beautiful English real landscapes, which are far finer than Claude's. At least I never saw any painted landscape like them--say that from the Chestnut Walk at Shrubland, looking over the lovely Suffolk country. That is the precious heritage we have to keep. And that is where simple and picturesque gardening will help us by making the garden a beautiful foreground for the true landscape, instead of cutting it off with a "high wall" or anything else that is ugly and needless. The lawns are not to be left in broad expanse, but to have Pampas Grasses, foreign shrubs, etc., dotted about on the surface. I have fought for years against the lawn-destruction by the terrace-builders and bedding-out gardeners! But how are we to have our lawns in "broad expanse" if we build a high wall near the house to cut off even the possibility of a lawn? This has been done in too many cases to the ruin of all good effect and repose, often to shut out as good landscapes as ever were painted! There are flagrant cases in point to be found in private gardens in the suburbs of London. There is much bad and ignorant landscape work as there is bad building everywhere, but errors in that way are more easily removed than mistakes in costly and aimless work in brick and stone. At Coombe Cottage, when I first saw its useless terrace wall shutting out the beautiful valley view from the living rooms, I spoke of the error that had been made, but the owner thought that, as it had cost him a thousand pounds, he had better leave it where it was! BUILDINGS IN RELATION TO THE GARDEN The place of formal gardening is clear for ever. The architect can help the gardener much by building a beautiful house! That is his work. The true architect, it seems to me, would seek to go no farther. The better the real work of the architect is done, the better for the garden and landscape. If there are any difficulties of level about the house beautiful, they should be dealt with by the architect, and the better his work and the necessary terracing, if any, are done, the pleasanter the work of the landscape or other gardener who has to follow him should be. [Illustration: _Longleat. Type of nobler English country seat with old house and picturesque planting_] That a garden is made for plants is what most people who care for gardens suppose. If a garden has any use, it is to treasure for us beautiful flowers, shrubs, and trees. In these days--when our ways of building are the laughing-stock of all who care for beautiful buildings--there is plenty for the architect to do without spoiling our gardens! Most of the houses built in our time are so bad, that even the best gardening could hardly save them from contempt. Our garden flora is now so large, that a life's work is almost necessary to know it. How is a man to make gardens wisely if he does not know what has to be grown in them? I do not mean that we are to exclude other men than the landscape gardener proper from the garden. We want all the help we can get from those whose tastes and training enable them to help us--the landscape painter best of all, if he cares for gardens and trees--the country gentleman, or any keen student and lover of Nature. The landscape gardener of the present day is not always what we admire, his work often looking more like that of an engineer. His gardening near the house is usually a repetition of the decorative work of the house, of which I hope many artistic people are already tired. And as I think people will eventually see the evil and the wastefulness of this "decorative" stuff, and spend their money on really beautiful and artistic things, so I think the same often-repeated "knots" and frivolous patterns must leave the artistic garden, and simpler and dignified forms take their place. To endeavour to apply any one preconceived plan or general idea to every site is folly, and the source of many blunders. The authors are not blind to the absurdities of the architectural gardeners, and say, on page 232:-- Rows of statues were introduced from the French, costly architecture superseded the simple terrace, intricate parterres were laid out from gardeners' pattern books, and meanwhile the flowers were forgotten. It was well that all this pomp should be swept away. We do not want this extravagant statuary, these absurdities in clipped work, this aggressive prodigality. But though one would admit that in its decay the formal garden became unmanageable and absurd, the abuse is no argument against the use. Certainly not where the place calls for it, and all absolutely necessary stone-work about a house should be controlled by the architect; beyond that, nothing. To let him lay out our home landscapes again with lines of trees, as shown in the old Dutch books, and with no regard to landscape design and to the relations of the garden to the surrounding country, would be the greatest evil that could come to the beautiful home landscapes of Britain. [Illustration: _Old Place, Lindfield. Picturesque garden of old English house, admitting of charming variety in its vegetation_] TIME AND GARDENS Not one word of the swift worker, Time! Its effect on gardens is one of the first considerations. Fortress-town, castle, and moat all without further use! In old days gardens had to be set within the walls; hence, formal in outline, though often charming inside. To keep all that remains of such should be our first care; never to imitate them now! Many old gardens of this sort that remain to us are far more beautiful than the modern formal gardening, which by a strange perversity has been kept naked of plants or flower life! When safety came from civil war, then came to us the often beautiful Elizabethan house, free of all moat or trace of war. At one time it was rash to make a garden away from the protecting walls. Now, any day in a country place beautiful situations may be found for certain kinds of gardens far away from the house, out of sight of it often. [Illustration: _Arundel Castle. Example of situation in which a certain amount of terracing is essential. This does not necessarily mean that the vegetation around should be in formal lines, as much better and more artistic effects are obtained otherwise_] Again, in the home fighting days there was less art away from the home. Rugged wastes and hills; vast woodland districts near London; even small houses moated to keep the cattle from wolves--fear of the rough hills and woods! In those days an extension of the decorative work of the house into the garden had some novelty to carry it off, while the kinds of cultivated trees and shrubs were few. Hence if the old gardeners wanted an evergreen line, hedge, or bush of a certain height, they clipped an evergreen tree into the size they wanted. Notwithstanding this we have no evidence that anything like the geometrical monotony often seen in our own time existed then. To-day the ever-growing city, pushing its hard face over the once beautiful land, should make us wish more and more to keep such beauty of the earth as may be still possible to us. The horror of railway embankments, where were once the beautiful suburbs of London, cries to us to save all we can save of the natural beauty of the earth. [Illustration: Tailpiece] TRUE USE OF A GARDEN It is surely flying in the face of Nature to fill our gardens with tropical plants, as we are urged to do by the writers on landscape gardening, ignoring the entire difference of climate and the fact that a colour which may look superb in the midst of other strong colours will look gaudy and vulgar amongst our sober tints, and that a leaf like that of the Yucca, which may be all very well in its own country, _is out of scale and character_ amidst the modest foliage of our English trees. (_The Formal Garden._) A passage full of nonsense! The true use and first reason of a garden is to keep and grow for us plants _not_ in our woods and mostly from other countries than our own! The Yucca, we are told by the authors, is a "plant out of scale and character among the modest foliage of our English trees"! The Yuccas of our gardens are natives of the often cold plains of Eastern America, hardy in, and in every way fitted for, English gardens, but _not_ amidst English trees. Is the aim of the flower-garden to show the "modest foliage" of English trees when almost every country house is surrounded by our native woods? According to such childish views, the noble Cedars in the park at Goodwood and on the lawn at Pain's Hill are out of place there! What is declared by Mr. Blomfield to be absurd is the soul of true gardening--to show, on a small scale it may be, some of the precious and inexhaustible loveliness of vegetation on plain or wood or mountain. This is the necessary and absolutely only true, just and fair use of a garden! [Illustration: _West Dean. Example of country seat in which terracing is needless, and in which turf may and indeed must often come to at least one side of the house_] FORMAL GARDENING The very name of the book is a mistake. "Formal gardening" is rightly applied only to the gardens in which both the design and planting were formal and stupidly formal like the upper terrace of the Crystal Palace, Kensington Gore, as laid out by Nesfield, Crewe Hall; and Shrubland, as laid out by Barry, in which, as in others of these architects' gardens, strict orders were given that no plants were to be allowed on the walls. The architect was so proud of his design, that he did not want the gardener at all, except to pound up bricks to take the place of flower colour! It may be necessary to explain to some that this pounded brick and tile in lieu of colours has frequently been laid down in flower-gardens in our own day. To old gardens like Haddon and Rockingham, in which the vegetation about the house is perfectly free and natural in form, the term "formal gardening" is quite unfitted. But those who attack the old English formal garden do not take the trouble to understand its very considerable differences from the Continental gardens of the same period. No one has "attacked" old English gardens. Part of my work has been to preserve much record of their beauty. The necessary terraces round houses like Haddon may be and are as beautiful as any garden ever made by man. Can anything be more unlike than the delicate veil of beautiful climbers and flowers over the grey walls of the courtyard at Ightham Mote and the walls of some gardens of our own day? The great dark rock-like feudal Berkeley is clad with Fig and Vine and Rose as far as they can reach. No trace in these old gardens of the modern "landscape architect," who said, My walls are not made for plants, and for my beds I prefer coloured brick! [Illustration: _Athelhampton Hall, Dorset. Old English house with trees in their natural form_] What, then, is the kind of "Formal Gardening" that is bad? It is the purely formal or stone garden made for its own sake, often without a shadow of excuse. The garden of the Crystal Palace in part; the stone garden at the head of the Serpentine; Versailles; the Grand Trianon; Caserta, Schönbrunn are among the public gardens of Europe where this kind of garden is seen. Great harm has come to many a fair English lawn through this system. Let us learn by one instance, easily seen, the harm done in formal gardening, even where the ground called for an amount of terracing not usual in the plains and mostly gentle lawns of England--I mean the flower-garden at Shrubland Park, laid out by Sir Charles Barry, of which I have recently altered the plan and which I planted with graceful life where I found bare walls. We will assume that the main terrace lines here are right, as the place stands on a bluff, and speak of a secondary evil of this formal gardening, which arose, I think, about the time Barry laid out Shrubland. That was that the walls of the house or garden were _not_ to be graced by plants, and that to secure the keeping of the design, coloured gravels were to take the place of flowers. This rule, as is well known, has been carried out in many gardens--it was rigid here. I see it in some of the new gardens, and in asking at Worth Park why a long terra-cotta wall had not climbers on it, was told the designer would not allow it! Yet Nature clothes the rock walls with beautiful life, even to the snow line, where the gems of the flower world stain the rocks with loveliest flowers. The crag walls of every alpine valley are her gardens; the Harebells toss their azure bells from the seams of the stones in the bridges across the mountain streams; the ruins of the temples of the great peoples of old, who really could build nobly, grow many a wild flower. Even when we take the stone and build with it, tender colours of lowly plants soon come and clothe the stone. But the maker of these miserable garden walls, without use or need, says in effect, _Here Nature shall not come to hide my cleverness. I have built walls, and bare they must be!_ Well, with this bareness of the wall there were the usual geometrical pattern beds, many filled with sand and broken stone, and only very low and formal beds of flowers pinched into very low carpets, with much Box often edging beds a foot across. When I first went one spring day with Mr. Saumarez, we saw a large showy bed, and on going near, found it composed of pieces of broken brick painted yellow, blue, and red! So, apart from needless formality of design and bare walls where no walls were wanted, there was often an ugly formality of detail, a senseless attempt to leave Nature out of the garden, an outrage against all that ever has or ever can make a garden delightful throughout the year by ruling that even the walls of the house should not shelter a Rose! And that is only part of what we get by letting "builders and decorators" waste precious means in stone that should be devoted to the living treasures of garden, lawn, or wood. [Illustration: _The formal garden, with its insistence on strong bounding lines, is, strictly speaking, the only "garden" possible._--R. F. BLOMFIELD _The Vicarage Garden, Odiham. One of numerous British gardens in which the conditions here declared to be essential are absent_] "NATURE" AND WHAT WE MEAN BY IT As to a natural school of landscape gardening, the authors say: A great deal is said about Nature and her beauty, and fidelity to Nature, and so on; but as the landscape gardener never takes the trouble to state precisely what he means by Nature, and, indeed, prefers to use the word in half a dozen different senses, we are not very much the wiser so far as principles are concerned. They make this statement as if all beautiful natural landscape were a closed book; as if there were no stately Yews, in natural forms, on the Merrow Downs, as well as clipped Yews at Elvaston; as if the tree-fringed mountain lawns of Switzerland did not exist; or lovely evergreen glades on the Californian mountains, or wild Azalea gardens on those of Carolina, or even naturally-grown Planes in London squares. There are many gardens and parks which clearly show what is meant by the "natural" style; and though, like others, this art is too often imperfect, we have so many instances of its success, that it is curious to find any one shutting his eyes to them. There are lessons in picturesque gardening in every country in Europe and in many parts of North America. Mr. Olmstead's work in America and Mr. Robert Marnock's in England teach them; they may be learnt in many English gardens--from Sir Richard Owen's little garden in Richmond Park to Dunkeld--even small rectory and cottage gardens, wholly free of architectural aids, show the principle. It was but a few weeks ago, in the garden of the English Embassy in Paris, that I was struck with the simplicity of the lawn and plan of the garden there, and its fitness for a house in a city. To support their idea that there is and can be no natural school of landscape gardening, the authors suppose what does not exist, and describe A piece of ground laid out with a studied avoidance of all order, all balance, all definite lines, and the result a hopeless disagreement between the house and its surroundings. This very effect can be seen in the efforts of the landscape gardener, and in old country houses, such as Barrington Court, near Langport, where the gardens have not been kept up. Here, instead of taking one of the many good examples in Britain, they take poor, beautiful old Barrington, now an ill-kept farmhouse, with manure piled against the walls and the ceiling of the dining-room propped up with a Fir pole! The foolish proposition here laid down, that, because a garden is picturesque there must necessarily be a "_studied avoidance of all order, all balance, all definite lines_," is disproved by hundreds of gardens in England. Why did not the authors take Miss Alice de Rothschild's garden at Eythorpe, or any beautiful and picturesque English garden, to compare with their results in stone and clipped and aligned trees? [Illustration: _Unclipped trees at the Little Trianon. (Compare with cut on p. 52.)_] "ALL OUR PATHS" ARE CROOKED! For instance, because Nature is assumed never to show straight lines, all paths are to be made crooked; because in a virgin forest there are no paths at all, let us in our acre and a half of garden make as little of the paths as possible. Deception is a primary object of the landscape gardener. (_The Formal Garden._) This, too, in the face of the facts of the case, of proof ready for the authors, in gardens in every country, from Prospect Park at Brooklyn to the English park at Munich. The fact that the Phoenix Park at Dublin is laid out in a fine, picturesque way does not forbid a great straight road through it--a road finer than in any strait-laced park in France. The late Robert Marnock was the best landscape gardener I have known, and I never saw one of his many gardens where he did not make an ample straight walk where an ample straight walk was required--as, indeed, many may remember is the case in the Botanic Gardens in the Regent's Park, laid out by him. Again, Nature is said to prefer a curved line to a straight, and it is thence inferred that all the lines in a garden, and especially paths, should be curved. The utter contempt for design of the landscape gardener is shown most conspicuously in his treatment of paths. He lays them about at random, and keeps them so narrow that they look like threads, and there is barely room to walk abreast. The opposite of this is indeed the truth, for many gardens and parks laid out with some regard to landscape beauty are partly spoiled by the size and number of the walks, as in the gardens around Paris--the Parc Monceau and Buttes Chaumont, for instance. The slightest knowledge of gardens would show that walks like threads are no necessary part of landscape gardening! [Illustration: _Westonbirt_] This error shows well the effect of men reading and writing about what they have not seen. The axiom on which landscape gardening rests is declared by Messrs. Blomfield and Thomas to be _Whatever Nature does is right; therefore let us go and copy her (p. 5)._ Here is a poor sneer at true art, not only at art in landscape gardening, but in all the fine arts. The central and essential idea of the landscape art is choice of what is beautiful--not taking the salt waste in Utah, or a field of weeds, or a Welsh slope of decayed slate, or the bog of Allen, or the thousand other things in Nature that are monotonous or dull to us, even though here and there beautiful as a wide bog may be. We can have in a garden a group of Scotch Firs as good in form as a fine group in wild Nature, and so of the Cedar of Lebanon and many of the lovely trees of the world. We can have bits of rock alive with alpine flowers, or pieces of lawn fringed with trees in their natural forms and as graceful as the alpine lawns on the Jura. So of all other true art. The Venus of Milo is from a noble type of woman--not a mean Greek. The horses of the Parthenon are the best types of Eastern breed, full of life and beauty, not sickly beasts. Great landscape painters like Corot, Turner, and Troyon show us in their work the absurdity of this statement so impertinently used. They seek not ugly things because they are natural, but beautiful combinations of field, and hill, wood, water, tree, and flower, and grass, selecting groupings which go to make good composition, and then waiting for the most beautiful effects of morning, evening, or whatever light suits the chosen subject best, so give us lovely pictures! But they work always from faithful study of Nature and from stores of knowledge gathered from Nature study, and that is the only true path for the landscape gardener; as all true and great art can only be based on the eternal laws of Nature. "THE ONLY GARDEN POSSIBLE!" The word "garden" itself means an enclosed space, a garth or yard surrounded by walls, as opposed to unenclosed fields and woods. The formal garden, with its insistence on strong bounding lines, is, strictly speaking, the only "garden" possible. All other gardens are, of course, impossible to the authors--the Parc Monceau, the informal gardens about Paris, Glasnevin, the Botanic Gardens in Regent's Park and at Sheffield, Golder's Hill, Greenlands, Pendell Court, Rhianva, and the thousand cottage, rectory, and other British gardens where no wall is seen! The Bamboo garden at Shrubland, the Primrose garden at Munstead, the rock and other gardens, which we must keep in quiet places away from any sight of walls, are all "_impossible_" to these authors! How much better it would be for every art if it were impossible for men to write about things of which by their own showing they have not even elementary knowledge! [Illustration: _Thrumpton Hall. A type of numerous English gardens with informal planting_] And the sketches in the book show us what these possible gardens are! They are careful architects' drawings, deficient in light and shade; not engraved, but reproduced by a hard process, some being mere reproductions of old engravings; and diagrams of old "knots" and "patterns," with birds and ships perched on wooden trellises, without the slightest reference to any human or modern use. A curious one of Badminton will show fully the kind of plan the authors wish to see revived. Some of the illustrations show the evils of the system which the authors advocate, notably one of Levens Hall, Westmoreland, a very interesting and real old garden. Interesting as it is from age, the ugliness of the clipped forms takes away from the beauty of the house. Even in sketches of gardens like Montacute and Brympton, the beauty of the gardens is not well shown. The most interesting drawings, it is not surprising to find, are the informal ones! Many of the others show the _evil_, not the good, of the system advocated, by their hard lines and the emphasising of ugly forms. "NO DESIGN IN LANDSCAPE" Horticulture stands to garden design much as building does to architecture. This book has been written entirely from the standpoint of the designer, and therefore contains little or no reference to the actual methods of horticulture. Throughout the book it is modestly assumed that there can be no "design" in anything but in lines of stone, and clipped trees to "harmonise" with the stone, and to bring in "order" and "balance." A Longleat, Highclere or Little Trianon, or any of the many English places which are planted in picturesque ways can show no design; but a French town, with its wretched lines of tortured Limes, is "pure" and "broad" in design. _The naiveté_ of the book in this respect is often droll. One amusing passage is on p. 54:-- However rich the details, there is no difficulty in grasping the principle of _a garden laid out in an equal number of rectangular plots_. Everything is straightforward and logical; you are not bored with hopeless attempts to master the bearings of the garden. This is the kitchen gardener's view, and that of the market gardener of all countries, but the fun is in calling the idea of it "_grasping a principle_"! At this rate makers of chessboards have strong claims to artistic merit! No wonder that men who call a "principle" the common way of setting out kitchen and cabbage gardens from Pekin to Mortlake can see no design in the many things that go to make a beautiful landscape! Equally stupid is the assumption, throughout the book, that the people the authors are pleased to term "landscapists" flop their houses down in the Grass, and never use low walls for dividing lines, nor terraces where necessary, never use walls for shelter or privacy, have no "order" or "balance," and presumably allow the Nettles to look in at the windows, and the cattle to have a fine time with the Carnations! [Illustration: Tailpiece] NO GRASS IN LANDSCAPE GARDENING! The following glaring piece of injustice is due to want of the most elementary consideration of garden design:-- Grass-work as an artistic quantity can hardly be said to exist in landscape gardening. It is there considered simply as so much background to be broken up with shrubs and Pampas Grass and irregular beds (p. 135). The opposite of this is the fact. Grass-work as an "artistic quantity" did not exist in anything like the same degree before landscape gardening. One of the faults of the formal style of gardening still seen in France and Austria is that there is little or no Grass. Compare the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with the Parc Monceau, or the many other gardens about Paris in which Grass is an "artistic quantity." One of the most effective reasons indeed for adopting the English landscape garden was that it gave people some fresh and open Grass, often with picturesque surroundings, and, nowadays, one can hardly travel on the continent and not see some pleasant results of this. In England, the landscape gardeners and writers have almost destroyed every trace of the stiff old formal gardens, and we cannot judge the ill effects of the builder's garden so easily as in France. As a rule, the want of rest and freshness in tropical and sub-tropical gardens is due to the absence of those broad and airy breadths of greensward which, in gardens at least, are largely due to landscape gardening. Think of Warwick without its turf and glorious untrimmed Cedars! [Illustration: _Goodwood. Example of large English places in which the grass sweeps up to the house_] Consider the difference between a picturesque landscape like the Emperor of Austria's stately garden at Laxenberg, near Vienna, and the gardens in the same city formed of miserable clipped trees in lines! Grass as an "artistic quantity" is finely visible at Laxenberg; in the old clipped gardens gravel and distorted trees are the only things seen in quantity--we cannot call it "artistic." "Landscapist" is used throughout the book as a term of contempt. The authors take some of the worst work that is possible, and condemn all in the same opprobrious terms, as if we were to condemn the noble art of the builders of the Parthenon on seeing a "jerry" building in London. They may be quite sure that there _is_ a true and beautiful art of landscape gardening, notwithstanding their denunciations, and it is none the less real because there is no smug definition of it that pleases the minds of men who declare that it does not exist. The horticulturist and the gardener are indispensable, _but they should work under control_, and they stand in the same relation to the designer as the artist's colourman does to the painter, or, perhaps it would be fairer to say, as the builder and his workmen stand to the architect. What modesty! The men whose business it is to design gardens are heartily abused. How very graceful it would be on the part of one of them to write an essay telling architects how to build, and showing that to build well it is not necessary to know anything about the inhabitants or uses of a house! "IMPROVING" BATTERSEA PARK! Perhaps after the cemetery, the ugliest things in the fair land of France are the ugly old lines of clipped Limes which deface many French towns. Readers who have not seen these things can have no idea of their abominable hardness and ugliness, the natural form of the trees being destroyed, and deformed and hideous trees resulting from constant clipping. These gouty lines of clipped trees are praised as "noble walls" "pure and broad" in design, while Such a place, for instance, as Battersea Park is like a bad piece of architecture, full of details which stultify each other. The only good point in it is the one avenue, and this leads to nowhere. If this park had been planted out with groves and avenues of Limes, like the boulevard at Avallon, or the squares at Vernon, or even like the east side of Hyde Park between the Achilles statue and the Marble Arch, at least one definite effect would have been reached. There might have been shady walks, and noble walls of trees, instead of the spasmodic futility of Battersea Park. Battersea Park, like many others, may be capable of improvement; but here we have men who want to supplant its lawns, grassy playgrounds, and pretty retired gardens with Lime trees like those of a French town, and lines and squares of trees like those at Vernon, which I once saw half bare of leaves long before the summer was over! [Illustration: _Avenue in Paris. Showing that even in a land of clipped trees clipping is not essential_] The authors see with regret that the good sense of planters has for many years been gradually emancipated from the style (as old as the Romans and older) of planting in rows. It was the very early and in a very real sense a barbarous way. Since the days when country places were laid out "in a number of rectangular plots," whole worlds of lovely things have come to us--to give one instance only, the trees of California, Oregon, and the Rocky Mountains. For men to talk of designing homes for such things, who say they have no knowledge of them, is absurdity itself! [Illustration: _Clipped trees at the Little Trianon_] "_An unerring perception told the Greeks that the beautiful must also be the true, and recalled them back into the way. As in conduct they insisted on an energy which was rational, so in art and in literature they required of beauty that it, too, should be before all things rational._"--PROFESSOR BUTCHER, in _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius_. NATURE AND CLIPPED YEWS The remarks quoted below on Nature and the clipping shears are not from Josh Billings, but from _The Formal Garden_, of which the literary merit, we are told in the preface, belongs to Mr. Blomfield. A clipped Yew tree is as much a part of Nature--that is, subject to natural laws--as a forest Oak; but the landscapist, by appealing to associations which surround the personification of Nature, holds up the clipped Yew tree to obloquy as something against Nature. So far as that goes, it is no more unnatural to clip a Yew tree than to cut Grass. I believe we cut Grass when we want hay, or soft turf to play on, but disfiguring a noble tree is not a necessary part of our work either for our profit or pleasure. Perhaps, as is probable, Mr. Blomfield has never noticed what a beautiful tree a Yew in its natural form is. It is not only on the hills he may see them. If he will come and see them in my own garden in a high wind some day, or when bronzed a little with a hard winter, he may change his amusing notions about clipped Yews. I think I can give Mr. Blomfield a rational explanation of why it is foolish to clip so fair a tree or any _tree_. I clip Yews when I want to make a hedge of them, but then I am clipping a hedge, and not a tree. I hold up "the clipped Yew tree to obloquy," as the tree in its natural form is the most beautiful evergreen tree of our western world--as fine as the Cedar in its plumy branches, and more beautiful than any Cedar in the colour of its stem. In our own day we have seen trees of the same great order as the Yew gathered from a thousand hills--from British Columbia, through North America and Europe to the Atlas Mountains, and not one of them has yet proved to be so beautiful as our native Yew when it is allowed to grow unclipped root or branch. But in gardens the quest for the strange and exotic is so constant, that few give a fair chance to the Yew as a tree, while in graveyards where it is so often seen in a very old state, the frequent destruction of the roots in grave-digging prevents the tree from reaching its full stature and beauty, though there are Yews in English churchyards that have lived through a thousand winters. [Illustration: _The "Grange," Hartley Wintney_] I do not clip my Yews, because clipping destroys the shape of one of the most delightful in form of all trees, beautiful, too, in its plumy branching. It is not my own idea only that I urge here, but that of all who have ever thought of form, foremost among whom we must place artists who have the happiness of always drawing natural forms. Let Mr. Blomfield stand near one of the Cedar-like Yews by the Pilgrim's Way on the North Downs, and, comparing it with trees cut in the shape of an extinguisher, consider what the difference means to the artist who seeks beauty of form. Clipping such trees does not merely deserve "obloquy"; it is worse than idiotic, as there is a sad reason for the idiot's ways. If I use what in the Surrey nurseries are called "hedging Yews" to form a hedge, high or low, I must clip them to form my hedge, and go on doing so if I wish to keep it, or the hedge would soon show me that it was "subject to natural laws," and escape from the shears. What right have we to deform things given us so perfect and lovely in form? No cramming of Chinese feet into impossible shoes is half so wicked as the wilful distortion of the divinely beautiful forms of trees. The cost of this hideous distortion alone is one reason against it, as one may soon find out in places where miles of trees cut into wall-like shape have to be clipped, as at Versailles and Schönbrunn! This clipping is a mere survival of the day when gardens had very few trees, and it was necessary to clip the few they had to fit certain situations to conform to the architect's notion of "garden design." This is not design at all from any landscape point of view; and though the elements which go to form beautiful landscape, whether home landscape or the often higher landscape beauty of the open country, are often subtle, and though they are infinitely varied, they are none the less real. The fact that men when we had few trees clipped them into walls and grotesque shapes to make them serve their notions of "design" is surely not a reason why we, who have the trees of a thousand hills with trees of almost every size and shape among them, should violate and mutilate some of the finest natural forms! [Illustration: _A Yew Tree on Mountain, N. England_] Thus while it may be right to clip a tree to form a wall, dividing-line, or hedge, it is never so to clip trees grown as single specimens or groups, as by clipping such we only get ugly forms--unnatural, too. Last autumn, in Hyde Park, I saw a man clipping Hollies at the Rotten Row end of the Serpentine, and asking him why it was done, he said it was to "keep them in shape," though, to do him justice, he added that he thought it would be better to let them alone. Men who clip so handsome a tree as the Holly when taking no part in a hedge or formal line are blind to beauty of form. To tolerate such clipped forms is to prove oneself callous to natural beauty of tree form, and to show that we cannot even see ugliness. [Illustration: _Building in Paris. Showing that intimate association with buildings does not necessitate clipping or distortion of trees_] Take, again, the clipped Laurels by which many gardens and drives are disfigured. Laurel in its natural shape in the woods of west country or other places, where it is let alone, is often fine in form, though we may have too much of it. But it is planted everywhere without thought of its stature or fitness for the spot, and then it grows until the shears are called in, and we see nearly every day its fine leaves and free shoots cut short back into ugly banks and sharp, wall-like, or formless masses, disfiguring many gardens without the slightest necessity. There is no place in which it is used clipped for which we could not get shrubs quite suitable that would not need mutilation. It is not only clipped trees that are ugly, but even trees like the Irish Yew, Wellingtonia, and some Arbor-vitæ, which frequently assume shapes like extinguishers or the forms of clipped trees. It often happens that these, when over-planted or planted near houses, so emphasise ugly forms about the house, that there is no beauty possible in the home landscape. Many of such ugly, formless trees have been planted within the last generation, greatly to the injury of the garden landscape. In the old gardens, where, from other motives, trees were clipped when people had very few Evergreens or shrubs of any kind, or where they wanted an object of a certain height, they had to clip. It is well to preserve such gardens, but never to imitate them, as has been done in various English and American gardens. If we want shelter, we can get it in various delightful ways without clipping, and, while getting it, we can enjoy the beautiful natural forms of the finest Evergreens. Hedges and wall-like dividing lines of green living things will now and then be useful, and even may be artistically used; they are sometimes, however, used where a wall would be better, walls having the great advantage of not robbing the ground near. A wall is easily made into a beautiful garden with so many lovely things, too, from great scrambling yellow Roses to alpine flowers. To any one with the slightest sympathy with Nature or art these things need not be said. NO LINE IN NATURE! Now as a matter of fact in Nature--that is, in the visible phenomena of the earth's surface--there are no lines at all; "a line" is simply an abstraction which conveniently expresses the direction of a succession of objects which may be either straight or curved. "Nature" has nothing to do with either straight lines or curved; it is simply begging the question to lay it down as an axiom that curved lines are more "natural" than straight. Then men must never again talk of the "lines" of a ship! Perhaps Mr. Blomfield would accept a plumb line? One can hardly leave London an hour before a person who looks at the landscape may see the lines or boundaries between one mass and another. Who could stand amongst downs or an alpine valley and say there are no lines in them, inasmuch as one of the most visible and delightful things in all such cases is the beauty of those lines? This is the key of the whole question of landscape gardening. There is no good landscape gardening possible without a feeling for the natural gradation and forms of the earth. It can be seen in little things, like the slope of a field as well as in the slope of a mountain, and it is the neglect of this which leaves us so little to boast of in landscape work. In a country slightly diversified it is, of course, more important than in a perfectly flat one, but in all diversified ground no good landscape work can be done without regarding the natural gradation of the earth, which will often tell us what to do. It is blindness to this principle which makes so many people cut their roads and walks crudely through banks, leaving straight sharp sides--false lines, in fact--when a little care and observation would have avoided this and given a true and beautiful line for a road or walk. Once the necessary levels are settled and the garden walks by straight walls about the house are got away from, we soon come to ground which, whether we treat it rightly or not, will at once show whether the work done be landscape work or not. No plan, it seems to me, is so good as keeping to the natural form of the earth in all lawn, pleasure ground, and plantation work. Roads, paths, fences, plantations, and anything like wood will be all the better if we are guided by natural lines or forms, taking advantage of every difference of level and every little accident of the ground for our dividing lines and other beginnings or endings. In the absence of any guidance of this sort, what we see is brutal cutting through banks, lines like railway embankments--without the justification there is for the sharpness of a railway embankment--and ugly banks to roads, very often ugly in their lines too. If we are ever to have a school of true landscape gardening, the study and observation of the true gradation of the earth must be its first task. [Illustration: _Broadlands, Hants_] "VEGETABLE SCULPTURE"[2] [2] _Garden Craft, Old and New._ By John D. Sedding. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. This gentleman, unfortunately without any knowledge of plants, trees, or landscape beauty, launches out into the dreary sea of quotations from old books about gardens, and knows so little of where he is going, that he is put out of his course by every little drift of wind. One goes through chapter after chapter thinking to get to the end of the weary matter only to find again nothing but quotations, even to going back to an old book for a song. When at last we come to a chapter on "_Art in the Garden,_" this is what is offered us as sense on a charming subject, familiar to many, so that all may judge of the depth of this foolish talk about it! Such a writer discussing in this way a metaphysical or obscure subject might swim on in his inky water for ever, and no one know where he was! Let us here point to the fact, that any garden whatsoever is but Nature idealised, pastoral scenery rendered in a fanciful manner. It matters not what the date, size, or style of the garden, it represents an idealisation of Nature. _Real_ nature exists outside the artist and apart from him. The Ideal is that which the artist conceives to be an interpretation of the outside objects, or that which he adds to the objects. The garden gives imaginative form to emotions the natural objects have awakened in man. The _raison d'être_ of a garden is man's feeling the _ensemble_. But we cannot allow him to bring the false and confusing "art" drivel of the day into the garden without showing the absurdity of his ideas. [Illustration: _Warren House, Coombe Wood_] The illustrations are of the most wretched kind produced by some process, the only interesting one being one of Levens. The most childish ideas of the garden prevail--indeed we hardly like to call them childish, because children do put sensible questions and see clearly. For instance, for the author there is no art in gardening at all--the "art" consists entirely of building walls and planting Yew hedges. Thus the work of the late James Backhouse, who knew every flower on the hills of Northern England, and expressed that knowledge in his charming rock garden, is not art, but cutting a tree into the shape of a cocked hat _is_ art, according to Mr. Sedding! He assumes that landscape gardeners all follow artistic ways, and that only architects make terraces; whereas the greatest sinners in this respect have been landscape gardeners--Nesfield and Paxton. He has paid so little attention to the subject, that he says that the landscape gardener's only notion is to put Grass all around the house! It does not even occur to him that there may be Grass on one side of a house and gardens of various sorts at the others, as at Goodwood, Shrubland, Knole, and that a house may have at each side a different expression of landscape gardening! [Illustration: _Drummond Castle. Example of beautiful garden in Scotland, in position requiring terracing_] He takes the _English Flower Garden_ as the expression of landscape gardening practice; whereas the book, in all the parts that treat of design, is a protest against the formation by landscape gardeners of costly things which have nothing to do with gardening and nothing to do with true architecture. The good architect is satisfied with building a beautiful house, and that we are all the happier for. But what we have to deplore is that men who are not really architects, who are not gardeners, should cover the earth with rubbish like the Crystal Palace basins, the thing at the top of the Serpentine, and the Grand Trianon at Versailles. Here is a specimen of Mr. Sedding's knowledge of the landscape art. For the "landscape style" does not countenance a straight line, or terrace, or architectural form, or symmetrical beds about the house, for to allow these would not be to photograph Nature. As carried into practice, the style demands that the house shall rise abruptly from the Grass, and the general surface of the ground shall be _characterised by smoothness and bareness (like Nature!)_. If he had even taken the trouble to see a good garden laid out by Mr. Marnock or anybody worthy of the name of landscape gardener, he would find that they knew the use of the terrace very well. If he had taken the trouble to see one of my own gardens, he would find beds quite as formal, but not so frivolous as those described in the older books, and lines simple and straight as they can be. Where Barry left room for a dozen flowers at Shrubland I put one hundred; so much for the "_bareness_"! [Illustration: _Madresfield. Example of modern English garden_] On page 180 he says:-- I have no more scruple in using the scissors upon tree or shrub, where trimness is desirable, than I have in mowing the turf of the lawn that once represented a virgin world. There is a quaint charm in the results of the topiary art, in the prim imagery of evergreens, that all ages have felt. And I would even introduce Bizarreries on the principle of not leaving all that is wild and odd to Nature outside of the garden paling; and in the formal part of the garden _my Yews should take the shape of pyramids, or peacocks, or cocked hats, or ramping lions in Lincoln green, or any other conceit I had a mind to, which vegetable sculpture can take_. After reading this I saw again some of the true "vegetable sculpture" that I have been fortunate to see; Reed and Lily, a model for ever in stem, leaf, and bloom; the grey Willows of Britain, sometimes lovelier than Olives against our skies; many-columned Oak groves set in seas of Primroses, Cuckoo flowers and Violets; Silver Birch woods of Northern Europe beyond all grace possible in stone; the eternal garland of beauty that one kind of Palm waves for hundreds of miles throughout the land of Egypt,--a vein of summer in a lifeless world: the noble Pine woods of California and Oregon, like fleets of colossal masts on mountain waves--saw again these and many other lovely forms in garden and woodland, and then wondered that any one could be so blind to the beauty of plant and tree as to write as Mr. Sedding does here. From the days of the Greeks to our own time, the delight of all great artists has been to get as near this divine beauty as the material they work with permits. But this deplorable "_vegetable sculptor's_" delight is in distorting beautiful natural forms; and this in the one art in which we enjoy the living things themselves, and not merely representations of them! The old people from whom he takes his ideas were not nearly so foolish, as when the Yew tree was used as a shelter or a dividing line, and when a Yew was put at a garden door for shelter or to form a hedge, it was necessary to clip it if it was not to get out of all bounds. But here is a man delighting for its own sake in what he calls with such delicate feeling "_vegetable sculpture_," in "cocked hats" and "ramping lions"! [Illustration: Tailpiece] Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Minor punctuation errors and inconsistent hyphenation have been corrected without comment. All other variations in spelling and inconsistent hyphenation have been retained as they appear in the original book. 
45599	----	unkown source Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 45599-h.htm or 45599-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45599/45599-h/45599-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45599/45599-h.zip) Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). A WOMAN'S HARDY GARDEN * * * * * * [Illustration: Printer's Mark.] THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED TORONTO * * * * * * [Illustration: Rose Arch and Garden Walk. From a water-color sketch by George B. Bartholomew.] A WOMAN'S HARDY GARDEN by HELENA RUTHERFURD ELY With Illustrations from Photographs Taken in the Author's Garden by Professor C. F. Chandler New York The Macmillan Company London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. 1930 Copyright, 1903, By the Macmillan Company. All rights reserved--no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1903. Printed in the United States of America by Berwick & Smith Co. Dedication TO THE BEST FRIEND OF MY GARDEN, WHO, WITH HEART AND HANDS, HAS HELPED TO MAKE IT WHAT IT IS PREFACE This little book is only meant to tell briefly of a few shrubs, hardy perennials, biennials and annuals of simple culture. I send it forth, hoping that my readers may find within its pages some help to plant and make their gardens grow. MEADOWBURN FARM October, 1902 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Introduction 2 II. Hardy Gardening and Preparation of the Soil 9 III. Laying Out a Garden and Borders Around a House 19 IV. How to Plant a Small Plot 35 V. The Seed-bed 57 VI. Planting 65 VII. Annuals 75 VIII. Perennials 93 IX. Biennials and a Few Bedding-out Plants 117 X. Roses 125 XI. Lilies 139 XII. Spring-flowering Bulbs 149 XIII. Shrubs 159 XIV. Water, Walks, Lawns, Box-Edgings, Sun-dial and Pergola 171 XV. Insecticides. Tool-room 189 XVI. Conclusion 203 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Rose arch and garden walk _Frontispiece_ From a water-color sketch made by George D. Bartholomew Garden gate, with Japanese gourds 1 September twenty-ninth Broad grass walk 5 August twenty-fifth A shady garden walk 12 May thirty-first Asters blooming in a border 16 September fifteenth A clump of Valerian 19 June sixth _Rhododendron maximum_ and Ferns along north side of house, with _Ampelopsis Veitchii_ 23 July fourth Arch over Rose-walk covered with Golden Honeysuckle and _Clematis paniculata_ 26 September fifteenth _Rhododendron maximum_ under a cherry tree 30 July fourth Vase of Delphinium (Perennial Larkspur) 33 June twenty-first Vase of Peonies 39 June sixth _Lilium speciosum rubrum_ 42 September fifteenth Vase of Altheas 48 September sixteenth Planting on the edge of lawn 51 August second Asters in rows for picking 55 August twenty-fifth Foxgloves--seedlings ready for final transplanting 58 September twenty-ninth Long grass walk, with _Narcissus Poeticus_ blooming in the border 62 April twenty-sixth Long grass walk, with Peonies in the border 65 June sixth Long grass walk, with Foxgloves blossoming in the border 67 June thirteenth Long grass walk, with Hydrangeas; Rudbeckias in background 78 August twenty-fifth A single plant of Asters 80 September tenth Poppies growing in rows 83 July fourteenth A bowl of Cosmos 87 September twenty-ninth A mass of Phlox; Rudbeckias in the background 90 August second Hollyhocks in blossom 94 July twelfth A single plant of Delphinium (Perennial Larkspur) 97 June twenty-first Yuccas in blossom 103 July twelfth Bed of Peonies, on edge of lawn 106 June sixth A single plant of Phlox 112 August twenty-fifth Vase of Canterbury Bells 115 June twenty-first A single plant of Foxgloves, White Sweet William in front 119 June thirteenth Vase of Foxgloves 122 June fourteenth Summer-house covered with Clematis and Crimson Rambler Roses 126 June twenty-first Rose bed carpeted with Pansies 129 June twenty-first Canterbury Bells blooming in a border 133 June twenty-first _Lilium auratum_ growing behind Peonies and Columbines that bloomed earlier 140 August tenth Vase of _Lilium auratum_ 144 August second Vase of _Lilium speciosum album_ and _rubrum_ 147 September sixth Garden arch, covered with Japanese Gourds 151 August twenty-seventh Vase of Phlox; single blossoms actual size 154 August second _Spiræa Van Houttei_ 158 May thirty-first _Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora_ 161 August twenty-sixth Vase of _Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora_ 165 September tenth Vase of double Hardy Sunflowers (_Helianthus multiflorus plenus_) 172 September fifteenth Vase of Monkshood 176 September thirtieth Sun-dial in center of formal garden 179 August second The Pergola (first summer) 190 August twenty-fifth Tritoma (Red-Hot Poker Plant) 197 September twenty-eighth Bringing in the flowers 204 September sixth [Illustration: Garden gate, with Japanese gourds September twenty-ninth] INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Love of flowers and all things green and growing is with many men and women a passion so strong that it often seems to be a sort of primal instinct, coming down through generation after generation, from the first man who was put into a garden "to dress it and to keep it." People whose lives, and those of their parents before them, have been spent in dingy tenements, and whose only garden is a rickety soap-box high up on a fire-escape, share this love, which must have a plant to tend, with those whose gardens cover acres and whose plants have been gathered from all the countries of the world. How often in summer, when called to town, and when driving through the squalid streets to the ferries or riding on the elevated road, one sees these gardens of the poor. Sometimes they are only a Geranium or two, or the gay Petunia. Often a tall Sunflower, or a Tomato plant red with fruit. These efforts tell of the love for the growing things, and of the care that makes them live and blossom against all odds. One feels a thrill of sympathy with the owners of the plants, and wishes that some day their lot may be cast in happier places, where they too may have gardens to tend. [Illustration: Broad grass walk August twenty-fifth] It has always seemed to me that the punishment of the first gardener and his wife was the bitterest of all. To have lived always in a garden "where grew every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food," to have known no other place, and then to have been driven forth into the great world without hope of returning! Oh! Eve, had you not desired wisdom, your happy children might still be tilling the soil of that blessed Eden. The first woman longed for knowledge, as do her daughters of to-day. When the serpent said that eating of the forbidden fruit would make them "as gods," what wonder that Eve forgot the threatening command to leave untouched the Tree of Life, and, burning to be "wise," ate of the fateful apple and gave it to her Adam? And then, to leave the lovely place at the loveliest of all times in a garden, the cool of the day! Faint sunset hues tinting the sky, the night breeze gently stirring the trees, Lilies and Roses giving their sweetest perfume, brilliant Venus mounting her accustomed path, while the sleepy twitter of the birds alone breaks the silence. Then the voice of wrath, the Cherubim, the turning flaming sword! Through trials and tribulations and hardly learned patience, I have gained some of the secrets of many of our best hardy flowering plants and shrubs. Many friends have asked me to tell them when to plant or transplant, when to sow this or that seed, and how to prepare the beds and borders; in fact, this has occurred so often that it has long been in my mind to write down what I know of hardy gardening, that other women might be helped to avoid the experiments and mistakes I have made, which only served to cause delay. But just this "please write it down," while sounding so easy and presenting to the mind such a fascinating picture of a well-printed, well-illustrated and prettily bound book on the garden, is quite a different matter to one who has never written. When you diffidently try to explain the chaos in your brain, family and friends say, "Oh! never mind; just begin." That often-quoted "_premier pas_!" To-day is the first snow-storm of the winter, and, while sitting by the fireside, my thoughts are so upon my garden, wondering if this or that will survive, and whether the plants remember me, that it seems as though to-day I could try that first dreaded step. Living all my life, six months and sometimes more of each year, in the country,--real country on a large farm,--I have from childhood been more than ordinarily interested in gardening. Surrounded from babyhood with horses and dogs, my time as a little girl was spent out of doors, and whenever I could escape from a patient governess, whose eyes early became sad because of the difficulties of her task, I was either riding a black pony of wicked temper, or was to be found in a lovely garden with tall Arborvitæ hedges and Box-edged walks, in the company of an old gardener, one of my very best friends, who for twenty years ruled master and mistress, as well as garden and graperies. Under this old gardener, I learned, even as a child, to bud Roses and fruit trees, and watched the transplanting of seedlings and making of slips; watched, too, the trimming of grape-vines, fruit trees and shrubs; so that while still very young I knew more than many an older person of practical garden work. Then, as I grew older, the interests of a gay girl, and, later, the claims of early married life and the care of two fat and fascinating babies, absorbed my time and thoughts to the exclusion of the garden. But as the babies grew into a big boy and girl, the garden came to the front again, and, for more than a dozen years now, it has been my joy,--joy in summer when watching the growth and bloom, and joy in winter when planning for the spring and summer's work. There is pleasure even in making lists, reading catalogues of plants and seeds, and wondering whether this year my flowers will be like the pictured ones, and always, in imagination, seeing how the sleeping plants will look when robed in fullest beauty. HARDY GARDENING AND THE PREPARATION OF THE SOIL CHAPTER II HARDY GARDENING AND THE PREPARATION OF THE SOIL It has not been all success. I have had to learn the soil and the location best suited to each plant; to know when each bloomed and which lived best together. Mine is a garden of bulbs, annuals, biennials and hardy perennials; in addition to which there are Cannas, Dahlias and Gladioli, whose roots can be stored, through the winter, in a cellar. All the rest of the garden goes gently to sleep in the autumn, is well covered up about Thanksgiving time, and slumbers quietly through the winter; until, with the first spring rains and sunny days, the plants seem fairly to bound into life again, and the never-ceasing miracle of nature is repeated before our wondering eyes. I have no glass on my place, not even a cold-frame or hot-bed. Everything is raised in the open ground, except the few bedding plants mentioned whose roots are stored through the winter. Therefore, mine can truly be called a hardy garden, and is the only one I know at all approaching it in size and quantity of flowers raised, where similar conditions exist. [Illustration: A shady garden walk May thirty-first] I have observed that, with few exceptions, the least success with hardy perennials is found in the gardens of those of my friends whose gardeners are supposed to be the best, because paid the most. These men will grow wonderful Roses, Orchids, Carnations, Grapes, etc., under glass, and will often have fine displays of Rhododendrons. But to most of them the perennial or biennial plant, the old friend blossoming in the same place year after year, is an object unworthy of cultivation. Their souls rejoice in the bedding-out plant, which must be yearly renewed, and which is beautiful for so short a time, dying with the early frost, I was astounded last summer on visiting several fine places, where the gardeners were considered masters of their art, to see the poor planting of perennials and annuals. I recall particularly two Italian gardens, perfectly laid out by landscape gardeners, but which amounted to nothing because the planting was insufficient,--here a Phlox, there a Lily, then a Rose, with perhaps a Larkspur or a Marigold, all rigidly set out in single plants far apart, with nothing in masses, and no colour effects. To attain success in growth, as well as in effect, plants must be so closely set that when they are developed no ground is to be seen. If so placed, their foliage shades the earth, and moisture is retained. In a border planted in this way, individual plants are far finer than those which, when grown, are six inches or a foot apart. First of all in gardening, comes the preparation of the soil. Give the plants the food they need and plenty of water, and the blessed sunlight will do the rest. It is wonderful what can be done with a small space, and how from April to November there can always be a mass of bloom. I knew of one woman's garden, in a small country town,--house and ground only covering a lot hardly fifty by one hundred feet,--where, with the help of a man to work for her one day in the week and perhaps for a week each spring and fall, she raises immense quantities of flowers, both perennials and annuals. For six months of the year she has always a dozen vases full in the house, and plenty to give away. More than half the time her little garden supplies flowers for the church, while others in the same village owning large places and employing several men "have really no flowers." I remember returning once from a two weeks' trip, to find that my entire crop of Asters had been destroyed by a beetle. It was a horrid black creature about an inch long, which appeared in swarms, devoured all the plants and then disappeared, touching nothing else. Such a thing had never before happened in my garden. One of the men had sprayed them with both slug-shot and kerosene emulsion to no effect,--and so no Asters. My friend with the little garden heard me bemoaning my loss, and the next day sent me, over the five intervening miles, a hamper--almost a small clothes-basket--full of the beautiful things. It quite took my breath away. I wondered how she could do it, and thought she must have given me every one she had. Yet, upon driving over in hot haste to pour out thanks and regrets, lo! there were Asters all a-blow in such quantities in her garden that it seemed as if none had been gathered. Except by the sea-coast, our dry summers, with burning sun and, in many places, frequent absence of dew, are terribly hard on a garden; but with deep, rich soil, and plenty of water and proper care, it will yield an almost tropical growth. Therefore, whenever a bed or border is to be made, make it right. Unless one is willing to take the trouble properly to prepare the ground, there is no use in expecting success in gardening. I have but one rule: stake out the bed, and then dig out the entire space two feet in depth. Often stones will be found requiring the strength and labor of several men, with crowbars and levers, to remove them; often there will be rocks that require blasting. Stones and earth being all removed, put a foot of well-rotted manure in the bottom; then fill up with alternate layers, about four inches each, of the top soil, taken out of the first foot dug up, and of manure. Fill the bed or border very full, as it will sink with the disintegration of the manure. Finish off the top with three inches of soil. Then it is ready for planting. If the natural soil is stiff or clayey, put it in a heap and mix with one-fourth sand, to lighten it, before returning to the bed. Thus prepared, it will retain moisture, and not pack and become hard. [Illustration: Asters blooming in a border September fifteenth] LAYING OUT A GARDEN AND BORDERS AROUND THE HOUSE [Illustration: A clump of Valerian June sixth] CHAPTER III LAYING OUT A GARDEN AND BORDERS AROUND THE HOUSE Perplexities assail a would-be gardener on every side, from the day it is decided to start a garden. The most attractive books on the subject are English; and yet, beyond the suggestions for planting, and the designs given in the illustrations, not much help is to be derived in this latitude from following their directions. In England the climate, which is without great extremes of heat and cold, and the frequent rains, with the soft moist atmosphere, not only enable the English gardener to accomplish what would be impossible for us, but permit him to grow certain flowers out of doors that here must be housed in the winter. Daffodils and Narcissi bloom in England, near the coast, at the end of February and early in March,--Lilies-of-the-Valley in March. Many Roses live out of doors that would perish here during our winters. Gardening operations are begun there much earlier than in this part, at least, of the United States, and many of the methods for culture differ from those employed here. In England there is excess of moisture; therefore, care in securing good drainage is essential, while here, except in low places near streams, special provision for drainage is rarely necessary. It is more important to have a deep, rich preparation of the soil, so that plants may not be dried out. A serious part of the gardener's work during the average summer consists in judicious watering of the garden. One writer will say that this or that plant should have sun, another that it does best in the shade. One advocates a rich soil, another a light sandy soil; so that after all, in gardening, as in all else in life, experience is the best teacher, either your own or that of others who have already been successful under similar conditions. A garden is almost sure to be gradually increased in size, and its capacity limited only by the grounds of the owner and his pocket-book. The possibilities and capabilities of a couple of acres are great, and will give the owner unlimited pleasure and occupation. Individuality is one of the most marked of American characteristics; hence, in making a place, whether it is big or little, the tastes and individuality of the owner will generally direct his efforts, and no hard and fast rules can be given. In starting a garden, the first question, of course, is where to plant. If you are a beginner in the art, and the place is new and large, go to a good landscape gardener and let him give advice and make you a plan. But don't follow it; at least not at once, nor all at one time. Live there for a while, until you yourself begin to feel what you want, and where you want it. See all the gardens and places you can, and then, when you know what you want, or think you do, start in. The relation of house to grounds must always be borne in mind, and simplicity in grounds should correspond with that of the house. A craze for Italian gardens is seizing upon people generally, regardless of the architecture of their houses. To my mind, an Italian garden, with its balustrades, terraces, fountains and statues, is as inappropriate for surrounding a colonial or an ordinary country house as would be a Louis XV drawing-room in a farm-house. [Illustration: _Rhododendron maximum_ and Ferns along north side of house, with _Ampelopsis Veitchii_ July fourth] What is beautiful in one place becomes incongruous and ridiculous in another. Not long ago, a woman making an afternoon visit asked me to show her the gardens. Daintily balancing herself upon slippers with the highest possible heels, clad in a costume appropriate only for a fête at Newport, she strolled about. She thought it all "quite lovely" and "really, very nice," but, at least ten times, while making the tour, wondered "Why in the world don't you have an Italian garden?" No explanation of the lack of taste that such a garden would indicate in connection with the house, had any effect. The simple, formal gardens of a hundred years ago, with Box-edged paths, borders and regular Box-edged beds, are always beautiful, never become tiresome, and have the additional merit of being appropriate either to the fine country-place or the simple cottage. [Illustration: Plan for a Small Plot] For a small plot of ground, like the one before mentioned, the plan of which is on page 24, the matter is simple, because of the natural limitations. I love to see a house bedded, as it were, in flowers. This is particularly suitable for the usual American country house, colonial in style, or low and rambling. Make a bed perhaps four feet wide along three sides of the house,--south, east and west. Close against the house plant the vines. Every one has an individual taste in vines,--more so, perhaps, than in any other ornamental growth. If the house be of stone, and the climate not too severe, nothing is more beautiful than the English Ivy. It flourishes as far north as Princeton, New Jersey. I have never grown it, fearing it would be winter-killed. _Ampelopsis Veitchii_, sometimes called Boston Ivy, grows rapidly, clinging closely to the wall and turning a dark red in the autumn, and is most satisfactory. The Virginia Creeper, and the Trumpet Creeper, with its scarlet flowers, are both beautiful, perfectly hardy, and of rapid growth. All of these vines cling to stone and wood, and, beyond a little help for the first two or three feet, need not be fastened to the house. Care must be taken to prevent the vines growing too thickly to admit sun and air to the house. If the house be of wood, the question of repainting must be considered. Both the White and the Purple Wistaria, which can be twined about heavy wire and fastened at the eaves, Rambler Roses and Honeysuckles may be grown. They can be laid down, to permit painting. But, if the house be of wood and well covered with vines, put off the evil day of painting until it can be deferred no longer, and then have it done early in November. Never, never permit it to be done in the spring, or before November, unless you would take the risk of killing the vines or of losing at least a season's growth. The house surrounded by my gardens is colonial, something over a hundred and fifty years old, stern and very simple. Tall locusts, towering above the roof, and vines that cover it from ground to eaves, have taken away its otherwise puritanical and somewhat uncompromising aspect. These vines are mostly the ordinary Virginia Creeper, which I had dug from the woods and planted when the first fat baby was two months old. Now their main trunks are, in places, as large as my arm. They have never been laid down. Whenever the house has been repainted, I have been constantly by, and admonished the men to gently lift the heavy branches while painting under them, and not to paint the light tendrils. When the master-painter has remonstrated, that it was not a "good job" and took three times as long as if the vines were laid down, my reply has been, that "three times" was nothing in comparison with the years it had taken to grow them, and that stunting or killing the vines could never be a "good job." [Illustration: Arch over rose-walk, covered with Golden Honeysuckle and _Clematis paniculata_. September fifteenth] Among the creepers are the Crimson Rambler Rose and the Honeysuckle. In three years the Roses have grown above the second-story windows. _Clematis paniculata_, with its delicate foliage and mass of starry bloom in early autumn, is particularly good to plant by veranda posts in connection with other vines. It grows luxuriantly and is absolutely hardy. The large white-flowered Henryi and purple-flowered Jackmani Clematis, though of slow growth, should always have a place, either about a veranda, a summer-house or a trellis, for the sake of their beautiful flowers. While waiting for the hardy vines to make their first year's growth, the seeds of the Japanese Morning-Glory, the Japanese Moonflower and _Coboea scandens_ may be planted. All of these will grow at least ten feet in a summer, and cover the bare places. But I would not advise sowing them among the hardy vines, except the first summer. In their luxuriance they may suffocate the Roses and Clematis. The seeds of the Moonflower must be soaked in hot water, and left over night, before sowing. So much for the vines about a house. In front of the vines, and on the south side in the same bed, plant masses of Hollyhocks, from eight to twelve in a bunch, and Rudbeckia in bunches of not more than five, as they grow so large. Hollyhocks and Rudbeckias plant two feet apart; they will grow to a solid mass. In front of these, again, put a clump of Phloxes, seven in a bunch, and Larkspur, _Delphinium formosum_ being the best. On either side of the Delphinium have clumps of about a dozen _Lilium candidum_, which bloom at the same time. Edge the border with Sweet Williams, three kinds only,--white, pink and dark scarlet. I should not advise making all the borders around a house alike. The easterly one will be most lovely if planted with tall ferns or brakes, taken from near some stream in early April, before they begin to grow. These will become about four feet high if you get good roots and keep them wet. Plant in among them everywhere Auratum Lilies, and you will have a border that will fill your heart with joy. On the north side of the house it is not possible to have much success with vines, as they need the sun. They will grow, but not with great luxuriance. Here plant two rows of the common _Rhododendron maximum_, which grows in our woods. I crave pardon for calling it "common," since none that grows is more beautiful. In front of these plant ferns of all kinds from the woods, and edge the border with Columbines. If these Rhododendrons do not grow in your vicinity, they can be ordered from a florist. In the hills, about five miles from us, acres of them grow wild, and twice a year I send my men with wagons to dig them up. They stand transplanting perfectly if care is taken to get all the roots, which is not difficult, as they do not grow deep. Keep them quite wet for a week after planting, and never let them get very dry. A good plan is to mulch them in early June to the depth of six inches or more with the clippings of the lawn grass, or with old manure. When once well rooted, the Rhododendrons will last a lifetime. They seem to bear transplanting at any season. Some think they do best if taken when in full bloom. I have always done this in April or late October, and, of a wagon-load transplanted last October, all have lived. Many of these were like trees, quite eight feet tall and too large to be satisfactory about the house, so they were set among the evergreens in a shrubbery. [Illustration: _Rhododendron maximum_ under a Cherry tree July fourth] In cold localities, where the thermometer in winter falls below zero, Rhododendrons should be mulched with stable litter or leaves to the depth of one foot, after the ground has frozen. They should also have some protection from the winter sun, which can be easily given them by setting evergreen boughs of any kind into the ground here and there among them. Rhododendrons are as likely to be killed by alternate freezing and thawing of the ground in winter as by summer drought. The lovely _Azalea mollis_, and many beautiful varieties of imported Rhododendrons, are usually described as "hardy," but I cannot recommend them to those who live where the winters are severe. In such places their growth is very slow, and many perish. Maidenhair, the most beautiful of the hardy ferns, is to be found in quantities in many of our woods, particularly those covering hillsides. Their favorite spot is along the edges of mountain brooks. I know such a hillside, where Maidenhair Ferns are superb. But nothing would induce me to venture there again, since I have been told it was infested with rattlesnakes, and that the woodchoppers kill a number of them every year. This fact, too, gives me scruples about sending the men to dig them up, although it is an awful temptation. All ferns should be transplanted late in the autumn, or very early in the spring before the fronds are started, as they are very easily broken. This is particularly the case with ferns from wet places. When planted on the east or north side of a house, the tall ones at the back, and Maidenhair and other low varieties in front, they make a beautiful bank of cool green. They must be kept moist, however, to be successful, and in dry weather require a daily soaking. [Illustration: Vase of Delphinium (Perennial Larkspur) June twenty-first] The Cardinal Flower, whose natural haunt is along the banks of streams, and whose spikes are of the most beautiful red, can also be safely transplanted, and will bloom in deep, rich soil equally well in shade or sun and will be very effective among the Ferns. About the end of November, after cutting the dead stalks, cover each plant with a piece of sod, laid grass-side down. Remove this the first of April, and the little sprouts will soon appear above the ground. Cardinal Flowers bloom for nearly a month--during the last two weeks of August and first two weeks of September. HOW TO PLANT A SMALL PLOT CHAPTER IV HOW TO PLANT A SMALL PLOT I am frequently surprised to hear people say, "Oh, a flower garden is very nice, but such a trouble!" I have heard this expression several times from friends who employ a number of men and have large places with extensive lawns, shrubberies and vegetable gardens, but without flowers, except, perhaps, a few annuals growing among the vegetables. Yet no one is indifferent to the beauty of garden, or unobservant of the improvement which even a few flowers can make around the humblest cottage. Think of the pretty thatched cottages one sees everywhere in England and France, covered to the eaves with Roses and Clematis, and surrounded by flowers growing wherever they can find root in the tiny gardens. Yet all this is the result of only a half hour's daily care after the long day's work is done. One should begin with a few plants--perhaps a dozen only--and the "trouble" will soon become a delight, unless one is devoid of all love for flowers. [Illustration: Vase of Peonies June sixth] Whenever I hear remarks on the "trouble" of a flower garden, I think of those peasant homes, and also of a little plot grown and cared for by a certain tenant farmer's wife I know. She has six children, and must cook and bake and clean for four men in addition; yet, some time every day, she finds a few minutes to tend her flowers. She has a border along the fence four by fifty feet, filled with perennials; a border across the front of her house with Phlox and Funkias, and a couple of beds with Asters, Poppies, Balsams, Portulaca and Pinks. The perennials were given her, a few at a time. She separated the roots, saved the seeds to raise others, and has been able in this way to increase her borders. The seeds of the few annuals she buys do not cost more than a dollar a year. Thus, for a trifling expenditure and a short time every day, this woman makes her humble surroundings beautiful, while her soul finds an object upon which to expend its love of beauty, and her thoughts have a respite from the daily cares of life. Many people have the mistaken idea that a flower garden, however small, is an expensive luxury, and are so convinced of this, that they never venture any attempt at gardening, and pass their lives knowing nothing of its pleasures. Let us suppose some one is starting a suburban home in a simple way, and see how flowers can be had for many months at small cost. If one has a place in a town or village, the plot of ground not over fifty by two hundred feet, still the possibilities are great, and the owner can easily gather flowers for herself and her friends from April until mid-November. A house or cottage on such a piece of ground generally stands back from twenty to fifty feet, with a gravel or flagged walk running to the street. If the owner be a beginner in gardening and expects to do most of the work herself, let her commence with a few plants in a small space. As the plants thrive and become beautiful, the care of them will give an added pleasure to life, and, little by little, the beds and borders can be increased. In beginning to plant a small plot, the most natural place first is a border, say two feet wide, on either side of the walk leading from the house to the street. Have these borders dug out and made properly. Then, if the owner wishes to see them continually abloom, bulbs must be planted, to give the early spring flowers. Tulips can be had for eighty cents a hundred, _Narcissus Poeticus_ for sixty-five cents a hundred, and Yellow Daffodils for one dollar and twenty-five cents a hundred. Hyacinths are more expensive, and cost from four dollars a hundred up. If a hundred each of the Tulips, Narcissi, Hyacinths and Daffodils were planted they would make the borders lovely from early in April until late in May. The Daffodils will bloom first, then the Hyacinths, followed by the Narcissi, and the Tulips last, if care is taken to buy a late variety. There should certainly be three or four Peonies in the borders,--pink, white, and dark red; good roots of these can be had for about thirty-five cents each. Once planted, they should not be disturbed for years; and, although the first season they may not yield more than two or three blossoms, in each succeeding year the flowers will increase in number. A friend told me, not long ago, that she had counted sixty blossoms upon each of several of her plants. There should also be at least a dozen Columbines (Aquilegias) to bloom the end of May and the first of June. The roots of these can be bought for a dollar and a half a dozen, or they can be raised from seed; in the latter case, however, they would not bloom until the second year, being perennials. No border can be complete without Delphiniums (Larkspur). Good-sized roots of the _Delphinium formosum_, lovely dark blue, are a dollar and twenty-five cents a dozen. _Formosum Coelistina_, the light blue variety, is two dollars and a half a dozen. Then, of course, there must be other perennials,--Phlox, at least a dozen plants in the different colours, which will cost a dollar and a half. A few Lilies will add greatly to the beauty of the borders. Tiger Lilies, which are only sixty cents a dozen; Auratums, which can be had from eighty-five cents a dozen up, according to the size of the bulbs; _Speciosum rubrum_ from eighty-five cents a dozen up, and Candidums, or Madonna Lilies, a dollar and a half a dozen. German Iris, a dollar a dozen, and Japanese Iris, at a dollar and a quarter a dozen, should also have a place. [Illustration: _Lilium speciosum rubrum_ September fifteenth] Excellent Gladioli can be bought for a dollar and fifty cents a hundred, and these will be most satisfactory if planted in the border about May fifteenth in groups of six to ten. A dozen Chrysanthemums of the hardiest varieties to be obtained, and costing a dollar and a half a dozen, will, with the other plants mentioned, about fill two borders two feet wide by thirty long. It would also be well to sow the seeds of some Calendulas, Nasturtiums and Asters wherever there may be a vacant place. Or better, perhaps, sow the seeds in boxes in mid-April, and transplant to the border the early part of June. The first cost will be the only expense for these borders, except in the case of the Auratum Lilies, which will die out in about three years, and of the few flower seeds. The only care needed is to keep the borders free from weeds, to stir the soil every week, and to water after sunset in dry weather. It will be seen, from the following list, that such borders can easily be made and planted at a cost of less than thirty dollars. This can be reduced by omitting the Hyacinths. Directions for planting are given elsewhere. PRICE Tulips $0 80 Narcissi 65 Daffodils 1 25 Hyacinths 4 00 Peonies 1 40 Columbines 1 50 _Delphinium Formosum_ 1 25 _Delphinium Coelestina_ 2 50 Phlox 1 50 Tiger Lilies 60 Auratum 85 _Lilium rubrum_ 85 _Lilium candidum_ 1 50 Japanese Iris 1 25 _Iris Germanica_ 1 00 Chrysanthemums 1 50 Flower seeds 1 00 Three days' work, at $1.50 per day 4 50 Manure 1 50 ------ Total $29 40 After a year or two, the owner of the cottage may want to increase the flower garden, and the next place to plant is close about the house. It is to be taken for granted that the house and piazzas have the proper gutters. This is necessary, of course, for the preservation of the house, and without gutters the drip from the eaves would be such that nothing could grow directly against the house. The bed might be three feet wide and run across the front of the house on either side of the steps. The owner would probably wish to plant vines over the porch or piazza, in case it has not already been done. The best for this purpose are mentioned elsewhere. Should the house front the south, east or west, nearly everything can be grown; but should it face the north, nothing but Ferns and Rhododendrons would be successful on the front. Dahlias of the Cactus variety, in different colours, could be planted at the back of the bed on one side of the steps. Get good-sized roots, plant them two feet apart. They will grow against the house like a tall hedge. If planted the third week in April quite deep, say eight inches, they will begin to bloom about the sixth of July, and continue to be covered with flowers until killed by frost. In front of the Dahlias, plant white Phlox. In front of the Phlox sow a row of _Centaurea_ or Cornflowers, the Emperor William variety. These should be sown early in April, will begin to bloom by June tenth, and, if they are not allowed to go to seed, will blossom all summer. Sow in front of the Cornflowers, at the same time, a row of white Candytuft, of the Empress variety. This also will bloom continuously if the flowers are cut as soon as they wither. On the other side of the steps, at the back of the bed, plant Rudbeckia (Golden Glow) two feet apart. The roots should be bought and planted, preferably in October, otherwise as soon as the frost is out of the ground in the spring, as they start very early. In front of the Rudbeckias plant Cannas--the Tarrytown, of most vivid scarlet hue, I have found the best and freest-flowering of all. The roots should be planted about May fifteenth. On the edge of the bed, sow by April fifteenth a row of salmon-pink Zinnias, and when they are well up, thin out to six inches apart. They begin to blossom when very small, and will stand considerable frost. The expense of these beds will be trifling. Rudbeckias of the Golden Glow variety, one dollar a dozen; the Tarrytown Canna, two dollars and a half a dozen; Cactus Dahlias, two dollars a dozen; Phlox, one dollar and a half a dozen. The small quantity of flower seeds required will cost less than a dollar. A man can easily make the beds in three days. Therefore, the cost with manure will be less than fifteen dollars. After a hard frost has killed the tops, the Dahlias, Cannas and Gladioli should be taken up, the tops cut off, the roots well dried, and then stored in a cellar that does not freeze. The Canna and Dahlia roots will have grown so large that they can be divided and it will be found that there are enough to plant, the following spring, nearly twice the space they occupied before. It is impossible, if successful with the borders already planned, for the owner not to wish for more garden. She sees the neighbors' gardens with newly opened eyes; flowers and their treatment become an absorbing topic of conversation, and the exchange of plants a delightful transaction. [Illustration: Vase of Altheas September sixteenth] It will be seen that the next places to plant are along the boundary lines of the property. Even if one side only be laid out at a time, a large number of plants will be required. The owner will find great pleasure in raising as many of these herself as possible. To accomplish this, somewhere at the back of the place, a seed-bed should be made, and in April the seeds of perennials and annuals sown. The border must be made by September the twentieth and should be at least four feet wide. Either a hedge can be placed at the back of the border, or tall-growing flowering shrubs, such as white and purple Lilacs (not the Persian), Mock Oranges (Syringa), Deutzia and Roses of Sharon (Althea). These shrubs will grow about equally high, yield an abundance of flowers, the Altheas in August, the others in May or June, and in four or five years will form a complete screen from the neighboring grounds. In front of the shrubs perennials can be planted, taller ones at the back, lower-growing ones in front, and annuals along the edge. Such a border, if from fifty to a hundred feet in length, will be a garden by itself. The plants will do best if closely set, and every vacant space filled in June with annuals. Weeds then have little chance to grow, and a short time every day will keep such a border in order. The border can be of any width from four to twelve feet, but when more than four feet, the front edge should be made with irregular curves to avoid a stiff appearance. Shrubs should be set out not later than October tenth, and, as they or the hedge would be at the back of the bed, the planting of them will not interfere with the perennials that have already been transplanted from the seed-bed. Hedges are so much more beautiful than any fence that ever was built that, in towns or villages where cattle are not allowed to run at large, hedges should, wherever possible, be used in place of fences. To prepare the ground for a hedge, make a trench eighteen inches deep, put a good layer of well-rotted manure in the bottom and fill up with earth. When the hedge is planted give it a good top-dressing of manure, and continue this top-dressing, with a little bone-meal sown on the surface of the ground, every spring. [Illustration: Planting on the edge of lawn August second] The best and hardiest evergreen hedge is of Hemlock Spruce. Plants of this can be bought for fifteen dollars a hundred, and should be set eighteen inches apart. The Privet is a favorite hedge in this country. It keeps green until December, and leafs out early in the spring. It is hardy and of rapid growth. Good plants are six dollars a hundred, and should be planted a foot apart. Catalogues say that if planted in rich soil one foot apart, a hedge five feet high can be grown in three seasons. Common Privet is more hardy than California Privet. _Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora_ makes a beautiful low-growing hedge; good plants can be bought for six dollars a hundred. _Berberis Thunbergii_, or Barberry, makes a fine hedge, on account of its beautiful foliage and scarlet fruit. It is, however, slow-growing. The owner of a small place should avoid the temptation to scatter flower beds about the lawn. Keep all the planting along the edges of the property and around the house, and leave the lawn unbroken by flower beds. The years when gardening consisted only of beds of Coleus, Geraniums, Verbenas and bedding plants have passed away, like the black walnut period of furniture. And even as the mahogany of our grandfathers is now brought forth from garrets and unused rooms, and antiquity shops and farm-houses are searched for the good old-time furniture, so we are learning to take the old gardens for our models, and the old-fashioned flowers to fill our borders. The nurseryman of to-day has greatly improved the size and colour of the old varieties of perennials, so that they are far more beautiful than formerly, and offer a much greater choice. By skilful hybridization a hundred or more kinds of Phlox have been developed. In the same way, numerous varieties of Delphiniums, Iris, Peonies, Columbines, Canterbury Bells and Foxgloves have been produced. The old-fashioned annuals also appear in many new forms. In addition to the pink and white "Painted Lady," the pure white and the dark purple Sweet Peas of our mothers' time, we may now cultivate some eighty varieties of this delicate flower. Thus the garden of hardy perennials, annuals and bulbs will give us a continual sequence of flowers in every form and colour from April until November, if properly made and tended. [Illustration: Asters in rows for picking August twenty-fifth] THE SEED-BED CHAPTER V THE SEED-BED The possessor of a garden, large or small, should have a seed-bed, where seeds of perennials and some of the annuals can be sown and grown until large enough to be permanently placed. Not only will this bed give great pleasure in enabling one to watch the plants from the time the first tiny leaf appears, but also when laden with blossoms in fullest beauty. The knowledge that you have raised them gives a thrill of pride in the result which no bought plants, however beautiful, can impart. It is not necessary to prepare the seed-bed over a foot in depth, but the soil must be very light and fine, as well as rich. It is best, if possible, to have a portion of the bed somewhat shaded from the sun for a part of the day. If this combination cannot be had in one bed, there should be a second for plants that want less sun. Biennials must, of course, be sown every year, as they bloom but once, then die. Every year some perennials will disappear, killed by severe winters, by pests of one kind or another, or dying without apparent cause. To keep up the supply, therefore, some of each variety should be raised every year. Foxgloves and Sweet Williams, if allowed to go to seed, will sow themselves and increase rapidly. The same with Hollyhocks, but, except on the edges of shrubberies and in wild borders, it is better to cut the stalk just before the seed is ready to fall, and save it to sow in the seed-bed. [Illustration: Foxgloves--seedlings ready for final transplanting September twenty-ninth] In my garden, some seventy miles from New York, and where the spring opens ten days later, I sow my seeds,--the perennials about the tenth of April and the annuals from April twentieth to May first. Buy the seeds, if the garden is large, by the ounce or half-ounce; if small, in the seedsman's packets. I always have the seeds of perennials soaked for twenty-four hours before planting, and find that by so doing they are very sure to germinate. Care must be taken, when soaking a number of different kinds at the same time, to place the name of each variety of seed under the glass or bowl containing the same. When ready for planting, pour off the water and mix the wet seeds carefully with very dry earth, in a cigar-box, which is of the right size and easy to handle. Then sow, not too deeply, in rows about a foot apart in the bed, covering very lightly, according to size. One-half inch is enough for the large seeds. The very fine varieties should simply have the earth sprinkled on them. If planted too deep they will never come up. Seeds of annuals do not require soaking. Pat the earth down firmly with the back of the trowel, sprinkle with a fine sprinkler late every afternoon, and it is not your fault if you do not have hundreds and thousands of young plants to make your own place beautiful and to give to your friends. It is a keen delight, when a friend says that she has not raised such and such plants this year, to run and get your trowel and dig a bunch of this and that from the rows of sturdy little plants. It is a pleasure to know that a bit of your garden has gone to help make another's beautiful. One of the greatest pleasures of a garden is in giving flowers and plants to your friends. Every October, when arranging the borders and separating plants, I send away great boxes of them, some to fortunate friends with lovely gardens, but without the same varieties; some to humble cottage gardens, and others to friends who have never grown a flower, but would like to try. This year, having made a large new garden, I was able to give away to friends and neighbors only about seven hundred plants, not seedlings but large plants and roots. Generally I can send away far more. Think what a delight this is! A request for some plants came to me last autumn from the baggage-master of a railroad station some twenty miles from us, who, by the boxes of shrubs and plants that came to me, inferred that I might have some to spare. I learned that all this man's spare time was spent in his little garden plot, so great was his love of flowers. I know, too, a village expressman (another whom nature intended for a gardener), whose little plot of ground is always a mass of beauty. He has a surprising variety of plants, and every one is a fine specimen of its kind. His _Anemone Japonica alba_ are the finest I have ever seen, each one sending up perhaps a dozen slender stalks of the beautiful flowers. I have had great difficulty with this plant and have lost dozens of them. I always drive very slowly by the expressman's garden, burning with envy and wondering how he does it. In fact, it was only last year that I had my first success with these obdurate plants. They must grow under trees whose branches are sufficiently high to admit the sun half the day. As they bloom in September and October, the tree protects them from the frost, and in winter they should be well covered with stable litter. They are among the few plants to be set out in the spring, for if not well established they are always winter-killed. It is well not to empty the perennial seed-bed entirely in the autumn, but to leave a few plants of each variety to transplant in the spring, to take the place of those which have not survived the winter. When the bed is empty, in the spring, have a good coating of manure spaded in and proceed again with the sowing. Biennials, and also most perennials, must be raised every year to keep up the supply. [Illustration: Long grass walk, with _Narcissus Poeticus_ blooming in the border April twenty-sixth] PLANTING [Illustration: Long grass walk, with Peonies in the border June sixth] CHAPTER VI PLANTING I cannot impress too strongly upon my readers the importance of ordering their plants and seeds of well-known firms. The best are always the cheapest in the end. Inquiry among friends will generally give the best information as to reliable seedsmen and growers. In ordering shrubs and plants it is important to specify the precise date of delivery, that you may know in advance the day of arrival. The beds or borders should be prepared in advance, so that everything may be set out without delay. Care must be taken that the roots are not exposed to the air and allowed to become dry. It is a good plan, when unpacking a box of plants, to sort them, laying each variety in a pile by itself, covering the roots with the moss and excelsior in which they were packed, and then, if at all dry, to sprinkle thoroughly. Unpacking should, if possible, be done under cover--in the cellar if there be no other place. Great care must also be taken in setting out plants that ample room be given; as the roots should be well spread out and never doubled up. Do not be afraid of having the hole too big; see that the earth is finely pulverized and well packed about the roots; that the plant is thoroughly soaked, and, if the weather is dry, kept watered for a couple of weeks. If the plants have arrived in good condition and are carefully set out, but few should die. I have never lost a deciduous tree, and frequently, in setting out a hundred shrubs at one time, all have lived. [Illustration: Long grass walk, with Foxgloves blossoming in the border June thirteenth] Wherever there is a fence make a border, wide or narrow according to your space; if wide,--and it may be as much as twelve feet wide,--always make the edge irregular, never straight. Some prefer a hedge at the back of the border. The best effect and quickest screen is made by planting, against the fence at the back of the border, White Lilacs (not the Persian), Syringas, Deutzias and the beautiful new Altheas. Plant these shrubs three feet apart. In good soil they will send up great canes, and in four years time should be six feet high and shut you in from all prying gaze. In planting a border, always keep in mind the fact that it should be blooming from May to November. Put in the plants according to height, the tallest, of course, at the back and the lowest in front, filling the front also with spring-flowering bulbs, Daffodils, Tulips and Narcissi, which will blossom and be over before the plants come on. You will thus have the longest succession of bloom. If the border is quite wide--from four to six feet--and perhaps one hundred and fifty feet long, it will hold a surprising number of plants. Certain plants, in a long border with a background of shrubs, look best in rows, in spite of all that has been written against it: For instance, Hollyhocks, a long row of plants three deep, broken every ten feet or so by a clump of a dozen, and in front of these a single row of Rudbeckias, broken with clumps of six or so, and the rest of the border planted in masses, more or less according to space, of Phloxes, Larkspur, Lilies, Columbines, Sweet Williams, with every now and then a good clump of Chrysanthemums to blossom when all other flowers are gone. In filling a border along a rather short path, the plants should always be set in clumps of from six to twelve of a kind. If the border is narrow and has no shrubs or hedge back of it, the effect will be better if the plants do not exceed three feet in height. Omit from such a border Hollyhocks, Rudbeckias, Sunflowers and Cosmos. Sweet Williams, Columbines, Sweet Alyssum, Candytuft, Nasturtiums and _Phlox Drummondii_ can all be grown as edging for borders. I have a border, two and a half feet wide and three hundred and fifty feet long, that is a mass of bloom from the middle of May until the last of September. It may give the reader a suggestion to know its contents. Everything is in rows, the only border in my garden where the planting is done in this way. Along the edge is _Narcissus Poeticus_; back of _Narcissus Poeticus_ a row of Sweet Williams, pink, white and very dark red; back of the Sweet Williams, Foxgloves; back of the Foxgloves, Peonies and _Hydrangea grandiflora_ planted alternately; and back of these, a row of Hollyhocks. About two feet behind this border, a row of Rudbeckia (Golden Glow) grows like a tall hedge. When _Narcissus Poeticus_ has finished blooming, the Peonies come on. Before the last Peony has lost its petals, the Sweet Williams (quite two feet high) are in blossom, and the Foxgloves (from three to four feet high) begin to bloom, and last for a month. While these flowers are still lovely, the tall Hollyhocks begin to flower, each plant sending up from three to five stalks. Then, by the time the Hollyhock stalks are cut down, the Hydrangeas, which are trimmed back very severely every autumn, are a mass of white. Meanwhile the Rudbeckias, for quite six weeks, form a yellow background. The illustrations show this row of flowers while the Narcissi, Peonies, Foxgloves, and Hydrangeas are successively in blossom. Early in June, I transplant into perennial borders, wherever a spot can be found, clumps of Asters, Cosmos and other late annuals, which are beautiful in September and October when most flowers have ceased to bloom. From September twentieth to October fifteenth is a busy time in the garden. New beds and borders should be made then. The plants in all borders four years old should be lifted, and the beds or borders spaded deeply with plenty of manure, the plants reset, and the young perennials transplanted from the seed-bed into their final places. All perennial plants whose roots are sufficiently large, should now be divided and reset. This fall planting and transplanting should be done at about the time mentioned, for the shrubs and plants must become well rooted before the ground freezes, or they will rarely survive the winter. No matter how rich a bed or border may be, I always have the hole to receive the plant made larger than is necessary, and put a spadeful of manure in the bottom. In transplanting, my man always has a wheelbarrow of this at his side to work from. If there are bare places in lawns or grass paths, sow grass seed about the twentieth of September, then roll, and the grass will be well rooted before cold weather. It must be borne in mind that everything possible should be done in the fall. Perennials start early in the spring, and it is a pity, when they are once started, to disturb them. When the frost has finally killed everything, all the dead tops should be cut off at the ground, the dead annuals pulled up, the borders made clean and neat, and, about the last of November, covered with a good layer of stable litter, leaves or straw. I have always found the plants start earlier and do better for this slight protection. Whenever I tell my inquiring friends of the proper preparation of beds, and the spring top-dressing, and winter covering with manure, there is generally an exclamation of alarm at the quantity used. But much is required to make the garden grow. I call upon the farm for manure when the stable supply is insufficient, and both my farmer-husband and his manager at times look askance. But how can I live unless my garden has what it needs! The farmer-husband looks upon my gardening as a mild species of insanity, and cannot understand why a _little_ garden with a few plants is not enough for any woman. By dint of much showing and explanation through many years, he has acquired a floricultural knowledge which enables him to tell a Rose, Lily, Sunflower and Phlox, and of this knowledge he is proud. All manure should be drawn out into the garden when the ground is still frozen, in March or earlier, and placed in convenient piles, so that the ground may not be cut up, when soft, by the wagon wheels; and also to facilitate work when the first spring days come, and there are a hundred things to be done. If possible, have a spadeful of well-rotted stable manure stirred into the ground around each shrub and vine in early spring. The result will amply repay you. Save all wood-ashes carefully, under cover, for the garden, and scatter them on the beds and on the grass. Get well-ground fresh bone-meal, and let all plants have only a handful in the spring, and the reward in bloom is great. To have good results from the hardy Chrysanthemums the soil cannot be too rich, and I generally "give them something to eat," as a boy who helps in the garden calls it, about the fifteenth of June and the fifteenth of August. Care must be taken, in using bone-meal, not to put on too much, and to keep it away from contact with the rootlets. ANNUALS CHAPTER VII ANNUALS There are so many annuals that I will write only about the few which are easiest to grow and are most desirable. For me a flower must have merits for decorating the house as well as for making the garden beautiful. The other day I found an English book on flowers, and at once sat down to read it, expecting enjoyment and profit from every page; but at the end of a few minutes I came upon the following paragraph: "Particularly to most women one of the chief uses or functions of a garden is to provide flowers to be cut for the decoration of rooms. But I hold that a flower cut from its plant and placed in a vase is as a scalp on the walls of a wigwam." And I read no further in that book. I grow flowers to gather them, both for the house and to give away. We keep about sixty vases full in the house from late May until October, and never allow more than two colours in the same room. I have a yellow room, where only yellow and white flowers, or white and blue, are permitted; a pink room, for white and pink or pink and crimson flowers; and a hall, whose dominant tone is a rich red, where the flowers are red and white. Some of the annuals, like Mignonette and Poppies, must be sown where they are to grow. Mignonette does best in cool, rather moist soil. [Illustration: Long grass walk, with Hydrangeas; Rudbeckias in the background August twenty-fifth] Poppies, and oh! have plenty of them and all kinds. Get the Shirley Poppies, the Giant Double, the fringed kind, and the California with their sunny petals. Sow in great numbers wherever they are wanted, here and there in the borders wherever there is space. If there is no other place, sow them in rows in the vegetable garden. They are splendid in the house, but, alas! fall too quickly. The Shirley Poppies are almost like fairy flowers, they are so delicate and beautiful. They are the first of the annual Poppies to bloom. Then comes the variety which grows wild in France and Germany,--scarlet, with black blotches at the base of the petals. Last to bloom are the tall, fringed double and single Poppies,--white, pink and scarlet, growing on strong stems three feet high. Poppies must be sown thinly and the earth only sprinkled over the seeds. Sow as early in the spring as the ground can be worked, and thin out to six inches apart when the plants are well up. Nasturtiums, too, should be planted where they are to grow, also Sweet Alyssum and Candytuft. All of these make good edgings for borders. If not allowed to go to seed they will bloom all summer. Sunflowers, the Dwarf Double, and the tall Giant Sunflowers, are fine in backgrounds and against fences. THE FOLLOWING ANNUALS SHOULD BE SOWN IN THE SEED-BED ABOUT APRIL TWENTIETH TO MAY FIRST _Antirrhinum_, or _Snapdragon_, growing eighteen inches high. If sown in early May they will bloom from August until late autumn. The same is true of the German Ten-weeks Stocks, which have a long period of bloom. The white ones are most lovely. _Asters_, all varieties; sow a quantity. They are not only beautiful, but they give an abundance of blossoms in late September and early October, when flowers are beginning to be scarce. I prefer the Giant, Comet, Ostrich Plume and the late-flowering branching kind. Of these last, "Purity" (snow-white) and "Daybreak" (shell-pink) are the best, often bearing thirty flowers on a plant and lasting, in water, five days. A small quantity of wood-ashes stirred into the soil of the Aster bed is a fine fertilizer and destroys insects that attack the roots. Transplant in June to wherever they are to blossom. [Illustration: A single plant of Asters September tenth] I have lately learned, that the only way to destroy the black beetle which appears upon the Asters and eats the flowers, is to have them picked off morning and evening and thrown into a pan containing kerosene oil, which kills them. _Cosmos._ The early-summer flowering variety of Cosmos will begin to bloom in July, and, if not allowed to go to seed, will be a mass of flowers until killed by frost. In favorable soil Cosmos grows luxuriantly, and resembles a small tree six or eight feet high. This plant should be staked, or it is likely to be blown down. It is very effective when transplanted to the borders, blooming gayly when there is not much else. The pink and crimson varieties are beautiful, but do not compare with the white. _Calendula_, growing about a foot high in every shade of yellow from deep orange to pale ivory, is one of the best and most constant blooming of the yellow flowers. _Centaurea_, or _Cornflower_. These come in many colours, but I grow only the tall, ragged, blue variety. If not permitted to go to seed, they will bloom plentifully for several months. On the dinner-table with blue and white china, and in June combined with Syringa, they make a beautiful and unusual decoration. _Marigold_, both the double African and the double French. These flowers always give me a pricking of the conscience, for during the summer, when there are plenty of others, I give them the "go by," but in October turn to them with shame and thankfulness. _Phlox Drummondii_ grows about six or eight inches high, and comes in many colours. It makes beautiful borders, particularly the white, pink and dark red. _Plumed Celosia_, or _Cockscomb_. The new varieties are very effective. [Illustration: Poppies growing in rows July fourteenth] _Zinnias._ Lately I have grown only two varieties, a vivid scarlet and a salmon-pink. They are not only lovely when growing, but make a beautiful house decoration, as the stems are long and stiff. _Sweet Peas_, which no garden can do without. Several books say, plant in autumn, very late. I have twice sown two pounds at this time, carefully following the directions, and not one single Pea came up the following spring. Sweet Peas should be sown in the spring the moment the frost comes out of the ground, so that they may become deeply rooted before dry weather. Make a trench about a foot deep and a foot wide. Have a good layer of manure in the bottom of the trench, over which put a couple of inches of earth, and over this earth put a good layer of wood-ashes, again a sprinkling of earth. Then sow the Peas, and cover them with a couple of inches of earth. As they grow, fill in the trench, and keep on hilling up the plants until the roots are very deep. It is well to mulch them with the clippings of lawn grass. In this way the plants are kept from drying up, and will bloom until October. Sweet Peas flourish best on a trellis of galvanized wire netting. It should be a permanent trellis, made of cedar posts set three feet deep, so as to be below the frost line and four feet high. To this attach the wire netting. A trench should be made on either side of the netting, so that a double row of Peas may be sown. The quantity sown depends on the length of the trellis; three pounds will sow a double row one hundred and twenty-five feet long. I always sow the different colours separately. It simplifies the task of arranging them, if they can be gathered separately. A bowl of white Sweet Peas and Maidenhair Fern is indeed a "thing of beauty." _Pansies_, every one loves them. They are annuals, but do best if treated as biennials. The most practical hint that I was able to get from "Elizabeth's German Garden" was where she spoke of carpeting her Rose beds with Pansies. This instantly appealed to me, as I greatly dislike to see the earth in the beds and borders, and in Rose beds it always is to be seen. So I bought an ounce each of white and yellow Pansy seed, sowed it about the tenth of July in the partly shaded end of the seed-bed, and by October first had splendid great plants. I did not allow these to blossom, but picked off the buds, and, after the Rose beds had been given a plentiful top-dressing of manure carefully stirred in with a large trowel, I transplanted my Pansy plants. Of course, they had to be covered over with the Roses the last of November, and often during the winter I wondered whether the dears would be smothered. On the twenty-eighth of March the beds were uncovered, and, imagine it! there were Pansies in bloom. From April tenth until late in August these beds were simply a carpet of white and yellow. I never saw anything like it. It was probably due to the rich soil, perhaps also to the free watering necessary for the Roses. Then, in order that no Pansies should go to seed, my own maid, who is very fond of flowers, undertook each morning to cut off all that were beginning to wither. This required from one to two hours, but certainly prolonged the bloom, and I could never have spared a man so long for just the Pansies. Sow Pansy seed in the seed-bed about the tenth of July, and transplant late in October. * * * * * These are some of the more important annuals which no garden should be without. All of them are easy to raise, and blossom abundantly. I do not speak of the many others, but advise trying new flowers every year. [Illustration: A Bowl of Cosmos September twenty-ninth] The first week in June is the time to transplant all annuals. Do it, if possible, directly after a rain, always late in the afternoon, and, of course, water well after transplanting. I have a method of my own for the transplanting of seedlings, and by following it the tiny plants never wither or are set back, and in fact do not seem to know that they have been moved. Take a tin box, such as biscuits come in, half fill it with water, then lift into it from the seed-bed about one hundred seedlings at a time. With a sharp-pointed stick make holes in the bed where the little plants are to go, and then put them in. Soak the ground thoroughly after each patch is finished. In this way the tiny rootlets never become dry. All the beds and borders can be kept free from weeds and in good condition if gone over with a trowel every five days, or once a week, the earth stirred thoroughly, and any weeds that may have grown taken out. It is particularly necessary, for a few weeks in the spring, to keep well ahead of the weeds. I always think of my sins when I weed. They grow apace in the same way and are harder still to get rid of. It seems a pity sometimes not to nurture a pet one, just as it does to destroy a beautiful plant of Wild Mustard, or of Queen Anne's Lace. LIST OF ANNUALS, WITH HEIGHT, COLOUR AND PERIOD OF BLOOMING _Asters_, all colours; one to two feet; August to October. _Alyssum_, white, dwarf for borders; six inches; blooms all summer if not allowed to go to seed. _Balsam_, Camellia-flowered, pale pink, dark red, white; two to three feet; July and August. _Calendula_ (Pot Marigold), all shades of yellow; mid-July until killed by frost. _Calliopsis_ (Coreopsis), yellow with red or brown center; two feet; mid-July, until killed by frost. _Candytuft_, red, white, purple, Empress variety white the best, fine for edging; six inches; blooms continually if not allowed to go to seed. _Centaurea_ (Cornflower), all shades of blue; three feet; blooms three months if kept cut. _Cockscomb_, crimson and scarlet; two to three feet; August and September. _Cosmos_, white, pink, crimson; three to five feet; from the fifteenth of July until killed by frost. _Eschscholtzia_, yellow Poppies; one foot; blooms all summer. _Godetia_, pink, crimson, white; one foot; blooms all summer. _Marigold_, all shades of yellow; one to two and one-half feet; mid-July until killed by frost. _Mignonette_, average height one foot; blooms all summer if kept from seeding. _Nasturtiums_, all shades of yellow and red; dwarf, nine inches; climbing, five feet; bloom all summer until killed by frost. _Pansy_, many colours; six inches; from early spring until November, if kept well cut. _Petunia_, double giant-flowered the only kind to raise; white, crimson and pink; one and one-half feet; bloom all summer. _Phlox Drummondii_, many colours; one foot; blooms July, August and September if not allowed to seed. _Poppy_, all shades of pink and red, also white; one to three feet. If several varieties are planted can be had in bloom from three to four weeks; end of June and July. _Snapdragon_, scarlet and white, white and yellow, pure white; one and one-half feet; July and August. _Stocks_ (German Ten-Weeks), white, pink, red, purple; one and one-half feet; middle of July until middle of September. _Sunflower_, yellow, dwarf and tall varieties, single and double; three to six feet; all summer. _Sweet Peas_, all colours; three feet; grown on bush or trellis; end of June until October if kept well cut and moist. _Sweet Sultan_, purple, white, yellow; one and one-half feet; June, July and August. _Zinnia_, many colours; one and one-half to two feet; July, August and September. [Illustration: A mass of Phlox; Rudbeckias in the background August second] PERENNIALS CHAPTER VIII PERENNIALS Some of the perennials to be sown yearly in the seed-bed from about April first to tenth, are the following: _Columbines_ of all varieties, yellow, white, shading from pink to red and from pale blue to darkest purple. Of Columbines every garden should have plenty. Blooming about May twentieth for three weeks, they are a perfect delight. They are very hardy, germinate readily in the seed-bed, are easy to transplant and need but little care. I have never been able to get them much over three feet in height, but then I have often a dozen stalks of bloom on a single plant, which is very satisfactory. The first dozen plants were sent to me by a friend from his garden on Long Island; now I have hundreds of them,--single and double, white, yellow, all shades of red and pink, pale blue, and a blue one with a white center almost like an Orchid; many shades of purple, also purple and white. _Hollyhocks_, single and double, of all colours. In order to get the desired colour effect with these, keep each variety separate. [Illustration: Hollyhocks in blossom July twelfth] No one can have too many Hollyhocks. Plant them at the back of the borders among the shrubbery, along fences, and in great clumps in any odd corner, or around buildings; they are never amiss, and always beautiful. I find that a Hollyhock cannot be counted upon to bloom more than three years. First-year stalks are about four feet high; afterwards, if in good soil, they will be from six to eight feet. There were hundreds of this size in my garden last summer, each plant with from three to five towering stalks of bloom. As soon as they have gone to seed, I save what seed I want and the stalks are then cut down and burned. By sowing the seeds as soon as thoroughly ripe and dry, plants can be raised which will be large enough to transplant in October, and will bloom the next year. These young plants should be given a slight covering the first winter, that they may not be winter-killed. When in a border, the Hollyhock, which will flourish in any soil, grows to such an extent that Lilies or Phloxes, or anything else near by, are likely to be crowded out, unless care is taken to cut off the lower leaves, which become enormous. I have this done usually three times before they bloom, beginning early in May, and great wheelbarrow-loads of leaves are taken away at each cutting. _Sweet Williams_, red, white and pink. These will grow from eighteen inches to two feet. The stems are straight and stiff, and the trusses of bloom about five inches across, with individual flowers as large as a nickel; they keep well in water and make a beautiful edging for a border, or give great effect when planted in masses. They bloom for three weeks or more, and make fine decorations for church or house. _Platycodon Mariesi_, beautiful blue; they resemble Canterbury Bells, and, as they blossom after the Canterbury Bells, are valuable in continuing the period of blue flowers, with the advantage of being perennials. _Delphiniums_, perennial Larkspurs, all varieties. These seeds I have found more difficult to make germinate than any others, so I do not rely upon what I raise, but purchase many plants. My best results have come from saving the seeds from the first crop of blossoms, drying thoroughly, and then sowing at once. I have found these seeds more sure to germinate than those bought in early spring. Perhaps nature intends them to be sown in this way, instead of nine months later. [Illustration: A single plant of Delphinium (Perennial Larkspur) June twenty-first] One can never say enough in praise of Delphiniums. Three-year-old plants will send up eight to ten beautiful great spikes of the richest blue, four feet high. The moment a blossom withers, cut the stalk down to the ground; another will immediately spring up. I had four crops of blossoms from some of my Delphiniums last summer, so that, from the end of June until the middle of October, there were always some of them in blossom. Some varieties of tall English Delphiniums are very beautiful. Among them is one, Coelestinum, of the loveliest shade of light blue, with very large, double individual flowers. As I have said before, the Delphinium blossoms at the same time as _Lilium candidum_, and should be planted near by. Great bunches of these two flowers, in tall vases, are lovely as well as unusual. There is a horrid small white worm which attacks the roots of the Delphinium, and gives no sign until you see the plant dying. I have found that keeping the soil around the plant well covered with coal ashes is a preventive. Delphiniums are hardy and long-lived (unless the worm gets them), and, once planted, they live a dozen years. _Coreopsis_ (Grandiflora). Every one knows the Coreopsis, which, by continual cutting, will give abundant bloom for three months. The variety with velvety maroon centers is particularly fine. _Hibiscus_ is very easy to raise, and should be planted among and along the edge of shrubbery. The plants are quite hardy, grow four feet high, and masses of them in pink or white are fine. They bloom in August and September. _Rockets_, white and purple. These increase tremendously from self-sowing, so be careful or they will suffocate all that grows near them. I have many plants, all of which have come from a single one that a colored woman gave me a few years ago. She is a nice comfortable old "mammy," black as the ace of spades, with a great love for flowers and a nice patch of them. We have exchanged plants several times. Some of the nicest things I have in my garden came to me in this way, and it is great fun. Whenever, in driving about, I see a particularly fine plant in a dooryard, I make friends with its owner, and later suggest that if she (it is usually "she") will give me a small root of this or that, I will bring her some plants or bulbs from my garden, of a kind which she has not. So we are both equally benefited. In this way I was once given a plant of _Valerian_, which has a tall, beautiful white flower with a most delicious odour like vanilla. It blooms for three weeks in late May and early June. From this one plant there are now in the garden a number of large clumps several feet in diameter, and I have given away certainly fifty roots. Valerian is a small white flower in good-sized clusters on long stems, seen now-a-days only in old-fashioned gardens. I am told it cannot be bought of horticulturists. One must have _Chrysanthemums_, but where the thermometer falls below zero there are not many to be bought, other than the pompon varieties, that will blossom in the garden before being killed by frost, or that will survive the winter. Year after year I have bought dozens of the so-called "September-flowering Chrysanthemums," and have only succeeded in making them blossom by the middle of October, by planting them on the south side of a building, in richest soil, giving abundance of water, and covering on all cold nights. But I have beautiful plants of perfectly hardy, good-sized blossoms of yellow, white, pink and red, the roots of which have come from the gardens of my farmer friends. I have never been able to buy this old-fashioned hardy kind. In the spring, as soon as the plants begin to sprout, divide them, setting out three or four sprouts together. In this way the stock will increase wonderfully. Chrysanthemums require very rich soil, must have sun, and do best against a building or a wall. About the first of July and the first of September have a couple of trowelfuls of manure carefully dug in about the roots of each plant. Buds should not be allowed to form until September, and the new shoots should be pinched back until then, to make the plants strong and bushy. I do not envy any one who has only the great, solemn, stiff flowers of the prize-show variety. An armful of the hardy garden ones, with their delicious odour, is worth a green-house full of the unnatural things which are the professional gardener's pride. When you can keep twenty or more vases filled from your own garden with these last blossoms of the year, in all their lovely colours, and not miss one of them from the plants, you will agree with me that they are the only kind to raise. Perennials, sown in rows in the seed-bed in April, will be nice little plants by July, when they should be lifted and transplanted some six inches apart. The portion of the seed-bed where the annuals were raised can be used now for the purpose. This is particularly necessary for Larkspur, Columbines, Monkshood, Platycodon, Coreopsis, Hibiscus and Pinks. If, when transplanting, each plant is set with a trowelful of manure, the result will be plants twice as large by the first of October, when they can be again transplanted to their permanent places. _Oriental Poppies_ and _Pinks_ should also be sown in the perennial seed-bed. Oriental Poppies, with great blossoms as large as a tea plate borne on strong stems, make a grand show about the end of May and beginning of June. Pinks, too, should be in every garden, if only for their delicious, spicy odor. The Chinensis, or China Pinks, are the best. Sweet Williams and Oriental Poppies need not be moved from the time they are sown until finally transplanted in the autumn. [Illustration: Yuccas in blossom July twelfth] _Yucca filamentosa_, the hardy native of Mexico, sends up, about the tenth of July, great stalks six to eight feet high, bearing masses of white flowers. The individual blossoms are of creamy waxy texture and as beautiful as an orchid. A single stalk of Yucca, in a tall vase, will last nearly a week, and is as unusual as it is beautiful for house decoration. Yuccas are perfectly hardy, need no protection in winter, no fertilizer, no water in dry weather. In my garden, at least, they have not been attacked by insects and have grown placidly on, needing absolutely no care but to have the stalks cut down when they have finished blossoming. They are most effective when grown in clumps, but look very well along a fence with Hollyhocks at the back. The plants are so inexpensive that I have bought mine, but see no reason why they cannot be raised from seed. Small plants form near the parent stem, and these can be separated and transplanted. A late spring frost will sometimes nip the flower stalk that has just started, and there will be no bloom that year. To avoid such a disaster, whenever, in late spring, a frosty night is suspected, cover the plants with a piece of burlap. _Tritomas_ (Red-hot Poker Plant) bloom in September and October, and should always be planted in masses, and in full sun. They must be well covered with leaves or stable litter late in November, or they will be winter-killed. They increase rapidly. _Gaillardias_ bloom all summer, and keep fresh in water for days. The plants are covered with long-stemmed, yellow flowers with dark crimson centers, and should also be protected in winter. _Veronica longifolia_, a most beautiful dark blue flower, which grows in long spikes. Veronica remains in bloom during the month of August, and is one of the most showy flowers in the garden at that time. _Iris_, Japanese and German, do well when naturalized in the grass. These plants increase so, that every four years they can be separated. Beginning with the German Iris, flowering the end of May, they can be had in bloom until the Japanese Iris finishes blossoming the middle of July. No Orchids are more beautiful than the Japanese Iris. A couple of weeks before and during the period of bloom they must be kept very moist. Both the German and the Japanese Iris are perfectly hardy and increase rapidly. The English Iris, of which the white variety, known as Mont Blanc, is the most beautiful, and the Spanish Iris, in all its varieties, are not hardy. But with careful winter covering, about equal to that given to the everblooming Roses, they will generally survive, and are well worth the trouble. The roots of all varieties of Iris are very long, and care must be taken to give them plenty of room and to plant deep. _Peonies._ For beauty and usefulness Peonies rank with Phloxes. Large plants will frequently bear twenty great blossoms. By raising both early and late varieties, their period of bloom can be continued for a month. The old, dark crimson variety is the first to bloom; the old-fashioned double pink and double white are beautiful enough to satisfy any one, but the new varieties give immense choice as to colour and form. The Japanese Tree Peonies do not die to the ground every year, like the herbaceous kinds, but form woody branches and grow like a small shrub. The blossoms of these Tree Peonies are truly wonderful; the only care needed is a little fertilizer in the autumn and a slight winter covering. They are best grown in front of the shrubbery. They blossom before the herbaceous varieties. The herbaceous Peonies can be grown in large beds by themselves, in borders with other plants, or as single specimens in the grass or among the shrubs. Peonies start so early in the spring that they should be manured in the fall, or there is danger of breaking the tender shoots. [Illustration: Bed of Peonies on edge of lawn June sixth] _Phlox._ There is no flower in the garden more beautiful, more easily cultivated, or giving so much bloom as the Phlox. I could certainly never have a garden without it. In mine there must be a couple of thousand. I have a great mass, of probably two hundred herbaceous Phloxes, growing together in one corner of my garden, the very tall varieties over four feet high. About the fifteenth of July, every year, this corner is a superb sight. Most of these plants are over fifteen years old. They have been kept fine by heaviest top-dressing every year, and by lifting all the plants every three years and digging in quantities of manure, and also by separating each plant into three, by cutting the roots with a spade, or pulling apart with the fingers. The newer varieties of Phlox come in the most beautiful colours,--dark crimson, fiery scarlet, many shades of pink, pink striped with white, and pink with a white eye; all shades of lilac, lilac with white and purple, the beautiful pure white, and the white with the scarlet eye. Of all the varieties, my favorites are the snowy white, and the salmon-pink with the dark red eye. Buy fifty large field-grown plants; at the end of three years separate them, and you have a hundred and fifty. They present a picture of progression much surer than the tale of the eggs that were to do so much. Many of the individual blossoms of my Phloxes are larger than a fifty-cent piece; a number of them larger by measurement than a silver dollar, and the heads also are very large. Always erect, neat and smiling, never needing to be staked (such a task in a large garden), when once grown they must always be dear to a gardener's heart. By breaking off the heads of Phlox immediately after blooming, a second crop of flowers will appear in about three weeks. The heads will not be so large as the first, but they will amply repay the slight trouble. Every owner of a garden has certain favorites; it really cannot be helped, although the knowledge that it is so makes it seem almost as unfair as for a mother to have a favorite child. A real lover of flowers finds it difficult to cast away a plant that has bloomed its best, even though the blossom is unsatisfactory. In my garden there are, at present, some plants that I am longing to dig up and burn. There are two climbing Roses that came by mistake in a large order and were set out. They have thriven as no others, cover a very large space on a trellis, and in June bear thousands of a most hideous, small, purplish crimson Rose. The other plant is _Scabiosia Caucasica_. Beware of the same. The description of it in a catalogue caused me to feel that without it the garden was nothing. A dozen were ordered and set out in a border, in two clumps. They grew and waxed strong, and fairly clambered over everything within several feet of them, seeming to be like gigantic thistles. Finally in August, on stems two feet long, the eagerly looked-for blossoms appeared. These were described in the catalogue as "a large head of pale blue flowers." But, to my despair, it developed a round green ball about three inches in circumference, with white thistle-like petals. And yet the plants had surpassed themselves. It seems a poor reward to turn them out to die. _Lychnis_ (London Pride). I cannot now recall any perennial except the Cardinal Flower, which has blossoms of so brilliant a scarlet as Lychnis, or London Pride, growing tall and erect, with its bright colour. It is most effective when grown in large clumps. _Monkshood_ (_Aconitum Napellus_) grows four feet high, and has a beautiful blossom of rich blue growing in quite large clusters. The name must come from the resemblance each individual blossom bears to the capuchin of a monk. These plants should be grown under tall trees, for they cannot stand too strong sun, and will blossom very late in the autumn if protected by the trees from frost. I gathered them last year in November. Phloxes, Rudbeckias, Monkshood, Valerian, Lychnis, Tritomas, Iris, Peonies and Veronica are best raised, not from seed, but by buying the plants, and then after a time, as I have said before, dividing them. For instance, take a fine large plant of Phlox of some choice variety, divide all the roots and set out each one separately. From one plant you may, in two years' time, get twenty splendid ones, and the same with the other varieties I have mentioned. _Rudbeckias_, of the Golden Glow variety, grow from six to eight feet high, and must be staked, or when heavy with blossoms they will blow down or be beaten down by the rain. Each plant will bear quantities of long-stemmed double yellow blossoms, which resemble a double Dahlia. These will keep nearly a week in water. When the plant has finished blossoming, cut down the tops, and in October there will be a second crop of blossoms just above the ground. The Golden Glow should be divided every other year, and in this way it is even more remunerative than the Phlox. I started with fifty plants, and think it will soon be possible to have a farm of them. LIST OF HARDY PERENNIALS, WITH HEIGHT, COLOUR AND TIME AND PERIOD OF BLOOMING, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY. _Aquilegia_, or Columbine, all colours; one to two and one-half feet; tenth of May to first week in June. _Chrysanthemums_, all colours but blue; three feet; end of September until very cold weather. _Delphiniums_, all shades of blue; three to four feet; July; later crops after cutting down. _Dianthus barbatus_ (Sweet William), red, pink, white; one to two feet; June. _Dicentra spectabilis_ (Bleeding Heart), red and white; one to two feet; May. _Gaillardia_, yellow, red center; two feet; July, August and September until killed by frost. [Illustration: A single plant of Phlox August twenty-fifth] _Helianthus multiflorus plenus_, hardy double Sunflower; yellow; four to five feet; all summer. _Hibiscus_, pink, white; four to five feet; August and September. _Hollyhocks_, all colours but blue; single, double, four to eight feet; tenth of July to middle of August; two to five stalks on a plant. _Hyacinthus candicans_, white; four feet; last three weeks of August. _Iris Germanica_, all colours; two to three feet; end of May to first of June. _Lychnis_ (London Pride), scarlet; two and one-half feet; July. _Oriental Poppy_, scarlet, also pink; three feet; end of May and first of June. _Peonies_, all colours but blue; two to two and one-half feet; end of May, for three weeks. _Pentstemon_, many colours; three feet; August and September. _Phlox_, all colours; two to four feet; early July until killed by frost, if the heads are cut as soon as finished flowering. _Platycodon Mariesi_, blue; one and one-half feet; August. _Rocket_ (_Hesperis Matronalis_), white and purple; two feet; May. _Rudbeckia_ (Golden Glow), yellow; five to eight feet; middle of July to September first; second crop in October. _Tritoma_ (Red-hot Poker Plant), orange-scarlet; three to four feet; September and October until killed by frost. _Valerian_, white; three feet; May and June. _Veronica longifolia_, blue; two feet; August. _Yucca filamentosa_, white; three to five feet; second and third weeks in July. [Illustration: Vase of Canterbury Bells June twenty-first] BIENNIALS AND A FEW BEDDING-OUT PLANTS CHAPTER IX BIENNIALS AND A FEW BEDDING-OUT PLANTS There are but few hardy biennials. The important ones, which no garden should be without, are: _Digitalis_ (Foxgloves) and _Campanula medium_, (Canterbury Bells.) Foxgloves and Canterbury Bells bloom in June and July for more than a month, and give a touch of glory to any garden. Catalogues and many gardening books say that the seeds should be sown in early autumn, and the plants will bloom the following year. It is true that they will bloom when sown in the autumn, but unless kept over the winter in a cold-frame the plants will send up stalks, only about a foot in height. Sow the seeds of Foxgloves and Canterbury Bells in the shady part of the seed-bed in early April. Keep the young plants moist. About the fifteenth of July, if there are a large number of plants and there be no other place, they should be transplanted to the vegetable garden, where they can follow early crops of peas or lettuce. Have the ground spaded finely, and make shallow trenches, perhaps six inches deep, in which put a good layer of manure and cover this with earth, then set the plants about six inches apart. Keep them well watered when the weather is dry, and the earth thoroughly stirred. By the twentieth of September or the first of October they should be transplanted to the places where they are to bloom the following year. The plants should then be a foot across, and next June will send up several stalks about three feet high. The Canterbury Bells should be six inches across in the fall, and the next year about two feet high. [Illustration: A single plant of Foxgloves; White Sweet William in front June thirteenth] _Foxgloves_ seed themselves with great abundance, unless the stalk is cut before the seed ripens. In the spring I have the little plants, seeded in this way from the year before, taken from the borders and transplanted in rows, and find they are larger and stronger than any others. Foxgloves, white, spotted and pale lilac, are the pride of the garden. Plant them back of the Sweet Williams, in clumps of six or eight, or else with Peonies. They blossom at the same time, and the pinks or reds of Sweet Williams or Peonies, with here and there a mass of white, and the tall, graceful spikes of the Foxgloves rising above them, produce so beautiful an effect that you will simply have to go and look at them many times a day. _Canterbury Bells._ Let any one who has been at Oxford in June and July recall the Canterbury Bells in those loveliest of all gardens, New College and St. Johns, and she will not rest until they have a place in her garden. I did not know these flowers before going to Oxford, and after seeing them could not wait to raise them from seed, but bought three dozen plants to look at the first year. The roots that came to me were miserable little things, and, in spite of every care, half of them died. Those which lived and bloomed were very lovely. They begin to blossom with us about the sixth of June, and last four or five weeks. In colour they are white, pink, purple and blue. Canterbury Bells and Foxgloves are biennials. They are sown one year and grow for a year, then bloom and die. This seems a great deal of trouble for one season's flowers, but their beauty repays the gardener a hundred fold. They require a slight winter protection of leaves or stable litter, but care must be taken that the tops of the plants are not covered. THE BEDDING-OUT PLANTS And now a little about the only three bedding-out plants that I grow--Dahlias, Cannas and Gladioli. I should have said four, for there is always a large bed of about four dozen Scarlet Salvia (the Bonfire variety is the best), whose brilliant colour and sturdy growth cannot be spared. They begin to blossom in July. By driving a tall stake in the center, and other stakes around the edge of the bed of Salvia, it can be covered with burlaps or carriage covers when the nights are frosty and preserved in all its beauty until November. _Dahlias_ can be grown in rows in the vegetable garden, if there be no other place for them. They are decorative and desirable for cutting. Plant two or three tubers in a hill about the third week in April. They should be planted eight inches deep and three feet apart, and kept well staked. The soil should not be too rich, or they will all grow to stalk and leaf, and blossom but little. All the varieties are lovely, the Cactus kind more so, perhaps, than the others. In the autumn, when the tops have been killed by the frost, the tubers must be taken up, dried off carefully, and stored in a cellar that does not freeze. _Gladioli_ can be planted from April fifteenth to June fifteenth, in beds by themselves or in clumps in the borders, so that the blossoms may be had in succession. Gladioli come in many colours. _Cannas_, the beautiful French varieties. These, of course, are most effectively grown in masses, and require full sun. The roots, like those of the Dahlias, increase so that there is almost double the quantity to plant the next spring. It is well to have the Cannas started in boxes in sunny windows, in tool-room or carriage-house, by mid-April. They can be kept through the winter with the Dahlias and Gladioli. [Illustration: Vase of Foxgloves June fourteenth] ROSES CHAPTER X ROSES The Rose asserts her right to the title of the "queen of flowers" through her very exclusiveness. She insists upon being grown apart from other plants; otherwise she sulks and is coy, refusing to yield more than an occasional bloom. I speak from experience, having tried several times to grow Roses in the front of wide borders, where soil and sun and everything except the proximity of other plants was propitious. But they scarcely bloomed at all. Now, the same bushes, planted in rows so that a cultivator may be run between them, flourish satisfactorily. Grow Roses, then, in beds by themselves or in rows. If one has but half a dozen Roses, let them be grown apart from other plants. Pansies, however, can be grown in the Rose beds, as I have elsewhere described; Gladioli can also be planted among them without detriment to either. The reason for this is that the roots of these two flowers are not deep and do not interfere with the nourishment of the Roses. Roses on their own roots should live for years, if given proper treatment. Witness the Rose bushes in gardens, where with but little care they have flourished more than a generation. [Illustration: Summer-house, covered with Clematis and Crimson Rambler Roses June twenty-first] Budded stock must be planted very deep. The joint should be at least three inches under ground. Roses grown on their own roots are more expensive than the budded stock, but a far better investment. The budded stock is apt to send up from the parent root suckers or shoots of Sweetbrier, Buckthorn, Flowering Almond, or whatever it may be. These shoots must be carefully cut off. A friend told me that, when new to Rose growing, his bed of budded Roses sent up so many strange shoots that, not knowing what to do, he dug them all up but one. This he kept as a curiosity, and now it is a bush of Flowering Almond six feet in circumference. Everblooming Roses should be set out in the spring, about the middle of April. Hybrid Perpetual and Hardy Roses are best set out in autumn, about October tenth. When planting, always cut the plants back to about a foot in height. All Roses should be lifted every three years, late in October, and plenty of manure, with fresh earth and leaf-mould, mixed with sand if the soil is heavy, dug in. After five or six years I dig up my Roses about October tenth, cut the tops down to about twelve inches, cut out some of the old wood, cut off the roots considerably, trench the ground anew, and replant. The following year the Roses may not bloom very profusely, but afterwards for four or five years the yield will be great. My physician in the country is a fine gardener, and particularly successful with Roses. We have many delightful talks about gardening. When I told him of my surgical operations upon the Roses he was horrified at such barbarity, and seemed to listen with more or less incredulity. So I asked him if, as a surgeon as well as physician, he approved, on occasion, of lopping off a patient's limbs to prolong his life, why he should not also sanction the same operation in the vegetable kingdom. He was silent. I shall not say much about Roses, because there is so much to say. They need a book by themselves, and many have already been written. In my garden there are not more than five hundred Roses, including the climbing varieties. They have done very well, and have not been given more care than other plants. [Illustration: Rose bed carpeted with Pansies June twenty-first] For years I did not grow Roses, fearing they would not be a success. I had read about the beetles and spiders and other creatures that attack them, and dreaded the spraying and insect-picking that all the books said must be done. But, of course, I finally yielded to the temptation of having the very flower of all flowers, in my garden, and have found the trouble slight and the reward great. I have them in beds in a little formal garden, and in rows in a picking garden. The beds and the trenches for the rows are both made in the usual way, and every fall, in late October, before the Pansies are set out as already described, manure is dug in, and in the early spring, about the tenth of April, a handful of finely ground fresh bone-meal is stirred in around each plant with a trowel. They are sprayed with slug-shot three times between April tenth and May fifteenth, when they get a thorough spraying with kerosene emulsion, and, as a result, my Roses are not troubled with the usual pests. In November the hardy perpetuals are all cut back to about two feet in height, and the old wood is thinned out. The everblooming Roses are cut back to a foot in height. And Roses! well, really, no one could ask better from a garden. I have not many varieties, but when I left the country last fall, the tenth of November, although ice nearly an inch in thickness had formed, there were Roses still in bloom in the garden. The very hardy Roses, which, with a few exceptions, bloom only in June and early July, with an occasional flower in the autumn, should be planted together, as they need but slight covering. In late November the hardy ones get about a foot of stable litter over the beds. The everblooming kinds have six inches of manure, then a foot of leaves, and then a good covering of cedar branches over all. But cover late and uncover early (the very minute the frost is out of the ground), or your Roses will die. If asked to name, from my own experience, the best dozen Roses, I should say the following were the most satisfactory: General Jacqueminot, Jubilee, Ulrich Brunner, Madame Plantier, Clothilde Soupert, Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, La France, Mrs. Robert Garrett, Princess Alice de Monaco, Soleil d'Or, Perle des Jardins, and Mrs. John Laing or Baroness Rothschild. Paul Neyron and Prince Camille de Rohan might also be added to the list. Between Mrs. John Laing and Baroness Rothschild, it is a toss-up. Mrs. John Laing is a healthy, strong Rose, and a most constant bloomer. But none that grows is more beautiful than the Baroness Rothschild. Rather a shy bloomer; still each Rose, on its long, strong stem, surrounded by the very fine foliage that distinguishes this variety, makes a bouquet in itself. Baroness Rothschild is also vigorous, and I have never seen it attacked by the enemies of most Roses. Climbing Roses have so much use, as well as beauty, in a garden, that my advice is, wherever there is an excuse for having one, plant it there. They do finely on the south side of a house, on arches, summer-houses and trellises. I have a trellis along one side of a grass walk three hundred and fifty feet long. At each post are planted two Roses, a Crimson Rambler and a Wichuraiana. The Wichuraiana blossoms when the Rambler is done. Imagine the beauty of this trellis when the Roses are in bloom! On the other side of this walk there is a border four feet wide, with shrubs at the back, filled, all of the three hundred and fifty feet, with many varieties of perennials, also with Lilies and annuals planted in wherever a foot of space can be found. All of the Ramblers are good, but none blooms so luxuriantly as the crimson. The Climbing Clothilde Soupert, Baltimore Belle and Climbing Wootton are also fine. Of the Wichuraiana Hybrids, Jersey Beauty and Evergreen Gem are the best. The foliage is lovely, and the perfume of the flowers delicious. [Illustration: Canterbury Bells blooming in a border June twenty-first] The Climbing Roses should be yearly enriched in the spring with manure and bone-meal, and, after two years, some old wood should be cut out every autumn. Many of the Crimson Ramblers and Wichuraiana in my garden made growth last summer of splendid great canes, larger around than one's thumb and from ten to fourteen feet long. Monday was the day for tying and training the Roses, and often it seemed impossible for them to grow so much in a week. It would have been incredible, had we not the actual proof before our eyes. LIST OF HYBRID PERPETUAL AND HARDY ROSES BLOOMING IN JUNE, WITH AN OCCASIONAL BLOOM IN SEPTEMBER _Red_ General Jacqueminot Prince Camilla de Rohan, (darkest Rose of all). Jubilee. Baron Bonstetten. General Washington. John Hopper. Ulrich Brunner. Victor Verdier. _Pink_ Mrs. John Laing (constant bloomer). Anne de Diesbach. La France (blooms all summer). Magna Charta. Mme. Gabriel Luizet. Baroness Rothschild. Paul Neyron. _White_ Margaret Dickson. Coquette des Alpes. White Maman Cochet (blooms continually). Madame Plantier (blooms continually). Coquette des Blanches. Mme. Alfred Carriere. Marchioness of Londonderry. _Yellow_ I know but two hardy yellow Roses: The Persian Yellow. Soleil d'Or. The monthly or everblooming Roses, which need very heavy covering in winter, should be planted together. The following are a few of the best and most constant bloomers: Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, white. Bride, white. Clothilde Soupert, white with faint blush center. Madame Hoste, creamy white. Perle des Jardins, yellow. Sunset, yellow. Mlle. Germaine Trochon, yellow. American Beauty, rich crimson. Marion Dingee, deep crimson. Souvenir de Wootton, crimson. Bridesmaid, pink. Hermosa, pink. Madame de Watteville, pink. Burbank, pink. Mrs. Robert Garrett, pink. Princess Alice de Monaco, petals white, edged with blush-pink. LILIES CHAPTER XI LILIES Lilies, too, should have a book for themselves. My knowledge of them is slight. _Lilium auratum_ (Auratum Lily), the grandest of all Lilies, disappears after a few years. If large-sized bulbs are bought there will be the first year from twenty to thirty Lilies on a stalk four feet high, the second year seven to ten, the third year perhaps two or three, but oftener none at all. If you then dig for the bulb, lo! it is gone. The expense, therefore, of these Lilies is great, from their having to be often renewed. Still, do not fail to have them, if possible, for nothing can take their place. They bloom from the middle of July for about a month. I wrote to an authority on Lilies to ask the cause of this disappearance. He told me that, as soon as planted in this country, a microbe disease attacked them and they gradually disappeared under its ravages. Botanists surely should find a specific, or antidote for this; but perhaps, like some of the most terrible diseases of the human being, it evades all research. Miss Jekyll, in her book on Lilies for English Gardens, in speaking of _Lilium auratum_ says: "This grand Lily, well planted, and left alone for three years, will probably then be at its best. After this the bulbs will be likely to have increased so much that it will be well to divide them." This would seem to imply that the Auratums thrive in England. Well, they have climate in England, even if we have weather, and English gardens will always fill American gardeners with despair. [Illustration: _Lilium auratum_ growing behind Peonies and Columbines that bloomed earlier August tenth] _Lilium candidum_, which blooms before the other Lilies, is hardy and fragrant and increases rapidly. These Lilies must have full sun and light soil. About every three or four years they can be separated, which should be done as soon as the stalks turn yellow, as the bulb makes an autumn growth. For this reason the Candidums must always be bought and planted by the tenth of September. Other Lilies may be planted in the spring, when the frost leaves the ground, or in October. _Lilium speciosum rubrum_ thrives and increases in our climate, needs a partly shaded location and, therefore, does well when planted among Rhododendrons. It blooms after the Auratum, the end of August and first two weeks of September. _Lilium speciosum album_ blooms at the same time as _Lilium rubrum_. It is a beautiful pure white Lily with wax-like curved petals, grows best in full sun, and averages six Lilies on a stalk, although I have often counted more. _Lilium longiflorum_ blooms early in July. These lilies are very much like the Bermuda Lily, except that they have, as a rule, about four blossoms on a stalk, and are hardy. In my garden they have not increased. _Hansoni_, a Japanese Lily, flowering in June; bright yellow in color; perfectly hardy and very desirable. _Lilium Canadense_ (the Meadow Lily), yellow, red and orange, increases, and is very satisfactory, but likes as moist a situation as possible. _Tigrinum_, the old Tiger Lilies, both single and double. These bloom in July, increase rapidly, and by planting, when fully ripened, the little black bulbils which form on the stalk, any number of bulbs can be raised. _Funkia subcordata_ is the old-fashioned white Day Lily of our grandmothers' gardens. The broad leaves of this plant are almost as handsome as the spikes of bloom. These Lilies flower best when grown in the sun, but then the leaves turn yellow--so give them a partly shaded place. _Funkia cærulea_, with the blue blossom, is worthy of a place in the garden, though far from being as effective as the white-flowered variety. I also grow the kind with the small white and green variegated leaves for the sake of the foliage, so useful in house decoration. Funkias are not, botanically speaking, Lilies, but are mentioned in this chapter because popularly known as Day Lilies and on account of the lily-like form of their blossoms. _Lily-of-the-valley_ should have a place in every garden. Absolutely hardy, requiring no care, it blooms prolifically in early May, fills the air with its fragrance, and is beloved by every one. The German name for this flower, Mai Glöcken (May Bells) is particularly appropriate. I have heard of one woman whose bed of these flowers, four feet by fifty feet, has yielded as many as twenty thousand sprays in one season. The pips can be set out the end of October or the beginning of November. If the bed is quite large, when the Lilies have finished blooming, some can be lifted here and there and transplanted. As the pips increase rapidly, their places will soon be filled. Lilies-of-the-valley do best in a partially shaded place, and require a deep, rich soil, well mixed with leaf-mould. * * * * * A Lily bed should be prepared, if the place is damp and drainage not good, by digging out the soil for three feet, and putting a foot of cobblestones in the bottom; then fill up with a mixture of good soil, leaf-mould and sand, and very old, well-rotted manure. In the ordinary garden that is not wet, two feet are enough to dig out the bed, and the cobblestones can be omitted. Lilies should always be set with a handful of sand around the bulb, to prevent any possibility of manure coming in contact with it, as the manure will destroy the bulb. [Illustration: Vase of _Lilium auratum_ August second] In my garden there is no special place prepared for the Lilies, but they are grown in all the borders, the _Rubrums_ in the shade, the others in the sun, and this year there have been thousands of them. If there are no woods near, where the men can gather leaf-mould, have the rakings of the autumn leaves put in a pile, cover with boards, and occasionally during the spring and summer have them well forked over; the next autumn there will be a quantity of the finest thing for Lilies, Rhododendrons, Ferns, or indeed any kind of plant. This should be mixed in a pile in the proportion of one wheelbarrow of mould, two of good soil, two coal-scuttlefuls of wood-ashes, one-half barrow of old manure and two spadefuls of fine bone-meal. There is also nothing better for the Roses than some of this mixture. All Lilies do better if well mulched with clippings of lawn grass or with very old manure. The varieties of Lilies mentioned are the easiest grown and the most satisfactory. Lilies should always be planted in clumps of the same kind--never less than six, and the number increased according to the size of the garden. Alternate clumps of a dozen each of _Lilium auratum_ and _Lilium album_ planted in a border just behind Foxgloves and Canterbury Bells will come into bloom when these two biennials have finished, the _Auratum_ first, then the _Album_; these four flowers will keep the border gay from early in June until the middle of September. Lilies should be planted about eight inches deep, and have a covering of litter late in the autumn. [Illustration: Vase of _Lilium speciosum album_ and _rubrum_ September sixth] SPRING-FLOWERING BULBS CHAPTER XII SPRING-FLOWERING BULBS Bulbs can be planted at any time in the autumn before the ground freezes; the first week in November is as good a time as any. The cost of Tulips, Narcissi and Daffodils is not great. They multiply and need not be disturbed for three or four years. _Snowdrops._ The earliest of all flowers to bloom is the Snowdrop. After the long, cold winter, with the melting of the snow and the first suspicion of milder air, these frail beauties send up their graceful bells of white. With what triumph the first one is found and brought to the house, and what a thrill of joy it gives to know that spring will soon be here! Snowdrops can be planted thickly in the borders and also, like Crocuses, in the grass. The foliage of both will die before it is time to mow the lawn. _Crocuses_, which should be planted in the grass, will begin to bloom as soon as the Snowdrops pass. The gay little things make the lawn, while still brown, a carpet of bright colors. I heard of a gentleman who planted ten thousand of them in this way, and was rewarded by a most beautiful display at a time when there were no other flowers. [Illustration: Garden arch, covered with Japanese gourds August twenty-seventh] _Tulips_ I plant everywhere in the borders about four inches apart, all kinds, such as single, double, Gesnerianas and Parrot Tulips; but always a quantity of only one kind together. The bed where later the Salvias are put, has three hundred Golden Yellow Tulips. When these have faded, the Salvia plants are set out in the same bed, without disturbing the bulbs. This can be done if the men are careful, and when the Tulip leaves are quite yellow they are cut off (for unless allowed to ripen the bulb does not grow and multiply). Every three years all Tulips are dug up in the autumn, after the Salvias have died; the bed is then made very rich, and the Tulips reset. There are generally more than enough to refill the bed. The same treatment is pursued in the Canna bed, only here the Tulips are double white. Tulips will bloom from April twentieth until the last of May, if both the very early as well as the late kinds are planted. The late varieties are the Parrot and Gesneriana, which latter grow two feet high and are very showy. I have been constantly surprised to find that many good gardeners take up all bulbs when through flowering in the spring, store through the summer and replant in the autumn. This is not only unnecessary, but it is better for the bulbs to remain in the ground as nature intended. Mine have always been so treated and have been successful. In planting bulbs in newly prepared soil, great care must be taken that they do not come in contact with manure. To prevent this, the man should have a box of sand, in a handful of which each bulb should be set. Spring-flowering bulbs should be planted about four inches deep. _Poeticus Narcissus_ and _Daffodils_, both single and double, do well when naturalized in grass that need not be cut until the foliage of the bulb has died in June. They also make a very good edging for a border along a walk. The single Van Sion and Emperor Narcissus are excellent varieties. The old-fashioned sweet-scented Jonquil and double Van Sion, or Double Yellow Daffodil, are as satisfactory as any of the numerous kinds named in the catalogues. One early spring, the Double Yellow Daffodils were all in bloom on the tenth of April. Narcissi and Daffodils live for generations. I know some double yellow Daffodils growing in my great-grandfather's garden, that were planted over seventy years ago. The place was sold and the house burned about thirty years since, and all this time has been entirely neglected. Some one told me that Daffodils and Narcissi still bloomed there bravely in the grass. With a cousin, one lovely day last spring, I took the train out to this old place and there found quantities of the dainty yellow flowers. We had come unprovided with any gardening implements, having nothing of the kind in town, and brought only a basket for the spoils, and a steel table-knife. We quickly found the knife of no avail, so borrowed a sadly broken coal-shovel from a tumble-down sort of a man who stood gazing at us from the door of a tumble-down house. The roots of the Daffodils were very deep, and neither of us could use a spade, so the driver of the ramshackle wagon taken at the station was pressed into service. Handling of shovel or spade was evidently an unknown art to him. The Daffodil roots were nearly a foot deep, but we finally got them, several hundreds of them, all we could carry. The driver seemed to think us somewhat mad and said "Them's only some kind of weed," but when I told him the original bulbs from which all these had come were planted by my great-grandmother and her daughter, and that I wanted to carry some away, to plant in my own garden, he became interested and dug with all his heart. The bulbs were in solid clumps a foot across and had to be pulled apart and separated. They were the old Double Yellow Daffodil and a very large double white variety, the edges of the petals faintly tinged with yellow and delightfully fragrant. My share of the spoils is now thriving in my garden. By the process of division every three years, these Daffodils can be made to yield indefinitely, and perhaps some great-grandchild of my own may gather their blossoms. [Illustration: Vase of Phlox; single blossoms actual size August second] _Hyacinths_, too, should have a place in the spring garden. They are more expensive, as a rule, than Tulips, Narcissi and Daffodils, but, in large or small quantities, are well worth the money. The single varieties are generally preferred, while, of all kinds, the white and pale blue are the loveliest. Nothing in the garden gives so much pleasure as the early spring flowers. Perhaps this is because they are the first to bloom. Every one knows how beautiful the first lovely Dandelion seems, gold-starring the new grass. Many bulbs can be had for little money, and I would say to all, plant as many as you can squeeze in. From April fifteenth to May fifteenth I receive in town, twice a week, great boxes of spring flowers from my garden, enough each time to fill sixteen to twenty vases; yet my orders to the men are to cut always so that the flowers cannot be missed from the garden. SHRUBS [Illustration: Spiræa Van Houttei May thirty-first] CHAPTER XIII SHRUBS Of the hundreds of shrubs, comparatively few survive the severe winter climate of interior New York, or grow very luxuriantly. Lilacs of all varieties, white and purple, single and double; Deutzias, white and pink; and Syringa, the improved large-flowered variety, are most beautiful. _Spiræa Van Houttei_, sometimes called Bridal Wreath, with its long trails of white blossoms; and _Viburnum plicatum_, or Japanese Snowball, which in late May bears a ball of bloom on every twig and is both healthy and hardy, are also desirable shrubs. The old variety of Snowball is attacked by a blight, the leaves curl up and grow black and the blooms are imperfect. A few years ago I dug up all of mine and burned them. Altheas, or Rose of Sharon,--not by any means the old purplish red variety, but the beautiful new double white and double pale pink kinds, with blossoms coming in August and reminding one of Camellias,--are indispensable. Do not fail to have _Hydrangea paniculata_, with its great heads of white bloom, slowly changing to dull pink, and lasting quite six weeks. [Illustration: _Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora_ August twenty-sixth] Japanese Barberry, a dwarf shrub, covered in autumn with scarlet berries which remain on the bush all winter, is very ornamental. Many of us remember _Calycanthus floridus_, or the Sweet-scented Shrub of our young days, when the children would tie two or three of the queer brown blossoms in the corner of a handkerchief to regale their less fortunate companions with a sniff of the delicious odor. _Forsythia_ and _Laburnum_, or Golden Chain, both have yellow blossoms. Others are, _Weigela Rosea_, the well-known pink-flowering shrub; _Rhus Cotinus_, or Purple Fringe, and _Cydonia Japonica_, or Japanese Quince, deep rose-pink, flowering early in the spring. These all yield beautiful flowers, beside being hardy and of rapid growth. All shrubs should be trimmed as soon as they have finished flowering, but only enough to prevent their becoming spindling, with the exception of _Hydrangea grandiflora_, which should be trimmed back, at least three-quarters of the new growth, every year. It is important, also, to thin out the old wood of most shrubs after five or six years. Shrubs can be grown from cuttings if one has patience to wait for the result. But as it takes from three to four years' time and considerable care to grow a shrub that would cost but twenty cents, for which price many varieties of shrubs can be bought, few people care to raise them. On a large place it might be worth while to raise shrubs from cuttings. And where there is plenty of space, a small nursery of them might be kept. At the end of June take clippings about a foot long, make a shallow trench in good ground and plant them a couple of inches deep. They should be well rooted, in about six weeks. If the weather be dry, after planting them, they must be watered daily. The following spring they should be reset, a foot apart, where they can grow until transplanted to their final resting place. I know a beautiful hedge of _Cydonia Japonica_, or Japanese Quince, that has been grown from cuttings. Privet can easily be grown from cuttings, and I have raised Box from clippings. Fortunately, the season was a wet one, for if allowed to become dry before being well rooted, they would probably have died. LIST OF MOST SATISFACTORY SHRUBS _Altheas_, pink or white; blooms in August. Jeanne d'Arc, pure double white, the best. Grows six to eight feet in five years; must be trimmed in October. _Berberis Thunbergii_, or Barberry, of slow growth; about three feet high; desirable for its beautiful foliage and scarlet fruit in winter. _Calycanthus floridus_, or Sweet-scented Shrub. It yields its brown blossoms the end of May; slow-growing; requires but little trimming; height, five to six feet. _Cydonia Japonica_, Japanese Quince, has brilliant red blossoms in early May; grows six to seven feet high. _Deutzia crenata_, variety of pale pink, and _Candidissima_, white; of rapid growth, and very high; six to eight feet in five years. _Forsythia_ blooms in April with masses of yellow flowers; moderate, quick growth; seldom over six feet high. _Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora_, the finest of all hardy shrubs. The flowers are great panicles of white. They bloom about the first of August and remain beautiful for six weeks, slowly changing to a soft, dull pink. This shrub is most effective when grown in masses of a dozen or more, although single specimens are very fine. They must be vigorously cut back late every fall, leaving only about six inches of new growth. _Lilac_, common purple and common white; also _Marie Legray_, a fine white Lilac, and _Madame Lemoine_, a new double variety bearing very large trusses of flowers. All of these varieties of Lilac grow high and rapidly--frequently eight feet in six years. They require little or no pruning. It is sufficient to cut the blossoms either before or after they go to seed. _Lonicera rosea_ and _Lonicera albida_, upright Honeysuckles, in shrub form, vigorous, quick-growing, requiring but slight pruning in late autumn. They flower in May, and in midsummer are covered with beautiful berries. [Illustration: Vase of _Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora_ September tenth] _Magnolia conspicua_, with large white blossoms, blooms the middle of April; _Soulangeana_ has large pink flowers and blossoms the end of April. Magnolias should be pruned when set out, and should be moved only in spring. _Philadelphus syringa_, or Mock Orange; _grandiflorus_ is the finest. The flowers are pure white, very fragrant and bloom about the middle of June. The shrub grows high, is perfectly hardy and in every way satisfactory. It should be trimmed as soon as it has finished blossoming. Cut back about three-quarters of the new growth; it will then send out side shoots and become continually thicker. _Privet._ The common Privet is of very rapid growth and excellent for a screen. It should be trimmed the end of June, but only enough to prevent its becoming scraggly. The California Privet is not so hardy. _Rhus Cotinus_, popularly known as Smoke Tree or Purple Fringe, grows as high as a small tree and requires almost no pruning. In midsummer it is covered with fine, mist-like, purple flowers. _Spiræa Van Houttei._ This is one of the most satisfactory shrubs; is rather dwarf in habit, growing about five feet high. The end of May it is covered with clusters of white flowers on long, pendulous branches. Trim as soon as it has finished blooming, cutting off about half of the new growth. _Spiræa Anthony Waterer,_ another Spirea, very dwarf, only about a foot in height, and covered with bright crimson flowers from June to October. _Viburnum plicatum,_ Japan Snowball, one of the finest shrubs. It grows about six feet high, and is completely covered with its balls of snow in early June. It requires comparatively little trimming. _Weigela._--The two most satisfactory varieties of this shrub are _Candida_, whose blossoms are white, and _Rosea_, with pink flowers. They bloom most freely about the tenth of June, when each shrub becomes a mass of flowers. Care must be taken to cut out the old wood from time to time, and to trim after the shrub has finished blooming. A FEW EVERGREEN SHRUBS Of evergreen shrubs, _Kalmia latifolia_, or Mountain Laurel, is most satisfactory, growing three to four feet high. It is covered in early June with large clusters of pale pink and white flowers. _Rhododendron maximum_, the large-leaved hardy American variety. Under cultivation this shrub seldom grows more than six feet high; in the woods it is found much larger. _Japanese Holly_, a dense-growing shrub about four feet high, with deep glossy green foliage. _Tree Box_, generally trimmed in standard or pyramidal form and very slow-growing. PERENNIAL VINES AND CREEPERS _Ampelopsis quinquefolia_, Virginia Creeper. _Ampelopsis Veitchi_, Boston Ivy. _Aristolochia Sipho_, Dutchman's Pipe. _Bignonia radicans_, Trumpet Creeper. _Clematis paniculata_, clusters of fine white flowers. _Clematis Henryi_, large white flowers. _Clematis Jackmani_, large purple flowers. _English Ivy._ _Honeysuckle_, Hall's Japan, Golden Japan. _Hops._ _Vitis Coignetiæ_, Japanese ornamental grapevine; rapid grower. _Wistaria_, both purple and white. A FEW OF THE BEST ANNUAL VINES _Cobæa scandens_, purple and white. _Moonflower_, white. _Japanese Morning-glory_, all colors. _Passion Flower_, blue and white; must be started very early, and if well protected will sometimes survive the winter. _Japanese Gourd._ This must be descended from Jonah's Gourd of biblical fame, as it often grows from forty to fifty feet in a summer. It has yellow flowers and gourds, and is very decorative. WATER, WALKS, LAWNS, BOX-EDGINGS, SUN-DIAL AND PERGOLA CHAPTER XIV WATER, WALKS, LAWNS, BOX-EDGING, SUN-DIAL AND PERGOLA It is not advisable to arrange for a garden of any size without considering the question of water. Within the limits of a town supply there is only the comparatively simple matter of laying the pipes. But when the place is dependent upon its own water system, the amount to be counted upon and the situation of the garden with reference to the source of supply must be seriously considered. If possible the garden hydrants should not be more than fifty feet apart. This greatly facilitates watering. When further apart, plants are in danger of being injured by the unwieldy hose. A nozzle that will regulate the flow of water from a fine spray to a strong stream will be found convenient. Opinions differ upon the best way to lay water-pipes through a place, some preferring to put them but a foot under ground, and turn off the water in winter; others lay them in trenches three and a half to four feet deep, so that they are beyond all danger from frost. This latter plan was followed in my garden and I recommend it as being most satisfactory. The watering of a garden requires nearly as much judgment as the seasoning of a soup. Keep the soil well stirred and loose on the surface, going through the garden, where possible, with a rake; and if there is no room for a rake, stir gently with a trowel every five days or once a week. In this way moisture will be retained in the soil, since the loose earth acts as a mulch. [Illustration: Vase of double hardy Sunflowers (_Helianthus multiflorus plenus_) September fifteenth] When watering, be generous. Soak the plants to the roots; wet all the earth around them, and do it late in the afternoon, when the sun is low. How often have I been obliged to chide the men for watering too early in the afternoon, and not doing it thoroughly, for, upon stirring the ground, I would find that the water had penetrated but a couple of inches. During long periods of dry weather, the garden, without water, will simply wither and burn. Rhododendrons, Ferns and Lilies suffer in dry time, even though well mulched, and must be kept moist. Japanese Iris blooms but indifferently unless quite wet. When dry weather continues for a long period I divide the garden into three parts; one part is thoroughly watered every evening, and the following day the soil is stirred. In this way the plants suffer comparatively little. For years we had no water supply through the gardens, and really, in dry weather, life had no pleasure for me because of my unhappiness at the sight of the withered garden. I would drag watering-cans about, and beg and bribe all the family to do likewise. Every afternoon, about five o'clock, one of the men would fill eight ten-gallon milk-cans with water, put them in a wagon, and drive about the place watering the flower beds and borders. Frequently he would fill these cans three times in one afternoon. This, as may be imagined, was slow and unsatisfactory work, and, except in the case of a small garden, is too great a task. Often in a dry time, after dinner, I bethink me of the Rhododendrons or Ferns or Iris, or some other plants to which drought means death, and I feel sure "that boy has not watered them enough." Then, in ten minutes the garden skirt, shoes and gloves are on, and those thirsty plants get a drenching to their very roots such as they would never receive from any perfunctory "boy" or gardener. I go to bed warm and weary, yet sleep is sweet from satisfaction at the thought of the garden's happiness. WALKS Unquestionably, walks near the house should be graveled; they naturally have too hard usage to keep turf in good condition. Graveled walks should be dug out a foot or more in depth, filled in with broken stone, this covered well with coarse gravel, and finished with a coating of a couple of inches of whatever fine gravel is chosen. A walk thus made will be dry and well drained and weeds have little chance to grow. The most beautiful walks of all are those of grass. Strange to say, they are seldom seen in this country. Through any garden, some little distance from the house, where they will be walked on only by those going to the garden, the turf-walks, with ordinary care, will last well, require only the usual cutting with the lawn-mower, and, especially if edged with Box, should be the very pride and joy of the possessor's heart. The ground for such walks should be spaded deeply with plenty of manure, raked carefully and made very smooth. Prepare in September, and by the fifteenth or twentieth sow, very thickly, a mixture of one-third each to the bushel of Kentucky Blue Grass, Long Island Bent Grass and Red Top. Roll thoroughly, and if the weather be dry have the newly sown paths sprinkled daily and kept moist. The tender grass should appear in two weeks, and will continue to grow during October. [Illustration: Vase of Monkshood September thirtieth] About Thanksgiving time of the first year, cover with a layer of straw, and uncover about the twenty-fifth of March. At this time it is well to sow thinly some more grass seed of the same kinds, and again roll, the reason for the additional spring sowing being to replace any of the grass that may have been winter-killed. About the twentieth of April spread cotton-seed meal, the best of all fertilizers for grass, all over the paths. For years we have had the lawns covered with stable manure in February and raked off the first of April, and for years I have waged war with the weeds and wild grasses. But sow cotton-seed meal early in April, and if possible give the paths a little wood-ashes in June; the result will be a hundred per cent better than from the use of manure. Cotton-seed meal should not be sown too thickly, and wood-ashes must be spread thinly, so as not to burn the grass. The men tell me that a sharp-pointed mason's trowel is more satisfactory than any other tool for removing weeds from the lawns and grass paths. If this is carefully attended to the end of May, and again the latter part of June, and only artificial fertilizer used, there will be but little trouble with weeds in the grass. BOX-EDGING Box-edging should be set out in the spring, that it may be thoroughly rooted before winter. Great care must be taken in setting out the Box, that the row be absolutely straight and even. The garden cord is carefully stretched; a shallow, narrow trench is dug with the spade, and then the little plants are placed about three inches apart, each plant against the string. The trench is half filled in with earth, then a layer of manure, and finally more earth packed down. Box planted in this way should grow and thrive, especially if given, along in May, a little bone-meal. [Illustration: Sun-dial in center of formal garden August second] I write feelingly of Box-edging to-day. Last week, Holy Week, I spent in the country, and most of my time was passed on my knees. For, when not at church or driving the intervening five miles, I was setting out plants in the garden, and that, like one's prayers, requires kneeling. Four men were working, setting out plants and trees, but the earth was so sweet and warm and brown that it was impossible to keep away from it. With trowel in hand and joy in my heart, I set out hundreds of little Box plants, transplanted Columbines, Foxgloves and Canterbury Bells. Big robins were hopping tamely about, calling to one another; blackbirds and meadow-larks were singing their refrains; the brave plants were pushing their way through the earth to new life, and I thought how good it was to be alive, to have a garden to dig in, and, above all, to be well and able to dig. With work in the garden care and worry vanish. The cook (as some cooks of mine have done) may announce that "'tis a woild waste of a place. I be lavin' the mornin'." The hamper of meat does not arrive on the one train from town, or somebody smashes something very dear to your heart,--just go to the garden, tie up some Roses or vines, or poke about with a trowel, and though murder may have been in your thoughts, in half an hour serenity will return. And what does it all matter, anyway? Another maid can cook for a few days, and there are always bacon and eggs. Philosophy is inevitably learned in a garden. Speaking of eggs, I think of hens. Living on a farm, of course there have always been hens and chickens. These creatures were provided with houses and yards and fences, and given every inducement to remain where they belonged; yet with diabolical ingenuity they would escape from their quarters, dig under the fence, fly over it, or some one would leave a door or a gate open, and then, with one accord, all the flock would make for the gardens and scratch and roll in the borders. This sort of thing happened repeatedly, until I felt there must be a league between the farmer's wife and the hens. But the limit of endurance was reached when, one afternoon, coming out to look at a bed of several dozen Chrysanthemums set out in the morning, I found the poor plants all scratched out of the ground, broken and wilted. Then in wrath the fiat went forth, "No more hens on this farm, those on hand to be eaten at once." For days a patient family had hen soup, hen croquettes, hen salad and hen fricassee, until the last culprit came to her end. SUN-DIAL There is no more charming and interesting addition to a garden than a sun-dial. For hundreds of years sun-dials have been used as timekeepers, and though some of the very old ones were occasionally set into the façade of a building, they are generally found in the _plaisaunce_ or garden, mounted upon quaint pedestals. Sun-dials are supposed, by their owners, to keep accurate time, but it must be remembered that there is always a difference between clock-time and sun-time. While, to-day, our lives are frequently portioned into minutes, and it would seem as if one might loiter and be lazy in a garden, if anywhere, still even among the flowers we find a "_tempus fugit_." For a time after my sun-dial was set, it was amusing to notice how often, about half after eleven o'clock, and again at five, this late addition to the garden would claim the attention of the workmen. My sun-dial stands in the center of a formal garden where four paths meet, forming a circle twenty feet across. The pedestal is a simple column of marble, four and one-half feet high, slightly tapering toward the top, with beveled corners. This is placed on a stone foundation three and one-half feet deep, laid in cement. The pedestal I found at the yard of a second-hand building-material man, on Avenue B, in New York city. After it had been set in place, I wanted it rubbed up and a chipped place smoothed. The only available man for this work, was the gravestone-cutter from the nearest town. When he was recognized at work in the garden by passing countrymen, they supposed, of course, that some one was buried there, and many have been the inquiries as to "whose be that mouny-ment." Crimson Rambler Roses twine about the pedestal. At the corners of the four paths are standard Box trees, which stand like sentinels, and between them there are Bay trees in terra-cotta vases of simple shape--copies of antique ones. The dial made for the latitude bears this inscription, "_Utere praesenti, memor ultimae_" (Use the present hour, mindful of the last), which I found in an old book on sun-dials in the Avery Library, at Columbia University. PERGOLA Across the end of this garden is a rustic pergola seventy feet long, made of cedar posts cut from the woods on the farm, ten posts on a side, each post being set four feet deep. A string-piece of heavy chestnut rests on the tops of each row of posts. Cedar poles ten inches apart extend across the top and project two feet over each side. The pergola is eight feet wide and ten feet high, is easy to build and very effective. Care must be taken to set the posts at least four feet. At each post are planted a two-year-old root of Wistaria and one of Virginia Creeper, and I live in the hope of some day seeing the vines cover the pergola. The ground slopes gently where this is built, and the first autumn after it was made, it looked, from a little distance, so much like a section of an elevated railroad as to be very depressing. But one must possess imagination to be a gardener, and have the ability to see the garden as it will look "next year." So I refused to see the pergola except as clothed with vines, and in May, with the beautiful racemes of Purple Wistaria hanging from every rafter. Patience and perseverance are traits necessary to the gardener. One must not be discouraged, but determined to succeed. If a set of plants die, or do not flourish this year, try them again next season, under different conditions, until the difficulties are overcome. I have known people who began gardening as a mere pastime when over forty years old, and who have told me what an absorbing interest it had become and how greatly it changed the whole aspect of life for them in the country. What a delightful tie, fondness for gardening makes between people! I know several men with beautiful places and lovely gardens in which they take the warmest personal interest. Whenever I meet one of them at dinner, if by chance I am not seated next to him, I am unhappy and cannot listen sympathetically, either to the enthusiasm of the man on one side whose heart is, perhaps, bound up in golf, or to the laments of my neighbor on the other, who may be suffering from rheumatism or gout, and unable to eat or drink what he wants. INSECTICIDES--TOOL-ROOM CHAPTER XV INSECTICIDES--TOOL-ROOM The enemies of growing things have certainly increased alarmingly of late years. I cannot recall that formerly any insect was to be found in either vegetable or flower garden, other than the potato bug, currant-worm, cabbage-worm, and the green worm and small black beetle on the Rose; but now there are so many horrid creatures lying in wait until a plant is in perfection, to cut the stalk, or eat the root, or eat the pith from the stalk so that it falls, or to devour the leaves and eat the blossoms, that insecticides and a spraying machine are as necessary to a garden as a spade. For a small garden a spraying machine holding from a couple of quarts to a gallon, can be bought for a trifling sum, that will answer the purpose very well For a larger garden, a good air-pump, costing from five dollars upwards, will be found an excellent investment. One of the best insecticides is Bordeaux mixture, which can either be bought or made. I have twenty-five gallons made at a time and keep it always on hand. The following is the receipe: Three pounds of blue vitriol in coarse crystals; three pounds of unslaked lime. Slake the lime in two and one-half gallons of water; pour two and one-half gallons of water over the blue vitriol in another receptacle, and let both stand over night. In the morning stir the blue vitriol until all is dissolved; then let two persons pour simultaneously the lime water and the blue vitriol into the same receptacle, and add twenty gallons of water; stir well before filling the spraying machine. [Illustration: The Pergola (first summer) August twenty-fifth] Bordeaux mixture is to be used for rust, mildew, and all kinds of blight, whenever the leaves of plants have a tendency to turn black. Hollyhocks seem to be universally attacked by rust. Spraying the plants at the end of April, and again in the middle of May, should entirely prevent this. I have found that Bordeaux mixture prevents the leaves of Monkshood from turning black and falling off, if the plants are well sprayed with it about the middle of June and the first of July. Phloxes grown in rather shady places will, in damp weather, fall victims to mildew on the leaves. Spraying with Bordeaux mixture the end of June and middle of July should prevent this. Roses also have a tendency in warm, damp weather to mildew, which can be prevented by spraying the plants with Bordeaux mixture. Kerosene emulsion may also be prepared, and is excellent for killing, both the small green aphids that often cover the leaves of Roses, and other hard, scaly insects. Following is the receipe: Put one cake of laundry soap shaved fine into one gallon of water. When dissolved, add two gallons of kerosene oil. This makes the emulsion. For spraying, use one quart of the emulsion in fourteen quarts of water. Be sure that this is very thoroughly mixed before filling the sprayer. Powdered hellebore, if dissolved in the proportion of one pound of powder to one gallon of water, will destroy both the green worm on the Rose leaf and the small dark beetle that eats the Roses. It will also dispose of green worms on other plants. Slug-shot dissolved, one-half pound of powder to one gallon of water, will, if used the latter part of April and several times in May, keep the Roses comparatively free from insects. Slug-shot and hellebore may also be used dry and blown on to the plants with a bellows. I have used Hellebore in my garden for many years without harm to anything except the worms and beetles. But recently I heard of a lady who was severely poisoned in using dry Hellebore. The wind blew it into her face; perhaps some was inhaled, and serious illness resulted. I mention the fact here, to caution all who use it not to let either the spray or the powder come in contact with the skin. Some persons may be susceptible to the poison while others are not,--presenting a case of what the doctors call an "idiosyncrasy." Paris green, mixed in the proportion of two tablespoonfuls to three quarts of water and used as a spray, will destroy a beetle that sometimes appears upon the Gourd vines. Tobacco water will kill the black aphids which appear on the stems and leaves of hardy Chrysanthemums. It will also kill green aphids. This spray is made by filling an ordinary pail lightly, not pressed down, with tobacco stems. Pour as much cold water into the pail as it will hold; let it stand for three hours, when it is ready to use in the spraying machine. This mixture will be good for only twenty-four hours. Tobacco spray will also destroy the large red aphid (I call it this for want of, perhaps, the proper name) that has recently appeared in some localities upon the stems of the Rudbeckia (Golden Glow) and of the single hardy Sunflower, just below the blossom. The enemy of the Box is the white spider. The insect spins its web on the Box and works from the inside. If the branches are pulled aside, the inside of the plant will be found full of dead leaves in the vicinity of the web. Recently I read in a well-known gardening monthly, that this spider could be destroyed by spraying with kerosene emulsion. I have some fine Box trees, and there were several white spider-webs on each. Watering with a very strong force of water had been tried without effect. Upon reading the article in the monthly and finding that the spider was certainly causing disaster which might be fatal, I proceeded to have the trees sprayed with kerosene emulsion, using it of the same strength as for Roses. In fact, the sprayer was not re-filled, as there was enough left in it since last using it on the Roses. About three days after the Box had been sprayed, large, unsightly brown patches appeared on the trees, showing that the emulsion had killed the leaves wherever it touched them. The spider was not harmed. I mention this experience as an example of the danger of taking all the directions found in horticultural publications as gospel truth. Nor should an amateur gardener ever be tempted to trifle with plant medicines. I have a certain friend whose affection for her Roses is more profound than her knowledge of how to treat their natural diseases. Observing last summer that one of her most cherished Crimson Ramblers was covered with aphids, she concluded to spray it with "something." A bottle of carbolic acid being most available, she tested its merits at once. The efficacy of carbolic acid as a poison was proved beyond a doubt, for the insects became singularly dead in a day or two, and so did the leaves; they fell off together. There was nothing left but the forlorn stems and branches, looking like some freak of the vegetable kingdom. TOOL-ROOM [Illustration: Tritoma (Red-Hot Poker Plant) September twenty-eighth] It is of the greatest importance to have a tool-room or closet according to the size of the place, and to require all implements to be kept there when not in actual use. There should be shelves across one end or side, where shears, trowels, garden cord, clippers, watering-cans, mallet, various mixtures for spraying, oil-cans, keys for turning on the water, twine and all the smaller things one uses, may be found at a moment's notice. Garden sticks painted green, in three sizes, three and a half and four feet long, and five-eighths of an inch in diameter, and thicker ones an inch in diameter for Dahlias, should be kept on hand in barrels. They can be bought of lumber-dealers in New York, where they are known as "dowels." They come in bundles of one hundred, costing from sixty cents to a dollar and twenty-five cents a bundle, according to size, unpainted, and the men can paint them on rainy days. The lawn mowers and the roller (which should be a heavy one) can also be kept in the tool-room. Rakes, both iron and wooden, hoes, spades and shovels, the latter both long-handled and short-handled, are best kept hung up along one side of the closet, where the men can see at a glance what they want. There should also be a pickaxe and a crowbar for taking out refractory stones, and, most necessary of all things in a garden, the wheelbarrow should be kept here, too. A sickle and a scythe must not be forgotten. If the garden is large, a two-wheel tip-cart will prove a great saver of labor in carting manure and soil and in the removal of debris. On a particular shelf in my tool-room I keep my private trowel and flower scissors, to which are attached long red ribbons as a warning of "Hands off!" to others. There is also a clipper which I often use in walking about to trim a bit here and there from a shrub or a climbing Rose. If a scrap-book be kept, in which everything of interest pertaining to the garden can be pasted or written, it will be found a great help. In this way items about fertilizers, insecticides, special treatment of plants, with copies of lists ordered, can be preserved, and also, most interesting of all, notes of when the different plants bloom each year. I find the following under date of October 18, 1901: "To-day, though ice has formed three times, I have filled nineteen vases with flowers. They are Phlox, Larkspur, Monkshood, Salvia, Nasturtium, Roses, Mignonette and Chrysanthemums." After trying many kinds of gloves for gardening, including the rubber ones, I now use only old Suede gloves; they give sufficient covering and permit more freedom of movement to the hands and fingers than those of heavier material. It would be quite impossible to transplant tiny seedlings while wearing gloves with clumsy finger-tips. Unless a woman possesses a skin impervious to wind and sun, she is apt to come through the summer looking as red and brown as an Indian; and if one is often out in the glare, about the only headgear that can be worn to prevent this, is the old-fashioned sunbonnet. With its poke before and cape behind, protecting the neck, one really cannot become sunburned, and pink ones are not so bad. Retired behind its friendly shelter, you are somewhat deaf to the world; and at the distant house, people may shout to you and bells be rung at you, and, if your occupation be engrossing, the excuse "no one can hear through a sunbonnet," must be accepted. CONCLUSION CHAPTER XVI CONCLUSION The character of professional gardeners seems to be changing. They have become more perfunctory, more stubborn, more opinionated, until now it is a really serious question with them of "the danger of a little knowledge." To find a man who combines sobriety and a good disposition with a fair knowledge of his business and a real liking for it, is a difficult matter. Where but one man is kept to care for vegetables, flowers and lawn, he is more than likely to have little interest beyond potatoes or corn, or to be good at raising small fruits, and to consider everything else he has to do as so much waste of time. When first married, one of our gardeners was a German who took no interest in flowers, and planted half the vegetable garden with "kohlrabi" and "korn salad." We had never heard of these delicacies before, and did not care for them. I remember also his telling me that one kind of flower was enough to raise anyway. If a young man with an elementary knowledge of gardening can be found, who wants to learn, is strong, willing and intelligent, it is better to supply most of the brains yourself. You will find your own wishes more apt to be carried out than by the gardener who "knows it all," and seems to resent what he calls "interference" on the part of his employer. I remember, when a child, seeing my father's gardener walking about in the early evening after his supper, smoking a meditative pipe, tying up Roses or spraying plants, and often setting out seedlings after sundown. He was never idle; he loved his work and attended to it. But now it is rare indeed to see a gardener, after hours, going about his work; _autre temps autres moeurs_. [Illustration: Bringing in the flowers September sixth] Remember always that it is the overcoming of the difficulties in the gardener's way, the determination to succeed, that gives zest to the occupation. Did everything planted grow and flourish, gardening would be too tame. Rust and blight, cutworms, rose-beetles and weeds, afford the element of sport so attractive to us all. A lesson must be learned from every failure; with renewed patience persevere until success is reached. I would make the strongest plea in favor of a garden to all those who are so fortunate as to possess any land at all. The relaxation from care and toil and the benefit to health are great, beyond belief, to those who may have to work with head or hands. If you can snatch a few minutes in early morning or late afternoon, to spend among the plants, life takes on a new aspect, health is improved, care is dissipated, and you get nearer to Nature, as God intended. If the rich and fashionable women of this country took more interest and spent more time in their gardens, and less in frivolity, fewer would suffer from nervous prostration, and the necessity for the multitude of sanitariums would be avoided. Flower gardening is preëminently a woman's occupation and diversion. Nearly every great lady in England takes a personal interest in her gardens and conservatories, and knows all about the plants and flowers. Here, the majority of women having large places leave the direction of the flowers, as well as the vegetables and fruit, to the taste and discretion of the gardener, and thus miss a great and healthful pleasure. As a rule, young people do not care for gardening. They lack the necessary patience and perseverance. But in the years of middle life, when one's sun is slowly setting and interest in the world and society relaxes, the garden, with its changing bloom, grows ever dearer. [Illustration] [Illustration: Bed edged all the way with Sweet Williams PLAN FOR BORDER] [Illustration: PLAN FOR BORDER] INDEX _Aconitum Napellus_, 110. Altheas, 160. _Ampelopsis Veitchii_, 25. _Anemone Japonica alba_, difficulty with, 61. Annuals-- List, with height, colour and period of blooming, 88. Sowing, 78, 80. Transplanting, 86. [_See also names of flowers._] Antirrhinum, sowing, 80. Aquilegias, _see Columbines_. Asters-- Destruction by beetle, 14, 81. Sowing, 80. Auratum lily, 139. Disappearance of bulb, 139. Price, 42. Autumn work in garden, 70-72. _Azalea mollis_, perishability of, 13. Barberry as hedge, 51, 160. Bedding-out plants, 120. [_See also names of plants._] Beds, rule for making, 16. Beetle destroying asters, 14, 81. Biennials, 117. [_See also names of flowers._] Bone-meal, 73, 74. Bordeaux mixture, 190. Borders-- Around house, 29. Blooming from May to September, contents of border, 69. Planting, 29, 40-44, 67. Short path and narrow borders, 68. Small plot borders-- Boundary lines of property, 48-50. Cost, 44. Planting, 40-44. Boston ivy, 25. Box, white spider pest, 194. Box-edging, 177-178. Bulbs, purchasing and planting, 40-44, 149-156. Calendula, 81. _Calycanthus floridus_, 160. _Campanula medium_, 117. Candytuft, planting, 46. Cannas, 48, 120, 122. Canterbury bells, 117, 190. Cardinal Flower, transplanting, etc., 32. Centaurea, _see Cornflower_. Chrysanthemums, 43, 99. Clayey soil, lightening, 16. _Clematis paniculata_, 27. Climbing roses, 27, 131. Columbines, 41. Planting, 41. Sowing, 93. _Coreopsis_, 98. Cornflowers-- Blooming, etc., 81. Planting, 46. Cosmos, sowing, 81. Cost, _see Expense_. Creepers, _see Vines_. Crocuses, 150. Daffodils, 41, 152-154. Dahlias, 120, 121. Cost, 47. Planting, 45. Storage, 47, 48. Delphiniums, 96. Digitalis, 117. Double yellow daffodils, 152-154. "Dowels," 197. England-- Gardening seasons, etc., 19. Gardens, small plots, 37. English ivy, 25. Everblooming roses, 127, 134. Evergreen shrubs, 167. Exchange of plants, 98, 99. Expense-- Border planting, 40-44. Front beds, 47. Fall work in the garden, 70-72. Ferns-- Border of, 29. Maidenhair haunts, 31. Planting, 32. Transplanting, 32. Watering, 173, 174. Flowers-- Annuals, _see that title_. Gathering, extract from English book, 77. Perennials, _see that title_. [_See also names of flowers._] Flower garden-- Small plots of ground, 23, 37. Foxgloves, 117-120. France, small plots, 37. Front of the house, planting bed, 45. _Funkia cærulea_, 142. _Funkia subcordata_, 142. Gaillardias, 104. German iris, 104. Gladioli, 120, 122, 126. Purchasing, 43. Storing, 47. Gloves for gardening, 198. Golden Glow, 46, 47, 111. Grandiflora, 98. Grass walks, 175-177. Graveled walks, 174-175. Ground, _see Soil_. Hansoni, 142. Hardy roses, 127, 130. List of roses blooming in June and September, 133. Hedges-- Beauty of, as fences, 50. Preparing ground for, 50. Quick screens, 67. Varieties, 50-51. [_See also names, Privet, etc._] Hellebore, 192. Hemlock spruce, 50. Henryi, 27. Hibiscus, 98. Hollyhocks, 94. Planting, 28, 68. Seeding, 58. House-- Painting, 25-27. Plan of garden to suit style of house, 21. Vines, _see that title_. Hyacinths, 40, 154. Hybrid perpetual roses, 127. List of roses blooming in June and September, 133. _Hydrangea paniculata_, 160. Insects and insecticides, 189. Asters destroyed by beetle, 14, 81. Bordeaux mixture, 190. Hellebore, 192. Kerosene emulsion, 191. Paris green, 192. Slug-shot, 192. Tobacco water, 193. White spider on box, 194. Iris, 104, 173, 174. Ivy-- Boston ivy, 25. English ivy, 25. Jackmani clematis, 27. Japanese barberry, 51, 160. Japanese iris, 104, 173, 174. Japanese lily, 142. Japanese tree peonies, 106. Japanese vines, planting, 28. Kerosene emulsion, 191. Laying out a garden-- Beds in front of vines, 28. Borders, _see that title_. North side of house, 29. Plan of garden, suiting to style of house, 21. Soil, _see that title_. Vines, _see that title_. [_See also names of flowers, etc._] Lilac, 164. Lilies, 139-146. Auratum lily, _see that title_. Border planting, 42. Planting, etc., 144-146. Watering, 173. [_See also names, Lilium, etc._] _Lilium auratum, see Auratum lily._ _Lilium Canadense_, 142. _Lilium candidum_, 140. _Lilium longiflorum_, 141. _Lilium speciosum album_, 141. _Lilium speciosum rubrum_, 141. Lily-of-the-valley, 143. London Pride, 110. Lychnis, 110. Maidenhair fern, haunts of, 31. Mai Glöcken, 143. Marigolds, 82. Meadow lily, 142. Monkshood, 110. Moonflower, Japanese, 28. Morning-glory, Japanese, 28. Narcissus, 40, 152. Nasturtiums, planting, 79. Ordering plants, 65. Oriental poppies, 102. Painting of house and care of vines, 25-27. Pansies, carpeting rose beds with, 84, 126. Paris green, 192. Peonies, 41, 105. Perennial vines and creepers, 167. Perennials-- Development, 52. List, with height, colour and time of blooming, 112. Planting, 49. Raising in seed-bed, 48, 57. Seed-bed, _see that title_. Sowing seeds, 59, 93. Transplanting, 102. [_See also names of perennials._] Pergola, 183-184. Pests, _see_ Insects. _Philadelphus syringa_, 165. Phlox, 82, 106, 111. Pinks, 102. Plan of garden, suiting to style of house, 21. Planting, 66-74. Borders, 29, 40-44, 67. Candytuft, 46. Cornflowers, 46. Dahlias, 45. Fall work, 70-72. Ferns, 32. Hollyhocks, 28, 68. Lilies, 144-146. Perennials, 49. Roses, 126, 127. Rows, 68, 69. Small plot, 37-54. Starting a garden, 21. Transplanting, _see that title_. Plants-- Exchange, 98, 99. Ordering, 65. Unpacking, 65. _Platycodon Mariesi_, 96. Poeticus narcissus, 40, 152. Poppies, 102. Sowing, 78-79. Privet, purchase, etc., 51. Professional gardeners, 13, 203. Red-hot poker plant, 104. Rhododendrons-- Planting and care of, 29-31. Watering, 173, 174. Rockets, 98. Roots, purchasing, 40-44. Rose of Sharon, 160. Roses, 125-135. Best roses, list of, 131. Budded stock, 126. Carpeting rose bed with pansies and gladioli, 84, 126. Climbing, 27, 131. Everblooming, 127, 134. Exclusiveness, 125. Hardy, _see that title_. Hybrid Perpetual, _see that title_. List of hybrid perpetual and hardy roses blooming in June and September, 133. Planting, 126, 127. Replanting and cutting, 127, 130. Rudbeckias, 28, 46, 47, 111. Salvia, 121. _Scabiosa Caucasica_, 109. Scarlet salvia, 121. Scrap-book, 198. Screens, quick, 67. Seed-bed-- Empty, 62. Importance and satisfaction, 48, 57. Preparing, 57. Seeds, sowing, 58. Setting of plants, 13. Shirley poppies, 78, 79. Shrubs, 159-168. Evergreen shrubs, 167. Growth from cuttings, 161, 162. List of most satisfactory shrubs, 162. Planting, 50. [_See also names of shrubs._] Slug-shot, 192. Small plot, planting, 37-54. Borders, _see that title_. Front of the house, 45-48. Snowball, blight, 159. Snowdrops, 149. Soil-- Beds, rules for making, 13. Clayey, lightening, 16. Manure, use of, 71-74. Preparation of, 13, 16, 20. Sowing-- Annuals sown in seed-bed in spring, list of, 80. Seeds, 58. Spider on box, 194. Spring-flowering bulbs, 40-44, 149-156. Starting a garden, 21. Sticks, "dowels," 196. Suburban gardens, 39. Sunbonnet, 199. Sun-dial, 181-183. Sweet Peas-- Sowing, 83. Trellis, 84. Sweet Williams, 95. Tigrinum, 142. Tobacco water, 193. Tools and tool-room, 196-199. Transplanting-- Annuals, 86. Cardinal flower, 32. Fall work, 70-72. Ferns, 32. Perennials, 102. Tritomas, 104. Trumpet creeper, 25. Tulips, 41, 150. Unpacking plants, 65. Valerian, 99. _Veronica longifolia_, 104. Vines and Creepers-- _Ampelopsis Veitchii_, 25. Best annual vines, 168. Care of, 25. _Clematis paniculata_, 27. English ivy, 25. Henryi, 27. Jackmani clematis, 27. Japanese vines, 28. North side of house, 29. Painting of house, 25-27. Perennials, 167. Planting, 23. Roses, climbing, 27, 131. Trumpet creeper, 25. Virginia creeper, 25. Walks, grass and graveled, 174-177. Water supply and watering, 171-174. Weeding, 87. White spider on box, 194. _Yucca filamentosa_, 102. Zinnias, varieties of, 82. F. C. Printed in the United States of America. * * * * * * Transcriber's note: Apparent typographical errors have been corrected and hyphenation standardised, e.g., sunbonnet and Sunflower are written without hyphens throughout the book. Unusual punctuation and original spelling have been retained, receipe (recipe?) left as printed. The 1930 date on the title page might be a misprint for 1903, although there was a 1930 edition. 
39929	----	THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY [WILLIAM GILPIN] A DIALOGUE UPON THE GARDENS OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE Lord Viscount _COBHAM_ AT STOW IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE _(1748)_ _Introduction by_ JOHN DIXON HUNT PUBLICATION NUMBER _176_ WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES _1976_ GENERAL EDITORS William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles ADVISORY EDITORS James L. Clifford, Columbia University Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Earl Miner, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library James Sutherland, University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library INTRODUCTION Stowe is certainly the most documented of all English Augustan gardens,[1] and William Gilpin's _Dialogue_ probably one of the most important accounts of it. He was at Stowe in 1747 and published his record of that visit anonymously the following year.[2] The _Dialogue_ reached a second edition, with some slight alterations in the text, in 1749 and a third in 1751, when the dialogue was transformed into narrative. The _Dialogue_ recommends itself both to the historian of the English landscape movement, in which Stowe was a prime exhibit, and to the student of the later vogue for the picturesque, in which Gilpin was a major participant. His account of Cobham's gardens illuminates some of the connections between the cult of the picturesque that Gilpin fostered with his publications of the 1780s and the earlier eighteenth-century invocation of pictures in gardens. Perhaps in no other art form were the tensions and transformations in the arts more conspicuous than in landscape gardening. Gilpin is especially rewarding in his instinctive attention to these shifting patterns; although the dialogue form is not very skillfully handled, it yet allows some play between the rival attitudes. Thus his characters attend to both the emblematic and the expressive garden;[3] to both its celebration of public worth and its commendation of private virtue. While Gilpin seems sufficiently and indeed sharply aware of set-piece views in the gardens, the three-dimensional pictures contrived among the natural and architectural features, he also reveals himself as sensitive towards the more fluid psychological patterns, what one might term the _kinema_ of landscape response. Above all, his obvious delight in the landscape garden and appreciation of it vie with an equally strong admiration for scenery outside gardens altogether. At the time of Gilpin's visit, Lord Cobham's gardens were substantially as they are represented in the engravings published in 1739 by the widow of Charles Bridgeman, one of Stowe's designers. In the year of Gilpin's visit work had just started in the northeast part of the grounds upon the natural glade that came to be known as the Grecian Valley.[4] Whether it is the work of Lancelot ("Capability") Brown, who was then a gardener at Stowe, or only prophetic of it, the Grecian Valley was a hint of the less architectural, the more carefully "natural" gardens of the next decades. Although Gilpin would presumably have seen little of this most advanced example of gardening style, he would still have observed what were, in the terms customarily invoked, formal and informal ingredients at Stowe. From the Rotunda, for example, he looked over the (now vanished) Queen's Pool, "laid out with all the Decorations of Art" (p. 15), including the oblong canal itself and various statues; the first body of water encountered beside the Lake Pavillions (p. 4) was octagonally shaped and bore an obelisk at its centre. Yet elsewhere there was frequent occasion to praise prospects that obviously seemed much less artificial. If there is any distinction between the two participants in the _Dialogue_, it is certainly between the one's taste for the evidence of art and the other's penchant for natural beauties. If their opposition is not very conspicuously maintained by Gilpin, it is surely because his own loyalties were divided and were to be reconciled only with some subtlety and ingenuity later in his career. Callophilus, who cites Pope's balanced instructions on the mixture of art and nature (p. 26), is more inclined to appreciate these elements in the garden where Nature's defective compositions have been improved; the love of beauty that his name announces is of beauty methodized, though without exceeding "a probable Nature" (p. 6). On the other hand, his enthusiastic companion, Polypthon, directs his eponymous ill-will mostly against the decorations of art: the "hewn Stone" of Dido's Cave particularly offends him (p. 14), and he "cannot very much admire" the canal below the Rotunda (p. 15). Yet he seems to share Callophilus' notions about "mending" nature (p. 23), and it is he who proposes a landscape that, substituting farm-houses for temples (p. 45), approximates most clearly to that prettiest of eighteenth-century landscape ideas, the _ferme ornée_. Polypthon's predilection for scenery outside gardens seems equally compromised by his ready assent to Callophilus' praise of the carefully studied contrasts in Stowe gardens: so that he may turn from the less agreeable vista down the Queen's Pool and look instead over Home Park, earlier noted for its "rural scene" (p. 8), and now admired as a natural field--though the cattle prominent in Rigaud's drawings[5] are not mentioned. But what is artless for Polypthon is studied by his companion in terms of art: "the Field is _formed_ by that Semi-circle of Trees into a very grand Theatre" (p. 15, _my italics_), and his eye registers an architectural feature--Vanbrugh's Pyramid--as the apt centre of that field of vision. This particular exchange at the Rotunda suggests that the usual modern discussion of landscape gardens in terms of their diminishing formality or escalating informality is less Gilpin's concern than the mind's involvement with the various landscapes. Callophilus and Polypthon can apparently both contemplate the same scene from the Rotunda, southwest towards Kent's Temple of Venus and Vanbrugh's Pyramid, yet adjudge its artifice differently. What is evidently at work in Gilpin's record of this garden is the mental experience of it, and in his case the ambiguities of his visual response. The complicated geometry that began on Bridgeman's drawing board[6] and then was transferred to shape the grounds is certainly a survival of the old-fashioned French style in gardens. Its presence is registered by Gilpin, who allows Callophilus to note how the Gibbs building, like many other objects at Stowe designed to be seen along a variety of axes, "has its Use ... in several Prospects" (p. 8). But the psychology of the viewer has at least equal weight in Gilpin with the many-faceted object viewed from different positions.[7] And in those circumstances the presence of formal or informal designs upon the ground or the drawing-board matters less than the variety of objects and scenes within a garden and even, as at the Rotunda, the variety of viewpoint and interpretation within one vista. Variety had, of course, always been essential to the English garden and is a special feature of Stowe, as Pope implies in the _Epistle to Burlington_ and as the writer of the appendix to Defoe's Tour of 1742 explicitly stated.[8] What we have in Gilpin's _Dialogue_ is both valuable evidence of response to garden structures, the visitor's rather than the designer's or client's account, and some hints of how the idea of variety, itself a painterly term, presented itself to Gilpin in the days before his picturesque tours. Gilpin's path through the gardens at Stowe is recorded in the _Dialogue_ as a journal of the mind's responses: the _Advertisement_ (p. iv) prepares the reader for this with its insistence upon the role memory has played in its composition. The varieties of mental experience are sometimes registered by the dialogue form; more often the two visitors share responses which correspond to the changes of Stowe's scenes. This is most amusingly illustrated by the "impertinent Hedge" that suddenly blocks their view (p. 11); Callophilus' ingenious explanation, a curious parallel to Sterne's blank page in _Tristram Shandy_, is that thereby the visitor's "Attention" is kept awake (p. 12). More strenuous is their intellectual involvement with the monuments, statues, and inscriptions in the Elysian Fields (pp. 19ff), emblems that provoke in Callophilus "a Variety of grand Ideas" (p. 29). Yet, as the text of the third edition makes precisely clear (p. 11), in face of the same objects his companion is more fascinated than he with the formal elements of an art--contrasts in landscape textures, style of inscriptions (p. 30), or unadmirable workmanship in bas-reliefs (p. 37). The "Subject[s] for ... Rapsody" (p. 30) that Polypthon mocks were an essential aspect of any Augustan garden, and six pages later they divert even Polypthon himself into moralizing. But his stronger inclination is to ignore the iconographical problems of the Saxon busts (p. 44) and gaze "into the Country" where his companion solicitously directs his attention to the elegant woods (p. 45). The _Dialogue_ allows these and related distinctions to emerge, even though it does not grapple with their implications. As Callophilus explains, there should be a grand terrace for strangers, and the shade of a "close vista" for friends (p. 31). Stowe provided both, just as it catered to the propensity for retirement--the Hermitage, the Temple of Friendship, or the Temple of Sleep--as well as for the obligations of public life--the Temple of British Worthies, the gothic Temple of Liberty. The most emblematic items in the gardens, upon which Callophilus predictably expatiates because they were designed to be easily "read," are in the public places, where they firmly control the visitors' mental reactions and leave less scope for the private and enthusiastic reveries of Polypthon. It is a fair assumption that most visitors to the Temples of Liberty or Ancient and Modern Virtue would have understood their meanings just as Callophilus did (pp. 40 and 19-21). But the aesthetic taste of Polypthon for the forms and shapes rather than the meanings of landscape betrays a potential for less controlled and more private rhapsodies. His quest "after beautiful Objects" (p. 24) takes him as much to the northern parts of Great Britain as to gardens like Stowe, and is obviously prophetic of Gilpin's own picturesque travels. Like Warton's _Enthusiast or the Lover of Nature_ (1740), Polypthon rejects "gardens deck'd with art's vain pomps." This is because he is fascinated with the more radical landscapes of solely formal elements--the serpentine windings of the river at Stirling (p. 44) or what has been called the abstract garden[9] that comes to fruition only in the decades after Gilpin's visit under the management of "Capability" Brown. But the fact that Polypthon finds sufficient abstract patterns to engage his attention at Stowe suggests that the Brownian mode was already latent among the richnesses of the Buckinghamshire gardens. The "rejection" of Stowe by Polypthon as by Warton also signals their desire to indulge the enthusiastic fit. His very first reaction upon arrival at Stowe is an "Exclamation" that expresses _his_ expectations of aesthetic delight (p. 2). Although his companion is equally susceptible and is accused by Polypthon of being an "Enthusiast" (p. 49) and in the third edition of the _Dialogue_ (p. 12) determines himself to "indulge the thrilling Transport," it seems to be Polypthon whom Gilpin intends to characterize by expressive as opposed to explanatory outbursts as they proceed round the gardens. And it is he who concludes their visit (p. 58) with a catalogue of the various human moods for which the gardens cater, rather more extravagant in its expressive fervour than Callophilus' traditional identification of the passions on faces of other visitors (p. 51). Gilpin's attention to his characters' intellectual and emotional reactions illuminates the roles of poetry and painting that have always been associated with the rise of the English landscape garden.[10] If Milton's description of the Garden of Eden, so frequently invoked by eighteenth-century gardenists, implied an informal structure for designers to emulate, it equally encouraged associationist activity in gardens. The visual reminders of literary texts at Stowe--_Il Pastor Fido_ (pp. 2ff) or Spenser (pp. 6-7)--which are sometimes accompanied by inscriptions which articulate the "dumb poetry" of the decorations (e.g., p. 13) serve mainly to provoke the imagination of visitors. Sometimes, as at the Hermitage, Stowe's designers force specific associations upon the mind; elsewhere they are content to manipulate the feelings in such a way as to stimulate merely general fancies to which the visitor himself must put whatever name he wishes. It is consistent with Gilpin's attempt to identify Polypthon with the less public aspects of Stowe that it is he who twice formulates his own responses to a scene: the quotations from Milton (pp. 10 and 52-3) may both describe the formal features of landscape, but they are also expressive of his emotional reactions. Pictures, too, provided associationist focus when recalled in a garden: the most obvious instance being the probable allusion to Claude at Stourhead.[11] Yet the actual influence of pictures on landscape gardens has been generally exaggerated.[12] Where they were perhaps a force seems to have been in articulating the mental and emotional reaction of visitors. When Walpole praises William Kent for realizing in gardens "the compositions of the greatest masters in painting",[13] I suspect that he is in part rationalizing his own associationalist instinct, when at Hagley he was reminded of Sadeler's prints or of the Samaritan woman in a picture by Nicolas Poussin. Allusions to pictures were a means of focusing evanescent mood. Gilpin, too, organizes his characters' responses in pictorial focus. The _Advertisement_ again alerts the reader to these studied painterly aims. Once inside the gardens Callophilus sees pictures everywhere: variously disposed objects "make a most delightful Picture" (p. 14), while on at least three occasions in the first half-dozen pages the ruins, prospects, and "Claro-obscuro" of trees are discussed in terms that suggest how his habits of vision have been educated in front of painted or engraved landscapes which in their turn are recalled to provide a suitable vocabulary for his experiences.[14] Even Polypthon invokes the syntax of painting (pp. 25 and 41) to formulate his reactions to scenery. It is in these painterly preconceptions of the characters and in Polypthon's account of Scottish scenery (pp. 23-4) that hints of Gilpin's later career are announced: the second edition of the _Dialogue_ even talks of his "Observations" on Stowe, a term that became a standard ingredient in the titles of his picturesque tours. The education of sight by the study of paintings and prints was clarified and expounded in the _Essay on Prints_, written at least by 1758 and published ten years later. The picturesque tours themselves were started in the 1770s and published from 1782 onwards. In them Gilpin refines and enlarges upon the methods and ideas of his Stowe _Dialogue_. The adjudication between a taste for natural beauties (what his _Three Essays_ term the "correct knowledge of objects")[15] and the inclination to adjust them according to painterly criteria (in 1792 termed "scenes of fancy") is more sophisticated and consistent. He still delights in the variety of a landscape; but the roughness that Stowe only occasionally allowed becomes one of his guiding rules in appraising scenery. Perhaps the most significant items in the _Dialogue_ for readers of Gilpin's later writings will be his psychological emphasis and his attention to verbal and visual associations. Although his picturesque tours never entirely neglected the topographical obligation to describe actual localities, it is increasingly an imaginative response to landscape that is his concern.[16] In the _Dialogue_ he explained how a good imagination will "improve" upon the sight of a grand object, just as Burke a few years later was to discuss the essential vagueness of the sublime and its appeal to the private sensibility. Polypthon's reactions at Stowe suggest something of this potential in contradistinction to Callophilus' ability to read the message of each temple or vista. What Gilpin displays in 1748 is more intricately adumbrated in the _Three Essays_ of 1792: a scene may strike "us beyond the power of thought ... and every mental operation is suspended. In this pause of intellect, this deliquirium of the soul, an enthusiastic sensation of pleasure over spreads it ...".[17] As the final pages of _Dialogue_ suggest, that experience was also available in the gardens of Stowe. But the more mature imagination in Gilpin is tempted simultaneously in two directions, which perhaps explains why one contemporary was moved to commend the published tours for being "the Ne plus ultra of the pen and pencil united."[18] At Stowe he is attentive to the expressive potential of scenery and its associations ("The Eye naturally loves Liberty" [p. 54]), which are best expounded in the written commentary. But he also delights in the shapes and forms of scenery, the abstract qualities of the Stowe landscape that please the eye rather than the mind's eye. These are best recorded in his watercolours and the illustrations which become a main feature of his later books. Bedford College University of London NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION [1] Before 1753 there was no guide to any English garden except Stowe; by then the Stowe guidebook had gone through sixteen editions (one in French) plus two pirated editions, the _Dialogue_ itself which mentions the guidebook on p. 17, and two sets of engraved views. For a modern account of Stowe see Christopher Hussey, _English Gardens and Landscapes, 1700-1750_ (London: Country Life, 1967), pp. 89-113. As a companion piece to this facsimile of _Dialogue_, ARS plans to publish in its 1976-77 series a facsimile of the _Beauties of Stowe_ (1750), with an introduction by George Clarke. [2] Gilpin's authorship is argued by William D. Templeman, _The Life and Works of William Gilpin (1724-1804), Illinois Studies in Language and Literature_, XXIV. 3-4 (Urbana, 1939), pp. 34-5. [3] The distinction is made by Thomas Whately, _Observations on Modern Gardening_, 5th ed. (London, 1793), pp. 154-5. [4] The Grecian Valley is seen first on Bickham's engraved plan of 1753. This and other plans of Stowe are reproduced by George Clarke, "The Gardens of Stowe," _Apollo_ (June, 1973), pp. 558-65. [5] See Peter Willis, "Jacques Rigaud's Drawings of Stowe in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," _Eighteenth-Century Studies_, 6 (1972), 85-98. [6] See George Clarke, _op. cit._, p. 560. [7] On this topic see two essays by Ronald Paulson: "Hogarth and the English garden: visual and verbal structures," _Encounters, Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts_, ed. John Dixon Hunt (London: Studio Vista, 1971), and "The Pictorial Circuit and related structures in eighteenth-century England," _The Varied Pattern_, ed. Peter Hughes and David Williams (Toronto: Hakkert, 1971). [8] "There is more Variety in this Garden, than can be found in any other of the same Size in _England_, or perhaps in _Europe_" (p. 290). [9] Derek Clifford, _A History of Garden Design_ (London: Faber, 1962), pp. 138-9. [10] "Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the Science of Landscape, will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the _Three New Graces_ who dress and adorn nature": MS. annotation to William Mason's _Satirical Poems_, published in an edition of the relevant poems by Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), p. 43. For an anthology of similar comments see _The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820_, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (London: Elek, 1975). [11] See Kenneth Woodbridge, _Landscape and Antiquity_ (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), plates 2a, 2b, and 3. [12] On this see Derek Clifford, _op. cit._, pp. 140 and 158. [13] I. W. U. Chase, _Horace Walpole: Gardenist. An edition of Walpole's 'The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening' with an estimate of Walpole's contribution to landscape architecture_ (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1943), p. 26. [14] This is an apt example of the psychological theory of sight proposed by E. H. Gombrich, _Art and Illusion_ (New York: Pantheon, 1961). [15] _Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape_ (London, 1792), p. 49. [16] Carl Paul Barbier, _William Gilpin, His Drawings, Teaching and Theory of the Picturesque_ (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 71, 106 and 139. [17] _Op. cit._, p. 49. [18] Cited by Templeman, _op. cit._, p. 228. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The facsimile of [William Gilpin's] _A Dialogue Upon The Gardens ... At Stow_ (1748) is reproduced from a copy (Shelf Mark: 577.e.26[3]) in the British Library. The total type-page (p. 7) measures 156 x 94 mm. A DIALOGUE UPON THE GARDENS OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE LORD VISCOUNT _COBHAM_, AT STOW in BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. _Here Order in Variety we see, Where all Things differ, yet where all agree._ Mr. POPE. [Illustration] _LONDON_: Printed for B. SEELEY, Bookseller in _Buckingham_, and Sold by J. and J. RIVINGTON, in _St. Paul's Church-Yard_. M DCC XLVIII. [Price One Shilling.] THE ADVERTISEMENT. _We read of a great Prince of Antiquity, who would suffer his Portrait to be taken only by the greatest Artist. And he thought justly without question: A great Object ought ever to be handled by a great Master. But yet I am apt to think that if Apelles had not offered his Service, the Monarch, rather than have had his Form unknown to Posterity, would have been glad to have employed some meaner Hand.----If Stow had been as fortunate in this Particular as Alexander, I need not now have taken up my Pencil: But as this charming Landskip is yet untouched by a Titian, or a Poussin, a mere Bungler has been tempted to venture upon it._ _But in Excuse for the Meaning of the Performance it may be said, that it is not designed to be considered as a finished Piece: This View was not taken upon the Spot, as it ought to have been, but only from my Memory and a few loose Scratches; if the Public therefore will call it only a rough Draught, or at best a coloured Sketch, my Ambition will be fully satisfied. The Curious therefore must purchase it rather from their necessity than its Merit; as they do meaner Engravings of the Cartoons, where Dorigny's are not to be had: "'Tis true, Gentlemen, says the Print-seller, they are far from being good, but take my Word for it, you will meet with no better."_ A DIALOGUE UPON THE GARDENS _of the Right Honourable the_ Lord Viscount COBHAM, _&c._ _Polypthon_ was a Gentleman engaged in a way of Life, that excused him two Months in the Year from Business; which Time he used generally to spend in visiting what was curious in the several Counties around him. As he had long promised his Friend _Callophilus_ to pass away his Vacancy, at some time or other, in _Buckinghamshire_, he determined upon it this Year; and accordingly paid him a Visit at * * *. _Stow_ was one of the first Places where his Curiosity carried him; and indeed he had scarce got his Foot within the Garden-door, before he broke out into the following Exclamation. Why, here is a View that gives me a kind of Earnest of what my Expectation is raised to! It is a very fine one indeed (replied _Callophilus_:) I do not wonder it should catch your Sight: The old Ruin upon the left of the Canal, the Opening to the Pyramid, the View towards the House, the River, the beautiful Disposition of the Trees on the other side of it, and that venerable old Temple, make a fine Variety of Objects. But your Eye is so taken up with Views at a distance, that you neglect something here at hand very well worth your notice. What do you think of these two Pavilions? _Polypth._ Why really they are light, genteel Buildings enough. I like these rough Paintings too; they are done in a very free, masterly Manner. Pray, Sir, do you know the Stories? _Calloph._ They are both taken from _Pastor Fido_; the disconsolate Nymph there, poor _Dorinda_, had long been in love with _Sylvio_, a wild Hunter, of barbarous Manners, in whose Breast she had no reason to believe she had raised an answering Passion. As she was roving in the Woods, she accidentally met his Dog, and saw her beloved Hunter himself at a distance hollowing, and running after it. She immediately calls the Hound to her, and hides it amongst the Bushes. _Sylvio_ comes up to her, and enquires very eagerly after his Dog: The poor Nymph puts him off, and tries all her Art to inspire him with Love, but to no purpose; the cold Youth was quite insensible, and his Thoughts could admit no other Object but his Dog. Almost despairing, she at length hopes to bribe his Affections, and lets him know she has his Dog, which she will return if he will promise to love her, and give her a Kiss; _Sylvio_ is overjoyed at the Proposal, and promises to give her ten thousand Kisses. _Dorinda_ upon this brings the Dog: but alas! see there the Success of all her Pains: the Youth transported at the Sight of his Dog, throws his Arms round its Neck, and lavishes upon it those Kisses and Endearments, in the very Sight of the poor afflicted Lady, which she had been flattering herself would have fallen to her share.--On this other Wall Disdain and Love have taken different Sides; the Youth is warm, and the Nymph is coy: Poor _Myrtillo_ had long loved _Amarillis_; the Lady was engaged to another, and rejected his Passion. Gladly would he only have spoke his Grief, but the cruel fair One absolutely forbid him her Presence. At length a Scheme was laid by _Corisca_, the young Lover's Confidant, which was to gain him Admission into his dear _Amarillis_'s Company. The Lady is enticed into the Fields with some of _Corisca_'s Companions, (who were let into the Plot) to play at Blindman's Buff, where _Myrtillo_ was to surprize her. See there he stands hesitating what use to make of so favourable an Opportunity, which Love has put into his Hands.----If you have satisfied your Curiosity here, let us walk towards the Temple of _Venus_. But hold: we had better first go down towards that Wilderness, and take a View of the Lake. _Polypth._ Upon my Word here is a noble Piece of Water! _Calloph._ Not many Years ago I remember it only a Marsh: it surprized me prodigiously when I first saw it floated in this manner with a Lake. Observe, pray, what a fine Effect that old Ruin has at the Head of it: Its Ornaments too, the Cascade, the Trees and Shrubs, half concealing, and half discovering the ragged View, and the Obelisk rising beyond if, are Objects happily disposed. _Polypth._ Yes, indeed, I think the Ruin a great Addition to the Beauty of the Lake. There is something so vastly picturesque, and pleasing to the Imagination in such Objects, that they are a great Addition to every Landskip. And yet perhaps it would be hard to assign a reason, why we are more taken with Prospects of this ruinous kind, than with Views of Plenty and Prosperity in their greatest Perfection: Benevolence and Good-nature, methinks, are more concerned in the latter kind. _Calloph._ Yes: but cannot you make a distinction between natural and moral Beauties? Our social Affections undoubtedly find their Enjoyment the most compleat when they contemplate, a Country smiling in the midst of Plenty, where Houses are well-built, Plantations regular, and every thing the most commodious and useful. But such Regularity and Exactness excites no manner of Pleasure in the Imagination, unless they are made use of to contrast with something of an opposite kind. The Fancy is struck by _Nature_ alone; and if _Art_ does any thing more than improve her, we think she grows impertinent, and wish she had left off a little sooner. Thus a regular Building perhaps gives us very little pleasure; and yet a fine Rock, beautifully set off in Claro-obscuro, and garnished with flourishing Bushes, Ivy, and dead Branches, may afford us a great deal; and a ragged Ruin, with venerable old Oaks, and Pines nodding over it, may perhaps please the Fancy yet more than either of the other two Objects.--Yon old Hermitage, situated in the midst of this delightful Wilderness, has an exceeding good Effect: it is of the romantick Kind; and Beauties of this sort, where a probable Nature is not exceeded, are generally pleasing.----This Opening will lead us again into the Terrace.----That large Building, the Inscription lets you see, is a Temple dedicated to _Venus_. _Polypth._ Upon my Word a Master has been at work here! I cannot say I have met with any modern Touching, this long time, that has pleased me better. I see very little to be cavilled at, with regard either to the Design, Colouring, or Drawing. These Stories are taken from the _Fairy-Queen_ I dare say; they look like _Spencer_'s Ideas. _Calloph._ Yes: that Lady is the fair _Hellinore_, who having left a disagreeable Husband, and wandering in the Woods, was met by the polite Sett of Gentry she is dancing with: She likes their Manner of Life, and resolves to enjoy it with them. Her old Spouse _Malbecco_ is inconsolable for his Loss: he wanders many Days in search of her, and at length finds her (you see him at a distance peeping from behind a Tree) revelling with a beastly Herd of Satyrs. When the Evening comes on, he follows the Company to their Retirement, takes a commodious stand, and to his great Torment sees every thing that passes among them. After they were all laid asleep, he creeps gently to his Lady, and you see him in the other Painting offering to be reconciled to her again, if she will return back with him. But _Hellinore_ threatens to awake the Satyrs, and get him severely handled if he does not immediately leave her. Upon which the poor Cuckold is obliged to fly, and soon after runs distracted. _Polypth._ This loose Story, these luxurious Couches, and the Embellishments round the Walls, give the Place quite a _Cyprian_ Air, and make it a very proper Retreat for its incontinent Inhabitant upon the Roof.----But let us move forward towards yon cubico-pyramidical Building. It looks like a mighty substantial one: I fancy it is Sir _John_'s; he is generally pretty liberal of his Stone. However, it terminates this Terrace extremely well: the Ascent up to it too has a good Effect.----Pray, do you know what that Field there, upon the right, is to be improved into? _Calloph._ I am surprized the Beauty of it, in its present Form, does not strike you at first sight. It is designed, like a Glass of Bitters before Dinner, to quicken your Appetite for the elegant Entertainment that is to follow. For my part, I assure you, I find it a very great Relief to my Eye, to take it from these grand Objects, and cast it for a few Minutes upon such a rural Scene as this. Do not you think that Haycock contrasts extremely well with this Temple? Such Oppositions, in my Opinion, are highly pleasing.----That Building there is called, _The Belvidere_. Whatever you may think of it, from this Stand, it has its Use, I assure you, in several Prospects in the Gardens.----There is a very good Copy of the _Roman_ Boxers. _Polypth._ I like its Situation extreamly: it terminates these Alleys, and that Opening from the Terrace, very beautifully; much better, I think, than the fighting Gladiator, and _Sampson_ killing the _Philistine_, do that other vast Terrace; the Objects there, in my Opinion, are too small for the Distance: Here both are justly proportioned. _Calloph._ Your Criticism, I think, is rather too refined: I cannot see what occasion there is always for a confined View; a more open one sometimes makes Variety. _Polypth._ You mistake me: I am not against a Prospect's being bounded even by the blue Hills in the Country. All I mean is this, that where Objects are set up to terminate a View, they ought to be of such a Nature as to afford Pleasure at any Distance they are designed to be viewed from. These Statues I have been mentioning, are Objects so small, that at one end of the Terrace it is impossible to make out what is offered you at the other.----I have too much Envy in my Temper, you must know, to bear to see any thing perfect; and I came in here fully determined to cavil, if I saw the least Grounds. But this is a sad Place, I find, for a malicious Spirit to enter: He whose chief _Entertainment_ is finding fault, will here meet with a very slender _Repast_: As the Devil did at Sight of the Creation, in spite of Envy he must cry out, _Terrestrial Heaven!---- With what Delight could I have walk'd thee round, If I could joy in ought: Sweet Interchange Of Hill, and Valley, Rivers, Woods, and Plains! Now Land, now Sea, and Shores with Forest crown'd, Rocks, Dens, and Caves._---- But what have we got here? _Calloph._ This is the Building we took notice of from the Temple of _Venus_. I know you are no Friend to a cloathed Statue; so I question whether you will meet with any thing here to your Taste. _Polypth._ There is something extremely grand and noble, I have always thought, in several of the old cloathed Statues, and particularly in some of the _Roman_ consular ones; yet I must confess I am always better pleased when I find them without their Finery. Marble, tho' admirably fitted to express the Roundness of a Muscle, very often fails when it attempts to give you the Folds of Drapery. The Ancients, it must be owned, even in their Draperies are often successful; but amongst our modern Attempts in this Way, how many horrid Pieces of Rock-work have I beheld! ------------ _atram Desinet in_ rupem _mulier_---- _Michael Angelo_, whenever he found himself obliged to cloath his Statues, used to do it with wet Linnen; which is unquestionably the most advantageous kind of Cloathing for a Statue. _Calloph._ Since you are not to be pleased here, let us pass on to something else. There is no Occasion to turn down to that Pyramid; it is an Object not designed to be viewed at a Yard's Distance; but you will see its Use by and by, in a Variety of beautiful Views: Let us pursue our Walk along this Terrace. _Polypth._ Why here we entirely lose sight of the Garden; our elegant Prospects are all vanished: I cannot conceive what this impertinent Hedge does here. _Calloph._ Did you never experience in a Concert vast Pleasure when the whole Band for a few Moments made a full Pause? The Case is parallel: You have already had a great many fine Views, and that you may not be cloyed, this Hedge steps in to keep your Attention awake. One Extreme recommends another: The Moralists observe, that a little Adversity quickens our Relish for the Enjoyment of Life; and it is the Man of Taste's Care not to distribute his Beauties with too profuse a Hand, for a Reason of the same kind. _Let not each Beauty every where be spy'd, Where half the Skill is decently to hide._ But if you must have something to look at, the Park there upon your left Hand affords you some very fine Views. I like that Equestrian Statue extremely: It is, in my Opinion, a very beautiful Circumstance. What a Number of fine Vistas it terminates thro' the Trees, varying its Appearance in each of them.--There you have a charming View struck out towards the Temple of Ancient Virtue. _Polypth._ Methinks that Statue of the Faun stands a little aukwardly: He might at least, I should think, have fixed himself in the Middle of the Semi-circle. _Calloph._ You do not certainly attend to his Use: He stands there to receive the Eye placed at the other End of that Opening.--That elegant little Building I think they call _Nelson_'s Seat. _Polypth._ The Painting is done masterly enough: The Inscriptions, I see, explain the Designs. Those Boys fixing the Trophies are prettily imagined. From hence that round Building terminates the View extremely well. Let us walk to it. _Calloph._ Hold----turn to the Right a little: We must first pay a Visit here to the Temple of _Bacchus_. _Polypth._ We have had a pretty long Walk, suppose we sit down here a Moment: These Walls seem to promise us some Entertainment. _Calloph._ Here, Sir, you see represented the Triumphs and Happiness of Drunkenness. Those musical Ladies too are not improper Companions to this mirthfully-disposed Deity. _Polypth._ Some of those smaller Figures are really done extremely well: And those two Vases are delightfully touched. I cannot say I am so much pleased with the jolly Inhabitant: Even _Bacchus_ himself certainly never made so enormous a Figure. _Calloph._ I am admiring the fine View from hence: So great a Variety of beautiful Objects, and all so happily disposed, make a most delightful Picture. Don't you think this Building too is a very genteel one, and is extremely well situated? These Trees give it an agreeable, cool Air, and make it, I think, as elegant a Retreat for the Enjoyment of a Summer's Evening, as can well be imagined.----But it is mere trifling to sit here: Let us walk towards the Rotunda.----This little Alley will carry us to _Dido_'s Cave. _Polypth._ _Dido_'s Cave! why 'tis built of hewn Stone! Here she is however, and her _pious_ Companion along with her. _Calloph._ Those two Cupids joining their Torches, I never see but I admire extremely: they are very finely painted. _Polypth._ I think they are indeed. But let us be a little complaisant, and not interrupt these kind Lovers too long. I want to see this Rotunda. _Calloph._ There then you have it: I hope you cannot complain of an heavy Building here. I do not know any Piece of Stone-work in the whole Garden that shews itself to more Advantage than this does, or makes a more beautiful Figure in a Variety of fine Views from several Parts of the Garden: Several Parts of the Garden likewise return the Compliment, by offering a great many very elegant Prospects to it. There you have an Opening laid out with all the Decorations of Art; a spacious Theatre; the Area floated by a Canal, and peopled with Swans and Wild-ducks: Her late Majesty is the principal Figure in the Scene, and around her a merry Company of Nymphs and Swains enjoying themselves in the Shade. _Polypth._ I must confess I cannot very much admire---- _Calloph._ Come; none of your Cavils.--Observe how this View is beautifully contrasted by one on the opposite Side of a different kind; in which we are almost solely obliged to Nature. You must know I look upon this as a very noble Prospect! The Field is formed by that Semi-circle of Trees into a very grand Theatre. The Point of Sight is centred in a beautiful manner by the Pyramid, which appears to great Advantage amongst those venerable Oaks: Two or three other Buildings, half hid amongst the Trees, come in for their Share in the Prospect, and add much to the Beauty of it. _Polypth._ I agree with you entirely; nor do I think this other View inferior to it. That Variety of different Shades amongst the Trees; the Lake spread so elegantly amongst them, and glittering here and there thro' the Bushes, with the Temple of _Venus_ as a Termination to the View, make up a very beautiful Landskip. _Calloph._ Here is a Vista likewise very happily terminated by the Canal, and the Obelisk rising in the Midst of it. There is another close View likewise towards _Nelson_'s Seat. _Polypth._ Upon my Word, we have a Variety of very elegant Prospects centred in this Point. I could sit here very agreeably a little longer. _Calloph._ Nay, if you are inclined to rest, come along with me: I'll carry you to where you may indulge your Humour with great Propriety. Deep in the Retirement of that Wood, the God of Sleep has reared his Habitation, where he will afford you every Convenience to make a Nap agreeable----It comes into my Head that I forgot to carry you to a little Place, which it is hardly worth while to travel back to from this Distance: It is called _St. Austin_'s Cave, and answers its Title very well; it appears quite Cell-like, stands retired, and is made of no other Materials but Roots and Moss. In the Inside a Straw Couch offers you an hard Seat, and the Walls three humorous Inscriptions, in Monkish Verse. You may buy them, bound up with Copies of all the other Inscriptions, in a Six-penny Pamphlet, that will be offered us at the Inn.----There, Sir, is the Temple of Sleep. _Polypth._ Why really I must confess _Ovid_ himself could scarce have buried the senseless God in an happier Retirement. This gloomy Darkness, these easy Couches, and that excellent _Epicurean_ Argument above the Door, would incline me wonderfully to indulge a little, if these beautiful Ornaments did not keep my Attention awake. There is wanting too a purling Stream, to sing a Requiem to the Senses; tho' the Want is in some measure made up by the drowsy Lullibies of that murmuring Swarm, which this Shade has invited to wanton beneath it. You would laugh at me, or I should certainly throw myself down upon one of these Couches; I am persuaded I should need no Opium to close my Eyes. _Calloph._ I own sleeping is a Compliment as much due to this Place, as Admiration and Attention are to _Raphael_ at _Hampton-Court_. But try if your Curiosity cannot keep you awake. Come, leave these drowsy Abodes, they are infectious; like luscious Food they will blunt your Appetite before the Entertainment is half over. Walk down that Alley, and pop your Head into the first Door you come to. _Polypth._ What the D----l have we got here? What wretched Scrawler has been at work upon these Walls? _Calloph._ I assure you, Sir, I look upon this as a very great Master-piece. You must know this House is inhabited by a Necromancer; and that Inscription lets you see the Hand that has been employed to paint it. The Composition, Drawing, and Pencilling, I can allow you, are not the most elegant; yet if the Design and Figures are the Artist's own, I can assure you he has shewn excellent Humour, and an exceeding good Invention. That Consultation is well imagined; and so are these Witches and Wizards; their Employments likewise, their Forms and Attitudes are well varied.---- But I see this is a Scene not suited to your Taste: Our next, I hope, will please you better. _Polypth._ Pray, what Building is that before us? I cannot say I dislike the Taste it is designed in. It seems an Antique. _Calloph._ It is the Temple, Sir, of Ancient Virtue; the Place I am now conducting you to. You will meet within it a very illustrious Assembly of great Men; the wisest Lawgiver, the best Philosopher, the most divine Poet, and the most able Captain, that perhaps ever lived. _Polypth._ You may possibly, Sir, engage yourself in a Dispute, by fixing your Epithets in such an absolute manner; there are so many Competitors in each of these Ways, that altho' Numbers may be called truly eminent, it will be a difficult matter to fix Pre-eminence upon any. _Calloph._ You will hardly, I fancy, dissent from me, when I introduce you to these great Heroes of Antiquity: There stands _Lycurgus_; there _Socrates_; there _Homer_; and there _Epaminondas_. Illustrious Chiefs, who made Virtue their only Pursuit, and the Welfare of Mankind their only Study; in whose Breasts mean Self-interest had no Possession. To establish a well-regulated Constitution; to dictate the soundest Morality, to place Virtue in the most amiable Light; and bravely to defend a People's Liberty, were Ends which neither the Difficulty in overcoming the Prejudices, and taming the savage Manners of a barbarous State; the Corruptions of a licentious Age, and the Ill-usage of an invidious City; neither the vast Pains of searching into Nature, and laying up a Stock of Knowledge sufficient to produce the noblest Work of Art; nor popular Tumults at Home, and the most threatening Dangers Abroad, could ever tempt them to lose Sight of, or in the least abate that Ardency of Temper with which they pursued them. _Polypth._ A noble Panegyric upon my Word! why, Sir, these great Spirits have inspired you with the very Soul of Oratory. However, in earnest, I confess your Encomium is pretty just; and I am apt to believe that if any of those worthy Gentlemen should take it into his Head to walk from his Nitch, it would puzzle the World to find his Equal to fix in his Room.----That old Ruin, I suppose, is intended to contrast with this new Building. _Calloph._ Yes, Sir, it is intended to contrast with it not only in the Landskip, but likewise in its Name and Design. Walk a little nearer, and you will see its Intention. _Polypth._ I can see nothing here to let me into its Design, except this old Gentleman; neither can I find any thing extraordinary in him, except that he has met with a Fate that he is entirely deserving of, which is more than falls to the Share of every worthless Fellow. _Calloph._ Have you observed how the Statue is decorated? _Polypth._ O! I see the whole Design: A very elegant Piece of Satyr, upon my Word! This pompous Edifice is intended, I suppose, to represent the flourishing Condition, in which ancient Virtue still exists; and those poor shattered Remains of what has never been very beautiful (notwithstanding, I see, they are placed within a few Yards of a Parish-church) are designed to let us see the ruinous State of decayed modern Virtue. And the Moral is, that Glory founded upon true Worth and Honour, will exist, when Fame, built upon Conquest and popular Applause, will fade away. This is really the best thing I have seen: I am most prodigiously taken with it. _Calloph._ I intend next to carry you to a Scene of another kind. I am going to shew you the Grotto, a Place generally very taking with Strangers.----I thought that Piece of Satyr would catch your Attention: I hope likewise you will be as well pleased here. This Gate will carry us into the romantic Retirement. What do you think of this Scene? _Polypth._ Why really, Sir, it is quite a Novelty: This Profusion of Mirrors has a very extraordinary Effect: The Place seems divided into a thousand beautiful Apartments, and appears fifty times as large as it is. The Prospects without are likewise transferred to the Walls within: And the Sides of the Room are elegantly adorned with Landskips, beyond the Pencil of _Titian_; with this farther Advantage, that every View, as you change your Situation, varies itself into another Form, and presents you with something new. _Calloph._ Don't you think that serpentine River, as it is called, is a great Addition to the Beauty of the Place? _Polypth._ Undoubtedly it is. Water is of as much Use in a Landskip, as Blood is in a Body; without these two Essentials, it is impossible there should be Life in either one or the other. Yet methinks it is a prodigious Pity that this stagnate Pool should not by some Magic be metamorphosed into a crystal Stream, rolling over a Bed of Pebbles. Such a quick Circulation would give an infinite Spirit to the View. I could wish his Lordship had such a Stream at his Command; he would shew it, I dare say, to the best Advantage, in its Passage thro' the Gardens. But we cannot _make_ Nature, the utmost we can do is to _mend_ her.----I have heard a _Scotch_ Gentleman speak of the River, upon which the Town of _Sterling_ stands, which is as remarkable a Meander as I have ever heard of. From _Sterling_ to a little Village upon the Banks of this River, by Land it is only four Miles, and yet if you should follow the Course of the Water, you will find it above twenty.----There is an House likewise that stands upon a narrow Isthmus of a Peninsula, formed by this same River, which is mighty remarkable: The Water runs close to both Ends of it, and yet if you sail from one to the other, you will be carried a Compass of four Miles.----Such a River winding about this Place, would make it a Paradise indeed! As we are got into the North, I must confess I do not know any Part of the Kingdom that abounds more with elegant natural Views: Our well-cultivated Plains, as you observed before, are certainly not comparable to their rough Nature in point of Prospect. About three Years ago I rode the Northern Circuit: The Weather was extremely fine; and I scarce remember being more agreeably entertained than I was with the several charming Views exhibited to me in the northern Counties. Curiosity indeed, rather than Business, carried me down: And as I had my Time pretty much to myself, I spent it in a great measure in hunting after beautiful Objects. Sometimes I found myself hemmed within an Amphitheatre of Mountains, which were variously ornamented, some with scattered Trees, some with tufted Wood, some with grazing Cattle, and some with smoaking Cottages. Here and there an elegant View likewise was opened into the Country.----A Mile's riding, perhaps, would have carried me to the Foot of a steep Precipice, down which thundered the whole Weight of some vast River, which was dashed into Foam at the Bottom, by the craggy Points of several rising Rocks: A deep Gloom overspread the Prospect, occasioned by the close Wood that hung round it on every Side.--I could describe to you a Variety of other Views I met with there, if we _here_ wanted Entertainment in the Way of Landskip. One, however, I cannot forbear mentioning, and wishing at the same time that his Lordship had such Materials to work with, and it could not be but he would make a most noble Picture.----The Place I have in view is upon the Banks of the River _Eden_ (which is indeed one of the finest Rivers I ever saw). I scarce know a fitter Place for a Genius in this Way to exert itself in. There is the greatest Variety of garnished Rocks, shattered Precipices, rising Hills, ornamented with the finest Woods, thro' which are opened the most elegant Vales that I have ever met with: Not to mention the most enchanting Views up and down the River, which winds itself in such a manner as to shew its Banks to the best Advantage, which, together with very charming Prospects into the Country, terminated by the blue Hills at a Distance, make as fine a Piece of Nature, as perhaps can any where be met with. _Calloph._ I admire your Taste in Landskip extremely; you have marked out just such Circumstances as would take me most in a View. I am I find almost as enthusiastic a Lover of Nature as you are. Yet tho' I can allow her to have an excellent _Fancy_, I do not think she has the best _Judgment_. Tho' Nature is an admirable _Colourist_, her _Composition_ is very often liable to Censure. For which Reason I am for having her placed under the Direction of _Art_: And the Rule I would go by should be Mr. _Pope_'s; --_Treat the Goddess like a modest Fair, Not over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare._ Suppose, therefore, we leave your romantic Nature, and continue our View of her here, where she is treated according to this Prescription of the Poet.----That Building is called the Temple of Contemplation; those Bas-relief Heads it is adorned with, are, I assure you, extremely good ones. _Polypth._ Pray, Sir, what kind of a Building have we yonder, that struck our Sight as we crossed that Alley? _Calloph._ We will walk up to it if you please: It is a _Chinese_ House. _Polypth._ A mighty whimsical Appearance it makes truly. _Calloph._ In my Opinion it is a pretty Object enough, and varies our View in a very becoming manner. Its cool stand upon the Lake, and those canvas Windows, designed as well to keep out the Sun, as let in the Air, give us a good Notion of the Manner of living in an hot Country. It is finely painted in the Inside: Will you look into it? _Polypth._ Finely painted indeed! Our Travellers tell us the _Chinese_ are a very ingenious People; and that Arts and Sciences flourish amongst them in great Beauty. But for my Part, whenever I see any of their Paintings, I am apt, I must confess, in every thing else to call their Taste into question. It is impossible for one _Art_ to be in Perfection, without introducing the rest. They are all _Links_ of the same _Chain_: If you draw up one, you must expect the rest will follow. _Cognoscitur ex socio_, is an old Rule you know in judging of _Men_; and I believe it may be applied with as much Propriety in judging of _Arts_. It is hardly to be imagined that any _Art_, perfect in its Kind, would claim any Kindred, or even bear to keep Company with such a wretched _Art of Painting_ as prevails amongst the _Chinese_: Its whole Mystery consists in dawbing on glaring Colours: Correctness of Drawing, Beauty of Composition, and Harmony of colouring, they seem not to have even the least Notion of. _Calloph._ I like your Reflections extremely. We should certainly have some more elegant Productions from _China_, if they were able to answer the Character I have sometimes heard given of them. They have very little of true, manly Taste, I fancy, among them: Their Ingenuity lies chiefly in the knick-knack Way; and is, I imagine, pretty much of the _Dutch_ Kind.----Hold, Sir: This Way if you please. We will walk again towards the River, and pursue it to the Canal.----It is divided, you see, into three Parts; one takes its Rise from the Grotto; another from the Pebble Bridge (as it is called) which is, I think, a pretty Object; and the third issues from a dark Wood.----There, Sir, let me present you to an illustrious set of your gallant Countrymen. This Place is called the Temple of _British_ Worthies; and is gloriously filled, you see, with the greatest Wits, Patriots, and Heroes, that are to be met with in our Chronicles. _Unspotted Names, and memorable long! If there be Force in Virtue, or in Song._ Does not your Pulse beat high, while you thus stand before such an awful Assembly? Is not your Breast warmed by a Variety of grand Ideas, which this Sight must give Birth to?----There you have a View of the calm Philosophers, who sought Virtue in her Retirement, and benefited Mankind by Thought and Meditation.----Some took the human Mind for their Theme, examined the various Powers it is endowed with, and gave us, _to know ourselves_.----Others took _Nature_ for their Subject, looked thro' all her Works, and enlarged our Notions of a God----While others, warmed with a generous Resentment against Vice and Folly, made Morality their Care: To the cool Reasoner serious Philosophy, without any Ornament but Truth, was recommended: To the gayer Disposition the moral Song was directed, and the Heart was improved, while the Fancy was delighted: To those who were yet harder to work upon, the Force of Example was made use of: Folly is put to the Test of Ridicule, and laughed out of Countenance, while the moral Scene, like a distorting Mirror, shews the Villain his Features in so deformed a Manner, that he darts at his own Image with Horror and Affright.----On the other Side you are presented with a View of those illustrious Worthies, who spent their Lives in Action; who left Retirement to the cool Philosopher, entered into the Bustle of Mankind, and pursued Virtue in the dazzling Light in which she appears to Patriots and Heroes. Inspired by every generous Sentiment, these gallant Spirits founded Constitutions, stemmed the Torrent of Corruption, battled for the State, ventured their Lives in the Defence of their Country, and gloriously bled in the Cause of Liberty. _Polypth._ What an happy Man you are, thus to find an Opportunity of moralizing upon every Occasion! What a noble View you have displayed before me; when perhaps if I had been alone, I should have entertained myself no otherwise than in examining the Busts; or if I read the Inscriptions, they would only have drawn a Remark from me, that they were well wrote.--The Assembly yonder on the opposite Side of the Water, will be, I suppose, the next Subject for your Rapsody. Pray what Titles are those Gentry distinguished by? At this Distance I can hardly find out whether they are Philosophers or Milk-maids. _Calloph._ Why, Sir, you have there a View of the Kingdom of _Parnassus_: That Assembly is composed of _Apollo_, and his Privy-council. But as I believe they will hardly pay us, by any Beauty in their Workmanship, for our Trouble, should we go round and make them a Visit; it is my Advice that we walk directly from hence to the Temple of Friendship, and so return by that Terrace back again to those Parts of the Garden that remain yet unseen. _Polypth._ With all my Heart: But let us turn in here, I beseech you, and walk as much in the Shade as possible, for the Day grows vastly warm. _Calloph._ I am ready to follow you amongst the Trees, not more out of Complaisance than Inclination: I like a cool Retreat as well as you. When I plan a Garden, I believe, I shall deal much in shady Walks; wherever I open a grand Terrace, I intend to lengthen out by its Side a close Vista: through the one I shall lead Strangers, in the other enjoy my Friends. I am a great Admirer of walking in a Shade; it is a kind of Emblem of the most agreeable Situation in Life, the retired one: Every fantastic View is hid from us, and we may if we please, be Poets, or Philosophers, or what we will. I own I admire the Taste of these buzzing Insects, sporting themselves in the Shade; a glaring Sun-shine neither in the World, nor in a Walk, is agreeable to my Way of thinking. _Polypth._ If all the World thought as you do, we should have neither Statesmen to mend our Laws, nor Coblers to mend our Shoes: We should all run and hide ourselves amongst Trees, and what then would become of Society? _Calloph._ If I thought you did not will-fullyy mistake my Meaning, I would take the Trouble of telling you that I am an Advocate for no other _Retirement_ than such as is consistent with the Duties of Life. A Love for which kind of Retirement, _properly qualified_, is _Health_ to the Mind; but when it is _made up_ unskillfully, it throws us into a _fatal Lethargy_, from whence begins the Date of an useless Life. Every virtuous Mind, in a greater or a less Degree, has a turn this Way, and the _best_, I believe, ought to be at the _most_ Pains to guard against carrying this Inclination into the Extreme. _Polypth._ And yet the Annals of most Nations let us see that their greatest Men have often indulged it; and much for the Benefit of Mankind too; witness many of the illustrious Worthies we have just been visiting: You forget the Panegyric you bestowed upon them. _Calloph._ No, Sir: But do you remember that I placed these cool Reasoners on the best Side of a Comparison with those who entred into the World, and spent their Lives in Action? On the contrary, this latter kind of Men have always stood fairest in my Esteem. The Life of a Recluse I would recommend to none but a Valetudinarian. We were intended to assist each other as much as we are able. For my Part, it has always been my Opinion, that _one good Man_ does more Service in the World, than _a thousand good Books_.----But we'll drop our Argument at present, because I see we have finished our Walk. _Polypth._ Is that Building the Temple of Friendship? I cannot say that I extremely admire it: But I hope I shall meet with more Entertainment within, than I am able to do without----Well: This is elegant I must confess. _Calloph._ Ay, look round, and tell me if you are not struck by several very beautiful Objects. Those Busts I assure you are _all_ pretty well done, and _some_ of them extremely well. _Polypth._ So they are indeed: But I am chiefly intent upon the Painting, which I am much taken with: It is by the same Hand, I dare say, with that in the Temple of _Venus_. That Emblem of Friendship above the Door, those of Justice and Liberty, and those other Ornaments upon the Walls, are well touched. What is that Painting upon the Cieling? I do not rightly understand it. _Calloph._ Why, Sir, it is a Piece of Satyr: I am sure you will like it if you will give yourself the Trouble to examine it: It is in your Taste I know exactly.----There you see sits _Britannia_; upon one Side are held the Glory of her Annals, the Reigns of Queen _Elizabeth_ and _Edward_ III. and on the other is offered the Reign of----, which she frowns upon, and puts by with her Hand. _Polypth._ Excellent, upon my Word! Faith, this is good! Never accept it, honest Lady, till Corruption is at an End, and public Spirit revives. _Calloph._ With so little Malevolence as I know you are possessed of, I do not think I ever met with any body in my Life so eager to catch at any thing to blame; or to whom an Opportunity of that kind afforded a more seeming real Pleasure than it does to you.----But I know it proceeds from an honest Nature.----Well: Suppose we continue our Walk.----I look upon that Statue as one of the finest in the World: I would give all the Money in my Pocket for a Sight of the Original. _Polypth._ The Posture always to me appears a little too much strained. I can scarce throw myself into such an Attitude. Yet it is fine I must confess. _Calloph._ You have the best View of it, Sir, from hence. Most of the Engravings I have met with give us the back View, but I think the Statue appears infinitely to the best Advantage when taken in Front. The Air of the Head is delightful, and cannot be hid without depriving the Figure of half its Life.----I am leading you now to that genteel Piece of Building which goes by the Name of the Palladian Bridge. _Polypth._ I have seen, I think, something like it at my Lord _Pembroke_'s. _Calloph._ I believe, Sir, the Model was taken from thence. Tho' if I remember right, the Roof is there supported by Pillars on both Sides. _Polypth._ I think it is.----But what have we got there? You are taking me past something curious. _Calloph._ I beg your Pardon: Indeed I had almost forgot the Imperial Closet: And I wonder I should, for I assure you I have the greatest Veneration for its Inhabitants.--There, Sir, is a noble Triumvirate. _Titus_, _Trajan_, and _Aurelius_, are Names which want not the Pomp of Title to add a Lustre to them. _Polypth._ I wish you could persuade all the Kings in _Europe_ to take them as Patterns. But, God knows, public Spirit is now at a low Ebb amongst us: There is more of it in that single honest Sentiment, _Pro me: si merear, in me_, than I believe is to be found in this degenerate Age in half a Kingdom. _Calloph._ I see, my good Friend, you can moralize upon Occasion too. _Polypth._ Moralize! The D----l take me, if I would not this Moment, in spite of-- _Calloph._ Nay, come, don't grow serious: You know I have long since laid it down as a Rule, to stop my Ears when you get into your political Vein. I am not now to learn that there is no keeping you within the Bounds of Temperance upon that Topic. _Polypth._ Well then, let us have something else to talk about.----Yon Wall at this Distance seems to promise us some Bass-relief. _Calloph._ Yes, Sir; you are there presented with a View of the different Quarters of the World, bringing their various Products to _Britannia_. It is a pretty Ornament enough for a Bridge, which, like the Art of Navigation, joins one Land to another. _Polypth._ I can't say I much admire the Workmanship. There is a great Degree of Awkwardness in several of the Figures. _Calloph._ Why really I am so far of your way of thinking, that I must own I am no great Admirer of this kind of Work, except it be extremely fine.----The best thing in this Way, that ever I met with, is a Piece of Alt-relief which his Lordship keeps within Doors. We shall scarce, I believe have time now, but we must take an Opportunity of seeing it before you leave the Country. You will meet with likewise in those Apartments several very good Pictures: I remember spending an Afternoon about half a Year ago, in a very agreeable Manner amongst them. But this Piece of Alt-relief struck me beyond every thing. The Story is _Darius_'s Tent; and it is so charmingly told, that I have had, I can tell you, a meaner Opinion of _Le Brun_ upon that Subject, ever since I have seen it: The Composition is so just, the Figures so graceful and correct, nay, the very Drapery so free and easy, that I declare I was altogether astonished at the Sight of it. _Polypth._ Well; I shall find some Opportunity of paying it a Visit. There is so much Art required, and so much Difficulty attends doing any thing in this Way as it ought to be, that when we do meet with a good Piece of Workmanship of this kind, it affords us an extreme Pleasure.----So, Sir _William_, have I met you here! I should rather have expected to have seen you among the _British_ Worthies.----This same _Penn_, Sir, I assure you, is a great Favourite of mine. I esteem him one of the most worthy Legislators upon Record. His Laws, I am told, act still with great Force in _Pensylvania_, and keep the honest, inoffensive People there in extreme good Order. _Calloph._ Our Sailors mention his Colony as a very happy Set of People; they live entirely at Peace amongst themselves; and (bred up in a strict Observance of Probity) without any Knowledge of an Art Military amongst them, are able to preserve the most sociable Terms with their Neighbours.----These Busts seem to have escaped your Observation. _Polypth._ No, Sir, I am not so incurious as to suffer any thing that has been in _Italy_ to slip my Notice: Some of those particularly that stand on the Side next _Rawleigh_, I was exceedingly taken with. _Calloph._ Pray what is your Opinion of checquered Marble's being made use of in Busts? _Polypth._ Why, Sir, I never see any of these party-coloured Faces, but I am moved with Indignation at the Sculptor's ridiculous Humour. It is so absurd a Taste, that I cannot conceive how it should ever enter into a Workman's Head, to make every Feature of a Man's Face of a different Colour; and it amazes me, I assure you, that we meet with daily so many Instances of such Absurdity.----In several Parts of the Garden, I have had various Views of that old _Gothic_ Building; we are now at last I hope moving towards it. I am so wonderfully pleased with its outward Appearance, that I shall be disappointed if I don't meet something answerable within. _Calloph._ Why, Sir, as old as it looks, I assure you it is not yet finished. You will meet with nothing ornamental in the Inside; so I would have you persuade yourself it has already done all in its Power to entertain you. And upon my Word I think it has done a great deal: Without it, I am sure this Part of the Garden would be quite naked and lifeless; nor would any other Part appear with so much Beauty. It puts one in Mind of some generous Patriot in his Retirement; his own Neighbourhood feels most the Effects of that Bounty, which in some measure spreads itself over a whole Country. _Polypth._ I like this Disposition within, I assure you, altogether as well as its Form without.----There are two or three Pieces of the best painted Glass that I have any where met with: Those little historical Pieces are exceedingly beautiful; and so are those Landskips likewise.----This Hill I think appears rather too naked. _Calloph._ Throw your Eye over it then, and tell me if you are not ravished with the View before you. Nothing certainly in the kind can be more beautiful or great, than that pompous Pile rising in so magnificent a manner above the Wood. The Building cannot possibly be shewn to greater Advantage: The Appearance it _makes_ presents you with an Idea sufficiently grand; yet your Imagination cannot be persuaded but that it is in fact much grander, and that the Wood hides a great Part of what is to be seen from your Eye. This is a most delightful manner of pleasing: A grand Object left to a good Imagination to improve upon, seldom loses by its Assistance. Our View likewise is greatly added to in point of Beauty, by those several other smaller Buildings which offer themselves, some only half hid amongst the Branches, and others just peeping from amongst tufted Trees, which make very beautiful little garnished Dishes in this most elegant Entertainment. _Polypth._ As you have thus painted the near Objects, let my Pencil, I beg, come in for a few rough Touches in the backgrounds: Without something of an Off-skip, your Man of Art, you know, seldom esteems his View perfect. And in this Landskip there are as many beautiful Objects thrown off to a Distance as can well be imagined: That Variety of fine Wood; that bright Surface of Water, with the pointed Obelisk in the Midst of it; those two Pavilions upon the Banks of the Canal; and the still more distant View into the Country, are Objects which, in my Opinion, make no small Addition to the Beauty of your Landskip; or, to carry on your Allusion, may very well come in as a second Course in your Entertainment.----Our Attention, I think, in the next Place, is demanded by this venerable Assembly. That old Gentleman there sits with great Dignity: I like his Attitude extremely: If I understood the _Runic_ Character, I might have known probably (for this Inscription I fancy would inform me) by what Title he is distinguished. But the Gracefulness of his Posture discovers him to have been nothing less than an Hero of the first Rank. He puts me in Mind of a _Roman_ Senator, sitting in his Curule Chair to receive the _Gauls_. _Calloph._ Why, Sir, you have done him great Honour I must own; but you have not yet honoured him according to his Dignity: He is nothing less, Sir, I assure you, than the Representative of a _Saxon_ Deity. You see here __Thor_ and _Woden_ fabled Gods_---- with the whole System of your Ancestor's Theology. Walk round the Assembly, they will smile upon a true _Briton_, and try if you can acknowledge each by his distinct Symbol. _Polypth._ I must confess they do not to me seem accoutered like Gods: For my Part, I should rather suspect them to be Statues of Heroes and Lawgivers, metamorphised into Divinities by the Courtesy of the Place: I shall not however go about to dispute their Titles; but like my good Ancestors before me, acquiesce piously in what other People tell me.----Tho' I cannot say but that Lady there, bearing the Sun (who represents I suppose _Sunday_) looks whimsical enough; and makes just such an Appearance as I could imagine the misled Conception of an enthusiastic _Saxon_ might mould his Deities into. But in these other Figures I must own I cannot see Superstition at all characterized, which you may observe generally forms its Objects of Worship into the most mis-created things that can possibly enter the Imagination of Man. _Calloph._ Why, Sir, amongst the _Greeks_ and _Romans_, you may observe several very well-shaped Deities: The _Hercules_, the _Apollo_, and the _Venus_, are at this Day Standards of Beauty. _Polypth._ Yes; but I am apt to attribute this rather to the Imagination of their Sculptors, than their Priests. To _shew Art_, rather than to _express Religion_, was the Point aimed at in these enchanting Pieces of Workmanship.----But when Superstition acted without Controul; when the fantastic Notions of Priests were put into the Hands of ordinary Workmen, even amongst the polite _Greeks_ and _Romans_ themselves, Lord! what misshapen Monsters crouded into Temples, and reared themselves aloft above Altars! Search other Countries likewise, _Egypt_ and _Africa_, _China_ and _Japan_, or any Place either ancient or modern, where Superstition prevails, and I dare engage in the whole Catalogue of their Deities you will scarce meet with one that bears any thing like the human Shape. _Calloph._ Why their Demi-Gods, or canonized Heroes, of which all pagan Nations had Abundance, were generally I fancy represented in the human Form. And these _Saxon_ Divinities, I suppose, pretend not to any superior Rank----But however, as no Degree of Veneration is exacted from you, you may I think let them rest quietly upon their Pedestals, without any farther Molestation.----We have a good View into the Country from hence. Those Woods are extremely elegant in their kind; we must certainly contrive to take a Ride thither some Evening. They are laid out in a very fine Manner, and cut into very beautiful Ridings. _Polypth._ Ay, that is the kind of Improvement that takes most with me (let us step in here a Moment, we are caught I see in a Shower). I am altogether of the Poet's Opinion, that _'Tis _Use_ alone that sanctifies Expence._ Were I a Nobleman, I should endeavour to turn my Estate into a Garden, and make my Tenants my Gardiners: Instead of useless Temples, I would build Farm-houses; and instead of cutting out unmeaning Vistas, I would beautify and mend Highways: The Country should smile upon my Labours, and the Public should partake in my Pleasures. What signifies all this ostentatious Work? Is any Man the better for it? Is it not Money most vilely squandered away? _Calloph._ So far from it, that I assure you, considered even in a public Light, I look upon it as an Expence that may very properly be said to be sanctified by _Use_. _Polypth._ I suppose you are going to tell me that it feeds two or three poor Labourers; and when you have said this, I know not what more you can say to defend it. But how is it possible for a Man to throw away his Money without doing some Service in the World? _Calloph._ How? Why by spending it in gaming, to the Encouragement of Cheats and Sharpers: By squandering it away upon Lusts and Appetites, in the Support of Stews and Bawdy-houses: Or by Dealing it out in Bribes, in opposition to Honesty, and to advance Corruption. In Arts like these, what Numbers consume their Wealth! It is not enough for them to prevent Mankind's being benefited by their affluent Circumstances; but they do their utmost, while they diminish their Fortunes, to make all they can influence as worthless as themselves. So that I assure you I should look upon it as a very great Point gained, if all our Men of Fortune would only take care that their Wealth proves of no Disservice to Mankind. Tho' I am far from desiring they should stop there: I would have them endeavour to turn it into some useful Channel. And in my Opinion, it is laid out in a very laudable Manner, when it is spent, as it is here, in circulating thro' a Variety of Trades, in supporting a Number of poor Families, and in the Encouragement of Art and Industry. _Polypth._ Well, Sir, I confess Wealth thus laid out, is beneficial to a Country; but still you keep from the Point: I ask whether all these good Ends would not be answered, and more too, were this Wealth laid out according to my Scheme, in public Works, or something of an _useful_ Nature. _Calloph._ And so you have no Notion of any Use arising from these elegant Productions of Art: You cannot conceive how they should be of any Service to the Public. Why you are a mere _Goth_, an unpolished _Vandal_; were you impowered to reform the Age, I suppose I should see you, like one of those wild misguided People, coursing furiously round the Land, and laying desolate every thing beautiful you met with. But in my Opinion, Sir, these noble Productions of Art, considered merely as such, may be looked upon as Works of a very public Nature. Do you think no _End_ is answered when a Nation's Taste is regulated with regard to the most innocent, the most refined, and elegant of its Pleasures? In all polite Countries the Amusements of the People were thought highly deserving a Legislator's Inspection. To establish a just Taste in these, was esteemed in some measure as advancing the Interest of Virtue: And can it be considered as a Work entirely of a private Nature, for a superior Genius to exert itself in an Endeavour to fix a true Standard of Beauty in any of these allowed and useful kinds of Pleasure? In the Way of Gardening particularly, the Taste of the Nation has long been so depraved, that I should think we might be obliged to any one that would undertake to reform it. While a Taste for Painting, Music, Architecture, and other polite Arts, in some measure prevailed amongst us, our Gardens for the most Part were laid out in so formal, aukward, and wretched a Manner, that they were really a Scandal to the very Genius of the Nation; a Man of Taste was shocked whenever he set his Foot into them. But _Stow_, it is to be hoped, may work some Reformation: I would have our Country Squires flock hither two or three times in a Year, by way of Improvement, and after they have looked about them a little, return Home with new Notions, and begin to see the Absurdity of their clipped Yews, their Box-wood Borders, their flourished Parterres, and their lofty Brick-walls.----You may smile, but I assure you such an Improvement of public Taste, tho' there is no Occasion to consider it as a matter of the first Importance, is certainly a Concern that ought by no means to be neglected. Perhaps indeed I may carry the Matter farther than the generality of People; but to me I must own there appears a very visible Connection between an _improved_ Taste for Pleasure, and a Taste for Virtue: When I sit ravished at an Oratorio, or stand astonished before the Cartoons, or enjoy myself in these happy Walks, I can feel my Mind expand itself, my Notions enlarge, and my Heart better disposed either for a religious Thought, or a benevolent Action: In a Word, I cannot help imagining a Taste for these exalted Pleasures contributes towards making me a better Man. _Polypth._ Good God! what an Enthusiast you are! Polite Arts improve Virtue! an Assertion indeed for a Philosopher to make. Why are they not always considered as having a natural Tendency to Luxury, to Riot, and Licentiousness? _Calloph._ No more, in my Opinion, than a wholesome Meal has to a Surfeit, or reading the Scriptures to Heresy: All things are capable, we know, of Abuse; and perhaps the best things the most capable: And tho' this may indeed argue a Depravity in _us_, yet it by no means, I think, argues a Tendency in _them_ to deprave us. However, (to let what I have yet said stand for nothing) I can tell you one very great Piece of Service arising to the Country from Wealth laid out in this elegant manner, which you seem so much to grumble at; and that is, the Money spent in the Neighbourhood by the Company daily crouding hither to satisfy their Curiosity. We have a kind of a continual Fair; and I have heard several of the Inhabitants of the neighbouring Town assert, that it is one of the best Trades they have: Their Inns, their Shops, their Farms, and Shambles, all find their Account in it: So that, in my Opinion, viewed in this Light only, such Productions of Art may be considered as very great Advantages to every Neighbourhood that enjoys the lucky Situation of being placed near them.----To this Advantage might be added, the great Degree of Pleasure from hence derived daily to such Numbers of People: A Place like this is a kind of keeping open House, there is a Repast at all times ready for the Entertainment of Strangers. And sure if you have any Degree of Benevolence, you must think an _useful End_ answered in thus affording an innocent Gratification to so many of your Fellow-creatures. A _Sunday_ Evening spent here, adds a new Relish to the Day of Rest, and makes the Sabbath appear more chearful to the Labourer after a toilsome Week. For my Part, I assure you I have scarce experienced a greater Pleasure than I have often felt upon meeting a Variety of pleased Faces in these Walks: All Care and Uneasiness seems to be left behind at the Garden-door, and People enter here fully resolved to enjoy themselves, and the several beautiful Objects around them: In one Part a Face presents itself marked with the Passion of gaping Wonder; in another you meet a Countenance bearing the Appearance of a more rational Pleasure; and in a third, a Sett of Features composed into serene Joy; while the Man of Taste is seen examining every Beauty with a curious Eye, and discovering his Approbation in an half-formed Smile.--To this I might still add another Advantage, of a public Nature, derived from these elegant Productions of Art; and that is their Tendency to raise us in the Opinion of Foreigners. If our Nation had nothing of this kind to boast of, all our Neighbours would look upon us a stupid, tasteless Set of People, and not worth visiting. So that for the Credit of the Country, I think, something of this kind ought to be exhibited amongst us. Our public Virtues, if we have any, would not, I dare say, appear to less Advantage when recommended by these Embellishments of Art. _Polypth._ I wonder you should not know me better than to imagine I am always in earnest when I find fault. My Thoughts and yours, I assure you, agree exactly upon this Subject. I only wanted to engage you in some Discourse till the Shower was over; and as the Sky seems now quite clear, if you will, we'll venture out, and visit what we have yet to see. _Calloph._ You are a humorous Fellow: This is not the first time you have made me play my Lungs to no purpose.----As we walk along this Terrace, you may observe the great Advantage of low Walls: By this means the Garden is extended beyond its Limits, and takes in every thing entertaining that is to be met with in the range of half a County. Villages, Works of Husbandry, Groups of Cattle, Herds of Deer, and a Variety of other beautiful Objects, are brought into the Garden, and make a Part of the Plan. Even to the _nicest_ Taste these rural Scenes are highly delightful. _Polypth._ Nay you may add, that whoever has no Relish for them, gives Reason for a Suspicion that he has no Taste at all. _Straight mine Eye hath caught new Pleasures, Whilst the Landskip round it measures; Russet Lawns, and Fallows gray. Where the nibbling flocks do stray; Mountains, on whose barren Breast The labouring Clouds do often rest; Meadows trim with Daisies pide, Shallow Brooks, and Rivers wide: Towers and Battlements it sees Bosom'd high in tufted Trees, Where perhaps some Beauty lies, The Cynosure of neighbouring Eyes. Hard by a Cottage Chimney smokes, From betwixt two aged Oaks._ _Calloph._ Can you repeat no more? I could have listened with great Pleasure if you had gone on with the whole Piece. It is quite Nature: That View of an old Castle, _bosom'd high in tufted Trees_, pleases me exceedingly: And the two following Lines, _Where perhaps some Beauty lies, The Cynosure of neighbouring Eyes,_ give it an elegant, romantic Air; and add greatly to the Idea before conceived.----But to pursue our former Argument: It must be owned indeed that these Walks want such Openings into the Country as little as any Place can well be imagined to do; yet even _Stow_ itself, I assure you, is much improved by them. They contrast beautifully with this more polished Nature, and set it off to greater Advantage. After surfeiting itself with the Feast here provided for it, the Eye, by using a little Exercise in travelling about the Country, grows hungry again, and returns to the Entertainment with fresh Appetite. Besides, there is nothing so distasteful to the Eye as a confined Prospect (where the Reasonableness of it does not appear) especially if a dead Wall, or any other such disagreeable Object steps in between. The Eye naturally loves Liberty, and when it is in quest of Prospects, will not rest content with the most beautiful Dispositions of Art, confined within a narrow Compass, but (as soon as the Novelty of the Sight is over) will begin to grow dissatisfied, till the whole Limits of the Horizon be given it to range through. _Polypth._ The Eye, according to your Account, seems to be something like a Bee: Plant as many Flowers as you will near its Hive, yet still the little Insect will be discontented, unless it be allowed to wander o'er the Country, and be its own Caterer.----I have got a few very severe Exclamations at my Tongue's End, which I will not vent till you have told me the Architect's Name, who has loaded the Ground with that monstrous Piece of Building, tho' I believe I can guess him without your Information. _Calloph._ Suffer me to intercede in his Behalf. You are so unmerciful a Reprover, that I have not Patience to hear you. The Room above is designed, I am told, to be fitted up in a very elegant manner; but as very little is yet done to it, we shall find nothing I fancy to answer the Trouble of going up Stairs.----This Part of the Garden, you see, is yet unfinished. If we have the Pleasure of your Company in this Country next Year, you will see I dare say great Alterations here. That _Base_ is to shoot up into a lofty Monument: And several of those Objects you see before you are to take new Forms upon them. _Polypth._ Yonder likewise seems to be a Monument[19] rising: Pray who is it intended to do Honour to? _Calloph._ Why, Sir, it is intended to do Honour to a Gentleman, who has done Honour to his Country: It is dedicated to the Memory of Captain _Grenville_, and joins with the Nation in applauding a Man, who pushed forwards by Honour, and a Love for his Country, met Danger and Death with the Spirit of a _Roman_.----Well, how do you like the Plan which you see laid out before you? [19] Since this View of the Gardens was taken, the Monument here spoken of has been finished. The following Lines are a Translation of its Inscription, which in the Original is wrote in Latin. As a Monument To testify both his Applause and Grief, RICHARD Lord Viscount COBHAM Erected this Naval Pillar to the Memory of his Nephew CAPTAIN GRENVILLE, Who commanding a Ship of War in the _British_ Fleet Under ADMIRAL ANSON, In an Engagement with the _French_, was Mortally wounded upon the Thigh By a Fragment of his shattered Ship; Yet with his last Breath had the Bravery to cry out, How much more desireable is it thus to meet Death, "Than, convicted of Cowardice, to meet Justice!" May this noble Instance of Virtue Prove instructive to an abandoned Age, And teach _Britons_ how to act In their Country's Cause! _Polypth._ As far as I can judge of the future Landskip from this Sketch, it will be an admirable one. I am extremely taken with it. That Bason has a very fine Effect.--I could return back the same Round with great Pleasure, but my Watch informs me that Mr.----, has been expecting us this half Hour. _Calloph._ Is it so late? The Time has stole off very slily. However you need be under no Apprehensions; that honest Gentleman is seldom very hasty in his Motions. Having thus finished their Round, our two Gentlemen directed their Faces back again towards the Gate. _Polypthon_, notwithstanding the sour Humour he had given so many Evidences of in his Walk, began now to relent, and could talk of nothing but the agreeable Entertainment that had been afforded him. Sometimes he would run out into the highest Encomiums of the many beautiful Terminations of the several Walks and Vistas; and observe how many Uses each Object served, and in how many different Lights it was made to vary itself. "For Instance, says he, the Pavilion you shewed me from the Temple of _Venus_, terminates that Terrace in a very grand Manner; and makes likewise a very magnificent Appearance, where it corresponds with another of the same Form, at the Entrance into the Park: Yet the same Building, like a Person acquainted with the World, who can suit his Behaviour to Time and Place, can vary itself upon occasion into a more humble Shape, and when viewed thro' a retired Vista, can take upon it the lowly Form of a close Retreat."----When he had enlarged pretty copiously upon this Subject, he would next launch out into the highest Praises of the vast Variety of Objects that was every where to be met with: "Men of all Humours, says he, will here find something pleasing and suited to their Taste. The thoughtful may meet with retired Walks calculated in the best Manner for Contemplation: The gay and chearful may see Nature in her loveliest Dress, and meet Objects corresponding with their most lively Flights. The romantic Genius may entertain itself with several very beautiful Objects in its own Taste, and grow wild with Ideas of the inchanted kind. The disconsolate Lover may hide himself in shady Groves, or melancholy wander along the Banks of Lakes and Canals; where he may sigh to the gentle Zephyrs; mingle his Tears with the bubbling Water; or where he may have the best Opportunity, if his Malady be grown to such an Height, of ending his Despair, and finishing his Life with all the Decency and Pomp of a Lover in a Romance. In short, says he, these Gardens are a very good Epitome of the World: They are calculated for Minds of every Stamp, and give free Scope to Inclinations of every kind: And if it be said that in some Parts they too much humour the debauched Taste of the Sensualist, it cannot be denied on the other hand, but that they afford several very noble Incitements to Honour and Virtue."----But what beyond all other things seemed most to please him, was the amicable and beautiful Conjunction of _Art_ and _Nature_ thro' the whole: He observed that the _former_ never appeared stiff, or the _latter_ extravagant. Upon many other Topicks of Praise _Polypthon_ run out with great Warmth. _Callophilus_ seemed surprized, and could not forbear asking him, By what means his Opinions became so suddenly changed? "Why, says he, Sir, I have said nothing now that contradicts any thing I said before. I own I met with two or three Objects that were not entirely to my Taste, which I am far from condemning for that Reason; tho' if I should, it is nothing to the purpose, because I am now taking a Survey of the whole together; in which Light I must confess I am quite astonished with the View before me. Besides, I hate one of your wondering Mortals, who is perpetually breaking out into a Note of Admiration at every thing he sees: I am always apt to suspect his Taste or his Sincerity. It is impossible that all Genius's can alike agree in their Opinions of any Work of Art; and the Man who never _blames_, I can scarce believe is qualified to _commend_. Besides, finding fault now and then, adds Weight to Commendation, and makes us believed to be in earnest. However, notwithstanding what you may think of my frequent Cavils, I assure you, with the greatest Sincerity, I never before saw any thing of the kind at all comparable to what I have here seen: I shall by no means close this Day with a _Diem perdidi_; nor would the _Roman_ Emperor himself, I believe, have made the Reflection if he had spent his condemned Hours in this Place." By this time the Gentlemen were come to the Gate, thro' which _Polypthon_ assured his Friend he passed with the greatest Reluctance, and went growling out of this delightful Garden, as the Devil is said to have done out of Paradise. _FINIS._ WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES The Augustan Reprint Society PUBLICATIONS IN PRINT The Augustan Reprint Society PUBLICATIONS IN PRINT 1948-1949 16. Henry Nevil Payne, _The Fatal Jealousie_ (1673). 18. "Of Genius," in _The Occasional Paper_, Vol. III, No. 10 (1719), and Aaron Hill, Preface to _The Creation_ (1720). 1949-1950 19. Susanna Centlivre, _The Busie Body_ (1709). 22. Samuel Johnson, _The Vanity of Human Wishes_ (1749), and two _Rambler_ papers (1750). 23. John Dryden, _His Majesties Declaration Defended_ (1681). 1951-1952 26. Charles Macklin, _The Man of the World_ (1792). 31. Thomas Gray, _An Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard_ (1751), and _The Eton College Manuscript_. 1952-1953 41. Bernard Mandeville, _A Letter to Dion_ (1732). 1964-1965 110. John Tutchin, _Selected Poems_ (1685-1700). 111. _Political Justice_ (1736). 113. T. R., _An Essay Concerning Critical and Curious Learning_ (1698). 1965-1966 115. Daniel Defoe and others, _Accounts of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal_ (1705, 1706, 1720, 1722). 116. Charles Macklin, _The Convent Garden Theatre_ (1752). 117. Sir Roger L'Estrange, _Citt and Bumpkin_ (1680). 118. Henry More, _Enthusiasmus Triumphatus_ (1662). 120. Bernard Mandeville, _Aesop Dress'd or a Collection of Fables_ (1740). 1966-1967 124. _The Female Wits_ (1704). 1968-1969 133. John Courtenay, _A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the Late Samuel Johnson_ (1786). 136. Thomas Sheridan, _A Discourse Being Introductory to His Course of Lectures on Elocution and the English Language_ (1759). 137. Arthur Murphy. _The Englishman from Paris_ (1756). 1969-1970 138. [Catherine Trotter] _Olinda's Adventures_ (1718). 139. John Ogilvie, _An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients_ (1762). 140. _A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling_ (1726) and _Pudding and Dumpling Burnt to Pot or a Compleat Key to the Dissertation on Dumpling_ (1727). 141. Sir Roger L'Estrange, Selections from _The Observator_ (1681-1687). 142. Anthony Collins, _A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing_ (1729). 143. _A Letter From a Clergyman to His Friend, with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver_ (1726). 144. _The Art of Architecture_, A Poem (1742). 1970-1971 145-146. Thomas Shelton,_ A Tutor to Tachygraphy, or Short-writing_ (1642) and _Tachygraphy_ (1647). 147-148. _Deformities of Dr. Samuel Johnson_ (1782). 149. _Poeta de Tristibus: or the Poet's Complaint_ (1682). 150. Gerard Langbaine, _Momus Triumphans: or the Plagiaries of the English Stage_ (1687). 1971-1972 151-152. Evan Lloyd, _The Methodist. A Poem_ (1766). 153. _Are These Things So?_ (1740), and _The Great Man's Answer to Are These Things So?_ (1740). 154. Arbuthnotiana: _The Story of the St. Alb-ns Ghost_ (1712), and _A Catalogue of Dr. Arbuthnot's Library_ (1779). 155-156. A Selection of Emblems from Herman Hugo's _Pia Desideria_ (1624), with English Adaptations by Francis Quarles and Edmund Arwaker. 1972-1973 157. William Mountfort, _The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus_ (1697). 158. Colley Cibber, _A Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope_ (1742). 159. [Catherine Clive] _The Case of Mrs. Clive_ (1744). 160. [Thomas Tryon] _A Discourse ... of Phrensie, Madness or Distraction_ from _A Treatise of Dreams and Visions_ [1689]. 161. Robert Blair, _The Grave. A Poem_ (1743). 162. [Bernard Mandeville] _A Modest Defence of Publick Stews_ (1724). 1973-1974 163. [William Rider] _An Historical and Critical Account of the Lives and Writings of the Living Authors of Great Britain_ (1762). 164. Thomas Edwards, _The Sonnets of Thomas Edwards_ (1765, 1780). 165. Hildebrand Jacob, _Of the Sister Arts; An Essay_ (1734). 166. _Poems on the Reign of William III_ [1690, 1696, 1699, 1702] 167. Kane O'Hara, _Midas: An English Burletta_ (1766). 168. [Daniel Defoe] _A Short Narrative History of the Life and Actions of His Grace John, D. of Marlborough_ (1711). 1974-1975 169-170. Samuel Richardson, _The Apprentice's Vade-Mecum_ (1734). 171. James Bramston, _The Man of Taste_ (1733). 172-173. Walter Charleton, _The Ephesian Matron_ (1668). 174. Bernard Mandeville, _The Mischiefs That Ought Justly to be apprehended From a Whig-Government_ (1714). 174X. John Melton, _Astrologaster_ (1620). Publications of the first fifteen years of the society (numbers 1-90) are available in paperbound units of six issues at $16.00 per unit from Kraus Reprint Company, 16 East 46th Street, New York, N. Y. 10017. Publications in print are available at the regular membership rate of $5.00 for individuals and $8.00 for institutions per year. Prices of single issues may be obtained upon request. Subsequent publications may be checked in the annual prospectus. _Make check or money order payable to_ THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA _and send to_ The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, California 90018 Transcriber's Note. The original punctuation and spelling have been retained. 
19408	----	[Illustration: "That gardening is best ... which best ministers to man's felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom." This is my study. The tree in the middle of the picture is Barrie's elm. I once lifted it between my thumb and finger, but I was younger and the tree was smaller. The dark tree in the foreground on the right is Felix Adler's hemlock. [Page 82]] THE AMATEUR GARDEN BY GEORGE W. CABLE ILLUSTRATED CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK: MCMXIV _Copyright, 1914, by_ CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS _Published October, 1914_ CONTENTS PAGE MY OWN ACRE 1 THE AMERICAN GARDEN 41 WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 79 THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON 107 THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S PUBLIC VALUE 129 THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OF NEW ORLEANS 163 ILLUSTRATIONS "That gardening is best ... which best ministers to man's felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom" _Frontis_ "... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River loiters through Paradise" 6 "On this green of the dryads ... lies My Own Acre" 8 "The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full back to the rapids just above My Own Acre" 12 "A fountain ... where one,--or two,--can sit and hear it whisper" 22 "The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My Own Acre" 24 "Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn by visiting friends" 26 "How the words were said which some of the planters spoke" 28 "'Where are you going?' says the eye. 'Come and see,' says the roaming line" 34 "The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays on the side nearest the lawn" 36 "... until the house itself seems as naturally ... to grow up out of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a lady's song" 48 "Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds" 52 "Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and bloom" 52 Fences masked by shrubbery 64 After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive 72 Shrubbery versus annuals 72 Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South Hall, Williston Seminary 74 "... a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, graceful undulations" 74 "However enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and must require of her some subserviency about your own dwelling" 84 "Plant it where it will best enjoy itself" 86 "... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far end" 94 "Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure" 96 "... tall, rectangular, three-story piles ... full of windows all of one size, pigeon-house style" 100 "You can make gardening a concerted public movement" 112 "Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its buildings" 122 "Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its widest and most general dissemination" 122 "Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus" 138 "One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view" 138 "Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domicile" 148 "Those who pay no one to die, plant or prune for them" 148 "In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by its doors--so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines" 174 "The lawn ... lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across" 174 "There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward.... In a half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dignity by the elimination of these excesses" 176 "The rear walk ... follows the dwelling's ground contour with business precision--being a business path" 178 "Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even ... where it does not conceal, the house's architectural faults" 180 "... a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's unreality" 182 "Back of the building-line the fences ... generally more than head-high ... are _sure_ to be draped" 184 "... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter" 184 "The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration ... keeping a winter's share of its feminine grace and softness" 186 "It is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce" 192 MY OWN ACRE A lifelong habit of story-telling has much to do with the production of these pages. All the more does it move me because it has always included, as perhaps it does in most story-tellers, a keen preference for true stories, stories of actual occurrence. A flower-garden trying to be beautiful is a charming instance of something which a storyteller can otherwise only dream of. For such a garden is itself a story, one which actually and naturally occurs, yet occurs under its master's guidance and control and with artistic effect. Yet it was this same story-telling bent which long held me back while from time to time I generalized on gardening and on gardens other than my own. A well-designed garden is not only a true story happening artistically but it is one that passes through a new revision each year, "with the former translations diligently compared and revised." Each year my own acre has confessed itself so full of mistranslations of the true text of gardening, has promised, each season, so much fairer a show in its next edition, and has been kept so prolongedly busy teaching and reteaching its master where to plant what, while as to money outlays compelled to live so much more like a poet than like a prince, that the bent for story-telling itself could not help but say wait. Now, however, the company to which this chapter logically belongs is actually showing excellent reasons why a history of their writer's own acre should lead them. Let me, then, begin by explaining that the small city of Northampton, Massachusetts, where I have lived all the latter three-fifths of my adult years, sits on the first rise of ground which from the west overlooks the alluvial meadows of the Connecticut, nine miles above South Hadley Falls. Close at its back a small stream, Mill River, coming out of the Hampshire hills on its way to the Connecticut, winds through a strip of woods so fair as to have been named--from a much earlier day than when Jenny Lind called it so--"Paradise." On its town side this wooded ground a few hundred yards wide drops suddenly a hundred feet or so to the mill stream and is cut into many transverse ravines. In its timber growth, conspicuous by their number, tower white-pines, while among them stand only less loftily a remarkable variety of forest trees imperfectly listed by a certain humble authority as "mostly h-oak, h-ellum, and h-ash, with a little 'ickory." Imperfectly listed, for there one may find also the birch and the beech, the linden, sycamore, chestnut, poplar, hemlock-spruce, butternut, and maple overhanging such pleasant undergrowths as the hornbeam and hop-hornbeam, willows, black-cherry and choke-cherry, dogwood and other cornels, several viburnums, bush maples of two or three kinds, alder, elder, sumach, hazel, witch-hazel, the shadblow and other perennial, fair-blooming, sweet-smelling favorites, beneath which lies a leaf-mould rife with ferns and wild flowers. From its business quarter the town's chief street of residence, Elm Street, begins a gently winding westerly ascent to become an open high-road from one to another of the several farming and manufacturing villages that use the water-power of Mill River. But while it is still a street there runs from it southerly at a right angle a straight bit of avenue some three hundred yards long--an exceptional length of unbent street for Northampton. This short avenue ends at another, still shorter, lying square across its foot within some seventy yards of that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River loiters through Paradise. The strip of land between the woods and this last street is taken up by half a dozen dwellings of modest dignity, whose front shade-trees, being on the southerly side, have been placed not on the sidewalk's roadside edge but on the side next the dwellings and close within their line of private ownership: red, white and post-oaks set there by the present writer when he named the street "Dryads' Green." They are now twenty-one years old and give a good shade which actually falls where it is wanted--upon the sidewalk. [Illustration: " ... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River loiters through Paradise." A strong wire fence (invisible in the picture) here divides the _grove_ from the old river road.] On this green of the dryads, where it intercepts the "avenue" that slips over from the Elm Street trolley-cars, lies, such as it is, my own acre; house, lawn, shrubberies and, at the rear, in the edge of the pines, the study. Back there by the study--which sometimes in irony we call the power-house--the lawn merges into my seven other acres, in Paradise. Really the whole possession is a much humbler one than I find myself able to make it appear in the flattering terms of land measure. Those seven acres of Paradise I acquired as "waste land." Nevertheless, if I were selling that "waste," that "hole in the ground," it would not hurt my conscience, such as it is, to declare that the birds on it alone are worth more than it cost: wood-thrushes and robins, golden orioles, scarlet tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-birds, veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, kinglets, the flicker, the cuckoo, the nuthatch, the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, not to mention jays or kingfishers, swallows, the little green heron or that cock of the walk, the red squirrel. Speaking of walks, it was with them--and one drive--in this grove, that I made my first venture toward the artistic enhancement of my acre,--acre this time in the old sense that ignores feet and rods. I was quite willing to make it a matter of as many years as necessary when pursued as play, not work, on the least possible money outlay and having for its end a garden of joy, not of care. By no inborn sagacity did I discover this to be the true first step, but by the trained eye of an honored and dear friend, that distinguished engineer and famous street commissioner of New York, Colonel George E. Waring, who lost his life in the sanitary regeneration of Havana. [Illustration: "On this green of the dryads ... lies My Own Acre." The two young oaks in the picture are part of the row which gives the street its name.] "Contour paths" was the word he gave me; paths starting from the top of the steep broken ground and bending in and out across and around its ridges and ravines at a uniform decline of, say, six inches to every ten feet, until the desired terminus is reached below; much as, in its larger way, a railway or aqueduct might, or as cattle do when they roam in the hills. Thus, by the slightest possible interference with natural conditions, these paths were given a winding course every step of which was pleasing because justified by the necessities of the case, traversing the main inequalities of the ground with the ease of level land yet without diminishing its superior variety and charm. And so with contour paths I began to find, right at my back door and on my own acre, in nerve-tired hours, an outdoor relaxation which I could begin, leave off and resume at any moment and which has never staled on me. For this was the genesis of all I have learned or done in gardening, such as it is. My appliances for laying out the grades were simple enough: a spirit-level, a stiff ten-foot rod with an eighteen-inch leg nailed firmly on one end of it, a twelve-inch leg on the other, a hatchet, and a basket of short stakes with which to mark the points, ten feet apart, where the longer leg, in front on all down grades, rested when the spirit-level, strapped on the rod, showed the rod to be exactly horizontal. Trivial inequalities of surface were arbitrarily cut down or built up and covered with leaves and pine-straw to disguise the fact, and whenever a tree or anything worth preserving stood in the way here came the loaded barrow and the barrowist, like a piece of artillery sweeping into action, and a fill undistinguishable from nature soon brought the path around the obstacle on what had been its lower side, to meander on at its unvarying rate of rise or fall as though nothing--except the trees and wild flowers--had happened since the vast freshets of the post-glacial period built the landscape. I made the drive first, of steeper grade than the paths; but every new length of way built, whether walk or road, made the next easier to build, by making easier going for the artillery, the construction train. Also each new path has made it easier to bring up, for the lawn garden, sand, clay, or leaf-mould, or for hearth consumption all the wood which the grove's natural mortality each year requires to be disposed of. There is a superior spiritual quality in the warmth of a fire of h-oak, h-ash, and even h-ellum gathered from your own acre, especially if the acre is very small and has contour paths. By a fire of my own acre's "dead and down" I write these lines. I never buy cordwood. Only half the grove has required these paths, the other half being down on the flat margin of the river, traversed by a cart-road at least half a century old, though used by wheels hardly twice a year; but in the three acres where lie the contour paths there is now three-fifths of a mile of them, not a rod of which is superfluous. And then I have two examples of another kind of path: paths with steps; paths which for good and lawful reasons cannot allow you time to go around on the "five per cent" grade but must cut across, taking a single ravine lengthwise, to visit its three fish-pools. These steps, and two short retaining walls elsewhere in the grove, are made of the field stones of the region, uncut. All are laid "dry" like the ordinary stone fences of New England farms, and the walls are built with a smart inward batter so that the winter frosts may heave them year after year, heave and leave but not tumble them down. I got that idea from a book. Everything worth while on my acre is from books except what two or three professional friends have from time to time dropped into my hungry ear. Both my ears have good appetites--for garden lore. About half a mile from me, down Mill River, stands the factory of a prized friend who more than any other man helps by personal daily care to promote Northampton's "People's Institute," of whose home-garden work I have much to say in the chapters that follow this one. For forty years or more this factory has been known far and wide as the "Hoe Shop" because it makes shovels. It has never made hoes. It uses water-power, and the beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full back to the rapids just above my own acre. In winter this is the favorite skating-pond of the town and of Smith College. In the greener seasons of college terms the girls constantly pass upstream and down in their pretty rowboats and canoes, making a charming effect as seen from my lawn's rear edge at the head of the pine and oak shaded ravine whose fish-pools are gay by turns with elder, wild sunflower, sumach, iris, water-lilies, and forget-me-not. [Illustration: "The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full back to the rapids just above My Own Acre." This is the "Hoe Shop." The tower was ruined by fire many years ago, and because of its unsafety is being taken down at the present writing.] This ravine, the middle one of the grove's three, is about a hundred feet wide. When I first began to venture the human touch in it, it afforded no open spot level enough to hold a camp-stool. From the lawn above to the river road below, the distance is three hundred and thirty feet, and the fall, of fifty-five feet, is mostly at the upper end, which is therefore too steep, as well as too full of varied undergrowth, for any going but climbing. In the next ravine on its left there was a clear, cold spring and in the one on its right ran a natural rivulet that trickled even in August; but this middle ravine was dry or merely moist. Here let me say to any who would try an amateur landscape art on their own acre at the edge of a growing town, that the town's growth tends steadily to diminish the amount of their landscape's natural water supply by catching on street pavements and scores and hundreds of roofs, lawns and walks, and carrying away in sewers, the rain and melting snows which for ages filtered slowly through the soil. Small wonder, I think, that, when in the square quarter-mile between my acre and Elm Street fifty-three dwellings and three short streets took the place of an old farm, my grove, by sheer water famine, lost several of its giant pines. Wonder to me is that the harm seems at length to have ceased. But about that ravine: one day the nature of its growth and soil, especially its alders, elders, and willows and a show of clay and gravel, forced on my notice the likelihood that here, too, had once been a spring, if no more. I scratched at its head with a stick and out came an imprisoned rill like a recollected word from the scratched head of a schoolboy. Happily the spot was just at the bottom of the impassably steep fall of ground next the edge of the lawn and was almost in the centre of those four acres--one of sward, three of woods--which I proposed to hold under more or less discipline, leaving the rest--a wooded strip running up the river shore--wholly wild, as college girls, for example, would count wildness. In both parts the wealth of foliage on timber and underbrush almost everywhere shut the river out of view from the lawn and kept the eye restless for a glint, if no more, of water. And so there I thought at once to give myself what I had all my life most absurdly wished for, a fish-pool. I had never been able to look upon an aquarium and keep the tenth Commandment. I had never caught a fish without wanting to take it home and legally adopt it into the family--a tendency which once led my son to say, "Yes, he would be pleased to go fishing with me if I would only fish in a sportsmanlike manner." What a beautifully marked fish is the sun-perch! Once, in boyhood, I kept six of those "pumpkin-seed" in a cistern, and my smile has never been the same since I lost them--one of my war losses. I resolved to impound the waters of my spring in the ravine and keep fish at last--without salt--to my heart's content. Yet I remembered certain restraining precepts: first, that law of art which condemns incongruity--requires everything to be in keeping with its natural surroundings--and which therefore, for one thing, makes an American garden the best possible sort of garden to have in America; second, that twin art law, against inutility, which demands that everything in an artistic scheme serve the use it pretends to serve; third, a precept of Colonel Waring's: "Don't fool with running water if you haven't money to fool away"; and, fourth, that best of all gardening rules--look before you leap. However, on second thought, and tenth, and twentieth, one thought a day for twenty days, I found that if water was to be impounded anywhere on my acre here was the strategic point. Down this ravine, as I have said, was the lawn's one good glimpse of the river, and a kindred gleam intervening would tend, in effect, to draw those farther waters in under the trees and into the picture. Such relationships are very rewarding to find to whoever would garden well. Hence this mention. One's garden has to do with whatever is in sight from it, fair or otherwise, and it is as feasible and important to plant in the fair as to plant out the otherwise. Also, in making my grove paths, I had noticed that to cross this ravine where at one or two places in its upper half a contour grade would have been pettily circuitous and uninteresting, and to cross it comfortably, there should be either a bridge or a dam; and a dam with water behind it seemed pleasanter every way--showed less incongruity and less inutility--than a bridge with no water under it. As to "fooling with running water," the mere trickle here in question had to be dragged out of its cradle to make it run at all. It remained for me to find out by experience that even that weakling, imprisoned and grown to a pool, though of only three hundred square feet in surface, when aided and abetted by New England frosts and exposed on a southern slope to winter noonday suns, could give its amateur captor as much trouble--proportionately--as any Hebrew babe drawn from the bulrushes of the Nile is said to have given his. Now if there is any value in recording these experiences it can be only in the art principles they reveal. To me in the present small instance the principle illustrated was that of the true profile line for ascent or descent in a garden. You may go into any American town where there is any inequality of ground and in half an hour find a hundred or two private lawns graded--from the house to each boundary line--on a single falling curve, or, in plain English, a hump. The best reason why this curve is not artistic, not pleasing, but stupid, is that it is not natural and gains nothing by being unnatural. All gardening is a certain conquest of Nature, and even when "formal" should interfere with her own manner and custom as slightly as is required by the necessities of the case--the needs of that particular spot's human use and joy. The right profile and surface for a lawn of falling grade, the surface which will permanently best beguile both eye and foot, should follow a double curve, an ogee line. For, more or less emphasized, that is Nature's line in all her affable moods on land or water: a descent or ascent beginning gradually, increasing rapidly, and concluding gently. We see it in the face of any smooth knoll or billow. I believe the artists impute to Praxiteles a certain ownership in this double curve. It is a living line; it suggests Nature conscious and astir as no single curve or straight line can. I admit that even among amateurs this is rather small talk, but it brings me to this point: in the passage of water down a ravine of its own making, this line of Nature astir may repeat itself again and again but is commonly too inaffable, abrupt, angular, to suggest the ogee. In that middle part of it where the descent is swift it may be more or less of a plunge, and after the plunge the water is likely to pause on the third turn, in a natural pool, before resuming its triple action again. And so, in my ravine, some seasons later, I ventured to detain the overflow of my first pool on a second and a third lingering place, augmenting the water supply by new springs developed in the bottoms of the new pools. The second pool has a surface of a thousand square feet, the third spans nineteen hundred, and there are fish in all three, hatched there--"pumpkin-seed" included, but also trout--among spontaneous bulrushes, pond-lilies, flags, and dainty water-weeds; and sometimes at night, when the reflected glory of a ten-o'clock full moon shines up from it to the stone exedra on the lawn, I seem to have taken my Praxitelean curves so directly from Nature that she thinks she took them herself from me and thanks me for the suggestion. Please observe that of great gardens, or of costly gardens whether great or only costly, we here say nothing. Our theme is such a garden as a householder may himself make and keep or for which, at most, he needs professional advice only in its first planning, and for its upkeep one gardener, with one occasional helper in pressing seasons or in constructional work. Constructional work. Dams, for example. In two of my dams I built cores of concrete and thus made acquaintance with that interesting material. Later I pressed the acquaintanceship, made garden and grove seats, a table or two, a very modest fountain for a single jet of water in my highest, smallest fish-pool, and even a flight of steps with a pair of gaîne-shaped pedestals--suggested by a sculptor friend--at their top. The exedra I mentioned just now is of concrete. The stuff is a temptation to be wary of. The ordinary gray sort--I have touched no other--is a humble medium, and pretentious designs in humble materials are one of the worst, and oldest, of garden incongruities. In my ventures with concrete I have studied for grace in form but grace subordinated to stability, and have shunned embellishment. Embellishment for its own sake is the easiest and commonest sin against good art wherever art becomes self-conscious. It is having a riotous time just now in concrete. I have rarely seen a commercial concrete garden-seat which was not more ornate than I should want it for my own acre. I happen to have two or three articles in my garden which are a trifle elaborate but they are of terra-cotta, are not home-made and would be plainer could I have found them so. A garden needs furniture only less than a house, and concrete is a boon to "natural" gardening, being inexpensive, rustic, and imperishable. I fancy a chief reason why there is such inconsiderate dearth of seats and steps in our American amateur gardens is the old fashion--so well got rid of at any cost--of rustic cedar and hickory stairs and benches. "Have none of them," was Colonel Waring's injunction; "they are forever out of repair." But I fear another reason is that so often our gardens are neither for private ease nor social joy, but for public display and are planned mainly for street exhibition. That is the way we commonly treat garden fountains! We make a smug show of unfenced, unhedged, universal hospitality across a sidewalk boundary which nevertheless we hold inviolate--sometimes by means of a painted sign or gas-pipe--and never say "Have a seat" to the dearest friend in any secluded nook of our shrubberies, if there is such a nook. How many of us know a fountain beside an embowered seat where one,--or two,--with or without the book of verses, can sit and hear it whisper or watch the moonlight cover it with silent kisses? In my limited experience I have known of but two. One is by the once favorite thought-promoting summer seat of Augustus Saint-Gaudens on his own home acre in Vermont; the other I need not particularize further than to say that it is one of the things which interlock and unify a certain garden and grove. [Illustration: "A fountain ... where one,--or two,--can sit and hear it whisper." The ravine of the three fish pools. There is a drop of thirty feet between the upper and the lowermost pool.] The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of my own acre. When the house was built its lot and others backed up to a hard, straight rear line where the old field had halted at its fence and where the woods began on ground that fell to the river at an angle of from forty to fifty degrees. Here my gifted friend and adviser gave me a precept got from his earlier gifted friend and adviser, Frederick Law Olmsted: that passing from any part of a pleasure-ground to any part next it should be entirely safe and easy or else impossible. By the application of this maxim I brought my lawn and grove together in one of the happiest of marriages. For I proceeded, by filling with earth (and furnace ashes), to carry the lawn in, practically level, beyond the old fence line and under the chestnuts and pines sometimes six feet, sometimes twelve, until the difficult and unsafe forty or fifty degrees of abrupt fall were changed to an impassable sixty and seventy degrees, and every one's instinctive choice of way was the contour paths. At the same time this has preserved, and even enhanced, the place's wildness, especially the wild flowers and the low-nesting birds. Sometimes a few yards of retaining-wall, never cemented, always laid up dry and with a strong inward batter, had to be put in to avoid smothering the roots of some great tree; for, as everybody knows and nearly everybody forgets, roots, like fishes, must have air. In one place, across the filled head of a ravine, the wall, though but a scant yard high, is fifty feet long, and there is another place where there should be one like it. In this work no tree was sacrificed save one noble oak done to death by a youth who knew but forgot that roots must have air. Not to make the work expensive it was pursued slowly, through many successive seasons; yet before even its easy, first half was done the lawn was in under the grove on an apparently natural, irregular crest line. Moreover the grove was out on the lawn with an even more natural haphazard bordering line; for another operation had been carried on meantime. Trees, souvenir trees, had from time to time been planted on the lawn by visiting friends. Most of them are set close enough to the grove to become a part of it, standing in a careful irregularity which has already obliterated, without molesting, the tree line of the ancient fence. [Illustration: "The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My Own Acre." At the point where the party is drinking tea (the site of the Indian mound) the overlap of grove and lawn is eighty-five feet across the old fence line that once sharply divided them.] Young senators among their seniors, they still have much growth to make before they can enter into their full forest dignity, yet Henry Ward Beecher's elm is nearly two feet through and has a spread of fifty; Max O'Rell's white-ash is a foot in diameter and fifty feet high; Edward Atkinson's is something more, and Felix Adler's hemlock-spruce, the maple of Anthony Hope Hawkins, L. Clark Seelye's English ash, Henry van Dyke's white-ash, Sol Smith Russell's linden, and Hamilton Wright Mabie's horse-chestnut are all about thirty-five feet high and cast a goodly shade. Sir James M. Barrie's elm--his and Sir William Robertson Nicoll's, who planted it with him later than the plantings aforementioned--has, by some virtue in the soil or in its own energies, reached a height of nearly sixty-five feet and a diameter of sixteen inches. Other souvenirs are a horse-chestnut planted by Minnie Maddern Fiske, a ginkgo by Alice Freeman Palmer, a beech by Paul van Dyke, a horse-chestnut by Anna Hempstead Branch, another by Sir Sidney Lee, yet another by Mary E. Burt, a catalpa by Madelaine Wynne, a Colorado blue spruce--fitly placed after much labor of mind--by Sir Moses Ezekiel, and a Kentucky coffee-tree by Gerald Stanley Lee and Jennette Lee, of our own town. Among these should also stand the maple of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but it was killed in its second winter by an undetected mouse at its roots. Except Sir Moses, all the knights here named received the accolade after their tree plantings, but I draw no moral. [Illustration: "Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn by visiting friends." The Beecher elm, first of the souvenir trees.] Would it were practicable to transmit to those who may know these trees in later days the scenes of their setting out and to tell just how the words were said which some of the planters spoke. Mr. Beecher, lover of young trees and young children, straightened up after pressing the soil about the roots with hands as well as feet and said: "I cannot wish you to live as long as this tree, but may your children's children and their children sit under its shade." Said Felix Adler to his hemlock-spruce, "Vivat, crescat, floreat"; and a sentiment much like it was implied in Sol Smith Russell's words to the grove's master as they finished putting in his linden together--for he was just then proposing to play Rip Van Winkle, which Joseph Jefferson had finally decided to produce no more: "Here's to your healt', undt der healt' of all your family; may you lif long undt brosper." We--the first person singular grows tiresome--we might have now, on our acre, a tree planted by Joseph Jefferson had we thought in time to be provided with a sapling, growing, in a tub. Have your prospective souvenir tree already tubbed and waiting. This idea I got from Andrew Carnegie, with whom I had the honor to plant an oak at Skibo Castle and from whom I, like so many others, have had other things almost as good as ideas. Have your prospective souvenir tree tubbed and the tub sunk in the ground, of course, to its rim. Then the dear friend can plant it at any time that he may chance along between March and December. But let no souvenir tree, however planted, be treated, after planting, as other than a living thing if you would be just to it, to your friend, or to yourself. Cultivate it; coax it on; and it will grow two or three or four times as fast as if left to fight its daily battle for life unaided. And do not forbear to plant trees because they grow so slowly. They need not. They do not. With a little attention they grow so swiftly! Before you know it you are sitting in their shade. Besides Sir Arthur's maple the only souvenir tree we have lost was a tulip-tree planted by my friend of half a lifetime, the late Franklin H. Head. So much for my grove. I write of it not in self-complacency. My many blunders, some of them yet to be made, are a good insurance against that. I write because of the countless acres as good as mine, in this great, dear America, which might now be giving their owners all the healthful pastime, private solace, or solitary or social delights which this one yields, yet which are only "waste lands" or "holes in the ground" because unavailable for house lots or tillage. [Illustration: "How the words were said which some of the planters spoke." President Seelye of Smith College planting a tree.--A majority of the company present were Smith College students and others engaged in the work of the People's Institute. The tree on the left is Barrie's elm. The tree directly behind the small sapling which is being planted, and on a line with it, is Max O'Rell's. The hemlock-spruce between them is Felix Adler's.] And now as to the single acre by measure, of lawn, shrubs, and plants, close around my house; for the reason that it was and is my school of gardening. There was no garden here--I write this in the midst of it--when I began. Ten steps from where I sit there had been a small Indian mound which some one had carefully excavated. I found stone arrow chips on the spot, and one whole arrow-head. So here no one else's earlier skill was in evidence to point my course or impede it. This was my clean new slate and at that time I had never "done a sum" in gardening and got anything like a right answer. It is emphatically an amateur garden and a book garden: a garden which to me, as to most of us, would have been impossible in any but these days when the whole art of gardening has been printed in books and no amateur is excusable for trying to garden without reading them, or for saying after having read them that he has planned and worked without professional advice. The books _are_ the professional advice, with few drawbacks and with the great advantage that they are ours truly and do not even have to be "'phoned." I should rather have in my library my Bailey's "American Cyclopedia of Horticulture," than any two garden periodicals once a month. These, too, I value, but, for me, they are over-apt to carry too much deckload of the advice and gentle vauntings of other amateurs. I have an amateur's abhorrence of amateurs! The Cyclopedia _knows_, and will always send me to the right books if it cannot thresh a matter out with me itself. Before Bailey my fount of knowledge was Mr. E. J. Canning, late of Smith College Botanic Gardens; a spring still far from dry. As the books enjoin, I began my book-gardening with a plan on paper; not the elaborate thing one pays for when he can give his garden more money than time, but a light sketch, a mere fundamental suggestion. This came professionally from a landscape-architect, Miss Frances Bullard, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who had just finished plotting the grounds of my neighbor, the college. I tell of my own garden for another reason: that it shows, I think, how much can be done with how little, if for the doing you take time instead of money. All things come to the garden that knows how to wait. Mine has acquired at leisure a group of effects which would have cost from ten to twenty times as much if got in a hurry. Garden for ten-year results and get them for next to nothing, and at the same time you may quicken speed whenever your exchequer smiles broadly enough. Of course this argument is chiefly for those who have the time and not the money; for by time we mean play time, time which is money lost if you don't play. The garden that gives the most joy, "Joyous Gard," as Sir Launcelot named his, is not to be bought, like a Circassian slave; it must be brought up, like a daughter. How much of life they can miss who can buy whatever they want whenever they want it! But I tell first of my own garden also because I believe it summarizes to the eye a number of primary book-rules, authoritative "don'ts," by the observance of which a multitude of amateur gardeners may get better results than it yet shows. Nevertheless, I will hardly do more than note a few exceptions to these ground rules, which may give the rules a more convincing force. First of all, "don't" let any of your planting cut or split your place in two. How many a small house-lot lawn we see split down the middle by a row of ornamental shrubs or fruit-trees which might as easily have been set within a few feet of the property line, whose rigidity, moreover, would have best excused the rigidity of the planted line. But such glaring instances aside, there are many subtler ones quite as unfortunate; "don't" be too sure you are not unwittingly furnishing one. "Don't" destroy the openness of your sward by dotting it with shrubs or pattern flower-beds. To this rule I doubt if a plausible exception could be contrived. It is so sweeping and so primary that we might well withhold it here were we not seeking to state its artistic reason why. Which is, that such plantings are mere eruptions of individual smartness, without dignity and with no part in any general unity; chirping up like pert children in a company presumably trying to be rational. On the other hand, I hope my acre, despite all its unconscious or unconfessed mistakes, shows pleasantly that the best openness of a lawn is not to be got between unclothed, right-angled and parallel bounds. The more its verdure-clad borders swing in and out the longer they look, not merely because they are longer but also because they interest and lure the eye. "Where are you going?" says the eye. "Come and see," says the roaming line. "Don't" plant in stiff lines except in close relation to architectural or legal bounds. A straight horizontal line Nature scarcely knows save in her rocks and on a vaster scale than we here have to do with. Yet straight lines in gardening are often good and fine if only they are lines of real need. Where, when and in what degree it is good to subordinate utility to beauty or beauty to utility depends on time, place and circumstance, but when in doubt "don't" pinch either to pet the other. Oppression is never good art. Yet "don't" cry war, war, where there is no war. A true beauty and a needed utility may bristle on first collision but they soon make friends. Was it not Ruskin himself who wanted to butt the railway-train off the track and paw up the rails--something like that? But even between them and the landscape there is now an entente cordiale. I have seen the hand of Joseph Pennell make beautiful peace with billboards and telegraph-poles and wires. The railway points us to the fact that along the ground Nature is as innocent of parallel lines, however bent, as of straight ones, and that in landscape-gardening parallels should be avoided unless they are lines of utility. "Don't" lay parallel lines, either straight or curved, where Nature would not and utility need not. Yet my own acre has taught me a modification of this rule so marked as to be almost an exception. On each side of me next my nearest neighbor I have a turfed alley between a continuous bed of flowering shrubs and plants next the division line, and a similar bed whose meanderings border my lawn. At first I gave these two alleys a sinuous course in correspondence with the windings of the bed bordering the lawn--for they were purely ways of pleasure among the flowers, and a loitering course seemed only reasonable. But sinuous lines proved as disappointing in the alleys as they were satisfying out on the lawn, and by and by I saw that whereas the bendings of the open lawn's borders lured and rewarded the eye, the same curves in the alleys obstructed and baffled it. The show of floral charms was piecemeal, momentary and therefore trivial. "Don't" be trivial! [Illustration: "'Where are you going?' says the eye. 'Come and see,' says the roaming line." This planting conceals one of the alleys described on page 34. In the alley a concrete bench built into a concrete wall looks across the entire breadth of the garden and into the sunset.] But a cure was easy. I had to straighten but one side of each alley to restore the eye's freedom of perspective, and nothing more was wanting. The American eye's freedom of perspective is one of our great liberties. Oh, say, can you _see_--? I made this change, of course, on the side nearest the straight, property-division bound, where ran an invisible wire fence. Thus the bed on that side was set between two straight parallels, while the bed on the lawn side remained between waving parallels. This gave the best simplicity with the least artificiality. And thus the two lanes are open to view from end to end, yet each has two deep bays on the side nearest the lawn, bays which remain unseen till one actually reaches them in traversing the lane. In such a bay one should always have, I think, some floral revelation of special charm worthy of the seclusion and the surprise. But this thought is only one of a hundred that tell me my garden is not a finished thing. To its true lover a garden never is. Another sort of bay, the sort resulting from a swift retreat of a line of shrubberies pursued by the lawn and then swinging round and returning upon the lawn in a counter pursuit, I thought I had learned from books and Miss Bullard and had established on my own acre, until I saw the college gardens of Oxford, England, and the landscape work in Hyde Park, London. On my return thence I made haste to give my own garden's in-and-out curves twice the boldness they had had. And doubling their boldness I doubled their beauty. "Don't" ever let your acre's, or half or quarter acre's, ground lines relax into feebleness or shrink into pettiness. "Don't" ever plan a layout for whose free swing your limits are cramped. [Illustration: "The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays on the side nearest the lawn." The straight line of high growth conceals in the midst of its foliage a wire division fence, and makes a perfect background for blooming herbaceous perennials.] "Don't" ever, if you can help it, says another of my old mistakes to me, let your acre lead your guest to any point which can be departed from only by retracing one's steps. Such necessities involve a lapse--not to say collapse--of interest, which makes for dulness and loss of dignity. Lack what my own acre may, I have it now so that by its alleys, lawns and contour paths in garden and grove we can walk and walk through every part of it without once meeting our own tracks, and that is not all because of the pleasant fact that the walks, where not turfed, are covered with pine-straw, of which each new September drops us a fresh harvest. A garden, we say, should never compel us to go back the way we came; but in truth a garden should never compel us to do anything. Its don'ts should be laid solely on itself. Those applicable to its master, mistress, or guests should all be impossibilities, not requests. "Private grounds, no crossing"--take that away, please, wherever you can, and plant your margins so that there can be no crossing. Wire nettings hidden by shrubberies from all but the shameless trespasser you will find far more effective, more promotive to beauty and more courteous. "Don't" make your garden a garden of don'ts. For no garden is quite a garden until it is "Joyous Gard." Let not yours or mine be a garden for display. Then our rhododendrons and like splendors will not be at the front gate, and our grounds be less and less worth seeing the farther into them we go. Nor let yours or mine be a garden of pride. The ways of such a garden are not pleasantness nor its paths peace. And let us not have a garden of tiring care or a user up of precious time. That is not good citizenship. Neither let us have an old-trousers, sun-bonnet, black finger-nails garden--especially if you are a woman. A garden that makes a wife, daughter or sister a dowdy is hardly "Joyous Gard." Neither is one which makes itself a mania to her and an affliction to her family. Let us not even have, you or me, a wonder garden--of arboreal or floral curiosities. Perhaps because I have not travelled enough I have never seen a garden of exotics that was a real garden in any good art sense; in any way, that is, lastingly pleasing to a noble spirit. Let your garden, and let mine, be the garden of joy. For the only way it can be that, on and on, year in, year out, is to be so good in art and so finely human in its purposes that to have it and daily keep it will make us more worth while to ourselves and to mankind than to go without it. THE AMERICAN GARDEN Almost any good American will admit it to be a part of our national social scheme, I think,--if we have a social scheme,--that everybody shall aspire to all the refinements of life. Particularly is it our theory that every one shall propose to give to his home all the joys and graces which are anywhere associated with the name of home. Yet until of late we have neglected the art of gardening. Now and then we see, or more likely we read about, some garden of wonderful beauty; but the very fame of it points the fact that really artistic gardening is not democratically general with us. Our cities and towns, without number, have the architect and the engineer, for house and for landscape, for sky-scrapers and all manner of public works; we have the nurseryman, the florist; we have parks, shaded boulevards and riverside and lakeside drives. Under private ownership we have a vast multitude of exactly rectilinear lawns, extremely bare or else very badly planted; and we have hundreds of thousands of beautiful dames and girls who "love flowers." But our home gardens, our home gardeners, either professional or amateur, where are they? Our smaller cities by scores and our towns by hundreds are full of home-dwellers each privately puzzled to know why every one of his neighbors' houses, however respectable in architecture, stares at him and after him with a vacant, deaf-mute air of having just landed in this country, without friends. What ails these dwellings is largely lack of true gardening. They will never look like homes, never look really human and benign, that is, until they are set in a gardening worthy of them. For a garden which alike in its dignity and in its modesty is worthy of the house around which it is set, is the smile of the place. In the small city of Northampton, Massachusetts, there has been for many years an annual prize competition of amateur flower-gardens. In 1913 there were over a thousand homes, about one-fourth of all the dwellings in the town, in this pretty contest. Not all, not half, these competitors could make a show worthy the name of good gardening, but every one of these households stood pledged to do something during the year for the outdoor improvement of the home, and hundreds of their house lots were florally beautiful. If I seem to hurry into a mention of it here it is partly in the notion that such a recital may be my best credentials as the writer of these pages, and partly in the notion that such a concrete example may possibly have a tendency to help on flower-gardening in the country at large and even to aid us in determining what American flower-gardening had best be. For the reader's better advantage, however, let me first state one or two general ideas which have given this activity and its picturesque results particular aspects and not others. I lately heard a lady ask an amateur gardener, "What is the garden's foundation principle?" There was a certain overgrown pomp in the question's form, but that is how she very modestly asked it, and I will take no liberty with its construction. I thought his reply a good one. "We have all," he said, "come up from wild nature. In wild nature there are innumerable delights, but they are qualified by countless inconveniences. The cave, tent, cabin, cottage and castle have gradually been evolved by an orderly accumulation and combination of defences and conveniences which secure to us a host of advantages over wild nature and wild man. Yet rightly we are loath to lose any more of nature than we must in order to be her masters and her children in one, and to gather from her the largest fund of profit and delight she can be made to yield. Hence around the cottage, the castle or the palace waves and blooms the garden." Was he not right? This is why, in our pleasant Northampton affair, we have accepted it as our first rule of private gardening that _the house is the climacteric note_. This is why the garden should never be more architectural and artificial than the house of which it is the setting, and this is why the garden should grow less and less architectural and artificial as it draws away from the house. To say the same thing in reverse, the garden, as it approaches the house, should accept more and more discipline--domestication--social refinement, until the house itself at length seems as unabruptly and naturally to grow up out of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a lady's song. By this understanding of the matter what a fine truce-note is blown between the contending advocates of "natural" and of "formal" gardening! The right choice between these two aspects of the art, and the right degree in either choice, depend on the character of the house. The house is a part of the garden. It is the garden's brow and eyes. In gardening, almost the only thing which costs unduly is for us to try to give our house some other house's garden. One's private garden should never be quite so far removed from a state of nature as his house is. Its leading function should be to delight its house's inmates (and intimates) in things of nature so refined as to inspire and satisfy their happiest moods. Therefore no garden should cost, nor look as if it cost, an outlay of money, time or toil that cramps the house's own ability to minister to the genuine bodily needs and spiritual enlargements of its indwellers; and therefore, also, it should never seem to cost, in its first making or in its daily keeping, so much pains as to lack, itself, a garden's supreme essential--tranquillity. So, then, to those who would incite whole streets of American towns to become florally beautiful, "formal" gardening seems hardly the sort to recommend. About the palatial dwellings of men of princely revenue it may be enchanting. There it appears quite in place. For with all its exquisite artificiality it still is nearer to nature than the stately edifice it surrounds and adorns. But for any less costly homes it costs too much. It is expensive in its first outlay and it demands constantly the greatest care and the highest skill. Our ordinary American life is too busy for it unless the ground is quite handed over to the hired professional and openly betrays itself as that very unsatisfying thing, a "gardener's garden." [Illustration: " ... until the house itself seems as naturally ... to grow up out of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a lady's song." On the right of this picture you may see the piers of one of the front gates of My Own Acre standing under Henry Ward Beecher's elm. The urn forms surmounting them are of concrete, and the urns are cast from earlier forms in wood, which were a gift from Henry van Dyke. On the left the tops of the arbor vitæ and a magnolia are bending in the wind.] Our ordinary American life is also too near nature for the formal garden to come in between. Unless our formal gardening is of some inexpensive sort our modest dwelling-houses give us an anticlimax, and there is no inexpensive sort of formal gardening. Except in the far south our American climate expatriates it. A very good practical rule would be for none of us to venture upon such gardening until he is well able to keep up an adequate greenhouse. A formal garden without a greenhouse or two--or three--is a glorious army on a war footing, but without a base of supplies. It is largely his greenhouses which make the public gardener and the commercial florist so misleading an example for the cottager to follow in his private gardening. To be beautiful, formal gardening requires stately proportions. Without these it is almost certain to be petty and frivolous. In the tiny gardens of British and European peasants, it is true, a certain formality of design is often practised with pleasing success; but these gardens are a by-product of peasant toil, and in America we have no joy in contemplating an American home limited to the aspirations of peasant life. In such gardening there is a constraint, a lack of natural freedom, a distance from nature, and a certain contented subserviency, which makes it--however fortunate it may be under other social conditions--wholly unfit to express the buoyant, not to say exuberant, complacencies of the American home. For these we want, what we have not yet quite evolved, the American garden. When this comes it must come, of course, unconsciously; but we may be sure it will not be much like the gardens of any politically shut-in people. No, not even of those supreme artists in gardening, the Japanese. It will express the traits of our American domestic life; our strong individuality and self-assurance, our sense of unguarded security, our affability and unexclusiveness and our dislike to high-walled privacy. If we would hasten its day we must make way for it along the lines of these traits. On the other hand, if in following these lines we can contrive to adhere faithfully to the worldwide laws of all true art, who knows but our very gardening may tend to correct more than one shortcoming or excess in our national character? In our Northampton experiment it has been our conviction from the beginning that for a private garden to be what it should be--to have a happy individuality--a countenance of its own--one worthy to be its own--it must in some practical way be the fruit of its householder's own spirit and not merely of some hired gardener's. If one can employ a landscape-architect, all very well; but the most of us cannot, and after all, the true landscape-architect, the artist gardener, works on this principle and seeks to convey into every garden distinctively the soul of the household for which it springs and flowers. "Since when it grows and smells, I swear, Not of itself but thee." Few American householders, however, have any enthusiasm for this theory, which many would call high-strung, and as we in Northampton cannot undertake to counsel and direct our neighbors' hired helps, we enroll in the main branch of our competition only those who garden for themselves and hire no labor. To such the twenty-one prizes, ranging from two dollars and a half up to fifteen dollars, are a strong incentive, and by such the advice of visiting committees is eagerly sought and followed. The public educative value of the movement is probably largest under these limitations, for in this way we show what beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds and with the least outlay. Its private educative value, too, is probably largest thus, because thus we disseminate as a home delight a practical knowledge of æsthetic principles among those who may at any time find it expedient to become wage-earning gardeners on the home grounds of the well-to-do. [Illustration: "Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds." This is half of a back yard, the whole of which is equally handsome. The place to which it belongs took a capital prize in the Carnegie Flower Garden Competition.] [Illustration: "Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and bloom." An invisible fault of this planting is that it was set too close to the building and tended to give an impression, probably groundless, of promoting dampness. Also it was an inconvenience to mechanics in painting or repairing.] The competing gardens being kept wholly without hired labor, of course our constant advice to all contestants is to shun formal gardening. It is a pity that in nearly all our cities and towns the most notable examples of gardening are found in the parks, boulevards, and cemeteries. By these flaring displays thousands of modest cottagers who might easily provide, on their small scale, lovely gardens about their dwellings at virtually no cost and with no burdensome care, get a notion that this, and this only, is artistic gardening and hence that a home garden for oneself would be too expensive and troublesome to be thought of. On the other hand, a few are tempted to mimic them on a petty scale, and so spoil their little grass-plots and amuse, without entertaining, their not more tasteful but only less aspiring neighbors. In Northampton, in our Carnegie prize contest--so called for a very sufficient and pleasant reason--our counsel is to avoid all mimicry in gardening as we would avoid it in speech or in gait. Sometimes we do not mind being repetitious. "In gardening" we say--as if we had never said it before--"almost the only thing which costs unduly--in money or in mortification--is for one to try to give himself somebody else's garden!" Often we say this twice to the same person. One of the reasons we give against it is that it leads to toy gardening, and toy gardening is of all sorts the most pitiful and ridiculous. "No true art," we say, "can tolerate any make-believe which is not in some way finer than the reality it simulates. In other words, imitation should always be in the nature of an amiable condescension. Whatever falseness, pretension or even mere frailty or smallness, suggests to the eye the ineffectuality of a toy is out of place in any sort of gardening." We do not actually speak all this, but we imply it, and we often find that the mere utterance of the one word, "toy gardening," has a magical effect to suggest all the rest and to overwhelm with contrition the bad taste and frivolity of many a misguided attempt at adornment. At that word of exorcism joints of cerulean sewer-pipe crested with scarlet geraniums, rows of whited cobbles along the walk or drive like a cannibal's skulls around his hut, purple paint-kegs of petunias on the scanty door-steps, crimson wash-kettles of verbenas, ant-hill rockeries, and well-sweeps and curbs where no wells are, steal modestly and forever into oblivion. Now, when we so preach we try also to make it very plain that there is not one set of rules for gardening on a small scale of expense in a small piece of ground, and another set for gardening on a larger scale. For of course the very thing which makes the small garden different from the large, the rich man's from the poor man's, the Scotch or Italian peasant's from the American mechanic's, or the public garden from the private, is the universal and immutable oneness of the great canons of art. One of our competitors, having honestly purged her soul of every impulse she may ever have had to mimic the gardening of the cemeteries, planted her dooryard with a trueness of art which made it the joy of all beholders. Only then was it that a passing admirer stopped and cried: "Upon me soul, Mrs. Anonyma, yir gyairden looks joost loike a pooblic pairk!" He meant--without knowing it--that the spot was lovely for not trying to look the least bit like a public park, and he was right. She had kept what it would be well for the public gardeners to keep much better than some of them do--the Moral Law of Gardening. * * * * * There is a moral law of gardening. No garden should ever tell a lie. No garden should ever put on any false pretence. No garden should ever break a promise. To the present reader these proclamations may seem very trite; it may seem very trite to say that if anything in or of a garden is meant for adornment, it must adorn; but we have to say such things to many who do not know what trite means--who think it is something you buy from the butcher. A thing meant for adornment, we tell them, must so truly and sufficiently adorn as to be worth all the room and attention it takes up. Thou shalt not let anything in thy garden take away thy guest's attention without repaying him for it; it is stealing. A lady, not in our competition but one of its most valued patronesses, lately proposed to herself to place in the centre of a wide, oval lawn a sun-dial and to have four paths cross the grass and meet there. But on reflection the query came to her-- "In my unformal garden of simplest grove and sward will a sun-dial--posing in an office it never performed there, and will never again be needed for anywhere--a cabinet relic now--will a _posed_ sun-dial be interesting enough when it is arrived at to justify a special journey and four kept-up paths which cut my beautiful grass-plot into quarters?" With that she changed her mind--a thing the good gardener must often do--and appointed the dial to a place where one comes upon it quite incidentally while moving from one main feature of the grounds to another. It is now a pleasing, mild surprise instead of a tame fulfilment of a showy promise; pleasing, after all, it must, however, be admitted, to the toy-loving spirit, since the sun-dial has long been, and henceforth ever will be, an utterly useless thing in a garden, only true to art when it stands in an old garden, a genuine historical survival of its day of true utility. Only in such a case does the sun-dial belong to the good morals of gardening. But maybe this is an overstrict rule for the majority of us who are much too fond of embellishments and display--the rouge and powder of high art. On the other hand, we go to quite as much pains to say that though a garden may not lie nor steal, it may have its concealments; they are as right as they are valuable. One of the first steps in the making of a garden should be to determine what to hide and how most gracefully to hide it. A garden is a house's garments, its fig-leaves, as we may say, and the garden's concealments, like its revelations, ought always to be in the interest of comfort, dignity, and charm. We once had a very bumptious member on our board of judges. "My dear madam!" he exclaimed to an aspirant for the prizes, the underpinning of whose dwelling stood out unconcealed by any sprig of floral growth, "your house is barefooted! Nobody wants to see your house's underpinning, any more than he wants to see your own!" It is not good to be so brusque about non-penitentiary offences, but skilful and lovely concealments in gardening were his hobby. To another he whispered, "My dear sir, tell your pretty house her petticoat shows!" and to yet another, "Take all those shrubs out of the middle of your lawn and 'plant out' with them every feature of your house which would be of no interest to you if the house were not yours. Your house's morals may be all right, but its manners are insufferable, it talks so much about itself and its family." To a fourth he said: "In a gardening sense your house makes too much noise; you can hear its right angles hit the ground. Muffle them! Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and bloom. Up in the air they may be ever so correct and fine, but down in the garden and unclothed they are heinous, heinous!" Another precept we try to inculcate in our rounds among the gardens, another commandment in the moral law of gardening, is that with all a garden's worthy concealments it should never, and need never, be frivolous or be lacking in candor. I know an amateur gardener--and the amateur gardener, like the amateur photographer, sometimes ranks higher than the professional--who is at this moment altering the location of a sidewalk gate which by an earlier owner was architecturally misplaced for the sole purpose of making a path with curves--and such curves!--instead of a straight and honest one, from the street to the kitchen. When a path is sent on a plain business errand it should never loaf. And yet those lines of a garden's layout which are designed not for business but for pleasure, should never behave as though they were on business; they should loiter just enough to make their guests feel at ease, while not enough to waste time. How like a perfect lady, or a perfect gentleman, is--however humble or exalted its rank--a garden with courtly manners! As to manners, our incipient American garden has already developed one trait which distinguishes it from those beyond the Atlantic. It is a habit which reminds one of what somebody has lately said about Americans themselves: that, whoever they are and whatever their manners may be, they have this to their credit, that they unfailingly desire and propose to be polite. The thing we are hinting at is our American gardens' excessive openness. Our people have, or until just now had, almost abolished the fence and the hedge. A gard, yard, garth, garden, used to mean an enclosure, a close, and implied a privacy to its owner superior to any he enjoyed outside of it. But now that we no longer have any military need of privacy we are tempted--are we not?--to overlook its spiritual value. We seem to enjoy publicity better. In our American eagerness to publish everything for everybody and to everybody, we have published our gardens--published them in paper bindings; that is to say, with their boundaries visible only on maps filed with the Registrar of Deeds. Foreigners who travel among us complain that we so overdo our good-natured endurance of every public inconvenience that we have made it a national misfortune and are losing our sense of our public rights. This obliteration of private boundaries is an instance. Our public spirit and out imperturbability are flattered by it, but our gardens, except among the rich, have become American by ceasing to be gardens. I have a neighbor who every year plants a garden of annuals. He has no fence, but two of his neighbors have each a setter dog. These dogs are rarely confined. One morning I saw him put in the seed of his lovely annuals and leave his smoothly raked beds already a pleasant show and a prophecy of delight while yet without a spray of green. An hour later I saw those two setter dogs wrestling and sprawling around in joyous circles all over those garden beds. "Gay, guiltless pair!" What is one to do in such a case, in a land where everybody is expected to take everything good-naturedly, and where a fence is sign of a sour temper? Of course he can do as others do, and have no garden. But to have no garden is a distinct poverty in a householder's life, whether he knows it or not, and--suppose he very much wants a garden? They were the well-to-do who began this abolition movement against enclosures and I have an idea it never would have had a beginning had there prevailed generally, democratically, among us a sentiment for real gardening, and a knowledge of its practical principles; for with this sentiment and knowledge we should have had that sweet experience of outdoor privacy for lack of which we lose one of the noblest charms of home. The well-to-do started the fashion, it cost less money to follow than to withstand it and presently the landlords of the poor utilized it. The poor man--the poor woman--needs the protection of a fence to a degree of which the well-to-do know nothing. In the common interest of the whole community, of any community, the poor man--the poor woman--ought to have a garden; but if they are going to have a garden they ought to have a fence. We in Northampton know scores of poor homes whose tenants strive year after year to establish some floral beauty about them, and fail for want of enclosures. The neighbors' children, their dogs, their cats, geese, ducks, hens--it is useless. Many refuse to make the effort; some, I say, make it and give it up, and now and then some one wins a surprising and delightful success. Two or three such have taken high prizes in our competition. The two chief things which made their triumph possible were, first, an invincible passion for gardening, and, second, poultry-netting. A great new boon to the home gardener they are, these wire fencings and nettings. With them ever so many things may be done now at a quarter or tenth of what they would once have cost. Our old-fashioned fences were sometimes very expensive, sometimes very perishable, sometimes both. Also they were apt to be very ugly. Yet instead of concealing them we made them a display, while the shrubbery which should have masked them in leaf and bloom stood scattered over the lawn, each little new bush by itself, visibly if not audibly saying-- "You'd scarce expect one of my age----" etc.; the shrubs orphaned, the lawn destroyed. If the enclosure was a hedge it had to be a tight one or else it did not enclose. Now wire netting charms away these embarrassments. Your hedge can be as loose as you care to have it, while your enclosure may be rigidly effective yet be hidden from the eye by undulating fence-rows; and as we now have definite bounds and corners to plant out, we do not so often as formerly need to be reminded of Frederick Law Olmsted's favorite maxim, "Take care of the corners, and the centres will take care of themselves." [Illustration: Fences masked by shrubbery. One straight line of Williston Seminary campus, the effect of whose iron fence before it was planted out with barberry may be seen in the two panels of it still bare on the extreme right.] Here there is a word to be added in the interest of home-lovers, whose tastes we properly expect to find more highly trained than those of the average tenant cottager. Our American love of spaciousness leads us to fancy that--not to-day or to-morrow, but somewhere in a near future--we are going to unite our unfenced lawns in a concerted park treatment: a sort of wee horticultural United States comprised within a few city squares; but ever our American individualism stands broadly in the way, and our gardens almost never relate themselves to one another with that intimacy which their absence of boundaries demands in order to take on any special beauty, nobility, delightsomeness, of gardening. The true gardener--who, if he is reading this, must be getting very tired of our insistent triteness--carefully keeps in mind the laws of linear and of aërial perspective, no matter how large or small the garden. The relative stature of things, both actual and prospective; their breadth; the breadth or slenderness, darkness or lightness, openness or density, of their foliage; the splendor or delicacy of their flowers, whether in size or in color; the season of their blooming; the contour of the grounds--all these points must be taken into account in determining where things are to stand and how be grouped. Once the fence or hedge was the frame of the picture; but now our pictures, on almost any street of unpalatial, comfortable homes, touch edge to edge without frames, and the reason they do not mar one another's effects is that they have no particular effects to be marred, but lie side by side as undiscordantly as so many string instruments without strings. Let us hope for a time when they will rise in insurrection, resolved to be either parts of a private park, or each one a whole private garden. In our Carnegie prize contest nothing yields its judges more pleasure than to inculcate the garden rules of perspective to which we have just referred and to see the blissful complacency of those who successfully carry them out. I have now in my mind's eye a garden to which was awarded the capital prize of 1903. A cottage of maybe six small rooms crowns a high bank on a corner where two rural streets cross. There are a few square yards of lawn on its front, and still fewer (scarcely eight or ten) on the side next the cross-street, but on the other two sides there is nearly a quarter of an acre. On these two sides the limits touch other gardens, and all four sides are entirely without fencing. From the front sward have been taken away a number of good shrubs which once broke it into ineffectual bits, and these have been grouped against the inward and outward angles of the house. The front porch is garlanded--not smothered--with vines whose flowers are all white, pink, blue or light purple. About the base of the porch and of all the house's front, bloom flowers of these same delicate tints, the tallest nearest the house, the lesser at their knees and feet. The edges of the beds--gentle waves that never degenerate to straightness--are thickly bordered with mignonette. Not an audacious thing, not a red blossom nor a strong yellow one, nor one broad leaf, nor any mass of dense or dark foliage, comes into view until one reaches a side of the dwelling. But there at once he finds the second phase in a crescendo of floral colors. The base of the house, and especially those empty eye-sockets, the cellar windows, are veiled in exultant bloom, yellows predominating. Then at the back of the place comes the full chorus, and red flowers overmaster the yellow, though the delicate tints with which the scheme began are still present to preserve the dignity and suavity of all--the ladies of the feast. The paths are only one or two and they never turn abruptly and ask you to keep off their corners; they have none. Neither have the flower-beds. They flow wideningly around the hard turnings of the house with the grace of a rivulet. Out on the two wider sides of the lawn nothing breaks the smooth green but a well-situated tree or two until the limits of the premises are reached, and there, in lines that widen and narrow and widen again and hide the surveyor's angles, the flowers rise once more in a final burst of innumerable blossoms and splendid hues--a kind of sunset of the garden's own. When this place, five seasons ago, first entered the competition, it could hardly be called a garden at all. Yet it was already superior to many rivals. In those days it seemed to us as though scarcely one of our working people in a hundred knew that a garden was anything more than a bed of flowers set down anywhere and anyhow. It was a common experience for us to be led by an unkept path and through a patch of weeds or across an ungrassed dooryard full of rubbish, in order to reach a so-called garden which had never spoken a civil word to the house nor got one from it. Now, the understanding is that every part of the premises, every outdoor thing on the premises--path, fence, truck-patch, stable, stable-yard, hen-yard, tennis or croquet-court--everything is either a part of the garden or is so reasonably related to it that from whatever point one views the place he beholds a single satisfactory picture. This, I say, is the understanding. I do not say that even among our prize-winners anybody has yet perfectly attained this, although a few have come very near it. With these the main surviving drawback is that the artistic effect is each season so long coming and passes away so soon--cometh up as a flower and presently has withered. One of our most gifted literary critics a while ago pointed out the poetic charm of evanescence; pointed it out more plainly, I fancy, than it has ever been shown before. But evanescence has this poetic charm chiefly in nature, almost never in art. The transitoriness of a sunset glory, or of human life, is rife with poetic pathos because it is a transitoriness which _cannot be helped_. Therein lay the charm of that poetic wonder and marvel of its day (1893) the Columbian Exposition's "White City"; it was an architectural triumph and glory which we could not have except on condition that it should vanish with the swiftness of an aurora. Even so, there would have been little poetry in its evanescence if, through bad workmanship or any obvious folly, it had failed to fulfil the transient purpose for which it was erected. The only poetic evanescence is the evanescence that is inevitable. An unnecessary evanescence in things we make is bad art. If I remember the story correctly, it was to a Roman lady that Benvenuto Cellini took the exquisite waxen model of some piece of goldsmithing she had commissioned him to execute for her. So delighted was she with this mere model that she longed to keep it and called it the perfection of art, or some such word. But Benvenuto said, No, he could not claim for it the high name of art until he should have reproduced it in gold, that being the most worthy material in which it would endure the use for which it was designed. Unless the great Italian was in error, then, a garden ought not to be so largely made up of plants which perish with the summer as to be, at their death, no longer a garden. Said that harsh-spoken judge whom we have already once or twice quoted--that shepherd's-dog of a judge--at one of the annual bestowals of our Carnegie garden prizes: "Almost any planting about the base of a building, fence or wall is better than none; but for this purpose shrubs are far better than annual flowers. Annuals do not sufficiently mask the hard, offensive right-angles of the structure's corners or of the line whence it starts up from the ground. And even if sometimes they do, they take so long to grow enough to do it, and are so soon gone with the first cold blast, that the things they are to hide are for the most of the year not hidden. Besides which, even at their best moments, when undoubtedly they are very beautiful, they have not a sufficiently substantial look to be good company for the solid structure they are set against. Sweetly, modestly, yet obstinately, they confess to every passer-by that they did not come, but were put there and were put there only last spring. Shrubs, contrariwise, give a feeling that they have sprung and grown there in the course of nature and of the years, and so convey to the house what so many American homes stand in want of--a quiet air of being long married and a mother of growing children. "Flowering shrubs of well-chosen kinds are in leaf two-thirds of the year, and their leafless branches and twigs are a pleasing relief to the structure's cold nakedness even through the winter. I have seen a house, whose mistress was too exclusively fond of annuals, stand waiting for its shoes and stockings from October clear round to August, and then barefooted again in October. In such gardening there is too much of love's labor lost. If one's grounds are so small that there is no better place for the annuals they can be planted against the shrubs, as the shrubs are planted against the building or fence. At any rate they should never be bedded out in the midst of the lawn, and quite as emphatically they should never, alone, be set to mark the boundary lines of a property." [Illustration: After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive.] [Illustration: Shrubbery versus annuals. The contrast in these two pictures is between two small street plantings standing in sight of each other, one of annuals with a decorative effect and lasting three months, the other with shrubberies and lasting nine months.] It is hoped these sayings, quoted or otherwise, may seem the more in place here because they contemplate the aspects likely to characterize the American garden whenever that garden fully arrives. We like largeness. There are many other qualities to desire, and to desire even more; but if we give them also the liking we truly owe them it is right for us to like largeness. Certainly it is better to like largeness even for itself, rather than smallness for itself. Especially is it right that we should like our gardens to look as large as we can make them appear. Our countless lawns, naked clear up into their rigid corners and to their dividing lines, are naked in revolt against the earlier fashion of spotting them over with shrubs, the easiest as well as the worst way of making a place look small. But a naked lawn does not make the premises look as large, nor does it look as large itself, as it will if planted in the manner we venture to commend to our Northampton prize-seekers. Between any two points a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, graceful undulations appears much longer than a straight one, because it is longer. But, over and above this, it makes the distance between the two points seem greater. Everybody knows the old boast of the landscape-architects--that they can make one piece of ground look twice as large as another of the same measure, however small, by merely grading and planting the two on contrary schemes. The present writer knows one small street in his town, a street of fair dwellings, on which every lawn is diminished to the eye by faulty grading. [Illustration: Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South Hall, Williston Seminary. (See "Where to Plant What.")] [Illustration: " ... a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, graceful undulations." The straight planting on this picture's left masks the back yards of three neighbors, and gives them a privacy as well as My Own Acre. The curved planting shows but one of three bends. It was here that I first made the mistake of planting a sinuous alley. (See "My Own Acre," p. 34.)] For this he has no occasion to make himself responsible but there are certain empty lots not far from him for whose aspect he is answerable, having graded them himself (before he knew how). He has repeatedly heard their depth estimated at ninety feet, never at more. In fact it is one hundred and thirty-nine. However, he has somewhat to do also with a garden whose grading was quite as bad--identical, indeed--whose fault has been covered up and its depth made to seem actually greater than it is, entirely by a corrective planting of its shrubbery. One of the happiest things about gardening is that when it is bad you can always--you and time--you and year after next--make it good. It is very easy to think of the plants, beds and paths of a garden as things which, being once placed, must stay where they are; but it is shortsighted and it is fatal to effective gardening. We should look upon the arrangement of things in our garden very much as a housekeeper looks on the arrangement of the furniture in her house. Except buildings, pavements and great trees--and not always excepting the trees--we should regard nothing in it as permanent architecture but only as furnishment and decoration. At favorable moments you will make whatever rearrangement may seem to you good. A shrub's mere being in a certain place is no final reason that it should stay there; a shrub or a dozen shrubs--next spring or fall you may transplant them. A shrub, or even a tree, may belong where it is this season, and the next and the next; and yet in the fourth year, because of its excessive growth, of the more desired growth of something else, or of some rearrangement of other things, that spot may be no longer the best place for it. Very few shrubs are injured by careful and seasonable, even though repeated, transplanting. Many are benefited by one or another effect of the process: by the root pruning they get, by the "division," by the change of soil, by change of exposure or even by backset in growth. Transplanting is part of a garden's good discipline. It is almost as necessary to the best results as pruning--on which grave subject there is no room to speak here. The owner even of an American garden should rule his garden, not be ruled by it. Yet he should rule without oppression, and it will not be truly American if it fails to show at a glance that it is not overgardened. Thus do we propose to exhort our next season's competitors as this fall and winter they gather at our projected indoor garden-talks, or as we go among them to offer counsel concerning their grounds plans for next spring. And we hope not to omit to say, as we had almost omitted to say here, in behalf of the kind of garden we preach, that shrubs, the most of them, require no great enrichment of the soil--an important consideration. And we shall take much care to recommend the perusal of books on gardening. Once this gentle art was largely kept a close secret of craftsmen; but now all that can be put into books is in books, and the books are non-technical, brief and inexpensive; or if voluminous and costly, as some of the best needs must be, are in the public libraries. In their pages are a host of facts (indexed!) which once had to be burdensomely remembered. For one preoccupied with other cares--as every amateur gardener ought to be--these books are no mean part of his equipment; they are as necessary to his best gardening as the dictionary to his best English. What a daily, hourly, unfailing wonder are the modern opportunities and facilities by which we are surrounded! If the present reader and the present writer, and maybe a few others, will but respond to them worthily, who knows but we may ourselves live to see, and to see as democratically common as telephones and electric cars, the American garden? Of course there is ever and ever so much more to be said about it, and the present writer is not at all weary; but he hears his reader's clock telling the hour and feels very sure it is correct. WHERE TO PLANT WHAT Often one's hands are too heavily veneered with garden loam for him to go to his books to verify a quotation. It was the great Jefferson, was it not, who laid into the foundations of American democracy the imperishable maxim that "That gardening is best which gardens the least"? My rendition of it may be more a parody than a quotation but, whatever its inaccuracy, to me it still sounds Jeffersonian--Joseph Jeffersonian. Whether we read it "garden" or "govern," it has this fine mark of a masterful utterance, that it makes no perceptible effort to protect itself against the caviller or the simpleton; from men, for instance, who would interpret it as meaning that the only perfect government, or gardening, is none at all. Speaking from the point of view of a garden-lover, I suppose the true signification is that the best government is the government which procures and preserves the noblest happiness of the community with the least enthralment of the individual. Now, I hope that as world-citizens and even as Americans we may bear in mind that, while this maxim may be wholly true, it is not therefore the whole truth. What maxim is? Let us ever keep a sweet, self-respecting modesty with which to confront and consort with those who see the science of government, or art of gardening, from the standpoint of some other equally true fraction of the whole truth. All we need here maintain for our Jeffersonian maxim is that its wide domination in American sentiment explains the larger part of all the merits and faults of American government--and American gardening. It accounts for nearly all our American laws and ordinances, manners, customs, and whims, and in the great discussion of Where to Plant What (in America) no one need hope to prevail who does not recognize that this high principle of American democracy is the best rule for American gardening. That gardening is best, for most Americans, which best ministers to man's felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom. Hence the initial question--a question which every amateur gardener must answer for himself. How much subserviency of nature to art and utility is really necessary to my own and my friends' and neighbors' best delight? For--be not deceived--however enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and must require of her _some_ subserviency close about your own dwelling. You cannot there persistently enjoy the wolf and the panther, the muskrat, buzzard, gopher, rattlesnake, poison-ivy and skunk in full swing, as it were. How much, then, of nature's subserviency does the range of your tastes demand? Also, how much will your purse allow? For it is as true in gardening as in statecraft that, your government being once genuinely established, the more of it you have, the more you must pay for it. In gardening, as in government, the cost of the scheme is not in proportion to the goodness or badness of its art, but to its intensity. This is why the general and very sane inclination of our American preferences is away from that intense sort of gardening called "formal," and toward that rather unfairly termed "informal" method which here, at least, I should like to distinguish as "free-line" gardening. A free people who govern leniently will garden leniently. Their gardening will not be a vexing tax upon themselves, upon others, or upon the garden. Whatever freedom it takes away from themselves or others or the garden will be no more than is required for the noblest delight; and whatever freedom remains untaken, such gardening will help everybody to exercise and enjoy. The garden of free lines, provided only it be a real garden under a real government, is, to my eye, an angel's protest against every species and degree of tyranny and oppression, and such a garden, however small or extensive, will contain a large proportion of flowering shrubbery. Because a garden should not, any more than my lady's face, have all its features--nose, eyes, ears, lips--of one size? No, that is true of all gardening alike; but because with flowering shrubbery our gardening can be more lenient than with annuals alone, or with only herbaceous plants and evergreens. [Illustration: "However enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and must require of her _some_ subserviency about your own dwelling." A front view of the three older buildings of Williston Seminary.] So, then, our problem, Where to Plant What, may become for a moment, Where to Plant Shrubbery; and the response of the free-line garden will be, of course, "Remember, concerning each separate shrub, that he or she--or it, if you really _prefer_ the neuter--is your guest, and plant him or her or it where it will best enjoy itself, while promoting the whole company's joy." Before it has arrived in the garden, therefore, learn--and carefully consider--its likes and dislikes, habits, manners and accomplishments and its friendly or possibly unfriendly relations with your other guests. This done, determine between whom and whom you will seat it; between what and what you will plant it, that is, so as to "draw it out," as we say of diffident or reticent persons; or to use it for drawing out others of less social address. But how many a lovely shrub has arrived where it was urgently invited, and found that its host or hostess, or both, had actually forgotten its name! Did not know how to introduce it to any fellow guest, or whether it loved sun or shade, loam, peat, clay, leaf-mould or sand, wetness or dryness; and yet should have found all that out in the proper blue-book (horticultural dictionary) before inviting the poor mortified guest at all. "Oh, pray be seated--anywhere. Plant yourself alone in the middle. This is Liberty Garden." "It is no such thing," says the tear-bedewed beauty to herself; "it's Anarchy Garden." Yet, like the lady she is, she stays where she is put, and gets along surprisingly well. New England calls Northampton one of her most beautiful towns. But its beauty lies in the natural landscape in and around it, in the rise, fall, and swing of the seat on which it sits, the graceful curving of its streets, the noble spread of its great elms and maples, the green and blue openness of grounds everywhere about its modest homes and its highly picturesque outlook upon distant hills and mountains and intervening meadows and fields, with the Connecticut winding through. Its architecture is in three or four instances admirable though not extraordinary, and, as in almost every town in our vast America, there are hardly five householders in it who are really skilled flower-gardeners, either professional or amateur. [Illustration: "Plant it where it will best enjoy itself." These wild roses are in two clumps with a six-foot open way between them. They are a wild rose (_Rosa Arkansana_) not much in use but worthy of more attention, as indeed all the wild roses are. The sunlit tree farthest on the right is Sol Smith Russell's linden.] As the present century was coming in, however, the opportunity, through private flower-gardening, to double or quadruple the town's beauty and to do it without great trouble or expense, yet with great individual delight and social pleasure, came to the lively notice of a number of us. It is, then, for the promotion of this object throughout all our bounds, and not for the perfection of the art for its own sake, that we maintain this competition and award these "Carnegie" prizes. Hence certain features of our method the value and necessity of which might not be clear to the casual inquirer without this explanation. May I repeat it? Not to reward two or three persons yearly for reaching some dizzy peak of art unattainable by ordinary taste and skill, nor to reward one part of the town or one element of its people for gardening better than another, nor to promote the production of individual plants or flowers of extraordinary splendor, nor even to incite children to raise patches of flowers, is our design; but to make the modest and democratic art of Where to Plant What (an art, nevertheless, quite beyond the grasp of children) so well known and so valued that its practical adoption shall overrun the whole town. To this end we have divided our field into seven districts, in each of which the number of gardens is about the same. In each of these seven districts only three prizes (out of twenty-one) may be taken in any one season. Consequently three prizes _must_ fall to each district every year. Yet the best garden of all still carries off the capital prize, the second-best may win the second, and cannot take a lower than the third, and the lowest awards go into the district showing the poorest results. Even this plan is so modified as further to stimulate those who strive against odds of location or conditions, for no district is allowed to receive two prizes consecutive in the list. The second prize cannot be bestowed in the same district in which the first is being awarded, though the third can. The third cannot go into the same district as the second, though the fourth may. And so on to the twenty-first. Moreover, a garden showing much improvement over the previous season may take a prize, as against a better garden which shows no such improvement. Also no garden can take the capital prize twice nor ever take a prize not higher than it has taken before. The twenty-one prizes are for those who hire no help in their gardening; two others are for those who reserve the liberty to employ help, and still another two are exclusively for previous winners of the capital prize, competing among themselves. In each of the five districts a committee of ladies visits the competing gardens, inspecting, advising, encouraging, sometimes learning more than they teach, and reporting to headquarters, the People's Institute. At these headquarters, on two acres of ground in the heart of the city, we have brought gradually into shape, on a plan furnished by Frederick Law Olmsted's Sons, Landscape Architects, of Boston (Brookline), a remarkably handsome garden of flowers and shrubbery designed as a model for the guidance of those in the competition who seek to combine artistic beauty with inexpensiveness. From time to time we have given at these headquarters winter courses of lectures on practical flower-gardening. As a result we have improved, and are still improving, the aspect of entire streets and are interesting the whole city. But to return to our discussion. Here is a short story of two ladies. They are not in our competition, though among its most ardent well-wishers. A friend had given one of them a bit of green, woody growth some two feet high and half an inch thick. She had a wee square bit of front grass-plot something larger than a table-cloth, but certainly not large enough for a game of marbles. In the centre of this bit of grass she planted her friend's gift. Then came our other lady, making a call, and with her best smile of humorous commendation, saying: "My dear, you have violated the first rule of gardening. You've planted your bush where you wanted it." The delighted gardener went in the strength of that witticism for forty weeks or at least until some fiend of candor, a brother, like as not, said: "Yes, truly you have violated the first rule of gardening, for you have put your willow-tree--that's what it is--where a minute's real reflection would have told you you'd wish you hadn't." Where to Plant What! Plant it where you--and your friends--your friends of best gardening taste--will be glad you planted it when all your things are planted. Please those who know best, and so best please yourself. Nevertheless, beware! Watch yourself! Do so specially when you think you have mastered the whole art. Watch even those who indisputably know better than you do, for everybody makes mistakes which he never would have dreamed he could make. Only the other day I heard an amateur say to a distinguished professional gardener: "Did you plant those shrubs of gorgeous flower and broad, dark leaf out on your street front purely as a matter of artistic taste?" "I did," he replied. "I wanted to put my best foot foremost. Wouldn't you?" "Why should I?" asked the amateur. "I wouldn't begin a song with my highest note, nor a game with my strongest card, nor an address with my most impassioned declaration, nor a sonnet with its most pregnant line. If I should, where were my climax?" Certainly the amateur had the best of it. A garden is a discourse. A garden is a play. See with what care both the dramatist and the stage-manager avoid putting the best foot foremost. See how warily they hold back the supreme strength of the four or five act piece for the last act but one. There is a charmingly instructive analogy between a garden and a drama. In each you have preparation, progress, climax, and close. And then, also, in each you must have your lesser climaxes leading masterfully up to the supreme one, and a final quiet one to let gratefully down from the giddy height. In Northampton nearly all of our hundreds of gardens contesting for prizes are plays of only one or two acts. I mean they have only one or two buildings to garden up to and between and around and away from. Yet it is among these one-act plays, these one-house gardens, that I find the art truth most gracefully emphasized, that the best foot should not go foremost. In a large garden a false start may be atoned for by better art farther on and in; but in a small garden, for mere want of room and the chance to forget, a bad start spoils all. No, be the garden a prince's or a cottager's, the climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far end. Even in the one-house garden I should like to see the climaxes plural to the extent of two; one immediately at the back of the house, the other at the extreme rear of the ground. At the far end of the lot I would have the final storm of passion and riot of disclosure, and then close about the rear of the house there should be the things of supreme richness, exquisiteness and rarity. This soft-voiced echo answering back out of the inmost heart of the whole demesne gives genuineness of sentiment to the entire scheme. To plant a conflagration of color against the back fence and stop there would be worse than melodramatic. It would be to close the play with a bang, and even a worthy one-act play does not close with a bang. The back of the lot is not the absolute end of the garden-play. Like the stage-play, the garden-play brings its beholder back at the very last, by a sweet reversion, to the point from which it started. The true garden-lover gardens not mainly for the passer-by, but rather for himself and the friends who come to see him. Even when he treads his garden paths alone he is a pleased and welcome visitor to himself, and shows his garden to himself as to a visitor. Hence there is always at last a turning back to the house or to the front entrance, and _this_ is the play's final lines, the last grouping of the players, the relief of all tension and the descent of the curtain. [Illustration: " ... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far end." Everything in this photograph was planted by the amateur gardener except the pine-trees in perspective.] One point farther in this direction and we may give our hard-worked analogy a respite. It is this: as those who make and present a play take great pains that, by flashes of revelation to eye and to ear, the secrets most unguessed by the characters in the piece shall be early revealed to the audience and persistently pressed upon its attention, so should the planting of a garden be; that, as if quite without the gardener's or the garden's knowledge, always, to the eye, nostril or ear, some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure across easy and tempting distances from nook to nook of the small garden, or from alley to alley and from glade to glade of the large one. Where to Plant What? Plant it as far away as, according to the force of its character or the splendor of its charms, it can stand and beckon back with best advantage for the whole garden. [Illustration: "Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure." From a photograph taken on My Own Acre, showing how I pulled the lawn in under the trees. The big chestnuts in the middle are on the old fence line that stood on the very edge of the precipitously falling ground. All the ground in sight in the picture is a fill.] Thus we generalize. And as long as one may generalize he is comparatively safe from humiliating criticism. It is only when he begins to name things by name and say what is best for just where, that he touches the naked eyeball (or the funny-bone) of others whose crotchets are not identical with his. Yet in Northampton this is what we have to do, and since the competitors for our prizes always have the Where before they are moved to get and place the What, we find our where-and-what problem easiest to handle when we lift it, so to speak, by the tail. Then it is "What to Plant Where," and for answer we have made a short list of familiar flowering shrubs best suited to our immediate geographical locality. We name only fourteen and we so describe each as to indicate clearly enough, without dictating, whereabouts to put it. We begin: "Azalea. Our common wild azalea is the flowering bush best known as 'swamp honeysuckle.' The two azaleas listed here, _A. mollis_ and the Ghent varieties, are of large, beautiful and luxuriant bloom, and except the 'swamp honeysuckle' are the only azaleas hardy in western Massachusetts. Mollis is from two to six feet high, three to six feet broad, and blooms in April and May. Its blossoms are yellow, orange or pink, single or double. Its soil may be sandy or peaty, and moist, but any good garden soil will serve; its position partly shaded or in full sunlight. The Ghents are somewhat taller and not so broad in proportion. They bloom from May to July, and their blossoms are white, yellow, orange, pink, carmine, or red, single or double. Soil and position about the same as for mollis. "Berberis. Berberis is the barberry, so well known by its beautiful pendent berries. It is one of the best shrubs to use where a thorny bush is wanted. _B. vulgaris_, the common sort, and one of the most beautiful, grows from four to eight feet high, with a breadth of from three to six feet. _B. Thunbergii_, or Thunberg's barberry, is the well-known Japanese variety, a dense, drooping bush from two to four feet high and somewhat greater breadth. Its pale-yellow blossoms come in April and May, and its small, slender, bright-red berries remain on the spray until spring. A dry soil is the best for it, though it will grow in any, and needs little shade or none. _B. purpurea_ is a variety of vulgaris and is as handsome as the common. It answers to the same description, except that its foliage is purple, which makes it very tempting to new gardeners, but very hard to relate in good artistic taste among the other shrubs of the garden. Few small gardens can make good use of purple foliage. "_Deutzia gracilis._ The gracilis is one of the most beautiful of all the deutzias. Its delicate foliage of rather light green, its snowy flowers and its somewhat bending form, make it one of the fairest ornaments of the home grounds. Its height is three feet, its breadth from two to four feet. It blooms in May and June. Its soil may be any well-drained sort, and its position any slightly sheltered aspect." So we hurry down the alphabet. The list is short for several good reasons, one being that it is well to give other lists from season to season. No doubt our inaccuracies would distress a botanist or scientific gardener, but we convey the information, such as it is, to our fellow citizens, and they use it. In the last ten years we have furnished to our amateurs thousands of shrubs and plants, at the same reduced rates for a few specimens each which we pay for them by the hundred. But of the really good sorts are there shrubs enough, you ask, to afford new lists year after year? Well, for the campus of a certain preparatory school for boys, with the planting of which the present writer had somewhat to do a few years ago, the list of shrubs set round the bases of four large buildings and several hundred yards of fence numbered seventy-five kinds. To end the chapter, let us say something about that operation. On a pictorial page or two we give ourselves the pleasure of showing the results of this undertaking; but first, both by pictures and by verbal description let me show where we planted what. Of course we made sundry mistakes. Each thing we did may be vulnerable to criticism, and our own largest hope is that our results may not fall entirely beneath that sort of compliment. This campus covers some five acres in the midst of a small town. Along three of its boundaries old maples and elms, in ordinary single-file shade-tree lines, tower and spread. On the fourth line, the rear bound, a board fence divides the ground from the very unattractive back yards, stables and sheds of a number of town residents. The front lies along the main street of the place, facing the usual "shop-row." The entire area has nearly always been grassed. Not what an Englishman would call so, but turfed in a stuttering fashion, impetuous and abashed by turns, and very easy to keep off; most rank up against the granite underpinnings of the buildings, and managing somehow to writhe to all the fences, of which those on the street fronts are of iron. Parallel with the front fence and some fifty feet behind it, three of the institution's buildings stand abreast and about a hundred feet apart. All three are tall, rectangular three-story piles of old red brick, on granite foundations, and full of windows all of one size, pigeon-house style. The middle one has a fairly good Greek-pillared porch, of wood, on the middle half of its front. [Illustration: " ... tall, rectangular, three-story piles ... full of windows all of one size, pigeon-house style." Middle Hall, Williston Seminary, facing the main street of the town.] Among these buildings we began our planting. We had drawn, of course, a ground plan of the whole place, to scale, showing each ground-floor door and window, so that we might respect its customary or projected use. A great point, that, in Where to Plant What. I once heard of a school whose small boys were accused of wantonly trampling down some newly set shrubs on the playground. "Well," demanded one brave urchin, "what made 'em go and plant a lot of bushes right on first base?" And no one was ready with an answer, for there is something morally wrong about any garden that will rob a boy of his rights. With this ground plan before us we decided indoors where to plant what outdoors and calculated arithmetically the number of each sort of shrub we should need for the particular interval we designed that sort to fill. Our scheme of arrangement was a crescendo of foliage and flower effects, beginning on the fronts of the buildings and rising toward their rears, while at all points making more of foliage than of bloom, because the bloom shows for only a month or less, while the leaf remains for seven or more. Beginning thus with our quietest note, the interest of any one looking in, or coming in, from the public front is steadily quickened and progressively rewarded, while the crowning effects at the rear of the buildings are reserved for the crowning moment when the visitor may be said to be fully received. On the other hand, if the approach is a returning one from the rear of the entire campus,--where stands the institution's only other building, a large tall-towered gymnasium, also of red brick,--these superlative effects show out across an open grassy distance of from two hundred to three hundred feet. Wherefore--and here at last we venture to bring names of things and their places together--at the fronts of the northernmost and southernmost of these three "Halls" we set favorite varieties of white-flowering spireas (_Thunbergia, sorbifolia_, _arguta_, _Van Houttei_), the pearl-bush (_exochorda_), pink diervillas, and flowering-almonds. After these, on the southern side of the southernmost building, for example, followed lilacs, white and purple, against the masonry,--the white against the red brick, the lilac tint well away from it,--with tamarisk and kerria outside, abreast of them, and then pink and red spireas (_Bumaldi_ and its dwarf variety, _Anthony Waterer_). On the other side of the same house we set deutzias (_scabra_ against the brick-work and _Lemoynei_ and _gracilis_ outside). In a wing corner, where melting snows crash down from a roof-valley, we placed the purple-flowered _Lespedeza penduliflorum_, which each year dies to the ground before the snow-slides come, yet each September blooms from three to four feet high in drooping profusion. Then from that angle to the rear corner we put in a mass of pink wild roses. Lastly, on the tall, doorless, windowless rear end, we planted the crimson-rambler rose, and under it a good hundred of the red rugosas. In the arrangement of these plantings we found ourselves called upon to deal with a very attractive and, to us, new phase of our question. The rising progression from front to rear was a matter of course, but how about the progression at right angles to it; from building to building, that is, of these three so nearly alike in size and dignity? To the passer-by along their Main Street front--the admiring passer-by, as we hope--should there be no augmentation of charm in the direction of his steps? And if there should be, then where and how ought it to show forth so as to avoid an anticlimax to one passing along the same front from the opposite direction? We promptly saw,--as the reader sees, no doubt, before we can tell it,--that what we wanted was two crescendos meeting somewhere near the middle; a crescendo passing into a diminuendo from whichever end you moved to the other--a swell. We saw that our loud-pedal effect should come upon "Middle Hall." So there, on its lucky bit of Greek porch, we bestowed the purple wistaria for spring, and for late summer that fragrant snowdrift, the clematis paniculata, so adapted as to festoon and chaplet, but never to smother, the Greek columns. On one of this structure's sides we planted forsythia, backed closer against the masonry by althæas, with the low and exquisite mahonia (holly-leafed barberry) under its outer spread. On the other side of the house we placed, first, loniceras (bush honeysuckles); next, azaleas, in variety and profusion; then, toward the rear end, a mass of hardy hydrangeas (_Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora_), and at the very back of the pile another mass, of the flowering-quince (_Pyrus japonica_), with the trumpet-creeper (_Tecoma radicans_), to climb out of it. About "North Hall," the third building, we planted more quietly, and most quietly on its outer, its northern, side where our lateral "swell" (rising effect) begins, or ends, according to the direction of your going, beginning with that modest but pretty bloomer the _Ligustrum ibota_, a perfectly hardy privet more graceful than the California (_ovalifolium_) species, which really has little business in icy New England away from the seashore. I might have remarked before that nearly all the walls of these three buildings, as well as the gymnasium on the far side of the campus, were already adorned with the "Boston ivy" (_Ampelopsis Veitchii_). With the plantings thus described, and with the gymnasium surrounded by yet stronger greenery; with the back fence masked by willows, elders and red-stemmed cornus; and with a number of haphazard footpaths reduced to an equally convenient and far more graceful few, our scheme stands complete in its first, but only, please notice, its first, phase. The picture is submitted to your imagination not as it looked the day we ceased planting, but as we expected it to appear after a season or two, and as it does look now. At present, rather tardily, we have begun to introduce herbaceous flowering perennials, which we ignored in the first part of our plan, because herbaceous plants are the flesh and blood and garments of a complete living and breathing garden; the walls, shrubs, trees, walks and drives are its bones. When this secondary phase has been more fully realized and we have placed bush-clumps and tree-clumps out on the open campus, and when our hundreds of cottage gardens are shaking off the prison irons of frost, we hope, if you cannot do us the honor to be with us bodily, your spirit may be near, aiding us on in the conquest of this ever beautiful Where-to-Plant-What problem, which I believe would make us a finer and happier nation if it could be expanded to national proportions. THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON Adam and Eve, it is generally conceded, were precocious. They entered into the cares and joys of adult life at an earlier age than any later human prodigy. We call them the grand old gardener and his wife, but, in fact, they were the youngest gardeners the world has ever seen, and they really did not give entire satisfaction. How could they without tools? Let it pass. The whole allusion is prompted only by the thought that youth does not spontaneously garden. If it was actually necessary that our first parents should begin life as gardeners, that fully explains why they had to begin it also as adults. Youth enjoys the garden, yes! but not its making or tending. Childhood, the abecedarian, may love to plant seeds, to watch them spring, grow, and flower, and to help them do so; but that is the merest a-b-c of gardening, and no more makes him an amateur in the art than spelling words of one letter makes him a poet. One may raise or love flowers for a lifetime, yet never in any art sense become a gardener. In front of the main building of a public institution which we must presently mention again there is a sloping strip of sward a hundred feet long and some fifteen wide. A florist of fully half a century's experience one day halted beside it and exclaimed to the present writer, "Only say the word, and I'll set out the 'ole len'th o' that strip in foliage-plants a-spellin' o' the name: 'People's Hinstitute!'" Yet that gentle enthusiast advertised himself as a landscape-gardener and got clients. For who was there to tell them or him that he was not one? Not only must we confess that youth does not spontaneously garden, but that our whole American civilization is still so lingeringly in its non-gardening youth that only now and then, here and there, does it realize that a florist, whether professional or amateur, or even a nurseryman, is not necessarily a constructive gardener, or that artistic gardening, however informal, is nine-tenths constructive. Yet particularly because such gardening is so, and because some of its finest rewards are so slow-coming and long-abiding, there is no stage of life in which it is so reasonable for man or woman to love and practise the art as when youth is in its first full stature and may garden for itself and not merely for posterity. "John," said his aged father to one of our living poets, "I know now how to transplant full-grown trees successfully. Do it a long time ago." Let the stripling plant the sapling. Youth, however, and especially our American youth, has his or her excuses, such as they are. Of the garden or the place to be gardened, "It's not mine," he or she warmly says; "it's only my father's," or "my mother's." Young man! Young maiden! True, the place, so pathetically begging to be gardened, may not be your future home, may never be your property, and it is right enough that a feeling for ownership should begin to shape your daily life. But let it not misshape it. You know that ownership is not all of life nor the better half of it, and it is quite as good for you to give the fact due recognition by gardening early in life as it was for Adam and Eve. It is better, for you can do so in a much more fortunate manner, having tools and the first pair's warning example. It is better also because you can do what to them was impossible; you can make gardening a concerted public movement. That is what we have made it in Northampton, Massachusetts, whose curving streets and ancient elms you may have heard of as making it very garden-like in its mere layout; many of whose windows, piazzas, and hillside lawns look on across the beautiful Connecticut, winding broadly among its farmed meadows and vanishing southward through the towering gateway made for or by it millenniums ago between Mounts Tom and Holyoke. There Smith College is, as well as that "People's Institute" aforementioned, and it is through that institute, one of whose several branches of work is carried on wholly by Smith College students, that we, the Northampton townspeople, established and maintain another branch, our concerted gardening. [Illustration: "You can make gardening a concerted public movement." A gathering on My Own Acre in the interest of the Flower Garden Competition.] One evening in September a company of several hundred persons gathered in the main hall of the institute's "Carnegie House" to witness and receive the prize awards of their twelfth annual flower-garden competition. The place was filled. A strong majority of those present were men and women who earn their daily bread with their hands. The whole population of Northampton is but twenty thousand or so, and the entire number of its voters hardly exceeds four thousand, yet there were one thousand and thirteen gardens in the competition, the gardens of that many homes; and although children had taken part in the care of many of them, and now were present to see the prizes go to their winners, not one was separately a child's garden. By a rule of the contest, each garden had been required to comprise the entire home lot, with the dwelling for its dominating feature and the family its spiritual unit. The ceremony of award began with the lowest cash prize and moved steadily up to the second and first, these two being accompanied by brilliantly illuminated diplomas, and as each award was bestowed, the whole gathering of winners and non-winners--for no one could be called a loser--sounded their congratulations by a hearty clapping of hands. They had made the matter a public, concerted movement, and were interested in its results and rewards as spiritual proprietors in a common possession much wider than mere personal ownership under the law. This wider sentiment of community, so valuable to the whole public interest, was further promoted by the combining of nearly two hundred of these same gardens in "neighborhood garden clubs" of seven or more gardens each, every garden in each club directly adjoining another, and the clubs competing for prizes of so much a garden to the best and second-best clubs. Yet none the less for all this, but much more, a great majority of the multitude of home gardeners represented by this gathering were enjoying also--each home pair through their own home garden--the pleasures of personal ownership and achievement. Many of the prize-winners were young, but many were gray, and some were even aged, yet all alike would have testified that even for age, and so all the more for youth, artistic flower-gardening is as self-rewarding a form of unselfish work and as promptly rewarding a mode of waiting on the future as can easily be found; that there is no more beautifully rewarding way by which youth may "Learn to labor and to wait." Maybe that is why Adam and Eve were apprenticed to it so very young. It should have been said before that in advance of the award of prizes some very pleasant music and song were given from the platform by a few Smith College girls, and that then the company were shown stereopticon pictures of a number of their own gardens as they looked during the past summer and as they had looked when, a few years ago,--although seemingly but yesterday,--their owners began to plan and to plant. The contrasts were amazing and lent great emphasis to the two or three truths we have here dwelt on probably long enough. To wit: first, that, as a rule, all true gardeners are grown-ups; second, that therein lies the finest value of concerted gardening; third, that the younger the grown-up the better, for the very reason that the crowning recompenses of true gardening come surely, but come late; and fourth, that, nevertheless, gardening yields a lovely amplitude of immediate rewards. For instance, this gathering in our People's Institute also, before the announcement of prizes, took delight in hearing reported the aggregate of the flowers, mostly of that season's planting, distributed by a considerable number of the competitors to the shut-in and the bereaved. This feature of the movement had been begun only the previous year, and its total was no more than some three thousand dozens of flowers; but many grateful acknowledgments, both verbal and written, prove that it gave solace and joy to many hearts and we may call it a good beginning. A garden should be owned not to be monopolized, but to be shared, as a song is owned not to be hushed, but to be sung; and the wide giving of its flowers is but one of several ways in which a garden may sing or be sung--for the garden is both song and singer. At any rate it cannot help but be a public benefaction and a public asset, if only its art be true. Hence one of the values of our gardening in Northampton: making the gardens so many and so artistically true and good, it makes the town, as a whole, more interesting and pleasing to itself, and in corresponding degree the better to live in. Possibly there may be some further value in telling here how we do it. As soon as signs of spring are plain to the general eye the visiting for enrolment begins. A secretary of the institute sets out to canvass such quarters of the field as have not been apportioned among themselves individually by the ladies composing the committee of "volunteer garden visitors." At the same time these ladies begin their calls, some undertaking more, some less, according to each one's willingness or ability. This first round consists merely in enrolling the competitors by name, street, and number and in sending these registrations in to the institute. Later, by the same ladies, the same ground is more or less gone over again in visits of observation, inquiry and counsel, and once a month throughout the season the ladies meet together with the president of the institute to report the conditions and sentiments encountered and to plan further work. The importance of these calls is not confined to the advancement of good gardening. They promote fellowship among neighbors and kind feeling between widely parted elements of society. Last year this committee made nearly eleven hundred such visits. Meanwhile a circular letter has been early mailed to the previous year's competitors, urging them to re-enroll by post-card. Last year hundreds did so. Meanwhile, too, as soon as the enrolment is completed, the institute's general secretary begins a tour of official inspection, and as he is an experienced teacher of his art, his inspections are expert. His errand is known by the time he is in sight, and, as a rule, the householder joins him in a circuit of the place, showing achievements, reciting difficulties and disappointments, confessing errors, and taking tactful advice. And what room he finds for tact! He sees a grave-like bed of verbenas defacing the middle of a small greensward--a dab of rouge on a young cheek; a pert child doing all the talking. Whereupon he shrewdly pleads not for the sward but for the flowers, "You have those there to show off at their best?" "Yes. Don't they do it?" "Not quite." He looks again. "Nine feet long--five wide. If you'll plant them next year in a foot-wide ribbon under that border of stronger things along your side boundary they'll give you at least forty feet of color instead of nine, and they'll illuminate your bit of sward instead of eclipsing it." In another garden he says, "Splendid sunburst of color, that big tub of geraniums!" and the householder is pleased to admit the fact. "If you'd sink the tub into the ground clear down to the rim they'd take up no more room and they'd look natural. Besides, you wouldn't have to water them continually." "That's true!" says the householder, quite in the incredible way of an old-fashioned book. "I'll do it!" "And then," says the caller, "if you will set it away off on that far corner of the lawn it will shine clear across, showing everything between here and there, like a lighthouse across a harbor, or like a mirror, which you hang not in your parlor door, but at the far end of the room." "When you come back you shall see it there," is the reply. Sometimes, yet not often, a contestant is met who does not want advice, and who can hardly hide his scorn for book statements and experts. The present writer came upon one last year who "could not see what beauty there was in John Smith's garden, yet we had given him and his wife the capital prize!" Frequently one finds the house of a competitor fast locked and dumb, its occupants being at work in some mill or shop. Then if the visit is one of official inspection a card stating that fact and dated and signed on the spot is left under the door, and on its reverse side the returning householder finds printed the following: "In marking for merit your whole place is considered your garden. It is marked on four points: (1) Its layout, or ground plan; (2) its harmonies--of arrangement as to color of blooms and as to form and size of trees, shrubs and plants; (3) its condition--as to the neatness and order of everything; and (4) its duration--from how early in the year to how late it will make a pleasing show. "Mow your lawn as often as the mower will cut the grass, but also keep it thoroughly weeded. As a rule, in laying out your plantings avoid straight lines and hard angles; the _double_ curve, or wave line, is the line of grace. Plant all the flowers you wish, few or many, but set shrubs at their back to give stronger and more lasting effects when the flowers are out of season as well as while they are in bloom. "Try to plant so as to make your whole place one single picture of a _home_, with the house the chief element and the boundary-lines of the lot the frame. Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its buildings; but between these plantings keep the space grassed only, and open. In these house and boundary borders let your chief plantings be shrubs, and so have a nine months' instead of a three months' garden." The secretary's tour completed and his score of all the gardens tabulated, a list is drawn from it of the one hundred and fifty best gardens, and a second circuit of counsel and inspection, limited to this greatly reduced number, is made by the president of the institute, who marks them again on the same four points of merit. These two markings, averaged, determine the standing of all prize-winning gardens except the leading four. Then the president calls in one professional and one amateur expert, visits with them as many of the most promising contestants as can be seen in an afternoon's drive, and with them decides the award of the four highest prizes. [Illustration: "Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its buildings." A secluded back corner of a prize-winner's garden which shows how slight a planting may redeem the homeliness of an old fence.] [Illustration: "Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its widest and most general dissemination." A cheap apartment row whose landlord had its planting done by the People's Institute.] That is all. When we have given two or three lesser items our story is told--for what it is worth. It is well to say we began small; in our first season, fifteen years ago, our whole roll of competitors numbered but sixty. It is the visiting that makes the difference; last season these visits, volunteer and official, were more than thirty-one hundred. Another source of our success we believe to be the fact that our prizes are many and the leading ones large--fifteen, twelve, nine dollars, and so on down. Prizes and all, the whole movement costs a yearly cash outlay of less than three hundred dollars; without the People's Institute at its back it could still be done for five hundred. And now, this being told in the hope that it may incite others, and especially youth, to make experiments like it elsewhere, to what impulse shall we appeal? Will it not suffice if we invoke that adolescent instinct which moves us to merge our individual life--to consolidate it, as the stock-manipulators say--in the world's one great life, our "celestial selfishness" being intuitively assured that our own priceless individuality will gain, not lose, thereby? Or shall we make our plea to an "art impulse"? No? Is the world already artificial enough? Not by half, although it is full, crammed, with the things the long-vanished dead have done for it in every art, from cameos to shade-trees; done for it because it was already so fair that, live long or die soon, they could not hold themselves back from making it fairer. Yet, all that aside, is not this concerted gardening precisely such a work that young manhood and womanhood, however artificial or unartificial, anywhere, everywhere, Old World or newest frontier, ought to take to naturally? Adam and Eve did, and they--but we have squeezed Adam and Eve dry enough. Patriotism! Can you imagine a young man or woman without it? And if you are young and a lover of your country, do you not love its physical aspects, "its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills"? And if so, do you love only those parts of it which you never see and the appearance of which you have no power to modify? Or do you love the land only and not the people, the nation, the government? Or, loving these, have you no love for the nearest public fraction of it, your own town and neighbors? Why, then, your love of the Stars and Stripes is the flattest, silliest idolatry; so flat and silly it is hardly worth chiding. Your patriotism is a patriotism for war only, and a country with only that kind is never long without war. You see the difference? Patriotism for war generalizes. A patriotism for peace particularizes, localizes. Ah, you do love, despite all their faults, your nation, your government, your town and townspeople, else you would not so often scold them! Otherwise, why do you let us call them yours? Because they belong to you? No, because you belong to them. Beyond cavil you are your own, but beyond cavil, too, you are theirs; their purchased possession, paid for long, long in advance and sight-unseen. You cannot use a sidewalk, a street-lamp, or a post-box, or slip away into the woods and find them cleared of savages and deadly serpents, without seeing part of the price paid for you before your great-grandfather was born. So, then, loving your town enough to scold it, you will also serve it! Now this we say not so much to be preaching as to bring in a last word descriptive of our Northampton movement. We do not make that work a mere aggregation of private kindnesses, but a public business for the promotion of the town in sanitary upkeep, beauty and civic fellowship. And so our aim is not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its widest and most general dissemination. The individual is definitely subordinated to the community's undivided interest. Since gardening tends to develop in fortunate sections and to die out in others, we have laid off our town map in seven parts and made a rule that to each of these shall go three of the prizes. Moreover, no two consecutive prizes can be awarded in any one of these districts. Where a competitor takes the capital prize no other can take a higher than the third, and if two in one district win the first and third prizes no one else there can take a higher than the fifth. So on through to prize twenty-one. Still further, a garden taking any of these prizes can never again take any of them but a higher one, and those who attain to the capital prize are thenceforth _hors concours_ except to strive for the "Past Competitors' Prizes," first and second. Thus the seasons come and go, the gardens wake, rise, rejoice and slumber again; and because this arrangement is so evidently for the common weal and fellowship first, and yet leaves personal ownership all its liberties, rights and delights, it is cordially accepted of the whole people. And, lastly, as a certain dear lady whom we may not more closely specify exclaimed when, to her glad surprise, she easily turned the ceremonial golden key which first unlocked the Carnegie House of our People's Institute, "It works!" THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S PUBLIC VALUE What its pages are to a book, a town's private households are to a town. No true home, standing solitarily apart from the town (unbound, as it were) could be the blessed thing it is were there not so many other houses not standing apart but gathered into villages, towns and cities. Whence comes civilization but from _civitas_, the city? And where did _civitas_ get its name, when city and state were one, but from citizen? He is not named for the city but the city for him, and his title meant first the head of a household, the master of a home. To make a civilization, great numbers of men must have homes, must mass them compactly together and must not mass them together on a dead level of equal material equipment but in a confederation of homes of all ranks and conditions. The home is the cornerstone of the state. The town, the organized assemblage of homes, is the keystone of civilization's arch. In order to keep our whole civilization moving on and up, _which is the only way for home and town to pay to each other their endless spiral of reciprocal indebtedness_, every home in a town--or state, for that matter--should be made as truly and fully a home as every wise effort and kind influence of all the other homes can make it. Unless it takes part in this effort and influence, no home, be it ever so favored, can realize, even for itself and in itself, the finest civilization it might attain. Why should it? I believe this is a moral duty, a debt as real as taxes and very much like them. In our People's Institute over in Northampton, Massachusetts, this is the a-b-c of all they seek to do: the individual tutoring, by college girls and town residents, of hundreds of young working men and women in whatever these may choose from among a score or so of light studies calculated to refine their aspirations; the training of young girls, by paid experts, in the arts of the home, from cooking to embroidery; the training of both sexes in all the social amenities; and the enlistment of more than a thousand cottage homes in a yearly prize competition. It is particularly of this happy garden contest that I wish to say a word or two more. In 1914 it completed its sixteenth season, but it is modelled on a much older one in the town of Dunfermline, Scotland, the birthplace of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, and it is from the bountiful spirit of that great citizen of two lands that both affairs draw at least one vital element of their existence. We in Northampton first learned of the Dunfermline movement in 1898. We saw at once how strongly such a scheme might promote the general spiritual enrichment of our working people's homes if made one of the functions of our home-culture clubs, several features of whose work were already from five to ten years old. We proceeded to adopt and adapt the plan, and had our first competition and award of prizes in 1898-'99. Like Dunfermline, we made our prizes large, and to this we attribute no small part of our success. When we saw fit to increase their number we increased the total outlay as well, and at present we award twenty-one prizes a year, the highest being fifteen dollars, and one hundred dollars the sum of the whole twenty-one prizes. So we have gained one of our main purposes: to tempt into the contest the man of the house and thus to stimulate in him that care and pride of his home, the decline of which, in the man of the house, is one of the costliest losses of hard living. One day on their round of inspection our garden judges came to a small house at the edge of the town, near the top of a hill through which the rustic street cuts its way some twelve or fifteen feet below. The air was pure, the surroundings green, the prospect wide and lovely. Here was a rare chance for picturesque gardening. Although the yard was without a fence there had been some planting of flowers in it. Yet it could hardly be called a garden. So destitute was it of any intelligent plan and so uncared for that it seemed almost to have a conscious, awkward self-contempt. In the flecked shade of a rude trellis of grapes that sheltered a side door two children of the household fell to work with great parade at a small machine, setting bristles into tooth-brushes for a neighboring factory, but it was amusingly plain that their labor was spasmodic and capricious. The mother was away on a business errand. The father was present. He had done his day's stint in the cutlery works very early, and with five hours of sunlight yet before him had no use to make of them but to sit on a bowlder on the crest of the pleasant hill and smoke and whittle. Had he been mentally trained he might, without leaving that stone, have turned those hours into real living, communing with nature and his own mind; but he had, as half an eye could see, no developed powers of observation, reflection or imagination, and probably, for sheer want of practice, could not have fixed his attention on a worthy book through five of its pages. The question that arose in the minds of his visitors comes again here: what could have been so good to keep idleness from breeding its swarm of evils in his brain and hands--and home--as for somebody, something, somehow, to put it into his head--well--for example--to make a garden? A garden, we will say, that should win a prize, and--even though it failed to win--should render him and his house and household more interesting to himself, his neighbors and his town. He and his house seemed to be keeping the Ten Commandments in a slouching sort of way and we may even suppose they were out of debt--money debt; yet already they were an unconscious menace to society; their wage-earning powers had outgrown their wants. Outgrown them not because the wages were too high but because their wants were too low; were only wants of the body, wants of the barrenest unculture; _the inelastic wants_. That is "my own invention," that phrase! The bodily wants of a reptile are elastic. If an alligator or a boa-constrictor catches a dog he can swallow him whole and enjoy that one meal in unriotous bliss for weeks. Thereafter if he must put up with no more than a minnow or a mouse he can do that for weeks in unriotous patience. In a spring in one of our Northampton gardens I saw a catfish swallow a frog so big that the hind toes stuck out of the devourer's mouth for four days; but they went in at last, and the fish, in his fishy fashion, from start to finish was happy. He was never demoralized. It is not so with us. We cannot much distend or contract our purely physical needs. Especially is any oversupply of them mischievous. They have not the reptilian elasticity. Day by day they must have just enough. But the civilized man has spiritual wants and they are as elastic as air. A home is a house well filled with these elastic wants. Home-culture is getting such wants into households--not merely into single individuals--that lack them. What makes a man rich? Is the term merely comparative? Not merely. To be rich is to have, beyond the demands of our bodily needs, abundant means to supply our spiritual wants. To possess more material resources than we can or will use or bestow to the spiritual advantage of ourselves and others is to be perilously rich, whether we belong to a grinders' union in the cutlery works or to a royal family. Why is it so often right that a rich college, for example, should, in its money-chest, feel poor? Because it could so easily supply more spiritual wants if it had more money. Not low wages will ever make men harmless, nor high wages make them happy, nor low nor high save them from a spirit of pauperism or of malignant envy; but having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus--spiritual wants, that know both how to suffer need and how to abound, and to do either without backsliding toward savagery. Whoever would help this state of things on, let him seek at the same time to increase the home's wage-earning power and its spiritual powers to put to fine use the wages earned: to augment the love of beauty in nature and in art, the love of truth and knowledge, the love of achievement and of service, the love of God and of human society, the ambition to put more into the world than we get out of it. Wages will never be too high, nor the hours of a day's work too many or too few, which follow that "sliding scale." How much our garden contest may do of this sort for that cottage on the hill we have yet to know; last year was its first in the competition. But it has shown the ambition to enter the lists, and a number that promised no more at the outset have since won prizes. One such was so beautiful last year that strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view. [Illustration: "Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus." The owner of this cottage, who stands on the lawn, spaded and graded it and grassed it herself, and by shrubbery plantings about the house's foundation and on the outer boundaries of the grass has so transformed it since this picture was taken as to win one of the highest prizes awarded among more than a thousand competitors.] [Illustration: "One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view." A capital prize-winner's back yard which was a sand bank when he entered the competition. His front yard is still handsomer.] A certain garden to which we early awarded a high prize was, and yet remains, among the loveliest in Northampton. Its house stands perhaps seventy feet back from the public way and so nearly at one edge of its broad lot that all its exits and entrances are away from that side and toward the garden. A lawn and front bordered on side by loose hedges of Regel's privet and Thunberg's barberry and with only one or two slim trees of delicate foliage near its street line, rises slightly from the sidewalk to the house in a smooth half wave that never sinks below any level it has attained and yet consists of two curves. (It takes two curves, let us say once more, to make even half of the gentlest wave that can be made, if you take it from the middle of the crest to the middle of the trough, and in our American gardening thousands of lawns, especially small front lawns, are spoiled in their first layout by being sloped in a single curve instead of in two curves bending opposite ways.) Along a side of this greensward farthest from the boundary to which the house is so closely set are the drive and walk, in one, and on the farther side of these, next the sun, is the main flower-garden, half surrounding another and smaller piece of lawn. The dwelling stands endwise to the street and broadside to this expanse of bloom. Against its front foundations lies a bed of flowering shrubs which at the corner farthest from the drive swings away along that side's boundary line and borders it with shrubbery down to the street, the main feature of the group being a luxuriant flowering quince as large as ten ordinary ones and in every springtime a red splendor. But the focus of the gardening scheme is at the southeasterly side entrance of the house. To this the drive comes on unrigorous lines from the street. The walk curves away a few steps earlier to go to the front door but the drive, passing on, swings in under the rear corner windows and to the kitchen steps, veers around by the carriage-house door and so loops back into itself. In this loop, and all about the bases of the dwelling and carriage-house the flowers rise in dense abundance, related to one another with clever taste and with a happy care for a procession of bloom uninterrupted throughout the season. Straightaway from the side door, leaving the drive at a right angle, runs a short arbor of vines. Four or five steps to the left of this bower a clump of shrubbery veils the view from the street and in between shrubs and arbor lies a small pool of water flowers and goldfish. On the arbor's right, in charming privacy, masked by hollyhocks, dahlias and other tall-maidenly things, lie beds of strawberries and lettuce and all the prim ranks and orders of the kitchen garden. Words are poor things to paint with; I wish I could set forth all in one clear picture: lawn, drive, house, loop, lily pond, bower, rose-bordered drive again (as the eye comes back) and flowers crowding before, behind and beside you, some following clear out to the street and beseeching you not to go so soon. Such is the garden, kept without hired labor, of two soft-handed women; not beyond criticism in any of its aspects but bearing witness to their love of nature, of beauty and of home and of their wisdom and skill to exalt and refine them. This competitor early won, I say, a leading prize, and in later seasons easily held--still holds--a fine pre-eminence. Yet the later prizes fell to others, because, while this one had been a beautiful garden for years before the competition began, they, rising from much newer and humbler beginnings, sometimes from very chaos, showed between one season and the next far greater advances _toward_ artistic excellence. In the very next year a high prize fell to a garden in full sight of this one, a garden whose makers had caught their inspiration from this one, and, copying its art, had brought forth a charming result out of what our judges described as "particularly forlorn conditions." Does this seem hardly fair to the first garden? But to spread the gardening contagion and to instigate a wise copying after the right gardeners--these are what our prizes and honors are for. Progress first, perfection afterward, is our maxim. We value and reward originality, nevertheless, and only count it a stronger necessity to see not merely that no talented or happily circumstanced few, but that not even any one or two fortunate neighborhoods, shall presently be capturing all the prizes. Hence the rules already cited, which a prompt discovery of this tendency forced upon us. About this copying: no art is more inoffensively imitated than gardening but unluckily none is more easily, or more absurdly, miscopied. A safe way is to copy the gardener rather than the garden. To copy any performance in a way to do it honor we must discern and adapt its art without mimicking its act. To miscopy is far easier--we have only to mimic the act and murder the art. I once heard a man ask an architect if it would not answer to give his plan to the contractor and let him work it out without the architect's supervision. "My dear sir," the architect replied, "you wouldn't know the corpse." I suppose one reason why even the miscopying of gardens provokes so little offence is that the acts it mimics have no art it can murder. Mrs. Budd sets out her one little "high geraingia" in the middle of her tiny grass-plat (probably trimming it to look like a ballet-dancer on one leg). Whereupon Mrs. Mudd, the situation of whose house and grounds is not in the least like her neighbor's, plants and trims hers the same way and feels sure it has the same effect, for--why shouldn't it? The prize-winning copyist I am telling of copied principles only. To have copied mere performance would have been particularly unlucky, for though his garden stands within fifty yards of the one from which it drew its inspiration the two are so differently located that the same art principles demand of them very different performances. An old-time lover of gardens whom I have to quote at second-hand mentions in contrast "gardens to look in upon" and "gardens to look out from." The garden I have described at length is planned to be looked in upon; most town gardens must be, of course; but its competitor across the street, of which I am about to give account, is an exception. The lot has a very broad front and very little depth--at one side almost none, at the other barely enough for a small house and a few feet of front yard. Why there should be a drive I cannot say, but it is so well taken into the general scheme that to call it to account would be ungenerous. It enters at the narrowest part of the ground, farthest from the house, makes a long parabola, and turns again into the street close beside the dwelling. In the bit of lawn thus marked off, shrubs have place near the street, three or four old apple-trees range down the middle, and along the drive runs a gay border of annual flowers. Along the rear side of the drive lies but a narrow strip of turf beyond which the ground drops all at once to another level some thirty feet below. On the right this fall is so abrupt that the only way down to it is by a steep rustic stair. On the left, behind the house, the face of the bluff is broken into narrow terraces, from top to bottom of which, and well out on the lower level, the entire space is mantled with the richly burdened trellises of a small vineyard. At the right on this lower ground is a kitchen garden; beyond it stretch fair meadows too low to build on, but fruitful in hay and grain; farther away, on higher ground, the town again shows its gables and steeples among its great maples and elms, and still beyond, some three miles distant, the green domes and brown precipices of the Mount Holyoke Range stand across the sky in sharp billows of forest and rock. It seems at times a pity that Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom cannot themselves know how many modest gardens they are a component part of--the high violin note of: gardens, like this one, "to look out from." It stops one's pen for one to find himself using the same phrases for these New England cottage gardens that famous travellers have used in telling of the gardens of Italian princes; yet why should we not, when the one nature and the one art are mother and godmother of them all? It is a laughing wonder what beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domicile, out of what ugliness such beauty can be evoked and at how trivial a cost in money. Three years before this "garden to look out from" won its Carnegie prize it was for the most part a rubbish heap. Let me now tell of one other, that sprang from conditions still more unlovely because cramped and shut in. It was on the other side of the town from those I have been telling of. The house stood broadside to the street and flush with the sidewalk. The front of the lot was only broad enough for the house and an alley hardly four feet wide between the house's end and a high, tight board fence. The alley led into a small, square back yard one of whose bounds was the back fence of the house. On a second side was a low, mossy, picturesquely old wing-building set at right angles to the larger house, its doors and windows letting into the yard. A third boundary was the side of one well weathered barn and the back of another, with a scanty glimpse between them of meadows stretching down to the Connecticut River. The fourth was an open fence marking off a field of riotous weeds. When the tenant mistress of this unpromising spot began to occupy it the yard and alley were a free range for the poultry of the neighborhood, and its only greenery was two or three haphazard patches of weedy turf. One-fourth of the ground, in the angle made by the open fence and one of the barns, had been a hen-yard and was still inclosed within a high wire-netting; but outside that space every plant she set out had to be protected from the grubbing fowls by four stakes driven down with a hammer. Three years afterward she bore off our capital prize in a competition of one hundred gardens. Let me tell what the judges found. [Illustration: "Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domicile." One of a great number of competing cottages whose gardens are handsomer in the rear and out of sight than on the street-front, though well kept there also.] [Illustration: "Those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them." The aged owner of this place has hired no help for twenty years. Behind her honey-locust hedge a highly kept and handsome flower and shrubbery garden fills the whole house lot. She is a capital prize-winner.] Out in the street, at the off side of the alley-gate, between a rude fence and an electric-railway siding, in about as much space as would give standing room to one horse and cart, bloomed--not by right of lease, but by permission of the railway company--a wealth of annual flowers, the lowest (pansies and such like) at the outer edge, the tallest against the unsightly fence. This was the prelude. In the alley the fence was clothed with vines; the windows--of which there were two--were decked with boxes of plumbago--pink, violet, white and blue, and of lady-ferns and maiden-hair. The back yard was a soft, smooth turf wherever there were not flowers. Along the back doors and windows of the house and the low-roofed wing a rough arbor was covered with a vine whose countless blossoms scented the air and feasted the bees, while its luminous canopy sheltered a rare assemblage of such flowers as bloom and thrive only for those whom they know and trust. But the crowning transformation was out in the open sunlight, in the space which had been the hen-yard. Within it was a holiday throng of the gardening world's best-known and loved gentles and commons, from roses down to forget-me-nots. Its screen of poultry-netting had been kept in place, and no feature on the premises more charmingly showed that this floral profusion came of no mere greed for abundance or diversity, but of a true art instinct recognizing the limits of its resources. The garden had to be made a "garden to look in upon," a veritable imprisoned garden; the question of expense required it to be chiefly of annuals, and all the structural features of the place called for concealment. These wire nettings did so; on their outside, next the grass, two complete groups of herbaceous things were so disposed as to keep them veiled in bloom throughout the whole warm half of the year. Close against them and overpeering their tops were hollyhocks and dahlias; against these stood at lesser height sweet peas, asters, zinnias, coreopsis and others of like stature; in front of these were poppies for summer, marigolds for autumn; beneath these again were verbenas, candytuft--all this is sketched from memory, and I recall the winsome effect rather than species and names; and still below nestled portulaca and periwinkle. I fear the enumeration gives but a harlequin effect; but the fault of that is surely mine, for the result was delightful. I have ventured to make report of these two or three gardens, not as in themselves worthy of a great public's consideration and praise but as happy instances of a fruitage we are gathering among hundreds of homes in a little city where it is proposed to give every home, if possible, its utmost value. Many other pleasing examples could be cited if further turnings of the kaleidoscope were a real need, but this slender discourse is as long now as it should be. It seems droll to call grave attention to such humble things in a world so rightly preoccupied with great sciences and high arts, vast industries, shining discoveries and international rivalries, strifes and projects; yet what are all these for, at last, but the simple citizen, his family and his home, and for him and them in the cottage as well as in the palace? The poor man's home may shine dimly but it is one of the stars by which civilization must guide its onward course. It may well be supposed that those whose office it is to award the twenty-one prizes of our garden competition among our eleven hundred competitors have an intricate task. Yet some of its intricacies add to the pleasure of it. One of these pleasing complications arises from our division of the field of contest into seven parts, in each of which prizes must be given to three contestants. Another comes from our rule that not alone the competitors who show the best gardening are to be rewarded, but also those who have made the most earnest effort and largest progress toward the best gardening. Under this plan one whose work shows a patient and signal progress in the face of many disadvantages may outrank on our prize list a rival whose superior artistic result has been got easily under favoring conditions and reveals no marked advance beyond the season before. After the manner of Dunfermline again, our rules are that no gardener by trade and no one who hires help in his garden may compete. Any friend may help his friend, and any one may use all the advice he can get from amateur or professional. Children may help in the care of the gardens, and many do; but children may not themselves put gardens into the competition. "If the head of the house is the gardener-in-chief," shrewdly argued one of our committee, "the children, oftener than otherwise, will garden with him, or will catch the gardening spirit as they grow up; but if the children are head-gardeners we shall get only children's gardening. We want to dispel the notion that flower-gardening is only woman's work and child's play." Our rule against hired labor sets naturally a maximum limit to the extent of ground a garden may cover. Our minimum is but fifty square yards, including turf, beds, and walks, and it may be of any shape whatever if only it does not leave out any part of the dooryard, front or rear, and give it up to neglect and disorder. To the ear even fifty square yards seems extensive, but really it is very small. It had so formidable a sound when we first named it that one of our most esteemed friends, pastor of a Catholic church in that very pretty and thrifty part of Northampton called for its silk mills Florence, generously added two supplementary prizes for gardens under the limit of size. This happy thought had a good effect, for, although in the first and second years Father Gallon's people took prizes for gardens above the minimum limit in size, while his own two prizes fell to contestants not in his flock, yet only in the third year did it become to all of us quite as plain as a pikestaff that fifty square yards are only the one-fiftieth part of fifty yards square, and that whoever in Northampton had a dooryard at all had fifty square yards. In 1903 more than two hundred and fifty gardens were already in the contest but every one was large enough to compete for the Carnegie prizes, and the kind bestower of the extra ones (withdrawn as superfluous), unselfishly ignoring his own large share of credit, wrote: "Your gardens have altered the aspect of my parish." Such praise is high wages. It is better than to have achieved the very perfection of gardening about any one home. We are not trying to raise the world's standard of the gardening art. Our work is for the home and its indwellers; for the home and the town. Our ideal is a town of homes all taking pleasant care of one another. We want to make all neighbors and all homes esthetically interesting to one another, believing that this will relate them humanely, morally and politically. We began with those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them, but soon we went further and ventured to open to gardens kept with hired service an allied competition for a separate list of prizes. In this way we put into motion, between two elements of our people which there are always more than enough influences to hold sufficiently apart, a joint pursuit of the same refining delight and so promoted the fellowship of an unconflicting common interest. In degree some of us who use hired help had already obtained this effect. Last season: "Come," I often heard one of our judges say on his rounds, "see my own garden some afternoon; I'll show you all the mistakes I've made!" And some came, and exchanged seeds and plants with him. "A high civilization," said an old soldier to me only a few days ago, "must always produce great social inequalities. They are needed mainly by and for those who see no need of them." I admitted that the need is as real, though not so stern, as the need of inequalities in military rank. "But," I said, "in the military relation you must also vividly keep up, across all inequalities of rank, a splendid sentiment of common interest and devotion, mutual confidence and affection, or your army will be but a broken weapon, a sword without a hilt." "Yes," he agreed, "and so in civilization; if it would be of the highest it must draw across its lines of social cleavage the bonds of civic fellowship." It was what I had intended to say myself. Social selection raises walls between us which we all help to build, but they need not be Chinese walls. They need not be so high that civic fellowship, even at its most feminine stature, may not look over them every now and then to ask: "How does my neighbor's garden grow?" It is with this end in view as well as for practical convenience that we have divided our field into seven districts and from our "women's council" have appointed residents of each to visit, animate and counsel the contestants of that district. The plan works well. On the other hand, to prevent the movement, in any district, from shrinking into village isolation; in order to keep the whole town comprised, and, as nearly as may be, to win the whole town's sympathy and participation, we have made a rule that in whatever district the capital prize is awarded, the second prize must go to some other district. If we have said this before you may slip it here; a certain repetitiousness is one part of our policy. A competitor in the district where the capital prize is awarded may take the third prize, but no one may take the third in the district where the second has been awarded. He may, however, be given the fourth. In a word, no two consecutive prizes can be won in the same district. Also, not more than three prizes of the fifteen may in one season be awarded in any one district. So each district has three prize-winners each year, and each year the prizes go all over town. Again, no garden may take the same prize two years in succession; it must take a higher one or else wait over. "This prize-garden business is just all right!" said one of the competitors to our general secretary. "It gives us good things to say to one another's face instead of bad things at one another's back, it does!" That is a merit we claim for it; that it operates, in the most inexpensive way that can be, to restore the social bond. Hard poverty minus village neighborship drives the social relation out of the home and starves out of its victims their spiritual powers to interest and entertain one another, or even themselves. If something could keep alive the good aspects of village neighborship without disturbing what is good in that more energetic social assortment which follows the expansion of the village into the town or city, we should have better and fairer towns and cities and a sounder and safer civilization. But it must be something which will give entirely differing social elements "good things to say to one another's face instead of bad things at one another's back." We believe our Northampton garden competition tends to do this. It brings together in neighborly fellowship those whom the discrepancies of social accomplishments would forever hold asunder and it brings them together without forced equality or awkward condescension, civic partners in that common weal to neglect which is one of the "dangers and temptations of the home." Two of our committee called one day at a house whose garden seemed to have fallen into its ill condition after a very happy start. Its mistress came to the door wearing a heart-weary look. The weather had been very dry, she said in a melodious French accent, and she had not felt so very well, and so she had not cared to struggle for a garden, much less for a prize. "But the weather," suggested her visitors, "had been quite as dry for her competitors, and few of them had made so fair a beginning. To say nothing of prizes, was not the garden itself its own reward?" She shook her head drearily; she did not know that she should ever care to garden any more. "Why?" exclaimed one questioner persuasively, "you didn't talk so when I was here last month!" "No," was the reply, "but since three weeks ago--" and all at once up came the stifled tears, filling her great black eyes and coursing down her cheeks unhindered, "I los' my baby." The abashed visitors stammered such apologies as they could. "They would not have come on this untimely errand could they have known." They begged forgiveness for their slowness to perceive. "Yet do not wholly," they presently ventured to urge, "give up your garden. The day may come when the thought that is now so bitter will, as a memory, yield some sweetness as well, and then it may be that the least of bitterness and the most of sweetness will come to you when you are busy among your flowers." "It may be," she sighed, but with an unconvinced shrug. And still, before the summer was gone, the garden sedately, yet very sweetly, smiled again and even the visitors ventured back. That was nearly three years ago. Only a few weeks since those two were in the company of an accomplished man who by some chance--being a Frenchman--had met and talked with this mother and her husband. "We made a sad bungle there," said the visitors. "Do not think it!" he protested. "They are your devoted friends. They speak of you with the tenderest regard. Moreover, I think they told me that last year--" "Yes," rejoined one of the visitors, "last year their garden took one of the prizes." THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OF NEW ORLEANS If the following pages might choose their own time and place they would meet their reader not in the trolley-car or on the suburban train, but in his own home, comfortably seated. For in order to justify the eulogistic tone of the descriptions which must presently occupy them their first word must be a conciliatory protest against hurry. One reason we Americans garden so little is that we are so perpetually in haste. The art of gardening is primarily a leisurely and gentle one. And gentility still has some rights. Our Louisiana Creoles know this, and at times maintain it far beyond the pales of their evergreen gardens. "'Step lively'?" one of them is said to have amazedly retorted in a New York street-car. "No, the lady shall not step lively. At yo' leisure, madame, entrez!" In New Orleans the conductors do not cry "Step lively!" Right or wrong, the cars there are not absolutely democratic. Gentility really enjoys in them a certain right to be treated gently. If democracy could know its own tyrants it would know that one of them is haste--the haste, the hurry of the crowd; that hurry whose cracking whip makes every one a compulsory sharer in it. The street-car conductor, poor lad, is not to blame. The fault is ours, many of us being in such a scramble to buy democracy at any price that, as if we were belatedly buying railway tickets, we forget to wait for our change. Now one of this tyrant's human forms is a man a part of whose tyranny is to call himself a gardener, though he knows he is not one, and the symbol of whose oppression is nothing more or less than that germ enemy of good gardening, the lawn-mower. You, if you know the gardening of our average American home almost anywhere else, would see, yourself, how true this is, were you in New Orleans. But you see it beautifully proved not by the presence but by the absence of the tyranny. The lawn-mower is there, of course; no one is going to propose that the lawn-mower anywhere be abolished. It is one of our modern marvels of convenience, a blessed release of countless human backs from countless hours of crouching, sickle-shaped, over the sickle. It is not the tyrant, but only like so many other instruments of beneficent democratic emancipation, the tyrant's opportunity. A large part of its convenience is expedition, and expedition is the easiest thing in the world to become vulgarized; vulgarized it becomes haste, and haste is the tyrant. Such arguing would sound absurdly subtle aimed against the uncloaked, barefaced tyranny of the street-car conductor, but the tyranny of the man with the lawn-mower is itself subtle, masked, and requires subtlety to unmask it. See how it operates. For so we shall be the better prepared for a generous appreciation of those far Southern gardens whose beauty has singled them out for our admiration. We know, of course, that the "formal garden," by reason of its initial and continuing costliness, is, and must remain, the garden of the wealthy few, and that the gardening for the great democracy of our land, the kind that will make the country at large a gardened land, is "informal," freehand, ungeometrical gardening. In this sort, on whatever scale, whether of the capitalist or of the cottager, the supreme feature is the lawn; the lawn-mower puts this feature within the reach of all, and pretty nearly every American householder has, such as it is, his bit of Eden. But just in that happy moment the Tempter gets in. The garden's mistress or master is beguiled to believe that one may have a garden without the expense of a gardener and at the same time without any gardening knowledge. The stable-boy, or the man-of-all-work, or the cook, or the cottager himself, pushes the lawn-mower, and except for green grass, or changeable brown and green, their bit of Eden is naked and is not ashamed. Or if ashamed, certain other beguilements, other masked democratic tyrannies, entering, reassure it; bliss of publicity, contempt of skill, and joy in machinery and machine results. An itinerant ignoramus comes round with his own lawn-mower, the pushing of which he now makes his sole occupation for the green half of the year, and the entire length, breadth and thickness of whose wisdom is a wisdom not of the lawn but only of the lawn-mower; how to keep its bearings oiled and its knives chewing fine; and the lawn becomes staringly a factory product. Then tyranny turns the screw again, and in the bliss of publicity and a very reasonable desire to make the small home lot look as large as possible, down come the fences, side and front, and the applauding specialist of the lawn-mower begs that those obstructions may never be set up again, because now the householder can have his lawn mowed so much _quicker_, and he, the pusher, can serve more customers. Were he truly a gardener he might know somewhat of the sweet, sunlit, zephyrous, fragrant outdoor privacies possible to a real garden, and more or less of that benign art which, by skilful shrubbery plantings, can make a small place look much larger--as well as incomparably more interesting--than can any mere abolition of fences, and particularly of the street fence. But he has not so much as one eye of a genuine gardener or he would know that he is not keeping your lawn but only keeping it shaven. He is not even a good garden laborer. You might as well ask him how to know the wild flowers as how to know the lawn pests--dandelion, chickweed, summer-grass, heal-all, moneywort and the like--with which you must reckon wearily by and by because he only mows them in his blindness and lets them flatten to the ground and scatter their seed like an infantry firing-line. Inquire of him concerning any one of the few orphan shrubs he has permitted you to set where he least dislikes them, and which he has trimmed clear of the sod--put into short skirts--so that he may run his whirling razors under (and now and then against) them at full speed. Will he know the smallest fact about it or yield any echo of your interest in it? There is a late story of an aged mother, in a darkened room, saying falteringly to the kind son who has brought in some flowers which she caresses with her soft touch, "I was wishing to-day--We used to have them in the yard--before the lawn-mower--" and saying no more. I know it for a fact, that in a certain cemetery the "Sons of the American Revolution" have for years been prevented from setting up their modest marks of commemoration upon the graves of Revolutionary heroes, because they would be in the way of the sexton's lawn-mower. Now in New Orleans the case is so different that really the amateur gardener elsewhere has not all his rights until he knows why it is so different. Let us, therefore, look into it. In that city one day the present writer accosted an Irishman who stood, pruning-shears in hand, at the foot of Clay's statue, Lafayette Square. It was the first week of January, but beside him bloomed abundantly that lovely drooping jasmine called in the books _jasminum multiflorum_. "Can you tell me what shrub this is?" "That, sor, is the _monthly flora!_ Thim as don't know the but-hanical nayum sometimes calls it the stare jismin, but the but-hanical nayum is the _monthly flora_." The inquirer spoke his thanks and passed on, but an eager footfall overtook him, his elbow felt a touch, and the high title came a third time: "The but-hanical nayum is the _monthly flora_." The querist passed on, warmed by a grateful esteem for one who, though doubtless a skilled and frequent tinkler of the lawn-mower within its just limitations, was no mere dragoon of it, but kept a regard for things higher than the bare sod, things of grace in form, in bloom, in odor, and worthy of "but-hanical nayum." No mere chauffeur he, of the little two-wheeled machine whose cult, throughout the most of our land, has all but exterminated ornamental gardening. In New Orleans, where it has not conquered, there is no crowding for room. A ten-story building is called there a sky-scraper. The town has not a dozen in all, and not one of that stature is an apartment or tenement house. Having felled her surrounding forests of cypress and drained the swamps in which they stood, she has at command an open plain capable of housing a population seven times her present three hundred and fifty thousand, if ever she chooses to build skyward as other cities do. But this explains only why New Orleans _might_ have gardens, not why she chooses to have them, and has them by thousands, when hundreds of other towns that have the room--and the lawns--choose not to have the shrubberies, vines and flowers, or have them without arrangement. Why should New Orleans so exceptionally choose to garden, and garden with such exceptional grace? Her house-lots are extraordinarily numerous in proportion to the numbers of her people, and that is a beginning of the explanation; but it is only a beginning. Individually the most of those lots are no roomier than lots elsewhere. Thousands of them, prettily planted, are extremely small. The explanation lies mainly in certain peculiar limitations, already hinted, of her--democracy! That is to say, it lies in her fences. Her fences remain, her democracy is different from the Northern variety. The difference may consist only in faults both there and here which we all hope to see democracy itself one day eliminate; but the difference is palpable. The fences mean that the dwellers behind them have never accorded to each other, as neighbors, that liberty-to-take-liberties of which Northern householders and garden-holders, after a quarter-century's disappointing experiment, are a bit weary. In New Orleans virtually every home, be it ever so proud or poor, has a fence on each of its four sides. As a result the home is bounded by its fences, not by its doors. Unpleasant necessities these barriers are admitted to be, and those who have them are quite right in not liking them in their bare anatomy. So they clothe them with shrubberies and vines and thus on the home's true corporate bound the garden's profile, countenance and character are established in the best way possible; without, that is, any impulse toward embellishment _insulated_ from utility. Compelled by the common frailties of all human nature (even in a democracy) to maintain fortifications, the householder has veiled the militant aspect of his defences in the flowered robes and garlandries of nature's diplomacy and hospitality. Thus reassured, his own inner hospitality can freely overflow into the fragrant open air and out upon the lawn--a lawn whose dimensions are enlarged to both eye and mind, inasmuch as every step around its edges--around its meandering shrubbery borders--is made affable and entertaining by Flora's versatilities. [Illustration: "In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by its doors--so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines." It is pleasant to notice how entirely the evergreen-vine-covered wall preserves the general air of spaciousness. The forest tree at the front and right (evergreen magnolia) is covered with an evergreen vine from the turf to its branches.] [Illustration: "The lawn ... lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across." A common garden feature in New Orleans is the division fence with front half of wire, rear half of boards, both planted out with shrubs. The overhanging forest tree is the evergreen magnolia (_M. grandiflora_).] At the same time, let us note in passing, this enlargement is partly because the lawn--not always but very much oftener than where lawns go unenclosed--lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across; free of bush, statue, urn, fountain, sun-dial or pattern-bed, an uninterrupted sward. Even where there are lapses from this delightful excellence they often do not spoil, but only discount, more or less, the beauty of the general scheme, as may be noted--if without offence we may offer it the homage of criticism--in one of the gardens we have photographed [page 176] to illustrate these argumentations. There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward without in the least adding to the garden's abounding charm. The smallest effort of the reader's eye will show how largely, in a short half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dignity simply by the elimination of these slight excesses, or by their withdrawal toward the lawn's margins and into closer company with the tall trees. In New Orleans, where, even when there are basements, of which there are many, the domains of the cook and butler are somewhere else, a nearly universal feature of every sort of dwelling--the banker's on two or three lots, the laborer's on half a one--is a paved walk along one side of the house, between the house and the lawn, from a front gate to the kitchen. Generally there is but the one front gate, facing the front door, with a short walk leading directly up to this door. In such case the rear walk, beginning at the front door-steps, turns squarely along the house's front, then at its corner turns again as squarely to the rear as a drill-sergeant and follows the dwelling's ground contour with business precision--being a business path. In fact it is only the same path we see in uncrowded town life everywhere in our land. [Illustration: "There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward.... In a half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dignity by the elimination of these excesses." The sky-line of this beautiful garden becomes a part of the garden itself, a fact of frequent occurrence in New Orleans. The happy contrast of rearmost oak and palm is also worthy of notice.] But down there it shows this peculiarity, that it is altogether likely to be well bordered with blooming shrubs and plants along all that side of it next the lawn. Of course it is a fault that this shrubbery border--and all the more so because it is very apt to be, as in three of our illustrations [pages 174,178, 180], a rose border--should, so often as it is, be pinched in between parallel edges. "No pinching" is as good a rule for the garden as for the kindergarten. Manifestly, on the side next the house the edge between the walk and the planted border should run parallel with the base line of the house, for these are business lines and therefore ever so properly lines of promptitude--of the shortest practicable distance between two points--lines of supply and demand, lines of need. For lines of need, business speed! But for lines of pleasure, grace and leisure. It is the tactful office of this shrubbery border to veil the business path from the lawn--from the pleasure-ground. Therefore its _outside_, lawn-side edge should be a line of pleasure, hence a line of grace, hence not a straight line (dead line), nor yet a line of but one lethargic curve, but a line of suavity and tranquil ongoing, a leisurely undulating line. [Illustration: "The rear walk ... follows the dwelling's ground contour with business precision--being a business path."] Not to have it so is an error, but the error is an inoffensive one easily corrected and the merit is that the dwelling's business path is greenly, bloomingly screened from its pleasure-ground by a lovely natural drapery which at the same time furnishes, as far as the path goes, the house's robes of modesty. Indeed they are furnished farther than the path goes; for no good work gathers momentum more readily than does good gardening, and the householder, having begun so rightly, has now nothing to do to complete the main fabric of his garden but to carry this flow of natural draperies on round the domicile's back and farther side and forward to its front again. Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even above its reach and where it does not conceal, the house's architectural faults, thus winsomely enhance all its architectural charm; like a sweet human mistress of the place, putting into generous shadow all the ill, and into open sunshine all the best, of a husband's strong character. (See both right and left foreground of illustration on page 178, and right foreground on page 180.) And now if this New Orleans idea--that enough private enclosure to secure good home gardening is not incompatible with public freedom, green lawns, good neighborship, sense of room and fulness of hospitality, and that a house-lot which is a picture is worth more to everybody (and therefore is even more democratic) than one which is little else than a map--if this idea, we say, finds any credence among sister cities and towns that may be able to teach the Creole city much in other realms of art and criticism, let us cast away chalk and charcoal for palette and brush and show in floral, arborescent, redolent detail what is the actual pictorial excellence of these New Orleans gardens. For notwithstanding all their shut-in state, neither their virtues nor their faults are hid from the passing eye. The street fence, oftenest of iron, is rarely more than breast-high and is always an open fence. Against its inner side frequently runs an evergreen hedge never taller than the fence's top. Commonly it is not so tall, is always well clipped and is so civil to strangers that one would wish to see its like on every street front, though he might prefer to find it not so invariably of the one sort of growth--a small, handsome privet, that is, which nevertheless fulfils its office with the perfection of a solid line of palace sentries. Unluckily there still prevails a very old-fashioned tendency to treat the front fence as in itself ornamental and to forget two things: First, that its nakedness is no part of its ornamental value; that it would be much handsomer lightly clothed--underclothed--like, probably, its very next neighbor; clothed with a hedge, either close or loose, and generously kept below the passer's line of sight. And, second, that from the householder's point of view, looking streetward from his garden's inner depth, its fence, when unplanted, is a blank interruption to his whole fair scheme of meandering foliage and bloom which on the other three sides frames in the lawn; as though the garden were a lovely stage scene with the fence for footlights, and some one had left the footlights unlit. [Illustration: "Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even ... where it does not conceal, the house's architectural faults."] A lovely stage scene, we say, without a hint of the stage's unreality; for the side and rear fences and walls, being frankly unornamental, call for more careful management than the front and are often charmingly treated. (Page 174.) (See, for an example of a side fence with front half of wire and rear half of boards, page 174, and for solid walls, pages 180 and 184.) Where they separate neighbors' front lawns they may be low and open, but back of the building-line, being oftenest tight and generally more than head-high, they are sure to be draped with such climbing floral fineries as honeysuckles, ivies, jasmines white and yellow, lantanas, roses or the Madeira vine. More frequently than not they are planted also, in strong masses, with ever so many beautiful sorts of firmer-stemmed growths, herbaceous next the sod, woody behind, assembled according to stature, from one to twelve feet high, swinging in and out around the lawn until all stiffness of boundaries is waved and smiled away. [Illustration: " ... a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's unreality." The beauty of this spot could be enhanced in ten minutes by taking away the planted urns which stand like gazing children in the middle of the background.] In that first week of January already mentioned the present writer saw at every turn, in such borders and in leaf and blossom, the delicate blue-flowered plumbago; two or three kinds of white jasmine, also in bloom; and the broad bush-form of the yellow jasmine, beginning to flower. With them were blooming roses of a dozen kinds; the hibiscus (not althæa but the _H. rosasinensis_ of our Northern greenhouses), slim and tall, flaring its mallow-flowers pink, orange, salmon and deep red; the trailing-lantana, covering broad trellises of ten feet in height and with its drooping masses of delicate foliage turned from green to mingled hues of lilac and rose by a complete mantle of their blossoms. He saw the low, sweet-scented geraniums of lemon, rose and nutmeg odors, persisting through the winter unblighted, and the round-leaved, "zonal" sorts surprisingly large of growth--in one case, on a division fence, trained to the width and height of six feet. There, too, was the poinsettia still bending in its Christmas red, taller than the tallest man's reach, often set too forthpushingly at the front, but at times, with truer art, glowing like a red constellation from the remoter bays of the lawn; and there, taller yet, the evergreen _Magnolia fuscata_, full of its waxen, cream-tinted, inch-long flowers smelling delicately like the banana. He found the sweet olive, of refined leaf and minute axillary flowers yielding their ravishing tonic odor with the reserve of the violet; the pittosporum; the box; the myrtle; the camphor-tree with its neat foliage answering fragrantly the grasp of the hand. The dark camellia was there, as broad and tall as a lilac-bush, its firm, glossy leaves of the deepest green and its splendid red flowers covering it from tip to sod, one specimen showing by count a thousand blossoms open at once and the sod beneath innumerably starred with others already fallen. The night jasmine, in full green, was not yet in blossom but it was visibly thinking of the spring. The Chinese privet, of twenty feet stature, in perennial leaf, was saving its flowers for May. The sea-green oleander, fifteen feet high and wide (see extreme left foreground, page 176), drooped to the sward on four sides but hoarded its floral cascade for June. The evergreen loquat (locally miscalled the mespilus plum) was already faltering into bloom; also the orange, with its flower-buds among its polished leaves, whitening for their own wedding; while high over them towered the date and other palms, spired the cedar and arborvitæ, and with majestic infrequency, where grounds were ample, spread the lofty green, scintillating boughs of the magnolia grandiflora (see left foregrounds on pages 174, 182 and 184), the giant, winter-bare pecan and the wide, mossy arms of the vast live-oak. [Illustration: "Back of the building-line the fences ... generally more than head-high ... are sure to be draped."] [Illustration: " ... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter." In any garden as fair as this there should be some place to sit down. This deficiency is one of the commonest faults in American gardening.] Now while the time of year in which these conditions are visible heightens their lovely wonder, their practical value to Northern home-lovers is not the marvel and delight of something inimitable but their inspiring suggestion of what may be done with ordinary Northern home grounds, to the end that the floral pageantry of the Southern January may be fully rivalled by the glory of the Northern June. For of course the Flora of the North, who in the winter of long white nights puts off all her jewelry and nearly all her robes and "lies down to pleasant dreams," is the blonde sister of, and equal heiress with, this darker one who, in undivested greenery and flowered trappings, persists in open-air revelry through all the months from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter. Wherefore it seems to me the Northern householder's first step should be to lay hold upon this New Orleans idea in gardening--which is merely by adoption a New Orleans idea, while through and through, except where now and then its votaries stoop to folly, it is by book a Northern voice, the garden gospel of Frederick Law Olmsted. Wherever American homes are assembled we may have, all winter, for the asking--if we will but ask ourselves instead of the lawn-mower man--an effect of home, of comfort, cheer and grace, of summer and autumn reminiscences and of spring's anticipations, immeasurably better than any ordinary eye or fancy can extort from the rectangular and stiffened-out nakedness of unplanted boundaries; immeasurably better than the month-by-month daily death-stare of shroud-like snow around houses standing barefooted on the frozen ground. It may be by hearty choice that we abide where we must forego outdoor roses in Christmas week and broad-leaved evergreens blooming at New Year's, Twelfth-night or Carnival. Well and good! But we can have even in mid-January, and ought to allow ourselves, the lawn-garden's surviving form and tranced life rather than the shrubless lawn's unmarked grave flattened beneath the void of the snow. We ought to retain the sleeping beauty of the ordered garden's unlost configuration, with the warm house for its bosom, with all its remoter contours--alleys, bays, bushy networks and sky-line--keeping a winter share of their feminine grace and softness. We ought to retain the "frozen music" of its myriad gray, red and yellow stems and twigs and lingering blue and scarlet berries stirring, though leaflessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers and box, cypress, laurel, hemlock spruce and cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these, receiving from and giving to them a cheer which neither could have in their frostbound Eden without mutual contrast. [Illustration: "The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration ... keeping a winter's share of its feminine grace and softness." This picture was taken in the first flush of spring. The trees in blossom are the wild Japanese cherry.] Eden! If I so recklessly ignore latitude as to borrow the name of the first gardener's garden for such a shivering garden as this it is because I see this one in a dream of hope--a diffident, interrogating hope--really to behold, some day, this dream-garden of Northern winters as I have never with actual open eyes found one kept by any merely well-to-do American citizen. If I describe it I must preface with all the disclaimers of a self-conscious amateur whose most venturesome argument goes no farther than "Why not?" yet whom the evergreen gardens of New Orleans revisited in January impel to protest against every needless submission to the tyrannies of frost and of a gardening art--or non-art, a submission which only in the outdoor embellishment of the home takes winter supinely, abjectly. This garden of a hope's dream covers but three ordinary town lots. Often it shrinks to but one without asking for any notable change of plan. Following all the lines, the hard, law lines, that divide it from its neighbors and the street, there runs, waist-high on its street front, shoulder-high on its side bounds, a close evergreen hedge of hemlock spruce. In its young way this hedge has been handsome from infancy; though still but a few years old it gives, the twelvemonth round, a note both virile and refined in color, texture and form, and if the art that planted it and the care that keeps it do not decay neither need the hedge for a century to come. Against the intensest cold this side of Labrador it is perfectly hardy, is trimmed with a sloping top to shed snows whose weight might mutilate it, and can be kept in repair from generation to generation, like the house's plumbing or roof, or like some green-uniformed pet regiment with ranks yet full after the last of its first members has perished. Furthermore, along the inner side of this green hedge (sometimes close against it, sometimes with a turfed alley between), as well as all round about the house, extend borders of deciduous shrubs, with such meandering boundaries next the broad white lawn as the present writer, for this time, has probably extolled enough. These bare, gray shrub masses are not wholly bare or gray and have other and most pleasingly visible advantages over unplanted, pallid vacancy, others besides the mere lace-work of their twigs and the occasional tenderness of a last summer's bird's nest. Here and there, breaking the cold monotone, a bush of moose maple shows the white-streaked green of its bare stems and sprays, or cornus or willow gives a soft glow of red, purple or yellow. Only here and there, insists my dream, lest when winter at length gives way to the "rosy time of the year" their large and rustic gentleness mar the nuptial revels of summer's returned aristocracy. Because, moreover, there is a far stronger effect of life, home and cheer from the broad-leaved evergreens which, in duly limited numbers, assemble with and behind these, and from the lither sorts of conifers that spire out of the network and haze of living things in winter sleep. The plantings at the garden's and dwelling's front being properly, of course, lower than those farther back, I see among them, in this dream, the evergreen box and several kinds of evergreen ferns. I see two or three species of evergreen barberries, not to speak of Thunberg's leafless one warm red with its all-winter berries, the winter garden's rubric. I see two varieties of euonymus; various low junipers; two sorts of laurel; two of andromeda, and the high-clambering evergreen ivy. Beginning with these in front, infrequent there but multiplying toward the place's rear, are bush and tree forms of evergreen holly, native rhododendrons, the many sorts of foreign cedars and our native ones white and red, their skyward lines modified as the square or pointed architecture of the house may call for contrasts in pointed or broad-topped arborescence. If, at times, I dream behind all this a grove, with now and then one of its broad, steepling or columnar trees pushed forward upon the lawn, it is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce. Such is the vision, and if I never see it with open eyes and in real sunlight, even as a dream it is--like certain other things of less dignity--grateful, comforting. I warrant there are mistakes in it, but you will find mistakes wherever you find achievement, and there is no law against them--in well-meant dreams. Observe, if you please, this vision lays no drawback on the garden's summer beauty and affluence. Twelve months of the year it enhances its dignity and elegance. Both the numerical proportions of evergreens to other greens, and the scheme of their distribution, are quite as correct and effective for contrast and background to the transient foliage and countless flowers of July as amid the bare ramage of January. Summer and winter alike, the gravest items among them all, the conifers, retain their values even in those New Orleans gardens. When we remember that in New England and on all its isotherm it is winter all that half of the year when most of us are at home, why should we not seek to realize this snow-garden dream? Even a partial or faulty achievement of it will surely look lovelier than the naked house left out on its naked white lawn like an unclaimed trunk on a way-station platform. I would not, for anything, offend the reader's dignity, but I must think that this midwinter garden may be made at least as much lovelier than no garden as Alice's Cheshire cat was lovelier--with or without its grin--than the grin without the cat. [Illustration: "It is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce." The blossoming trees in this picture are a Chinese crab blooming ten days later than the Japanese wild cherry (see illustration facing p. 186), which is now in full leaf at their back.] Shall we summarize? Our gist is this: that those gardens of New Orleans are as they are, not by mere advantage of climate but for several other reasons. Their bounds of ownership and privacy are enclosed in hedges, tight or loose, or in vine-clad fences or walls. The lawn is regarded as a ruling feature of the home's visage, but not as its whole countenance--one flat feature never yet made a lovely face. This lawn feature is beautified and magnified by keeping it open from shrub border to shrub border, saving it, above all things, from the gaudy barbarism of pattern-bedding; and by giving it swing and sweep of graceful contours. And lastly, all ground lines of the house are clothed with shrubberies whose deciduous growths are companioned with broad-leafed evergreens and varied conifers, in whatever proportions will secure the best midwinter effects without such abatement to those of summer as would diminish the total of the whole year's joy. These are things that can be done anywhere in our land, and wherever done with due regard to soil as well as to climate will give us gardens worthy to be named with those of New Orleans, if not, in some aspects and at particular times of the year, excelling them. As long as mistakes are made in the architecture of houses they will be made in the architecture of gardening, and New Orleans herself, by a little more care for the fundamentals of art, of all art, could easily surpass her present floral charm. Yet in her gardens there is one further point calling for approval and imitation: the _very_ high trimming of the stems of lofty trees. Here many a reader will feel a start of resentment; but in the name of the exceptional beauty one may there see resulting from the practice let us allow the idea a moment's entertainment, put argument aside and consider a concrete instance whose description shall be our closing word. Across the street in which, that January, we sojourned (we were two), there was a piece of ground of an ordinary town square's length and somewhat less breadth. It had been a private garden. Its owner had given it to the city. Along its broad side, which our windows looked out upon, stood perfectly straight and upright across the sky to the south of them a row of magnolias (grandiflora) at least sixty feet high, with their boles, as smooth as the beach, trimmed bare for two-thirds of their stature. The really decorative marks of the trimming had been so many years, so many decades, healed as to show that no harm had come of it or would come. The soaring, dark-green, glittering foliage stood out against the almost perpetually blue and white sky. Beyond them, a few yards within the place but not in a straight line, rose even higher a number of old cedars similarly treated and offering a pleasing contrast to the magnolias by the feathery texture of their dense sprays and the very different cast of their lack-lustre green. Overtopping all, on the farther line of the grounds, southern line, several pecan-trees of nearly a hundred feet in height, leafless, with a multitude of broad-spreading boughs all high in air by natural habit, gave an effect strongly like that of winter elms, though much enlivened by the near company of the evergreen masses of cedar and magnolia. These made the upper-air half of the garden, the other half being assembled below. For the lofty trim of the wintergreen-trees--the beauty of which may have been learned from the palms--allowed and invited another planting beneath them. Magnolias, when permitted to branch low, are, to undergrowth, among the most inhospitable of trees, but in this garden, where the sunlight and the breezes passed abundantly under such high-lifted arms and among such clean, bare stems, a congregation of shrubs, undershrubs and plants of every stature and breadth, arose, flourished and flowered without stint. Yonder the wind-split, fathom-long leaves of the banana, brightening the background, arched upward, drooped again and faintly oscillated to the air's caress. Here bloomed and smelled the delicate magnolia fuscata, and here, redder with flowers than green with shining leaves, shone the camellia. Here spread the dark oleander, the pittosporum and the Chinese privet; and here were the camphor-tree and the slender sweet olive--we have named them all before and our steps should not take us over the same ground twice in one circuit; that would be bad gardening. But there they were, under those ordinarily so intolerant trees, prospering and singing praises with them, some in full blossom and perfume, some waiting their turn, like parts of a choir. In the midst of all, where a broad path eddied quite round an irregular open space, and that tender quaintness of decay appeared which is the unfailing New Orleans touch, the space was filled with roses. This spot was lovely enough by day and not less so for being a haunt of toddling babes and their nurses; but at night--! Regularly at evening there comes into the New Orleans air, from Heaven knows whither, not a mist, not a fog nor a dampness, but a soft, transparent, poetical dimness that in no wise shortens the range of vision--a counterpart of that condition which so many thousands of favored travellers in other longitudes know as the "Atlantic haze." One night--oh, oftener than that, but let us say one for the value of understatement--returning to our quarters some time before midnight, we stepped out upon the balcony to gaze across into that garden. The sky was clear, the neighborhood silent. A wind stirred, but the shrubberies stood motionless. The moon, nearly full, swung directly before us, pouring its gracious light through the tenuous cross-hatchings of the pecans, nestling it in the dense tops of the cedars and magnolias and sprinkling it to the ground among the lower growths and between their green-black shadows. When in a certain impotence of rapture we cast about in our minds for an adequate comparison--where description in words seemed impossible--the only parallel we could find was the art of Corot and such masters from the lands where the wonderful pictorial value of trees trimmed high has been known for centuries and is still cherished. For without those trees so disciplined the ravishing picture of that garden would have been impossible. Of course our Northern gardens cannot smile like that in winter. But they need not perish, as tens of thousands of lawn-mower, pattern-bed, so-called gardens do. They should but hibernate, as snugly as the bear, the squirrel, the bee; and who that ever in full health of mind and body saw spring come back to a Northern garden of blossoming trees, shrubs and undershrubs has not rejoiced in a year of four clear-cut seasons? Or who that ever saw mating birds, greening swards, starting violets and all the early flowers loved of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Bryant and Tennyson, has not felt that the resurrection of landscape and garden owes at least half its glory to the long trance of winter, and wished that dwellers in Creole lands might see New England's First of June? For what says the brave old song-couplet of New England's mothers? That-- "Spring would be but wintry weather If we had nothing else but spring." Every year, even in Massachusetts--even in Michigan--spring, summer, and autumn are sure to come overladen with their gifts and make us a good, long, merry visit. All the other enlightened and well-to-do nations of the world entertain them with the gardening art and its joys and so make fairer, richer and stronger than can be made indoors alone the individual soul, the family, the social, the civic, the national life. In this small matter we Americans are at the wrong end of the procession. What shall we do about it? 
36279	----	WOOD AND GARDEN [Illustration: _Frontispiece._] WOOD AND GARDEN NOTES AND THOUGHTS, PRACTICAL AND CRITICAL, OF A WORKING AMATEUR By GERTRUDE JEKYLL _With 71 Illustrations from Photographs by the Author_ [Illustration] Second Edition Longmans, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London New York and Bombay 1899 _All rights reserved_ Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. At the Ballantyne Press PREFACE From its simple nature, this book seems scarcely to need any prefatory remarks, with the exception only of certain acknowledgments. A portion of the contents (about one-third) appeared during the years 1896 and 1897 in the pages of the _Guardian_, as "Notes from Garden and Woodland." I am indebted to the courtesy of the editor and proprietors of that journal for permission to republish these notes. The greater part of the photographs from which the illustrations have been prepared were done on my own ground--a space of some fifteen acres. Some of them, owing to my want of technical ability as a photographer, were very weak, and have only been rendered available by the skill of the reproducer, for whose careful work my thanks are due. A small number of the photographs were done for reproduction in wood-engraving for Mr. Robinson's _Garden_, _Gardening Illustrated_, and _English Flower Garden_. I have his kind permission to use the original plates. G. J. CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY 1-6 CHAPTER II JANUARY 7-18 Beauty of woodland in winter -- The nut-walk -- Thinning the overgrowth -- A nut nursery -- _Iris stylosa_ -- Its culture -- Its home in Algeria -- Discovery of the white variety -- Flowers and branches for indoor decoration. CHAPTER III FEBRUARY 19-31 Distant promise of summer -- Ivy-berries -- Coloured leaves -- _Berberis Aquifolium_ -- Its many merits -- Thinning and pruning shrubs -- Lilacs -- Removing Suckers -- Training _Clematis flammula_ -- Forms of trees -- Juniper, a neglected native evergreen -- Effect of snow -- Power of recovery -- Beauty of colour -- Moss-grown stems. CHAPTER IV MARCH 32-45 Flowering bulbs -- Dog-tooth Violet -- Rock-garden -- Variety of Rhododendron foliage -- A beautiful old kind -- Suckers on grafted plants -- Plants for filling up the beds -- Heaths -- Andromedas -- Lady Fern -- _Lilium auratum_ -- Pruning Roses -- Training and tying climbing plants -- Climbing and free-growing Roses -- The Vine the best wall-covering -- Other climbers -- Wild Clematis -- Wild Rose. CHAPTER V APRIL 46-58 Woodland spring flowers -- Daffodils in the copse -- Grape Hyacinths and other spring bulbs -- How best to plant them -- Flowering shrubs -- Rock-plants -- Sweet scents of April -- Snowy Mespilus, Marsh Marigolds, and other spring flowers -- Primrose garden -- Pollen of Scotch Fir -- Opening seed-pods of Fir and Gorse -- Auriculas -- Tulips -- Small shrubs for rock-garden -- Daffodils as cut flowers -- Lent Hellebores -- Primroses -- Leaves of wild Arum. CHAPTER VI MAY 59-76 Cowslips -- Morells -- Woodruff -- Felling oak timber -- Trillium and other wood-plants -- Lily of the Valley naturalised -- Rock-wall flowers -- Two good wall-shrubs -- Queen wasps -- Rhododendrons -- Arrangement for colour -- Separate colour-groups -- Difficulty of choosing -- Hardy Azaleas -- Grouping flowers that bloom together -- Guelder-rose as climber -- The garden-wall door -- The Pæony garden -- Moutans -- Pæony varieties -- Species desirable for garden. CHAPTER VII JUNE 77-88 The gladness of June -- The time of Roses -- Garden Roses -- Reine Blanche -- The old white Rose -- Old garden Roses as standards -- Climbing and rambling Roses -- Scotch Briars -- Hybrid Perpetuals a difficulty -- Tea Roses -- Pruning -- Sweet Peas autumn sown -- Elder-trees -- Virginian Cowslip -- Dividing spring-blooming plants -- Two best Mulleins -- White French Willow -- Bracken. CHAPTER VIII JULY 89-99 Scarcity of flowers -- Delphiniums -- Yuccas -- Cottager's way of protecting tender plants -- Alströmerias -- Carnations -- Gypsophila -- _Lilium giganteum_ -- Cutting fern-pegs. CHAPTER IX AUGUST 100-111 Leycesteria -- Early recollections -- Bank of choice shrubs -- Bank of Briar Roses -- Hollyhocks -- Lavender -- Lilies -- Bracken and Heaths -- The Fern-walk -- Late-blooming rock-plants -- Autumn flowers -- Tea Roses -- Fruit of _Rosa rugosa_ -- Fungi -- Chantarelle. CHAPTER X SEPTEMBER 112-124 Sowing Sweet Peas -- Autumn-sown annuals -- Dahlias -- Worthless kinds -- Staking -- Planting the rock-garden -- Growing small plants in a wall -- The old wall -- Dry-walling -- How built -- How planted -- Hyssop -- A destructive storm -- Berries of Water-elder -- Beginning ground-work. CHAPTER XI OCTOBER 125-143 Michaelmas Daisies -- Arranging and staking -- Spindle-tree -- Autumn colour of Azaleas -- Quinces -- Medlars -- Advantage of early planting of shrubs -- Careful planting -- Pot-bound roots -- Cypress hedge -- Planting in difficult places -- Hardy flower border -- Lifting Dahlias -- Dividing hardy plants -- Dividing tools -- Plants difficult to divide -- Periwinkles -- Sternbergia -- Czar Violets -- Deep cultivation for _Lilium giganteum_. CHAPTER XII NOVEMBER 144-157 Giant Christmas Rose -- Hardy Chrysanthemums -- Sheltering tender shrubs -- Turfing by inoculation -- Transplanting large trees -- Sir Henry Steuart's experience early in the century -- Collecting fallen leaves -- Preparing grubbing tools -- Butcher's Broom -- Alexandrian Laurel -- Hollies and Birches -- A lesson in planting. CHAPTER XIII DECEMBER 158-170 The woodman at work -- Tree-cutting in frosty weather -- Preparing sticks and stakes -- Winter Jasmine -- Ferns in the wood-walk -- Winter colour of evergreen shrubs -- Copse-cutting -- Hoop-making -- Tools used -- Sizes of hoops -- Men camping out -- Thatching with hoop-chips -- The old thatcher's bill. CHAPTER XIV LARGE AND SMALL GARDENS 171-187 A well done villa-garden -- A small town-garden -- Two delightful gardens of small size -- Twenty acres within the walls -- A large country house and its garden -- Terrace -- Lawn -- Parterre -- Free garden -- Kitchen garden -- Buildings -- Ornamental orchard -- Instructive mixed gardens -- Mr. Wilson's at Wisley -- A window garden. CHAPTER XV BEGINNING AND LEARNING 188-199 The ignorant questioner -- Beginning at the end -- An example -- Personal experience -- Absence of outer help -- Johns' "Flowers of the Field" -- Collecting plants -- Nurseries near London -- Wheel-spokes as labels -- Garden friends -- Mr. Robinson's "English Flower-Garden" -- Mr. Nicholson's "Dictionary of Gardening" -- One main idea desirable -- Pictorial treatment -- Training in fine art -- Adapting from Nature -- Study of colour -- Ignorant use of the word "artistic." CHAPTER XVI THE FLOWER-BORDER AND PERGOLA 200-215 The flower-border -- The wall and its occupants -- _Choisya ternata_ -- Nandina -- Canon Ellacombe's garden -- Treatment of colour-masses -- Arrangement of plants in the border -- Dahlias and Cannas -- Covering bare places -- The Pergola -- How made -- Suitable climbers -- Arbours of trained Planes -- Garden houses. CHAPTER XVII THE PRIMROSE GARDEN 216-220 CHAPTER XVIII COLOURS OF FLOWERS 221-228 CHAPTER XIX THE SCENTS OF THE GARDEN 229-240 CHAPTER XX THE WORSHIP OF FALSE GODS 241-248 CHAPTER XXI NOVELTY AND VARIETY 249-255 CHAPTER XXII WEEDS AND PESTS 256-262 CHAPTER XXIII THE BEDDING FASHION AND ITS INFLUENCE 263-270 CHAPTER XXIV MASTERS AND MEN 271-279 INDEX 280 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FRONTISPIECE _face title_ A WILD JUNIPER _face page_ 19 SCOTCH FIRS THROWN ON TO FROZEN WATER BY SNOWSTORM " 27 OLD JUNIPER, SHOWING FORMER INJURIES " 29 JUNIPER, LATELY WRECKED BY SNOWSTORM " 29 GARDEN DOOR-WAY WREATHED WITH CLEMATIS GRAVEOLENS " 39 COTTAGE PORCH WREATHED WITH THE DOUBLE WHITE ROSE (_R. alba_) " 39 WILD HOP, ENTWINING WORMWOOD AND COW-PARSNIP " 43 DAFFODILS IN THE COPSE " 48 MAGNOLIA STELLATA " 50 DAFFODILS AMONG JUNIPERS WHERE GARDEN JOINS COPSE " 51 TIARELLA CORDIFOLIA " 53 HOLLYHOCK, PINK BEAUTY. (_See page 105_) " 53 TULIPA RETROFLEXA " 55 LATE SINGLE TULIPS, BREEDERS AND BYBLOEMEN " 55 TRILLIUM IN THE WILD GARDEN " 61 RHODODENDRONS WHERE THE COPSE AND GARDEN MEET " 65 GRASS WALKS THROUGH THE COPSE " 66 RHODODENDRONS AT THE EDGE OF THE COPSE " 68 SOUTH SIDE OF DOOR, WITH CLEMATIS MONTANA AND CHOISYA " 72 NORTH SIDE OF THE SAME DOOR, WITH CLEMATIS MONTANA AND GUELDER-ROSE " 72 FREE CLUSTER-ROSE AS STANDARD IN A COTTAGE GARDEN " 77 DOUBLE WHITE SCOTCH BRIAR " 81 PART OF A BUSH OF ROSA POLYANTHA " 82 GARLAND-ROSE SHOWING NATURAL WAY OF GROWTH " 82 LILAC MARIE LEGRAYE (_See page 23_) " 84 FLOWERING ELDER AND PATH FROM GARDEN TO COPSE " 84 THE GIANT LILY " 96 CISTUS FLORENTINUS " 101 THE GREAT ASPHODEL " 101 LAVENDER HEDGE AND STEPS TO THE LOFT " 105 HOLLYHOCK, PINK BEAUTY " 105 SOLOMON'S SEAL IN SPRING, IN THE UPPER PART OF THE FERN-WALK " 107 THE FERN-WALK IN AUGUST " 107 JACK (_See page 79_) " 117 THE "OLD WALL" " 117 ERINUS ALPINUS, CLOTHING STEPS IN ROCK-WALL " 121 BORDERS OF MICHAELMAS DAISIES " 126 PENS FOR STORING DEAD LEAVES " 150 CAREFUL WILD-GARDENING--WHITE FOXGLOVES AT THE EDGE OF THE FIR WOOD. (_See page 270_) " 150 HOLLY STEMS IN AN OLD HEDGE-ROW " 153 WILD JUNIPERS " 154 WILD JUNIPERS " 156 THE WOODMAN " 158 GRUBBING A TREE-STUMP " 161 FELLING AND GRUBBING TOOLS (_See page 150_) " 161 HOOP-MAKING IN THE WOODS " 167 HOOP-SHAVING " 169 SHED-ROOF, THATCHED WITH HOOP-CHIP " 169 GARLAND-ROSE WREATHING THE END OF A TERRACE WALL " 178 A ROADSIDE COTTAGE GARDEN " 185 A FLOWER-BORDER IN JUNE " 200 PATHWAY ACROSS THE SOUTH BORDER IN JULY " 202 OUTSIDE VIEW OF THE BRICK PERGOLA SHOWN AT PAGE 214, AFTER SIX YEARS' GROWTH " 202 END OF FLOWER-BORDER AND ENTRANCE OF PERGOLA " 210 SOUTH BORDER DOOR AND YUCCAS IN AUGUST " 210 STONE-BUILT PERGOLA WITH WROUGHT OAK BEAMS " 214 PERGOLA WITH BRICK PIERS AND BEAMS OF ROUGH OAK " 214 EVENING IN THE PRIMROSE GARDEN " 217 TALL SNAPDRAGONS GROWING IN A DRY WALL " 251 MULLEINS GROWING IN THE FACE OF DRY WALL (_See "Old Wall," page 116_) " 251 GERANIUMS IN NEAPOLITAN POTS " 267 SPACE IN STEP AND TANK-GARDEN FOR LILIES, CANNAS, AND GERANIUMS " 268 HYDRANGEAS IN TUBS, IN A PART OF THE SAME GARDEN " 268 MULLEIN (VERBASCUM PHLOMOIDES) AT THE EDGE OF THE FIR WOOD " 270 A GRASS PATH IN THE COPSE " 270 WOOD AND GARDEN CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY There are already many and excellent books about gardening; but the love of a garden, already so deeply implanted in the English heart, is so rapidly growing, that no excuse is needed for putting forth another. I lay no claim either to literary ability, or to botanical knowledge, or even to knowing the best practical methods of cultivation; but I have lived among outdoor flowers for many years, and have not spared myself in the way of actual labour, and have come to be on closely intimate and friendly terms with a great many growing things, and have acquired certain instincts which, though not clearly defined, are of the nature of useful knowledge. But the lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives. I rejoice when I see any one, and especially children, inquiring about flowers, and wanting gardens of their own, and carefully working in them. For the love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, but always grows and grows to an enduring and ever-increasing source of happiness. If in the following chapters I have laid special stress upon gardening for beautiful effect, it is because it is the way of gardening that I love best, and understand most of, and that seems to me capable of giving the greatest amount of pleasure. I am strongly for treating garden and wooded ground in a pictorial way, mainly with large effects, and in the second place with lesser beautiful incidents, and for so arranging plants and trees and grassy spaces that they look happy and at home, and make no parade of conscious effort. I try for beauty and harmony everywhere, and especially for harmony of colour. A garden so treated gives the delightful feeling of repose, and refreshment, and purest enjoyment of beauty, that seems to my understanding to be the best fulfilment of its purpose; while to the diligent worker its happiness is like the offering of a constant hymn of praise. For I hold that the best purpose of a garden is to give delight and to give refreshment of mind, to soothe, to refine, and to lift up the heart in a spirit of praise and thankfulness. It is certain that those who practise gardening in the best ways find it to be so. But the scope of practical gardening covers a range of horticultural practice wide enough to give play to every variety of human taste. Some find their greatest pleasure in collecting as large a number as possible of all sorts of plants from all sources, others in collecting them themselves in their foreign homes, others in making rock-gardens, or ferneries, or peat-gardens, or bog-gardens, or gardens for conifers or for flowering shrubs, or special gardens of plants and trees with variegated or coloured leaves, or in the cultivation of some particular race or family of plants. Others may best like wide lawns with large trees, or wild gardening, or a quite formal garden, with trim hedge and walk, and terrace, and brilliant parterre, or a combination of several ways of gardening. And all are right and reasonable and enjoyable to their owners, and in some way or degree helpful to others. The way that seems to me most desirable is again different, and I have made an attempt to describe it in some of its aspects. But I have learned much, and am always learning, from other people's gardens, and the lesson I have learned most thoroughly is, never to say "I know"--there is so infinitely much to learn, and the conditions of different gardens vary so greatly, even when soil and situation appear to be alike and they are in the same district. Nature is such a subtle chemist that one never knows what she is about, or what surprises she may have in store for us. Often one sees in the gardening papers discussions about the treatment of some particular plant. One man writes to say it can only be done one way, another to say it can only be done quite some other way, and the discussion waxes hot and almost angry, and the puzzled reader, perhaps as yet young in gardening, cannot tell what to make of it. And yet the two writers are both able gardeners, and both absolutely trustworthy, only they should have said, "In my experience _in this place_ such a plant can only be done in such a way." Even plants of the same family will not do equally well in the same garden. Every practical gardener knows this in the case of strawberries and potatoes; he has to find out which kinds will do in his garden; the experience of his friend in the next county is probably of no use whatever. I have learnt much from the little cottage gardens that help to make our English waysides the prettiest in the temperate world. One can hardly go into the smallest cottage garden without learning or observing something new. It may be some two plants growing beautifully together by some happy chance, or a pretty mixed tangle of creepers, or something that one always thought must have a south wall doing better on an east one. But eye and brain must be alert to receive the impression and studious to store it, to add to the hoard of experience. And it is important to train oneself to have a good flower-eye; to be able to see at a glance what flowers are good and which are unworthy, and why, and to keep an open mind about it; not to be swayed by the petty tyrannies of the "florist" or show judge; for, though some part of his judgment may be sound, he is himself a slave to rules, and must go by points which are defined arbitrarily and rigidly, and have reference mainly to the show-table, leaving out of account, as if unworthy of consideration, such matters as gardens and garden beauty, and human delight, and sunshine, and varying lights of morning and evening and noonday. But many, both nurserymen and private people, devote themselves to growing and improving the best classes of hardy flowers, and we can hardly offer them too much grateful praise, or do them too much honour. For what would our gardens be without the Roses, Pæonies, and Gladiolus of France, and the Tulips and Hyacinths of Holland, to say nothing of the hosts of good things raised by our home growers, and of the enterprise of the great firms whose agents are always searching the world for garden treasures? Let no one be discouraged by the thought of how much there is to learn. Looking back upon nearly thirty years of gardening (the earlier part of it in groping ignorance with scant means of help), I can remember no part of it that was not full of pleasure and encouragement. For the first steps are steps into a delightful Unknown, the first successes are victories all the happier for being scarcely expected, and with the growing knowledge comes the widening outlook, and the comforting sense of an ever-increasing gain of critical appreciation. Each new step becomes a little surer, and each new grasp a little firmer, till, little by little, comes the power of intelligent combination, the nearest thing we can know to the mighty force of creation. And a garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all, it teaches entire trust. "Paul planteth and Apollos watereth, but God giveth the increase." The good gardener knows with absolute certainty that if he does his part, if he gives the labour, the love, and every aid that his knowledge of his craft, experience of the conditions of his place, and exercise of his personal wit can work together to suggest, that so surely as he does this diligently and faithfully, so surely will God give the increase. Then with the honestly-earned success comes the consciousness of encouragement to renewed effort, and, as it were, an echo of the gracious words, "Well done, good and faithful servant." CHAPTER II JANUARY Beauty of woodland in winter -- The nut-walk -- Thinning the overgrowth -- A nut nursery -- _Iris stylosa_ -- Its culture -- Its home in Algeria -- Discovery of the white variety -- Flowers and branches for indoor decoration. A hard frost is upon us. The thermometer registered eighteen degrees last night, and though there was only one frosty night next before it, the ground is hard frozen. Till now a press of other work has stood in the way of preparing protecting stuff for tender shrubs, but now I go up into the copse with a man and chopping tools to cut out some of the Scotch fir that are beginning to crowd each other. How endlessly beautiful is woodland in winter! To-day there is a thin mist; just enough to make a background of tender blue mystery three hundred yards away, and to show any defect in the grouping of near trees. No day could be better for deciding which trees are to come down; there is not too much at a time within sight; just one good picture-full and no more. On a clear day the eye and mind are distracted by seeing away into too many planes, and it is much more difficult to decide what is desirable in the way of broad treatment of nearer objects. The ground has a warm carpet of pale rusty fern; tree-stem and branch and twig show tender colour-harmonies of grey bark and silver-grey lichen, only varied by the warm feathery masses of birch spray. Now the splendid richness of the common holly is more than ever impressive, with its solid masses of full, deep colour, and its wholesome look of perfect health and vigour. Sombrely cheerful, if one may use such a mixture of terms; sombre by reason of the extreme depth of tone, and yet cheerful from the look of glad life, and from the assurance of warm shelter and protecting comfort to bird and beast and neighbouring vegetation. The picture is made complete by the slender shafts of the silver-barked birches, with their half-weeping heads of delicate, warm-coloured spray. Has any tree so graceful a way of throwing up its stems as the birch? They seem to leap and spring into the air, often leaning and curving upward from the very root, sometimes in forms that would be almost grotesque were it not for the never-failing rightness of free-swinging poise and perfect balance. The tints of the stem give a precious lesson in colour. The white of the bark is here silvery-white and there milk-white, and sometimes shows the faintest tinge of rosy flush. Where the bark has not yet peeled, the stem is clouded and banded with delicate grey, and with the silver-green of lichen. For about two feet upward from the ground, in the case of young trees of about seven to nine inches diameter, the bark is dark in colour, and lies in thick and extremely rugged upright ridges, contrasting strongly with the smooth white skin above. Where the two join, the smooth bark is parted in upright slashes, through which the dark, rough bark seems to swell up, reminding one forcibly of some of the old fifteenth-century German costumes, where a dark velvet is arranged to rise in crumpled folds through slashings in white satin. In the stems of older birches the rough bark rises much higher up the trunk and becomes clothed with delicate grey-green lichen. The nut-walk was planted twelve years ago. There are two rows each side, one row four feet behind the other, and the nuts are ten feet apart in the rows. They are planted zigzag, those in the back rows showing between the front ones. As the two inner rows are thirteen feet apart measuring across the path, it leaves a shady border on each side, with deeper bays between the nearer trees. Lent Hellebores fill one border from end to end; the other is planted with the Corsican and the native kinds, so that throughout February and March there is a complete bit of garden of one kind of plant in full beauty of flower and foliage. The nut-trees have grown into such thick clumps that now there must be a vigorous thinning. Each stool has from eight to twelve main stems, the largest of them nearly two inches thick. Some shoot almost upright, but two or three in each stool spread outward, with quite a different habit of growth, branching about in an angular fashion. These are the oldest and thickest. There are also a number of straight suckers one and two years old. Now when I look at some fine old nut alley, with the tops arching and meeting overhead, as I hope mine will do in a few years, I see that the trees have only a few stems, usually from three to five at the most, and I judge that now is the time to thin mine to about the right number, so that the strength and growing power may be thrown into these, and not allowed to dilute and waste itself in growing extra faggoting. The first to be cut away are the old crooked stems. They grow nearly horizontally and are all elbows, and often so tightly locked into the straighter rods that they have to be chopped to pieces before they can be pulled out. When these are gone it is easier to get at the other stems, though they are often so close together at the base that it is difficult to chop or saw them out without hurting the bark of the ones to be left. All the young suckers are cut away. They are of straight, clean growth, and we prize them as the best possible sticks for Chrysanthemums and potted Lilies. After this bold thinning, instead of dense thickety bushes we have a few strong, well-branched rods to each stool. At first the nut-walk looks wofully naked, and for the time its pictorial value is certainly lessened; but it has to be done, and when summer side-twigs have grown and leafed, it will be fairly well clothed, and meanwhile the Hellebores will be the better for the thinner shade. The nut-catkins are already an inch long, but are tightly closed, and there is no sign as yet of the bright crimson little sea-anemones that will appear next month and will duly grow into nut-bearing twigs. Round the edges of the base of the stools are here and there little branching suckers. These are the ones to look out for, to pull off and grow into young trees. A firm grasp and a sharp tug brings them up with a fine supply of good fibrous root. After two years in the nursery they are just right to plant out. The trees in the nut-walk were grown in this way fourteen years ago, from small suckers pulled off plants that came originally from the interesting cob-nut nursery at Calcot, near Reading. I shall never forget a visit to that nursery some six-and-twenty years ago. It was walled all round, and a deep-sounding bell had to be rung many times before any one came to open the gate; but at last it was opened by a fine, strongly-built, sunburnt woman of the type of the good working farmer's wife, that I remember as a child. She was the forewoman, who worked the nursery with surprisingly few hands--only three men, if I remember rightly--but she looked as if she could do the work of "all two men" herself. One of the specialties of the place was a fine breed of mastiffs; another was an old Black Hamburg vine, that rambled and clambered in and out of some very old greenhouses, and was wonderfully productive. There were alleys of nuts in all directions, and large spreading patches of palest yellow Daffodils--the double _Narcissus cernuus_, now so scarce and difficult to grow. Had I then known how precious a thing was there in fair abundance, I should not have been contented with the modest dozen that I asked for. It was a most pleasant garden to wander in, especially with the old Mr. Webb who presently appeared. He was dressed in black clothes of an old-looking cut--a Quaker, I believe. Never shall I forget an apple-tart he invited me to try as a proof of the merit of the "Wellington" apple. It was not only good, but beautiful; the cooked apple looking rosy and transparent, and most inviting. He told me he was an ardent preacher of total abstinence, and took me to a grassy, shady place among the nuts, where there was an upright stone slab, like a tombstone, with the inscription: TO ALCOHOL. He had dug a grave, and poured into it a quantity of wine and beer and spirits, and placed the stone as a memorial of his abhorrence of drink. The whole thing remains in my mind like a picture--the shady groves of old nuts, in tenderest early leaf, the pale Daffodils, the mighty chained mastiffs with bloodshot eyes and murderous fangs, the brawny, wholesome forewoman, and the trim old gentleman in black. It was the only nursery I ever saw where one would expect to see fairies on a summer's night. I never tire of admiring and praising _Iris stylosa_, which has proved itself such a good plant for English gardens; at any rate, for those in our southern counties. Lovely in form and colour, sweetly-scented and with admirable foliage, it has in addition to these merits the unusual one of a blooming season of six months' duration. The first flowers come with the earliest days of November, and its season ends with a rush of bloom in the first half of April. Then is the time to take up old tufts and part them, and plant afresh; the old roots will have dried up into brown wires, and the new will be pushing. It thrives in rather poor soil, and seems to bloom all the better for having its root-run invaded by some stronger plant. When I first planted a quantity I had brought from its native place, I made the mistake of putting it in a well-prepared border. At first I was delighted to see how well it flourished, but as it gave me only thick masses of leaves a yard long, and no flowers, it was clear that it wanted to be less well fed. After changing it to poor soil, at the foot of a sunny wall close to a strong clump of Alströmeria, I was rewarded with a good crop of flowers; and the more the Alströmeria grew into it on one side and _Plumbago Larpenti_ on the other, the more freely the brave little Iris flowered. The flower has no true stem; what serves as a stem, sometimes a foot long, is the elongated style, so that the seed-pod has to be looked for deep down at the base of the tufts of leaves, and almost under ground. The specific name, _stylosa_, is so clearly descriptive, that one regrets that the longer, and certainly uglier, _unguicularis_ should be preferred by botanists. What a delight it was to see it for the first time in its home in the hilly wastes, a mile or two inland from the town of Algiers! Another lovely blue Iris was there too, _I. alata_ or _scorpioides_, growing under exactly the same conditions; but this is a plant unwilling to be acclimatised in England. What a paradise it was for flower-rambles, among the giant Fennels and the tiny orange Marigolds, and the immense bulbs of _Scilla maritima_ standing almost out of the ground, and the many lovely Bee-orchises and the fairy-like _Narcissus serotinus_, and the groves of Prickly Pear wreathed and festooned with the graceful tufts of bell-shaped flower and polished leaves of _Clematis cirrhosa_! It was in the days when there were only a few English residents, but among them was the Rev. Edwyn Arkwright, who by his happy discovery of a white-flowered _Iris stylosa_, the only one that has been found wild, has enriched our gardens with a most lovely variety of this excellent plant. I am glad to be able to quote his own words:-- "The finding of the white _Iris stylosa_ belongs to the happy old times twenty-five years ago, when there were no social duties and no vineyards[1] in Algiers. My two sisters and I bought three horses, and rode wild every day in the scrub of Myrtle, Cistus, Dwarf Oak, &c. It was about five miles from the town, on what is called the 'Sahel,' that the one plant grew that I was told botanists knew ought to exist, but with all their searching had never found. I am thankful that I dug it up instead of picking it, only knowing that it was a pretty flower. Then after a year or two Durando saw it, and took off his hat to it, and told me what a treasure it was, and proceeded to send off little bits to his friends; and among them all, Ware of Tottenham managed to be beforehand, and took a first-class certificate for it. It is odd that there should never have been another plant found, for there never was such a free-growing and multiplying plant. My sister in Herefordshire has had over fifty blooms this winter; but we count it by thousands, and it is _the_ feature in all decorations in every English house in Algiers." [1] The planting of large vineyards, in some cases of private enterprise, had not proved a financial success. Throughout January, and indeed from the middle of December, is the time when outdoor flowers for cutting and house decoration are most scarce; and yet there are Christmas Roses and yellow Jasmine and Laurustinus, and in all open weather _Iris stylosa_ and Czar Violets. A very few flowers can be made to look well if cleverly arranged with plenty of good foliage; and even when a hard and long frost spoils the few blooms that would otherwise be available, leafy branches alone are beautiful in rooms. But, as in all matters that have to do with decoration, everything depends on a right choice of material and the exercise of taste in disposing it. Red-tinted Berberis always looks well alone, if three or four branches are boldly cut from two to three feet long. Branches of the spotted Aucuba do very well by themselves, and are specially beautiful in blue china; the larger the leaves and the bolder the markings, the better. Where there is an old Exmouth Magnolia that can spare some small branches, nothing makes a nobler room-ornament. The long arching sprays of Alexandrian Laurel do well with green or variegated Box, and will live in a room for several weeks. Among useful winter leaves of smaller growth, those of _Epimedium pinnatum_ have a fine red colour and delicate veining, and I find them very useful for grouping with greenhouse flowers of delicate texture. _Gaultheria Shallon_ is at its best in winter, and gives valuable branches and twigs for cutting; and much to be prized are sprays of the Japan Privet, with its tough, highly-polished leaves, so much like those of the orange. There is a variegated Eurybia, small branches of which are excellent; and always useful are the gold and silver Hollies. There is a little plant, _Ophiopogon spicatum_, that I grow in rather large quantity for winter cutting, the leaves being at their best in the winter months. They are sword-shaped and of a lively green colour, and are arranged in flat sheaves after the manner of a flag-Iris. I pull up a whole plant at a time--a two-year-old plant is a spreading tuft of the little sheaves--and wash it and cut away the groups of leaves just at the root, so that they are held together by the root-stock. They last long in water, and are beautiful with Roman Hyacinths or Freesias or _Iris stylosa_ and many other flowers. The leaves of Megaseas, especially those of the _cordifolia_ section, colour grandly in winter, and look fine in a large bowl with the largest blooms of Christmas Roses, or with forced Hyacinths. Much useful material can be found among Ivies, both of the wild and garden kinds. When they are well established they generally throw out rather woody front shoots; these are the ones to look out for, as they stand out with a certain degree of stiffness that makes them easier to arrange than weaker trailing pieces. I do not much care for dried flowers--the bulrush and pampas-grass decoration has been so much overdone, that it has become wearisome--but I make an exception in favour of the flower of _Eulalia japonica_, and always give it a place. It does not come to its full beauty out of doors; it only finishes its growth late in October, and therefore does not have time to dry and expand. I grew it for many years before finding out that the closed and rather draggled-looking heads would open perfectly in a warm room. The uppermost leaf often confines the flower, and should be taken off to release it; the flower does not seem to mature quite enough to come free of itself. Bold masses of Helichrysum certainly give some brightness to a room during the darkest weeks of winter, though the brightest yellow is the only one I much care to have; there is a look of faded tinsel about the other colourings. I much prize large bunches of the native Iris berries, and grow it largely for winter room-ornament. Among the many valuable suggestions in Mrs. Earle's delightful book, "Pot-pourri from a Surrey Garden," is the use indoors of the smaller coloured gourds. As used by her they give a bright and cheerful look to a room that even flowers can not surpass. [Illustration: A WILD JUNIPER.] CHAPTER III FEBRUARY Distant promise of summer -- Ivy-berries -- Coloured leaves -- _Berberis Aquifolium_ -- Its many merits -- Thinning and pruning shrubs -- Lilacs -- Removing suckers -- Training _Clematis flammula_ -- Forms of trees -- Juniper, a neglected native evergreen -- Effect of snow -- Power of recovery -- Beauty of colour -- Moss-grown stems. There is always in February some one day, at least, when one smells the yet distant, but surely coming, summer. Perhaps it is a warm, mossy scent that greets one when passing along the southern side of a hedge-bank; or it may be in some woodland opening, where the sun has coaxed out the pungent smell of the trailing ground Ivy, whose blue flowers will soon appear; but the day always comes, and with it the glad certainty that summer is nearing, and that the good things promised will never fail. How strangely little of positive green colour is to be seen in copse and woodland. Only the moss is really green. The next greenest thing is the northern sides of the trunks of beech and oak. Walking southward they are all green, but looking back they are silver-grey. The undergrowth is of brambles and sparse fronds of withered bracken; the bracken less beaten down than usual, for the winter has been without snow; only where the soil is deeper, and the fern has grown more tall and rank, it has fallen into thick, almost felted masses, and the stalks all lying one way make the heaps look like lumps of fallen thatch. The bramble leaves--last year's leaves, which are held all the winter--are of a dark, blackish-bronze colour, or nearly red where they have seen the sun. Age seems to give them a sort of hard surface and enough of a polish to reflect the sky; the young leaves that will come next month are almost woolly at first. Grassy tufts show only bleached bents, so tightly matted that one wonders how the delicate young blades will be able to spear through. Ivy-berries, hanging in thick clusters, are still in beauty; they are so heavy that they weigh down the branches. There is a peculiar beauty in the form and veining of the plain-shaped leaves belonging to the mature or flowering state that the plant reaches when it can no longer climb, whether on a wall six feet high or on the battlements of a castle. Cuttings grown from such portions retain this habit, and form densely-flowering bushes of compact shape. Beautiful colouring is now to be seen in many of the plants whose leaves do not die down in winter. Foremost amongst these is the Foam-flower (_Tiarella cordifolia_). Its leaves, now lying on the ground, show bright colouring, inclining to scarlet, crimson, and orange. _Tellima_, its near relation, is also well coloured. _Galax aphylla_, with its polished leaves of hard texture, and stalks almost as stiff as wire, is nearly as bright; and many of the Megaseas are of a fine bronze red, the ones that colour best being the varieties of the well-known _M. crassifolia_ and _M. cordifolia_. Among shrubs, some of the nearly allied genera, popularly classed under the name Andromeda, are beautiful in reddish colour passing into green, in some of the leaves by tender gradation, and in others by bold splashing. _Berberis Aquifolium_ begins to colour after the first frosts; though some plants remain green, the greater number take on some rich tinting of red or purple, and occasionally in poor soil and in full sun a bright red that may almost be called scarlet. What a precious thing this fine old Berberis is! What should we do in winter without its vigorous masses of grand foliage in garden and shrubbery, to say nothing of its use indoors? Frequent as it is in gardens, it is seldom used as well or thoughtfully as it deserves. There are many places where, between garden and wood, a well-considered planting of Berberis, combined with two or three other things of larger stature, such as the fruiting Barberry, and Whitethorn and Holly, would make a very enjoyable piece of shrub wild-gardening. When one reflects that _Berberis Aquifolium_ is individually one of the handsomest of small shrubs, that it is at its very best in mid-winter, that every leaf is a marvel of beautiful drawing and construction, and that its ruddy winter colouring is a joy to see, enhanced as it is by the glistening brightness of the leaf-surface; and further, when one remembers that in spring the whole picture changes--that the polished leaves are green again, and the bushes are full of tufted masses of brightest yellow bloom, and fuller of bee-music than any other plant then in flower; and that even then it has another season of beauty yet to come, when in the days of middle summer it is heavily loaded with the thick-clustered masses of berries, covered with a brighter and bluer bloom than almost any other fruit can show,--when one thinks of all this brought together in one plant, it seems but right that we should spare no pains to use it well. It is the only hardy shrub I can think of that is in one or other of its varied forms of beauty throughout the year. It is never leafless or untidy; it never looks mangy like an Ilex in April, or moulting like a Holly in May, or patchy and unfinished like Yew and Box and many other evergreens when their young leafy shoots are sprouting. We have been thinning the shrubs in one of the rather large clumps next to the lawn, taking the older wood in each clump right out from the bottom and letting more light and air into the middle. Weigelas grow fast and very thick. Quite two-thirds have been cut out of each bush of Weigela, Philadelphus, and Ribes, and a good bit out of Ceanothus, "Gloire de Versailles," my favourite of its kind, and all the oldest wood from _Viburnum plicatus_. The stuff cut out makes quite a respectable lot of faggoting. How extremely dense and hard is the wood of Philadelphus! as close-grained as Box, and almost as hard as the bright yellow wood of Berberis. Some of the Lilacs have a good many suckers from the root, as well as on the lower part of the stem. These must all come away, and then the trees will have a good dressing of manure. They are greedy feeders, and want it badly in our light soil, and surely no flowering shrub more truly deserves it. The Lilacs I have are some of the beautiful kinds raised in France, for which we can never be thankful enough to our good neighbours across the Channel. The white variety, "Marie Legraye," always remains my favourite. Some are larger and whiter, and have the trusses more evenly and closely filled, but this beautiful Marie fills one with a satisfying conviction as of something that is just right, that has arrived at the point of just the best and most lovable kind of beauty, and has been wisely content to stay there, not attempting to pass beyond and excel itself. Its beauty is modest and reserved, and temperate and full of refinement. The colour has a deliciously-tender warmth of white, and as the truss is not over-full, there is room for a delicate play of warm half-light within its recesses. Among the many beautiful coloured Lilacs, I am fond of Lucie Baltet and Princesse Marie. There may be better flowers from the ordinary florist point of view, but these have the charm that is a good garden flower's most precious quality. I do not like the cold, heavy-coloured ones of the bluish-slaty kinds. No shrub is hardier than the Lilac; I believe they flourish even within the Arctic Circle. It is very nearly allied to Privet; so nearly, that the oval-leaved Privet is commonly used as a stock. Standard trees flower much better than bushes; in this form all the strength seems to go directly to the flowering boughs. No shrub is more persistent in throwing up suckers from the root and from the lower part of the stem, but in bush trees as well as in standards they should be carefully removed every year. In the case of bushes, three or four main stems will be enough to leave. When taking away suckers of any kind whatever, it is much better to tear them out than to cut them off. A cut, however close, leaves a base from which they may always spring again, but if pulled or wrenched out they bring away with them the swollen base that, if left in, would be a likely source of future trouble. Before the end of February we must be sure to prune and train any plants there may be of _Clematis flammula_. Its growth is so rapid when once it begins, that if it is overlooked it soon grows into a tangled mass of succulent weak young stuff, quite unmanageable two months hence, when it will be hanging about in helpless masses, dead and living together. If it is left till then, one can only engirdle the whole thing with a soft tarred rope and sling it up somehow or anyhow. But if taken now, when the young growths are just showing at the joints, the last year's mass can be untangled, the dead and the over-much cut out, and the best pieces trained in. In gardening, the interests of the moment are so engrossing that one is often tempted to forget the future; but it is well to remember that this lovely and tenderly-scented Clematis will be one of the chief beauties of September, and well deserves a little timely care. In summer-time one never really knows how beautiful are the forms of the deciduous trees. It is only in winter, when they are bare of leaves, that one can fully enjoy their splendid structure and design, their admirable qualities of duly apportioned strength and grace of poise, and the way the spread of the many-branched head has its equivalent in the wide-reaching ground-grasp of the root. And it is interesting to see how, in the many different kinds of tree, the same laws are always in force, and the same results occur, and yet by the employment of what varied means. For nothing in the growth of trees can be much more unlike than the habit of the oak and that of the weeping willow, though the unlikeness only comes from the different adjustment of the same sources of power and the same weights, just as in the movement of wind-blown leaves some flutter and some undulate, while others turn over and back again. Old apple-trees are specially noticeable for their beauty in winter, when their extremely graceful shape, less visible when in loveliness of spring bloom or in rich bounty of autumn fruit, is seen to fullest advantage. Few in number are our native evergreens, and for that reason all the more precious. One of them, the common Juniper, is one of the best of shrubs either for garden or wild ground, and yet, strangely enough, it is so little appreciated that it is scarcely to be had in nurseries. Chinese Junipers, North American Junipers, Junipers from Spain and Greece, from Nepaul and Siberia, may be had, but the best Juniper of all is very rarely grown. Were it a common tree one could see a sort of reason (to some minds) for overlooking it, but though it is fairly abundant on a few hill-sides in the southern counties, it is by no means widely distributed throughout the country. Even this reason would not be consistent with common practice, for the Holly is abundant throughout England, and yet is to be had by the thousand in every nursery. Be the reason what it may, the common Juniper is one of the most desirable of evergreens, and is most undeservedly neglected. Even our botanists fail to do it justice, for Bentham describes it as a low shrub growing two feet, three feet, or four feet high. I quote from memory only; these may not be the words, but this is the sense of his description. He had evidently seen it on the chalk downs only, where such a portrait of it is exactly right. But in our sheltered uplands, in sandy soil, it is a small tree of noble aspect, twelve to twenty-eight feet high. In form it is extremely variable, for sometimes it shoots up on a single stem and looks like an Italian Cypress or like the upright Chinese Juniper, while at other times it will have two or more tall spires and a dense surrounding mass of lower growth, while in other cases it will be like a quantity of young trees growing close together, and yet the trees in all these varied forms may be nearly of an age. [Illustration: SCOTCH FIRS THROWN ON TO FROZEN WATER BY SNOWSTORM.] The action of snow is the reason of this unlikeness of habit. If, when young, the tree happens to have one main stem strong enough to shoot up alone, and if at the same time there come a sequence of winters without much snow, there will be the tall, straight, cypress-like tree. But if, as is more commonly the case, the growth is divided into a number of stems of nearly equal size, sooner or later they are sure to be laid down by snow. Such a winter storm as that of the end of December 1886 was especially disastrous to Junipers. Snow came on early in the evening in this district, when the thermometer was barely at freezing point and there was no wind. It hung on the trees in clogging masses, with a lowering temperature that was soon below freezing. The snow still falling loaded them more and more; then came the fatal wind, and all through that night we heard the breaking trees. When morning came there were eighteen inches of snow on the ground, and all the trees that could be seen, mostly Scotch fir, seemed to be completely wrecked. Some were entirely stripped of branches, and stood up bare, like scaffold-poles. Until the snow was gone or half gone, no idea could be formed of the amount of damage done to shrubs; all were borne down and buried under the white rounded masses. A great Holly on the edge of the lawn, nearly thirty feet high and as much in spread, whose head in summer is crowned with a great tangle of Honeysuckle, had that crowned head lying on the ground weighted down by the frozen mass. But when the snow was gone and all the damage could be seen, the Junipers looked worse than anything. What had lately been shapely groups were lying perfectly flat, the bare-stemmed, leafless portions of the inner part of the group showing, and looking like a faggot of dry brushwood, that, having been stood upright, had burst its band and fallen apart in all directions. Some, whose stems had weathered many snowy winters, now had them broken short off half-way up; while others escaped with bare life, but with the thick, strong stem broken down, the heavy head lying on the ground, and the stem wrenched open at the break, like a half-untwisted rope. The great wild Junipers were the pride of our stretch of heathy waste just beyond the garden, and the scene of desolation was truly piteous, for though many of them already bore the marks of former accidents, never within our memory had there been such complete and comprehensive destruction. [Illustration: OLD JUNIPER, SHOWING FORMER INJURIES.] [Illustration: JUNIPER, LATELY WRECKED BY SNOWSTORM.] But now, ten years later, so great is their power of recovery, that there are the same Junipers, and, except in the case of those actually broken off, looking as well as ever. For those with many stems that were laid down flat have risen at the tips, and each tip looks like a vigorous young ten-year-old tree. What was formerly a massive, bushy-shaped Juniper, some twelve feet to fifteen feet high, now covers a space thirty feet across, and looks like a thick group of closely-planted, healthy young ones. The half broken-down trees have also risen at the tips, and are full of renewed vigour. Indeed, this breaking down and splitting open seems to give them a new energy, for individual trees that I have known well, and observed to look old and over-worn, and to all appearance on the downward road of life, after being broken and laid down by snow, have some years later, shot up again with every evidence of vigorous young life. It would be more easily accounted for if the branch rooted where it touched the ground, as so many trees and bushes will do; but as far as I have been able to observe, the Juniper does not "layer" itself. I have often thought I had found a fine young one fit for transplanting, but on clearing away the moss and fern at the supposed root have found that it was only the tip of a laid-down branch of a tree perhaps twelve feet away. In the case of one of our trees, among a group of laid-down and grown-up branches, one old central trunk has survived. It is now so thick and strong, and has so little top, that it will be likely to stand till it falls from sheer old age. Close to it is another, whose main stem was broken down about five feet from the ground; now, what was the head rests on the earth nine feet away, and a circle of its outspread branches has become a wholesome group of young upright growths, while at the place where the stem broke, the half-opened wrench still shows as clearly as on the day it was done. Among the many merits of the Juniper, its tenderly mysterious beauty of colouring is by no means the least; a colouring as delicately subtle in its own way as that of cloud or mist, or haze in warm, wet woodland. It has very little of positive green; a suspicion of warm colour in the shadowy hollows, and a blue-grey bloom of the tenderest quality imaginable on the outer masses of foliage. Each tiny, blade-like leaf has a band of dead, palest bluish-green colour on the upper surface, edged with a narrow line of dark green slightly polished; the back of the leaf is of the same full, rather dark green, with slight polish; it looks as if the green back had been brought up over the edge of the leaf to make the dark edging on the upper surface. The stems of the twigs are of a warm, almost foxy colour, becoming darker and redder in the branches. The tips of the twigs curl over or hang out on all sides towards the light, and the "set" of the individual twigs is full of variety. This arrangement of mixed colouring and texture, and infinitely various position of the spiny little leaves, allows the eye to penetrate unconsciously a little way into the mass, so that one sees as much tender shadow as actual leaf-surface, and this is probably the cause of the wonderfully delicate and, so to speak, intangible quality of colouring. Then, again, where there is a hollow place in a bush, or group, showing a cluster of half-dead stems, at first one cannot tell what the colour is, till with half-shut eyes one becomes aware of a dusky and yet luminous purple-grey. The merits of the Juniper are not yet done with, for throughout the winter (the time of growth of moss and lichen) the rugged-barked old stems are clothed with loveliest pale-green growths of a silvery quality. Standing before it, and trying to put the colour into words, one repeats, again and again, pale-green silver--palest silvery green! Where the lichen is old and dead it is greyer; every now and then there is a touch of the orange kind, and a little of the branched stag-horn pattern so common on the heathy ground. Here and there, as the trunk or branch is increasing in girth, the silvery, lichen-clad, rough outer bark has parted, and shows the smooth, dark-red inner bark; the outer covering still clinging over the opening, and looking like grey ribands slightly interlaced. Many another kind of tree-stem is beautiful in its winter dress, but it is difficult to find any so full of varied beauty and interest as that of the Juniper; it is one of the yearly feasts that never fails to delight and satisfy. CHAPTER IV MARCH Flowering bulbs -- Dog-tooth Violet -- Rock-garden -- Variety of Rhododendron foliage -- A beautiful old kind -- Suckers on grafted plants -- Plants for filling up the beds -- Heaths -- Andromedas -- Lady Fern -- _Lilium auratum_ -- Pruning Roses -- Training and tying climbing plants -- Climbing and free-growing Roses -- The Vine the best wall-covering -- Other climbers -- Wild Clematis -- Wild Rose. In early March many and lovely are the flowering bulbs, and among them a wealth of blue, the more precious that it is the colour least frequent among flowers. The blue of _Scilla sibirica_, like all blues that have in them a suspicion of green, has a curiously penetrating quality; the blue of _Scilla bifolia_ does not attack the eye so smartly. _Chionodoxa sardensis_ is of a full and satisfying colour, that is enhanced by the small space of clear white throat. A bed of it shows very little variation in colour. _Chionodoxa Lucilliæ_, on the other hand, varies greatly; one may pick out light and dark blue, and light and dark of almost lilac colour. The variety _C. gigantea_ is a fine plant. There are some pretty kinds of _Scilla bifolia_ that were raised by the Rev. J. G. Nelson of Aldborough, among them a tender flesh-colour and a good pink. _Leucojum vernum_, with its clear white flowers and polished dark-green leaves, is one of the gems of early March; and, flowering at the same time, no flower of the whole year can show a more splendid and sumptuous colour than the purple of _Iris reticulata_. Varieties have been raised, some larger, some nearer blue, and some reddish purple, but the type remains the best garden flower. _Iris stylosa_, in sheltered nooks open to the sun, when well established, gives flower from November till April, the strongest rush of bloom being about the third week in March. It is a precious plant in our southern counties, delicately scented, of a tender and yet full lilac-blue. The long ribbon-like leaves make handsome tufts, and the sheltered place it needs in our climate saves the flowers from the injury they receive on their native windy Algerian hills, where they are nearly always torn into tatters. What a charm there is about the common Dogtooth Violet; it is pretty everywhere, in borders, in the rock-garden, in all sorts of corners. But where it looks best with me is in a grassy place strewn with dead leaves, under young oaks, where the garden joins the copse. This is a part of the pleasure-ground that has been treated with some care, and has rewarded thought and labour with some success, so that it looks less as if it had been planned than as if it might have come naturally. At one point the lawn, trending gently upward, runs by grass paths into a rock-garden, planted mainly with dwarf shrubs. Here are Andromedas, Pernettyas, Gaultherias, and Alpine Rhododendron, and with them three favourites whose crushed leaves give a grateful fragrance, Sweet Gale, _Ledum palustre_, and _Rhododendron myrtifolium_. The rock part is unobtrusive; where the ground rises rather quickly are a couple of ridges made of large, long lumps of sandstone, half buried, and so laid as to give a look of natural stratification. Hardy Ferns are grateful for the coolness of their northern flanks, and Cyclamens are happy on the ledges. Beyond and above is the copse, or thin wood of young silver Birch and Holly, in summer clothed below with bracken, but now bristling with the bluish spears of Daffodils and the buds that will soon burst into bloom. The early Pyrenean Daffodil is already out, gleaming through the low-toned copse like lamps of pale yellow light. Where the rough path enters the birch copse is a cheerfully twinkling throng of the Dwarf Daffodil (_N. nanus_), looking quite at its best on its carpet of moss and fine grass and dead leaves. The light wind gives it a graceful, dancing movement, with an active spring about the upper part of the stalk. Some of the heavier trumpets not far off answer to the same wind with only a ponderous, leaden sort of movement. Farther along the garden joins the wood by a plantation of Rhododendrons and broad grassy paths, and farther still by a thicket of the free-growing Roses, some forming fountain-like clumps nine paces in diameter, and then again by masses of flowering shrubs, gradating by means of Sweetbriar, Water-elder, Dogwood, Medlar, and Thorn from garden to wild wood. Now that the Rhododendrons, planted nine years ago, have grown to a state and size of young maturity, it is interesting to observe how much they vary in foliage, and how clearly the leaves show the relative degree of relationship to their original parents, the wild mountain plants of Asia Minor and the United States. These, being two of the hardiest kinds, were the ones first chosen by hybridisers, and to these kinds we owe nearly all of the large numbers of beautiful garden Rhododendrons now in cultivation. The ones more nearly related to the wild _R. ponticum_ have long, narrow, shining dark-green leaves, while the varieties that incline more to the American _R. catawbiense_ have the leaves twice as broad, and almost rounded at the shoulder where they join the stalk; moreover, the surface of the leaf has a different texture, less polished, and showing a grain like morocco leather. The colour also is a lighter and more yellowish green, and the bush is not so densely branched. The leaves of all the kinds are inclined to hang down in cold weather, and this habit is more clearly marked in the _catawbiense_ varieties. There is one old kind called _Multum maculatum_--I dare say one of the earliest hybrids--for which I have a special liking. It is now despised by florists, because the flower is thin in texture and the petal narrow, and the truss not tightly filled. Nevertheless I find it quite the most beautiful Rhododendron as a cut flower, perhaps just because of these unorthodox qualities. And much as I admire the great bouncing beauties that are most justly the pride of their raisers, I hold that this most refined and delicate class of beauty equally deserves faithful championship. The flowers of this pretty old kind are of a delicate milk-white, and the lower petals are generously spotted with a rosy-scarlet of the loveliest quality. The leaves are the longest and narrowest and darkest green of any kind I know, making the bush conspicuously handsome in winter. I have to confess that it is a shy bloomer, and that it seems unwilling to flower in a young state, but I think of it as a thing so beautiful and desirable as to be worth waiting for. Within March, and before the busier season comes upon us, it is well to look out for the suckers that are likely to come on grafted plants. They may generally be detected by the typical _ponticum_ leaf, but if the foliage of a branch should be suspicious and yet doubtful, if on following the shoot down it is seen to come straight from the root and to have a redder bark than the rest, it may safely be taken for a robber. Of course the invading stock may be easily seen when in flower, but the good gardener takes it away before it has this chance of reproaching him. A lady visitor last year told me with some pride that she had a most wonderful Rhododendron in bloom; all the flower in the middle was crimson, with a ring of purple-flowered branches outside. I am afraid she was disappointed when I offered condolence instead of congratulation, and had to tell her that the phenomenon was not uncommon among neglected bushes. When my Rhododendron beds were first planted, I followed the usual practice of filling the outer empty spaces of the clumps with hardy Heaths. Perhaps it is still the best or one of the best ways to begin when the bushes are quite young; for if planted the right distance apart--seven to nine feet--there must be large bare spaces between; but now that they have filled the greater part of the beds, I find that the other plants I tried are more to my liking. These are, foremost of all, _Andromeda Catesbæi_, then Lady Fern, and then the dwarf _Rhododendron myrtifolium_. The main spaces between the young bushes I plant with _Cistus laurifolius_, a perfectly hardy kind; this grows much faster than the Rhododendrons, and soon fills the middle spaces; by the time that the best of its life is over--for it is a short-lived bush--the Rhododendrons will be wanting all the space. Here and there in the inner spaces I put groups of _Lilium auratum_, a Lily that thrives in a peaty bed, and that looks its best when growing through other plants; moreover, when the Rhododendrons are out of flower, the Lily, whose blooming season is throughout the late summer and autumn, gives a new beauty and interest to that part of the garden. The time has come for pruning Roses, and for tying up and training the plants that clothe wall and fence and pergola. And this sets one thinking about climbing and rambling plants, and all their various ways and wants, and of how best to use them. One of my boundaries to a road is a fence about nine feet high, wall below and close oak paling above. It is planted with free-growing Roses of several types--Aimée Vibert, Madame Alfred Carrière, Reine Olga de Wurtemburg, and Bouquet d'Or, the strongest of the Dijon teas. Then comes a space of _Clematis Montana_ and _Clematis flammula_, and then more Roses--Madame Plantier, Emélie Plantier (a delightful Rose to cut), and some of the grand Sweetbriars raised by Lord Penzance. From midsummer onward these Roses are continually cut for flower, and yield an abundance of quite the most ornamental class of bloom. For I like to have cut Roses arranged in a large, free way, with whole branches three feet or four feet long, easy to have from these free-growing kinds, that throw out branches fifteen feet long in one season, even on our poor, sandy soil, that contains no particle of that rich loam that Roses love. I think this same Reine Olga, the grand grower from which have come our longest and largest prunings, must be quite the best evergreen Rose, for it holds its full clothing of handsome dark-green leaves right through the winter. It seems to like hard pruning. I have one on a part of the pergola, but have no pleasure from it, as it has rushed up to the top, and nothing shows but a few naked stems. [Illustration: GARDEN DOOR-WAY WREATHED WITH CLEMATIS GRAVEOLENS.] [Illustration: COTTAGE PORCH WREATHED WITH THE DOUBLE WHITE ROSE (_R. alba_).] One has to find out how to use all these different Roses. How often one sees the wrong Roses used as climbers on the walls of a house. I have seen a Gloire de Dijon covering the side of a house with a profitless reticulation of bare stem, and a few leaves and flowers looking into the gutter just under the edge of the roof. What are generally recommended as climbing Roses are too ready to ramp away, leaving bare, leggy growth where wall-clothing is desired. One of the best is climbing Aimée Vibert, for with very little pruning it keeps well furnished nearly to the ground, and with its graceful clusters of white bloom and healthy-looking, polished leaves is always one of the prettiest of Roses. Its only fault is that it does not shed its dead petals, but retains the whole bloom in dead brown clusters. But if a Rose wishes to climb, it should be accommodated with a suitable place. That excellent old Rose, the Dundee Rambler, or the still prettier Garland Rose, will find a way up a Holly-tree, and fling out its long wreaths of tenderly-tinted bloom; and there can be no better way of using the lovely Himalayan _R. Brunonis_, with its long, almost blue leaves and wealth of milk-white flower. A common Sweetbriar will also push up among the branches of some dark evergreen, Yew or Holly, and throw out aloft its scented branches and rosy bloom, and look its very best. But some of these same free Roses are best of all if left in a clear space to grow exactly as they will without any kind of support or training. So placed, they grow into large rounded groups. Every year, just after the young laterals on the last year's branches have flowered, they throw out vigorous young rods that arch over as they complete their growth, and will be the flower-bearers of the year to come. Two kinds of Roses of rambling growth that are rather tender, but indispensable for beauty, are Fortune's Yellow and the Banksias. Pruning the free Roses is always rough work for the hands and clothes, but of all Roses I know, the worst to handle is Fortune's Yellow. The prickles are hooked back in a way that no care or ingenuity can escape; and whether it is their shape and power of cruel grip, or whether they have anything of a poisonous quality, I do not know; but whereas hands scratched and torn by Roses in general heal quickly, the wounds made by Fortune's Yellow are much more painful and much slower to get well. I knew an old labourer who died of a rose-prick. He used to work about the roads, and at cleaning the ditches and mending the hedges. For some time I did not see him, and when I asked another old countryman, "What's gone o' Master Trussler?" the answer was, "He's dead--died of a canker-bush." The wild Dog-rose is still the "canker" in the speech of the old people, and a thorn or prickle is still a "bush." A Dog-rose prickle had gone deep into the old hedger's hand--a "bush" more or less was nothing to him, but the neglected little wound had become tainted with some impurity, blood-poisoning had set in, and my poor old friend had truly enough "died of a canker-bush." The flowering season of Fortune's Yellow is a very short one, but it comes so early, and the flowers have such incomparable beauty, and are so little like those of any other Rose, that its value is quite without doubt. Some of the Tea Roses approach it in its pink and copper colouring, but the loose, open, rather flaunting form of the flower, and the twisted set of the petals, display the colour better than is possible in any of the more regular-shaped Roses. It is a good plan to grow it through some other wall shrub, as it soon gets bare below, and the early maturing flowering tips are glad to be a little sheltered by the near neighbourhood of other foliage. I do not think that there is any other Rose that has just the same rich butter colour as the Yellow Banksian, and this unusual colouring is the more distinct because each little Rose in the cluster is nearly evenly coloured all over, besides being in such dense bunches. The season of bloom is very short, but the neat, polished foliage is always pleasant to see throughout the year. The white kind and the larger white are both lovely as to the individual bloom, but they flower so much more shyly that the yellow is much the better garden plant. But the best of all climbing or rambling plants, whether for wall or arbour or pergola, is undoubtedly the Grape-Vine. Even when trimly pruned and trained for fruit-bearing on an outer wall it is an admirable picture of leafage and fruit-cluster; but to have it in fullest beauty it must ramp at will, for it is only when the fast-growing branches are thrown out far and wide that it fairly displays its graceful vigour and the generous magnificence of its incomparable foliage. The hardy Chasselas, known in England by the rather misleading name Royal Muscadine, is one of the best, both for fruit and foliage. The leaves are of moderate size, with clearly serrated edges and that strongly waved outline that gives the impression of powerful build, and is, in fact, a mechanical contrivance intended to stiffen the structure. The colour of the leaves is a fresh, lively green, and in autumn they are prettily marbled with yellow. Where a very large-leaved Vine is wanted nothing is handsomer than the North American _Vitis Labrusca_ or the Asiatic _Vitis Coignettii_, whose autumn leaves are gorgeously coloured. For a place that demands more delicate foliage there is the Parsley-Vine, that has a delightful look of refinement, and another that should not be forgotten is the Claret-Vine, with autumnal colouring of almost scarlet and purple, and abundance of tightly clustered black fruit, nearly blue with a heavy bloom. Many an old house and garden can show the far-rambling power of the beautiful _Wistaria Chinensis_, and of the large-leaved _Aristolochia Sipho_, one of the best plants for covering a pergola, and of the varieties of _Ampelopsis_, near relations of the Grape-Vine. The limit of these notes only admits of mention of some of the more important climbers; but among these the ever-delightful white Jasmine must have a place. It will ramble far and fast if it has its own way, but then gives little flower; but by close winter pruning it can be kept full of bloom and leaf nearly to the ground. [Illustration: WILD HOP, ENTWINING WORMWOOD AND COW-PARSNIP.] The woods and hedges have also their beautiful climbing plants. Honeysuckle in suitable conditions will ramble to great heights--in this district most noticeable in tall Hollies and Junipers as well as in high hedges. The wild Clematis is most frequent on the chalk, where it laces together whole hedges and rushes up trees, clothing them in July with long wreaths of delicate bloom, and in September with still more conspicuous feathery seed. For rapid growth perhaps no English plant outstrips the Hop, growing afresh from the root every year, and almost equalling the Vine in beauty of leaf. The two kinds of wild Bryony are also herbaceous climbers of rapid growth, and among the most beautiful of our hedge plants. The wild Roses run up to great heights in hedge and thicket, and never look so well as when among the tangles of mixed growth of wild forest land or clambering through some old gnarled thorn-tree. The common Brambles are also best seen in these forest groups; these again in form of leaf show somewhat of a vine-like beauty. In the end of March, or at any time during the month when the wind is in the east or north-east, all increase and development of vegetation appears to cease. As things are, so they remain. Plants that are in flower retain their bloom, but, as it were, under protest. A kind of sullen dulness pervades all plant life. Sweet-scented shrubs do not give off their fragrance; even the woodland moss and earth and dead leaves withhold their sweet, nutty scent. The surface of the earth has an arid, infertile look; a slight haze of an ugly grey takes the colour out of objects in middle distance, and seems to rob the flowers of theirs, or to put them out of harmony with all things around. But a day comes, or, perhaps, a warmer night, when the wind, now breathing gently from the south-west, puts new life into all growing things. A marvellous change is wrought in a few hours. A little warm rain has fallen, and plants, invisible before, and doubtless still underground, spring into glad life. What an innocent charm there is about many of the true spring flowers. Primroses of many colours are now in bloom, but the prettiest, this year, is a patch of an early blooming white one, grouped with a delicate lilac. Then comes _Omphalodes verna_, with its flowers of brilliant blue and foliage of brightest green, better described by its pretty north-country name, Blue-eyed Mary. There are Violets of many colours, but daintiest of all is the pale-blue St. Helena; whether it is the effect of its delicate colouring, or whether it has really a better scent than other varieties of the common Violet, I cannot say, but it always seems to have a more refined fragrance. CHAPTER V APRIL Woodland spring flowers -- Daffodils in the copse -- Grape Hyacinths and other spring bulbs -- How best to plant them -- Flowering shrubs -- Rock-plants -- Sweet scents of April -- Snowy Mespilus, Marsh Marigolds, and other spring flowers -- Primrose garden -- Pollen of Scotch Fir -- Opening seed-pods of Fir and Gorse -- Auriculas -- Tulips -- Small shrubs for rock-garden -- Daffodils as cut flowers -- Lent Hellebores -- Primroses -- Leaves of wild Arum. In early April there is quite a wealth of flower among plants that belong half to wood and half to garden. _Epimedium pinnatum_, with its delicate, orchid-like spike of pale-yellow bloom, flowers with its last year's leaves, but as soon as it is fully out the young leaves rush up, as if hastening to accompany the flowers. _Dentaria pinnata_, a woodland plant of Switzerland and Austria, is one of the handsomest of the white-flowered _cruciferæ_, with well-filled heads of twelve to fifteen flowers, and palmate leaves of freshest green. Hard by, and the best possible plant to group with it, is the lovely Virginian Cowslip (_Mertensia virginica_), the very embodiment of the freshness of early spring. The sheaf of young leafage comes almost black out of the ground, but as the leaves develop, their dull, lurid colouring changes to a full, pale green of a curious texture, quite smooth, and yet absolutely unreflecting. The dark colouring of the young leaves now only remains as a faint tracery of veining on the backs of the leaves and stalks, and at last dies quite away as the bloom expands. The flower is of a rare and beautiful quality of colour, hard to describe--a rainbow-flower of purple, indigo, full and pale blue, and daintiest lilac, full of infinite variety and indescribable charm. The flowers are in terminal clusters, richly filled; lesser clusters springing from the axils of the last few leaves and joining with the topmost one to form a gracefully drooping head. The lurid colouring of the young leaves is recalled in the flower-stems and calix, and enhances the colour effect of the whole. The flower of the common Dog-tooth Violet is over, but the leaves have grown larger and handsomer. They look as if, originally of a purplish-red colour, some liquid had been dropped on them, making confluent pools of pale green, lightest at the centre of the drop. The noblest plant of the same family (_Erythronium giganteum_) is now in flower--a striking and beautiful wood plant, with turn-cap shaped flowers of palest straw-colour, almost white, and large leaves, whose markings are not drop-like as in the more familiar kind, but are arranged in a regular sequence of bold splashings, reminding one of a _Maranta_. The flowers, single or in pairs, rise on stems a foot or fifteen inches high; the throat is beautifully marked with flames of rich bay on a yellow ground, and the handsome group of golden-anthered stamens and silvery pistil make up a flower of singular beauty and refinement. That valuable Indian Primrose, _P. denticulata_, is another fine plant for the cool edge or shady hollows of woodland in rather good, deep soil. But the glory of the copse just now consists in the great stretches of Daffodils. Through the wood run shallow, parallel hollows, the lowest part of each depression some nine paces apart. Local tradition says they are the remains of old pack-horse roads; they occur frequently in the forest-like heathery uplands of our poor-soiled, sandy land, running, for the most part, three or four together, almost evenly side by side. The old people account for this by saying that when one track became too much worn another was taken by its side. Where these pass through the birch copse the Daffodils have been planted in the shallow hollows of the old ways, in spaces of some three yards broad by thirty or forty yards long--one kind at a time. Two of such tracks, planted with _Narcissus princeps_ and _N. Horsfieldi_, are now waving rivers of bloom, in many lights and accidents of cloud and sunshine full of pictorial effect. The planting of Daffodils in this part of the copse is much better than in any other portions where there were no guiding track-ways, and where they were planted in haphazard sprinklings. [Illustration: DAFFODILS IN THE COPSE.] The Grape Hyacinths are now in full bloom. It is well to avoid the common one (_Muscari racemosum_), at any rate in light soils, where it becomes a troublesome weed. One of the best is _M. conicum_; this, with the upright-leaved _M. botryoides_, and its white variety, are the best for general use, but the Plume Hyacinth, which flowers later, should have a place. _Ornithogalum nutans_ is another of the bulbous plants that, though beautiful in flower, becomes so pestilent a weed that it is best excluded. Where and how the early flowering bulbs had best be planted is a question of some difficulty. Perhaps the mixed border, where they are most usually put, is the worst place of all, for when in flower they only show as forlorn little patches of bloom rather far apart, and when their leaves die down, leaving their places looking empty, the ruthless spade or trowel stabs into them when it is desired to fill the space with some other plant. Moreover, when the border is manured and partly dug in the autumn, it is difficult to avoid digging up the bulbs just when they are in full root-growth. Probably the best plan is to devote a good space of cool bank to small bulbs and hardy ferns, planting the ferns in such groups as will leave good spaces for the bulbs; then as their leaves are going the fern fronds are developing and will cover the whole space. Another way is to have them among any groups of newly planted small shrubs, to be left there for spring blooming until the shrubs have covered their allotted space. Many flowering shrubs are in beauty. _Andromeda floribunda_ still holds its persistent bloom that has endured for nearly two months. The thick, drooping, tassel-like bunches of bloom of _Andromeda japonica_ are just going over. _Magnolia stellata_, a compact bush some five feet high and wide, is white with the multitude of its starry flowers; individually they look half double, having fourteen to sixteen petals. _Forsythia suspensa_, with its graceful habit and tender yellow flower, is a much better shrub than _F. viridissima_, though, strangely enough, that is the one most commonly planted. Corchorus, with its bright-yellow balls, the fine old rosy Ribes, the Japan Quinces and their salmon-coloured relative _Pyrus Mauleii_, _Spiræa Thunbergi_, with its neat habit and myriads of tiny flowers, these make frequent points of beauty and interest. In the rock-garden, _Cardamine trifoliata_ and _Hutchinsia alpina_ are conspicuous from their pure white flowers and neat habit; both have leaves of darkest green, as if the better to show off the bloom. _Ranunculus montanus_ fringes the cool base of a large stone; its whole height not over three inches, though its bright-yellow flowers are larger than field buttercups. The surface of the petals is curiously brilliant, glistening and flashing like glass. _Corydalis capnoides_ is a charming rock-plant, with flowers of palest sulphur colour, one of the neatest and most graceful of its family. [Illustration: MAGNOLIA STELLATA.] [Illustration: DAFFODILS AMONG JUNIPERS WHERE GARDEN JOINS COPSE.] Border plants are pushing up vigorous green growth; finest of all are the Veratrums, with their bold, deeply-plaited leaves of brilliant green. Delphiniums and Oriental Poppies have also made strong foliage, and Daylilies are conspicuous from their fresh masses of pale greenery. Flag Iris have their leaves three parts grown, and Pæonies are a foot or more high, in all varieties of rich red colouring. It is a good plan, when they are in beds or large groups, to plant the dark-flowered Wallflowers among them, their colour making a rich harmony with the reds of the young Pæony growths. There are balmy days in mid-April, when the whole garden is fragrant with Sweetbriar. It is not "fast of its smell," as Bacon says of the damask rose, but gives it so lavishly that one cannot pass near a plant without being aware of its gracious presence. Passing upward through the copse, the warm air draws a fragrance almost as sweet, but infinitely more subtle, from the fresh green of the young birches; it is like a distant whiff of Lily of the Valley. Higher still the young leafage of the larches gives a delightful perfume of the same kind. It seems as if it were the office of these mountain trees, already nearest the high heaven, to offer an incense of praise for their new life. Few plants will grow under Scotch fir, but a notable exception is the Whortleberry, now a sheet of brilliant green, and full of its arbutus-like, pink-tinged flower. This plant also has a pleasant scent in the mass, difficult to localise, but coming in whiffs as it will. The snowy Mespilus (_Amelanchier_) shows like puffs of smoke among the firs and birches, full of its milk-white, cherry-like bloom--a true woodland shrub or small tree. It loves to grow in a thicket of other trees, and to fling its graceful sprays about through their branches. It is a doubtful native, but naturalised and plentiful in the neighbouring woods. As seen in gardens, it is usually a neat little tree of shapely form, but it is more beautiful when growing at its own will in the high woods. Marshy hollows in the valleys are brilliant with Marsh Marigold (_Caltha palustris_); damp meadows have them in plenty, but they are largest and handsomest in the alder-swamps of our valley bottoms, where their great luscious clumps rise out of pools of black mud and water. _Adonis vernalis_ is one of the brightest flowers of the middle of April, the flowers looking large for the size of the plant. The bright-yellow, mostly eight-petalled, blooms are comfortably seated in dense, fennel-like masses of foliage. It makes strong tufts, that are the better for division every four years. The spring Bitter-vetch (_Orobus vernus_) blooms at the same time, a remarkably clean-looking plant, with its cheerful red and purple blossom and handsomely divided leaves. It is one of the toughest of plants to divide, the mass of black root is like so much wire. It is a good plan with plants that have such roots, when dividing-time comes, to take the clumps to a strong bench or block and cut them through at the crown with a sharp cold-chisel and hammer. Another of the showiest families of plants of the time is _Doronicum_. _D. Austriacum_ is the earliest, but it is closely followed by the fine _D. Plantagineum_. The large form of wood Forget-me-not (_Myosotis sylvatica major_) is in sheets of bloom, opening pink and changing to a perfect blue. This is a great improvement on the old smaller one. Grouped with it, as an informal border, and in patches running through and among its clumps, is the Foam-flower (_Tiarella cordifolia_), whose flower in the mass looks like the wreaths of foam tossed aside by a mountain torrent. By the end of the month the Satin-leaf (_Heuchera Richardsoni_) is pushing up its richly-coloured leaves, of a strong bronze-red, gradating to bronze-green at the outer edge. The beauty of the plant is in the colour and texture of the foliage. To encourage full leaf growth the flower stems should be pinched out, and as they push up rather persistently, they should be looked over every few days for about a fortnight. [Illustration: TIARELLA CORDIFOLIA. (_Height, 12 inches._)] [Illustration: HOLLYHOCK, PINK BEAUTY. (_See page 105._) (_Height, 9 feet._)] The Primrose garden is now in beauty, but I have so much to say about it that I have given it a chapter to itself towards the end of the book. The Scotch firs are shedding their pollen; a flowering branch shaken or struck with a stick throws out a pale-yellow cloud. Heavy rain will wash it out, so that after a storm the sides of the roads and paths look as if powdered sulphur had been washed up in drifts. The sun has gained great power, and on still bright days sharp _snicking_ sounds are to be heard from the firs. The dry cones of last year are opening, and the flattened seeds with their paper-like edges are fluttering down. Another sound, much like it but just a shade sharper and more _staccato_, is heard from the Gorse bushes, whose dry pods are flying open and letting fall the hard, polished, little bean-like seeds. Border Auriculas are making a brave show. Nothing in the flower year is more interesting than a bed of good seedlings of the Alpine class. I know nothing better for pure beauty of varied colouring among early flowers. Except in varieties of _Salpiglossis_, such rich gradation of colour, from pale lilac to rich purple, and from rosy pink to deepest crimson, is hardly to be found in any one family of plants. There are varieties of cloudings of smoky-grey, sometimes approaching black, invading, and at the same time enhancing, the purer colours, and numbers of shades of half-tones of red and purple, such as are comprised within the term _murrey_ of heraldry, and tender blooms of one colour, sulphurs and milk-whites--all with the admirable texture and excellent perfume that belong to the "Bear's-ears" of old English gardens. For practical purposes the florist's definition of a good Auricula is of little value; that is for the show-table, and, as Bacon says, "Nothing to the true pleasure of a garden." The qualities to look for in the bed of seedlings are not the narrowing ones of proportion of eye to tube, of exact circle in the circumference of the individual pip, and so on, but to notice whether the plant has a handsome look and stands up well, and is a delightful and beautiful thing as a whole. [Illustration: TULIPA RETROFLEXA.] [Illustration: LATE SINGLE TULIPS, BREEDERS AND BYBLOEMEN.] Tulips are the great garden flowers in the last week of April and earliest days of May. In this plant also the rule of the show-table is no sure guide to garden value; for the show Tulip, beautiful though it is, is of one class alone--namely, the best of the "broken" varieties of the self-coloured seedlings called "breeders." These seedlings, after some years of cultivation, change or "break" into a variation in which the original colouring is only retained in certain flames or feathers of colour, on a ground of either white or yellow. If the flames in each petal are symmetrical and well arranged, according to the rules laid down by the florist, it is a good flower; it receives a name, and commands a certain price. If, on the other hand, the markings are irregular, however beautiful the colouring, the flower is comparatively worthless, and is "thrown into mixture." The kinds that are the grandest in gardens are ignored by the florist. One of the best for graceful and delicate beauty is _Tulipa retroflexa_, of a soft lemon-yellow colour, and twisted and curled petals; then Silver Crown, a white flower with a delicate picotee-like thread of scarlet along the edge of the sharply pointed and reflexed petals. A variety of this called Sulphur Crown is only a little less beautiful. Then there is Golden Crown, also with pointed petals and occasional threadings of scarlet. Nothing is more gorgeous than the noble _Gesneriana major_, with its great chalice of crimson-scarlet and pools of blue in the inner base of each petal. The gorgeously flamed Parrot Tulips are indispensable, and the large double Yellow Rose, and the early double white La Candeur. Of the later kinds there are many of splendid colouring and noble port; conspicuous among them are _Reine d'Espagne_, _Couleur de vin_, and _Bleu celeste_. There are beautiful colourings of scarlet, crimson, yellow, chocolate, and purple among the "breeders," as well as among the so-called _bizarres_ and _bybloemen_ that comprise the show kinds. The best thing now in the rock-garden is a patch of some twenty plants of _Arnebia echioides_, always happy in our poor, dry soil. It is of the Borage family, a native of Armenia. It flowers in single or double-branching spikes of closely-set flowers of a fine yellow. Just below each indentation of the five-lobed corolla is a spot which looks black by contrast, but is of a very dark, rich, velvety brown. The day after the flower has expanded the spot has faded to a moderate brown, the next day to a faint tinge, and on the fourth day it is gone. The legend, accounting for the spots, says that Mahomet touched the flower with the tips of his fingers, hence its English name of Prophet-flower. The upper parts of the rock-garden that are beyond hand-reach are planted with dwarf shrubs, many of them sweetly scented either as to leaf or flower--_Gaultherias_, Sweet Gale, Alpine Rhododendron, _Skimmias_, _Pernettyas_, _Ledums_, and hardy Daphnes. _Daphne pontica_ now gives off delicious wafts of fragrance, intensely sweet in the evening. In March and April Daffodils are the great flowers for house decoration, coming directly after the Lent Hellebores. Many people think these beautiful late-flowering Hellebores useless for cutting because they live badly in water. But if properly prepared they live quite well, and will remain ten days in beauty. Directly they are cut, and immediately before putting in water, the stalks should be slit up three or four inches, or according to their length, and then put in deep, so that the water comes nearly up to the flowers; and so they should remain, in a cool place, for some hours, or for a whole night, after which they can be arranged for the room. Most of them are inclined to droop; it is the habit of the plant in growth; this may be corrected by arranging them with something stiff like Box or Berberis. _Anemone fulgens_ is a grand cutting flower, and looks well with its own leaves only or with flowering twigs of Laurustinus. Then there are Pansies, delightful things in a room, but they should be cut in whole branches of leafy stem and flower and bud. At first the growths are short and only suit dish-shaped things, but as the season goes on they grow longer and bolder, and graduate first into bowls and then into upright glasses. I think Pansies are always best without mixture of other flowers, and in separate colours, or only in such varied tints as make harmonies of one class of colour at a time. The big yellow and white bunch Primroses are delightful room flowers, beautiful, and of sweetest scent. When full-grown the flower-stalks are ten inches long and more. Among the seedlings there are always a certain number that are worthless. These are pounced upon as soon as they show their bloom, and cut up for greenery to go with the cut flowers, leaving the root-stock with all its middle foliage, and cutting away the roots and any rough outside leaves. When the first Daffodils are out and suitable greenery is not abundant in the garden (for it does not do to cut their own blades), I bring home handfuls of the wild Arum leaves, so common in roadside hedges, grasping the whole plant close to the ground; then a steady pull breaks it away from the tuber, and you have a fine long-stalked sheaf of leafage held together by its own underground stem. This should be prepared like the Lent Hellebores, by putting it deep in water for a time. I always think the trumpet Daffodils look better with this than with any other kind of foliage. When the wild Arum is full-grown the leaves are so large and handsome that they do quite well to accompany the white Arum flowers from the greenhouse. CHAPTER VI MAY Cowslips -- Morells -- Woodruff -- Felling oak timber -- Trillium and other wood-plants -- Lily of the Valley naturalised -- Rock-wall flowers -- Two good wall-shrubs -- Queen wasps -- Rhododendrons -- Arrangement for colour -- Separate colour-groups -- Difficulty of choosing -- Hardy Azaleas -- Grouping flowers that bloom together -- Guelder-rose as climber -- The garden-wall door -- The Pæony garden -- Moutans -- Pæony varieties -- Species desirable for garden. While May is still young, Cowslips are in beauty on the chalk lands a few miles distant, but yet within pleasant reach. They are finest of all in orchards, where the grass grows tall and strong under the half-shade of the old apple-trees, some of the later kinds being still loaded with bloom. The blooming of the Cowslip is the signal for a search for the Morell, one of the very best of the edible fungi. It grows in open woods or where the undergrowth has not yet grown high, and frequently in old parks and pastures near or under elms. It is quite unlike any other fungus; shaped like a tall egg, with the pointed end upwards, on a short, hollow stalk, and looking something like a sponge. It has a delicate and excellent flavour, and is perfectly wholesome. The pretty little Woodruff is in flower; what scent is so delicate as that of its leaves? They are almost sweeter when dried, each little whorl by itself, with the stalk cut closely away above and below. It is a pleasant surprise to come upon these fragrant little stars between the leaves of a book. The whole plant revives memories of rambles in Bavarian woodlands, and of Mai-trank, that best of the "cup" tribe of pleasant drinks, whose flavour is borrowed from its flowering tips. In the first week in May oak-timber is being felled. The wood is handsomer, from showing the grain better, when it is felled in the winter, but it is delayed till now because of the value of the bark for tanning, and just now the fast-rising sap makes the bark strip easily. A heavy fall is taking place in the fringes of a large wood of old Scotch fir. Where the oaks grow there is a blue carpet of wild Hyacinth; the pathway is a slightly hollowed lane, so that the whole sheet of flower right and left is nearly on a level with the eye, and looks like solid pools of blue. The oaks not yet felled are putting forth their leaves of golden bronze. The song of the nightingale and the ring of the woodman's axe gain a rich musical quality from the great fir wood. Why a wood of Scotch fir has this wonderful property of a kind of musical reverberation I do not know; but so it is. Any sound that occurs within it is, on a lesser scale, like a sound in a cathedral. The tree itself when struck gives a musical note. Strike an oak or an elm on the trunk with a stick, and the sound is mute; strike a Scotch fir, and it is a note of music. [Illustration: TRILLIUM IN THE WILD GARDEN.] In the copse are some prosperous patches of the beautiful North American Wood-lily (_Trillium grandiflorum_). It likes a bed of deep leaf-soil on levels or cool slopes in woodland, where its large white flowers and whorls of handsome leaves look quite at home. Beyond it are widely spreading patches of Solomon's Seal and tufts of the Wood-rush (_Luzula sylvatica_), showing by their happy vigour how well they like their places, while the natural woodland carpet of moss and dead leaves puts the whole together. Higher in the copse the path runs through stretches of the pretty little _Smilacina bifolia_, and the ground beyond this is a thick bed of Whortleberry, filling all the upper part of the copse under oak and birch and Scotch fir. The little flower-bells of the Whortleberry have already given place to the just-formed fruit, which will ripen in July, and be a fine feast for the blackbirds. Other parts of the copse, where there was no Heath or Whortleberry, were planted thinly with the large Lily of the Valley. It has spread and increased and become broad sheets of leaf and bloom, from which thousands of flowers can be gathered without making gaps, or showing that any have been removed; when the bloom is over the leaves still stand in handsome masses till they are hidden by the fast-growing bracken. They do not hurt each other, as it seems that the Lily of the Valley, having the roots running just underground, while the fern-roots are much deeper, the two occupy their respective _strata_ in perfect good fellowship. The neat little _Smilacina_ is a near relation of the Lily of the Valley; its leaves are of an even more vivid green, and its little modest spikes of white flower are charming. It loves the poor, sandy soil, and increases in it fast, but will have nothing to say to clay. A very delicate and beautiful North American fern (_Dicksonia punctilobulata_) proves a good colonist in the copse. It spreads rapidly by creeping roots, and looks much like our native _Thelipteris_, but is of a paler green colour. In the rock-garden the brightest patches of bloom are shown by the tufts of dwarf Wallflowers; of these, _Cheiranthus alpinus_ has a strong lemon colour that is of great brilliancy in the mass, and _C. Marshalli_ is of a dark orange colour, equally powerful. The curiously-tinted _C. mutabilis_, as its name implies, changes from a light mahogany colour when just open, first to crimson and then to purple. In length of life _C. alpinus_ and _C. Marshalli_ are rather more than biennials, and yet too short-lived to be called true perennials; cuttings of one year flower the next, and are handsome tufts the year after, but are scarcely worth keeping longer. _C. mutabilis_ is longer lived, especially if the older growths are cut right away, when the tuft will generally spring into vigorous new life. _Orobus aurantiacus_ is a beautiful plant not enough grown, one of the handsomest of the Pea family, with flowers of a fine orange colour, and foliage of a healthy-looking golden-green. A striking and handsome plant in the upper part of the rockery is _Othonna cheirifolia_; its aspect is unusual and interesting, with its bunches of thick, blunt-edged leaves of blue-grey colouring, and large yellow daisy flowers. There is a pretty group of the large white Thrift, and near it a spreading carpet of blue Veronica and some of the splendid gentian-blue _Phacelia campanularia_, a valuable annual for filling any bare patches of rockery where its brilliant colouring will suit the neighbouring plants, or, best of all, in patches among dwarf ferns, where its vivid blue would be seen to great advantage. Two wall-shrubs have been conspicuously beautiful during May; the Mexican Orange-flower (_Choisya ternata_) has been smothered in its white bloom, so closely resembling orange-blossom. With a slight winter protection of fir boughs it seems quite at home in our hot, dry soil, grows fast, and is very easy to propagate by layers. When cut, it lasts for more than a week in water. _Piptanthus nepalensis_ has also made a handsome show, with its abundant yellow, pea-shaped bloom and deep-green trefoil leaves. The dark-green stems have a slight bloom on a half-polished surface, and a pale ring at each joint gives them somewhat the look of bamboos. Now is the time to look out for the big queen wasps and to destroy as many as possible. They seem to be specially fond of the flowers of two plants, the large perennial Cornflower (_Centaurea montana_) and the common Cotoneaster. I have often secured a dozen in a few minutes on one or other of these plants, first knocking them down with a battledore. Now, in the third week of May, Rhododendrons are in full bloom on the edge of the copse. The plantation was made about nine years ago, in one of the regions where lawn and garden were to join the wood. During the previous blooming season the best nurseries were visited and careful observations made of colouring, habit, and time of blooming. The space they were to fill demanded about seventy bushes, allowing an average of eight feet from plant to plant--not seventy different kinds, but, perhaps, ten of one kind, and two or three fives, and some threes, and a few single plants, always bearing in mind the ultimate intention of pictorial aspect as a whole. In choosing the plants and in arranging and disposing the groups these ideas were kept in mind: to make pleasant ways from lawn to copse; to group only in beautiful colour harmonies; to choose varieties beautiful in themselves; to plant thoroughly well, and to avoid overcrowding. Plantations of these grand shrubs are generally spoilt or ineffective, if not absolutely jarring, for want of attention to these simple rules. The choice of kinds is now so large, and the variety of colouring so extensive, that nothing can be easier than to make beautiful combinations, if intending planters will only take the small amount of preliminary trouble that is needful. Some of the clumps are of brilliant scarlet-crimson, rose and white, but out of the great choice of colours that might be so named only those are chosen that make just the colour-harmony that was intended. A large group, quite detached from this one, and more in the shade of the copse, is of the best of the lilacs, purples, and whites. When some clumps of young hollies have grown, those two groups will not be seen at the same time, except from a distance. The purple and white group is at present rather the handsomest, from the free-growing habit of the fine old kind _Album elegans_, which forms towering masses at the back. A detail of pictorial effect that was aimed at, and that has come out well, was devised in the expectation that the purple groups would look richer in the shade, and the crimson ones in the sun. This arrangement has answered admirably. Before planting, the ground, of the poorest quality possible, was deeply trenched, and the Rhododendrons were planted in wide holes filled with peat, and finished with a comfortable "mulch," or surface-covering of farmyard manure. From this a supply of grateful nutriment was gradually washed in to the roots. This beneficial surface-dressing was renewed every year for two years after planting, and even longer in the case of the slower growing kinds. No plant better repays care during its early years. Broad grass paths leading from the lawn at several points pass among the clumps, and are continued through the upper parts of the copse, passing through zones of different trees; first a good stretch of birch and holly, then of Spanish chestnut, next of oak, and finally of Scotch fir, with a sprinkling of birch and mountain ash, all with an undergrowth of heath and whortleberry and bracken. Thirty years ago it was all a wood of old Scotch fir. This was cut at its best marketable maturity, and the present young wood is made of what came up self-sown. This natural wild growth was thick enough to allow of vigorous cutting out, and the preponderance of firs in the upper part and of birch in the lower suggested that these were the kinds that should predominate in their respective places. [Illustration: RHODODENDRONS WHERE THE COPSE AND GARDEN MEET.] It may be useful to describe a little more in detail the plan I followed in grouping Rhododendrons, for I feel sure that any one with a feeling for harmonious colouring, having once seen or tried some such plan, will never again approve of the haphazard mixtures. There may be better varieties representing the colourings aimed at in the several groups, but those named are ones that I know, and they will serve as well as any others to show what is meant. The colourings seem to group themselves into six classes of easy harmonies, which I venture to describe thus:-- 1. Crimsons inclining to scarlet or blood-colour grouped with dark claret-colour and true pink. In this group I have planted Nigrescens, dark claret-colour; John Waterer and James Marshall Brook, both fine red-crimsons; Alexander Adie and Atrosanguineum, good crimsons, inclining to blood-colour; Alarm, rosy-scarlet; and Bianchi, pure pink. 2. Light scarlet rose colours inclining to salmon, a most desirable range of colour, but of which the only ones I know well are Mrs. R. S. Holford, and a much older kind, Lady Eleanor Cathcart. These I put by themselves, only allowing rather near them the good pink Bianchi. 3. Rose colours inclining to amaranth. 4. Amaranths or magenta-crimsons. 5. Crimson or amaranth-purples. 6. Cool clear purples of the typical _ponticum_ class, both dark and light, grouped with lilac-whites, such as _Album elegans_ and _Album grandiflorum_. The beautiful partly-double _Everestianum_ comes into this group, but nothing redder among purples. _Fastuosum florepleno_ is also admitted, and _Luciferum_ and _Reine Hortense_, both good lilac-whites. But the purples that are most effective are merely _ponticum_ seedlings, chosen when in bloom in the nursery for their depth and richness of cool purple colour. My own space being limited, I chose three of the above groups only, leaving out, as of colouring less pleasing to my personal liking, groups 3, 4, and 5. The remaining ones gave me examples of colouring the most widely different, and at the same time the most agreeable to my individual taste. It would have been easier, if that had been the object, to have made groups of the three other classes of colouring, which comprise by far the largest number of the splendid varieties now grown. There are a great many beautiful whites; of these, two that I most admire are Madame Carvalho and Sappho; the latter is an immense flower, with a conspicuous purple blotch. There is also a grand old kind called Minnie, a very large-growing one, with fine white trusses; and a dwarf-growing white that comes early into bloom is Cunningham's White, also useful for forcing, as it is a small plant, and a free bloomer. [Illustration: GRASS WALKS THROUGH THE COPSE.] Nothing is more perplexing than to judge of the relative merits of colours in a Rhododendron nursery, where they are all mixed up. I have twice been specially to look for varieties of a true pink colour, but the quantity of untrue pinks is so great that anything approaching a clear pink looks much better than it is. In this way I chose Kate Waterer and Sylph, both splendid varieties; but when I grew them with my true pink Bianchi they would not do, the colour having the suspicion of rank quality that I wished to keep out of that group. This same Bianchi, with its mongrel-sounding name, I found was not grown in the larger nurseries. I had it from Messrs. Maurice Young, of the Milford Nurseries, near Godalming. I regretted to hear lately from some one to whom I recommended it that it could not be supplied. It is to be hoped that so good a thing has not been lost. A little way from the main Rhododendron clumps, and among bushy Andromedas, I have the splendid hybrid of _R. Aucklandi_, raised by Mr. A. Waterer. The trusses are astoundingly large, and the individual blooms large and delicately beautiful, like small richly-modelled lilies of a tender, warm, white colour. It is quite hardy south of London, and unquestionably desirable. Its only fault is leggy growth; one year's growth measures twenty-three inches, but this only means that it should be planted among other bushes. [Illustration: RHODODENDRONS AT THE EDGE OF THE COPSE.] The last days of May see hardy Azaleas in beauty. Any of them may be planted in company, for all their colours harmonise. In this garden, where care is taken to group plants well for colour, the whites are planted at the lower and more shady end of the group; next come the pale yellows and pale pinks, and these are followed at a little distance by kinds whose flowers are of orange, copper, flame, and scarlet-crimson colourings; this strong-coloured group again softening off at the upper end by strong yellows, and dying away into the woodland by bushes of the common yellow _Azalea pontica_, and its variety with flowers of larger size and deeper colour. The plantation is long in shape, straggling over a space of about half an acre, the largest and strongest-coloured group being in an open clearing about midway in the length. The ground between them is covered with a natural growth of the wild Ling (_Calluna_) and Whortleberry, and the small, white-flowered Bed-straw, with the fine-bladed Sheep's-fescue grass, the kind most abundant in heathland. The surrounding ground is copse, of a wild, forest-like character, of birch and small oak. A wood-path of wild heath cut short winds through the planted group, which also comprises some of the beautiful white-flowered Californian _Azalea occidentalis_, and bushes of some of the North American Vacciniums. Azaleas should never be planted among or even within sight of Rhododendrons. Though both enjoy a moist peat soil, and have a near botanical relationship, they are incongruous in appearance, and impossible to group together for colour. This must be understood to apply to the two classes of plants of the hardy kinds, as commonly grown in gardens. There are tender kinds of the East Indian families that are quite harmonious, but those now in question are the ordinary varieties of so-called Ghent Azaleas, and the hardy hybrid Rhododendrons. In the case of small gardens, where there is only room for one bed or clump of peat plants, it would be better to have a group of either one or the other of these plants, rather than spoil the effect by the inharmonious mixture of both. I always think it desirable to group together flowers that bloom at the same time. It is impossible, and even undesirable, to have a garden in blossom all over, and groups of flower-beauty are all the more enjoyable for being more or less isolated by stretches of intervening greenery. As one lovely group for May I recommend Moutan Pæony and _Clematis montana_, the Clematis on a wall low enough to let its wreaths of bloom show near the Pæony. The old Guelder Rose or Snowball-tree is beautiful anywhere, but I think it best of all on the cold side of a wall. Of course it is perfectly hardy, and a bush of strong, sturdy growth, and has no need of the wall either for support or for shelter; but I am for clothing the garden walls with all the prettiest things they can wear, and no shrub I know makes a better show. Moreover, as there is necessarily less wood in a flat wall tree than in a round bush, and as the front shoots must be pruned close back, it follows that much more strength is thrown into the remaining wood, and the blooms are much larger. I have a north wall eleven feet high, with a Guelder Rose on each side of a doorway, and a _Clematis montana_ that is trained on the top of the whole. The two flower at the same time, their growths mingling in friendly fashion, while their unlikeness of habit makes the companionship all the more interesting. The Guelder Rose is a stiff-wooded thing, the character of its main stems being a kind of stark uprightness, though the great white balls hang out with a certain freedom from the newly-grown shoots. The Clematis meets it with an exactly opposite way of growth, swinging down its great swags of many-flowered garland masses into the head of its companion, with here and there a single flowering streamer making a tiny wreath on its own account. On the southern sides of the same gateway are two large bushes of the Mexican Orange-flower (_Choisya ternata_), loaded with its orange-like bloom. Buttresses flank the doorway on this side, dying away into the general thickness of the wall above the arch by a kind of roofing of broad flat stones that lay back at an easy pitch. In mossy hollows at their joints and angles, some tufts of Thrift and of little Rock Pinks have found a home, and show as tenderly-coloured tufts of rather dull pink bloom. Above all is the same white Clematis, some of its abundant growth having been trained over the south side, so that this one plant plays a somewhat important part in two garden-scenes. Through the gateway again, beyond the wall northward and partly within its shade, is a portion of ground devoted to Pæonies, in shape a long triangle, whose proportion in length is about thrice its breadth measured at the widest end. A low cross-wall, five feet high, divides it nearly in half near the Guelder Roses, and it is walled again on the other long side of the triangle by a rough structure of stone and earth, which, in compliment to its appearance, we call the Old Wall, of which I shall have something to say later. Thus the Pæonies are protected all round, for they like a sheltered place, and the Moutans do best with even a little passing shade at some time of the day. Moutan is the Chinese name for Tree Pæony. For an immense hardy flower of beautiful colouring what can equal the salmon-rose Moutan Reine Elizabeth? Among the others that I have, those that give me most pleasure are Baronne d'Alès and Comtesse de Tuder, both pinks of a delightful quality, and a lovely white called Bijou de Chusan. The Tree Pæonies are also beautiful in leaf; the individual leaves are large and important, and so carried that they are well displayed. Their colour is peculiar, being bluish, but pervaded with a suspicion of pink or pinkish-bronze, sometimes of a metallic quality that faintly recalls some of the variously-coloured alloys of metal that the Japanese bronze-workers make and use with such consummate skill. [Illustration: SOUTH SIDE OF DOOR, WITH CLEMATIS MONTANA AND CHOISYA.] [Illustration: NORTH SIDE OF THE SAME DOOR, WITH CLEMATIS MONTANA AND GUELDER-ROSE.] It is a matter of regret that varieties of the better kinds of Moutans are not generally grown on their own roots, and still more so that the stock in common use should not even be the type Tree Pæony, but one of the herbaceous kinds, so that we have plants of a hard-wooded shrub worked on a thing as soft as a Dahlia root. This is probably the reason why they are so difficult to establish, and so slow to grow, especially on light soils, even when their beds have been made deep and liberally enriched with what one judges to be the most gratifying comfort. Every now and then, just before blooming time, a plant goes off all at once, smitten with sudden death. At the time of making my collection I was unable to visit the French nurseries where these plants are so admirably grown, and whence most of the best kinds have come. I had to choose them by the catalogue description--always an unsatisfactory way to any one with a keen eye for colour, although in this matter the compilers of foreign catalogues are certainly less vague than those of our own. Many of the plants therefore had to be shifted into better groups for colour after their first blooming, a matter the more to be regretted as Pæonies dislike being moved. The other half of the triangular bit of Pæony ground--the pointed end--is given to the kinds I like best of the large June-flowered Pæonies, the garden varieties of the Siberian _P. albiflora_, popularly known as Chinese Pæonies. Though among these, as is the case with all the kinds, there is a preponderance of pink or rose-crimson colouring of a decidedly rank quality, yet the number of varieties is so great, that among the minority of really good colouring there are plenty to choose from, including a good number of beautiful whites and whites tinged with yellow. Of those I have, the kinds I like best are-- Hypatia, pink. Madame Benare, salmon-rose. The Queen, pale salmon-rose. Léonie, salmon-rose. Virginie, warm white. Solfaterre, pale yellow. Edouard André, deep claret. Madame Calot, flesh pink. Madame Bréon. Alba sulfurea. Triomphans gandavensis. Carnea elegans (Guerin). Curiosa, pink and blush. Prince Pierre Galitzin, blush. Eugenie Verdier, pale pink. Elegans superbissima, yellowish-white. Virgo Maria, white. Philomèle, blush. Madame Dhour, rose. Duchesse de Nemours, yellow-white. Faust. Belle Douaisienne. Jeanne d'Arc. Marie Lemoine. Many of the lovely flowers in this class have a rather strong, sweet smell, something like a mixture of the scents of Rose and Tulip. Then there are the old garden Pæonies, the double varieties of _P. officinalis_. They are in three distinct colourings--full rich crimson, crimson-rose, and pale pink changing to dull white. These are the earliest to flower, and with them it is convenient, from the garden point of view, to class some of the desirable species. Some years ago my friend Mr. Barr kindly gave me a set of the Pæony species as grown by him. I wished to have them, not for the sake of making a collection, but in order to see which were the ones I should like best to grow as garden flowers. In due time they grew into strong plants and flowered. A good many had to be condemned because of the raw magenta colour of the bloom, one or two only that had this defect being reprieved on account of their handsome foliage and habit. Prominent among these was _P. decora_, with bluish foliage handsomely displayed, the whole plant looking strong and neat and well-dressed. Others whose flower-colour I cannot commend, but that seemed worth growing on account of their rich masses of handsome foliage, are _P. triternata_ and _P. Broteri_. Though small in size, the light red flower of _P. lobata_ is of a beautiful colour. _P. tenuifolia_, in both single and double form, is an old garden favourite. _P. Wittmanniana_, with its yellow-green leaves and tender yellow flower, is a gem; but it is rather rare, and probably uncertain, for mine, alas! had no sooner grown into a fine clump than it suddenly died. All Pæonies are strong feeders. Their beds should be deeply and richly prepared, and in later years they are grateful for liberal gifts of manure, both as surface dressings and waterings. Friends often ask me vaguely about Pæonies, and when I say, "What kind of Pæonies?" they have not the least idea. Broadly, and for garden purposes, one may put them into three classes-- 1. Tree Pæonies (_P. moutan_), shrubby, flowering in May. 2. Chinese Pæonies (_P. albiflora_), herbaceous, flowering in June. 3. Old garden Pæonies (_P. officinalis_), herbaceous, including some other herbaceous species. I find it convenient to grow Pæony species and Caulescent (Lent) Hellebores together. They are in a wide border on the north side of the high wall and partly shaded by it. They are agreed in their liking for deeply-worked ground with an admixture of loam and lime, for shelter, and for rich feeding; and the Pæony clumps, set, as it were, in picture frames of the lower-growing Hellebores, are seen to all the more advantage. [Illustration: FREE CLUSTER-ROSE AS STANDARD IN A COTTAGE GARDEN.] CHAPTER VII JUNE The gladness of June -- The time of Roses -- Garden Roses -- Reine Blanche -- The old white Rose -- Old garden Roses as standards -- Climbing and rambling Roses -- Scotch Briars -- Hybrid Perpetuals a difficulty -- Tea Roses -- Pruning -- Sweet Peas, autumn sown -- Elder-trees -- Virginian Cowslip -- Dividing spring-blooming plants -- Two best Mulleins -- White French Willow -- Bracken. What is one to say about June--the time of perfect young summer, the fulfilment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade? For my own part I wander up into the wood and say, "June is here--June is here; thank God for lovely June!" The soft cooing of the wood-dove, the glad song of many birds, the flitting of butterflies, the hum of all the little winged people among the branches, the sweet earth-scents--all seem to say the same, with an endless reiteration, never wearying because so gladsome. It is the offering of the Hymn of Praise! The lizards run in and out of the heathy tufts in the hot sunshine, and as the long day darkens the night-jar trolls out his strange song, so welcome because it is the prelude to the perfect summer night; here and there a glowworm shows its little lamp. June is here--June is here; thank God for lovely June! And June is the time of Roses. I have great delight in the best of the old garden Roses; the Provence (Cabbage Rose), sweetest of all sweets, and the Moss Rose, its crested variety; the early Damask, and its red and white striped kind; the old, nearly single, Reine Blanche. I do not know the origin of this charming Rose, but by its appearance it should be related to the Damask. A good many years ago I came upon it in a cottage garden in Sussex, and thought I had found a white Damask. The white is a creamy white, the outsides of the outer petals are stained with red, first showing clearly in the bud. The scent is delicate and delightful, with a faint suspicion of Magnolia. A few years ago this pretty old Rose found its way to one of the meetings of the Royal Horticultural Society, where it gained much praise. It was there that I recognised my old friend, and learned its name. I am fond of the old _Rosa alba_, both single and double, and its daughter, Maiden's Blush. How seldom one sees these Roses except in cottage gardens; but what good taste it shows on the cottager's part, for what Rose is so perfectly at home upon the modest little wayside porch? I have also learnt from cottage gardens how pretty are some of the old Roses grown as standards. The picture of my neighbour, Mrs. Edgeler, picking me a bunch from her bush, shows how freely they flower, and what fine standards they make. I have taken the hint, and have now some big round-headed standards, the heads a yard through, of the lovely Celeste and of Madame Plantier, that are worth looking at, though one of them is rather badly-shaped this year, for my handsome Jack (donkey) ate one side of it when he was waiting outside the studio door, while his cart-load of logs for the ingle fire was being unloaded. What a fine thing, among the cluster Roses, is the old Dundee Rambler! I trained one to go up a rather upright green Holly about twenty-five feet high, and now it has rushed up and tumbles out at the top and sides in masses of its pretty bloom. It is just as good grown as a "fountain," giving it a free space where it can spread at will with no training or support whatever. These two ways I think are much the best for growing the free, rambling Roses. In the case of the fountain, the branches arch over and display the flowers to perfection; if you tie your Rose up to a tall post or train it over an arch or _pergola_, the birds flying overhead have the best of the show. The Garland Rose, another old sort, is just as suitable for this kind of growth as Dundee Rambler, and the individual flowers, of a tender blush-colour, changing to white, are even more delicate and pretty. The newer Crimson Rambler is a noble plant for the same use, in sunlight gorgeous of bloom, and always brilliant with its glossy bright-green foliage. Of the many good plants from Japan, this is the best that has reached us of late years. The Himalayan _Rosa Brunonii_ is loaded with its clusters of milk-white bloom, that are so perfectly in harmony with its very long, almost blue leaves. But of all the free-growing Roses, the most remarkable for rampant growth is _R. polyantha_. One of the bushes in this garden covers a space thirty-four feet across--more than a hundred feet round. It forms a great fountain-like mass, covered with myriads of its small white flowers, whose scent is carried a considerable distance. Directly the flower is over it throws up rods of young growth eighteen to twenty feet long; as they mature they arch over, and next year their many short lateral shoots will be smothered with bloom. Two other Roses of free growth are also great favourites--Madame Alfred Carrière, with long-stalked loose white flowers, and Emilie Plantier. I have them on an east fence, where they yield a large quantity of bloom for cutting; indeed, they have been so useful in this way that I have planted several more, but this time for training down to an oak trellis, like the one that supports the row of Bouquet d'Or, in order to bring the flowers within easier reach. Now we look for the bloom of the Burnet Rose (_Rosa spinosissima_), a lovely native plant, and its garden varieties, the Scotch Briars. The wild plant is widely distributed in England, though somewhat local. It grows on moors in Scotland, and on Beachy Head in Sussex, and near Tenby in South Wales, favouring wild places within smell of the sea. The rather dusky foliage sets off the lemon-white of the wild, and the clear white, pink, rose, and pale yellow of the double garden kinds. The hips are large and handsome, black and glossy, and the whole plant in late autumn assumes a fine bronzy colouring between ashy black and dusky red. Other small old garden Roses are coming into bloom. One of the most desirable, and very frequent in this district, is _Rosa lucida_, with red stems, highly-polished leaves, and single, fragrant flowers of pure rosy-pink colour. The leaves turn a brilliant yellow in autumn, and after they have fallen the bushes are still bright with the coloured stems and the large clusters of bright-red hips. It is the St. Mark's Rose of Venice, where it is usually in flower on St. Mark's Day, April 25th. The double variety is the old _Rose d'amour_, now rare in gardens; its half-expanded bud is perhaps the most daintily beautiful thing that any Rose can show. [Illustration: DOUBLE WHITE SCOTCH BRIAR.] After many years of fruitless effort I have to allow that I am beaten in the attempt to grow the Grand Roses in the Hybrid Perpetual class. They plainly show their dislike to our dry hill, even when their beds are as well enriched as I can contrive or afford to make them. The rich loam that they love has to come many miles from the Weald by hilly roads in four-horse waggons, and the haulage is so costly that when it arrives I feel like distributing it with a spoon rather than with the spade. Moreover, even if a bed is filled with the precious loam, unless constantly watered the plants seem to feel and resent the two hundred feet of dry sand and rock that is under them before any moister stratum is reached. But the Tea Roses are more accommodating, and do fairly well, though, of course, not so well as in a stiffer soil. If I were planting again I should grow a still larger proportion of the kinds I have now found to do best. Far beyond all others is Madame Lambard, good alike early and late, and beautiful at all times. In this garden it yields quite three times as much bloom as any other; nothing else can approach it either for beauty or bounty. Viscountess Folkestone, not properly a Tea, but classed among Hybrid Noisettes, is also free and beautiful and long-enduring; and Papa Gontier, so like a deeper-coloured Lambard, is another favourite. Bouquet d'Or is here the strongest of the Dijon Teas. I grow it in several positions, but most conveniently on a strong bit of oak post and rail trellis, keeping the long growths tied down, and every two years cutting the oldest wood right out. It is well to remember that the tying or pegging down of Roses always makes them bloom better: every joint from end to end wants to make a good Rose; if the shoots are more upright, the blooming strength goes more to the top. The pruning of Tea Roses is quite different from the pruning required for the Hybrid Perpetuals. In these the last year's growth is cut back in March to within two to five eyes from where it leaves the main branch, according to the strength of the kind. This must not be done with the Teas. With these the oldest wood is cut right out from the base, and the blooming shoots left full length. But it is well, towards the end of July or beginning of August, to cut back the ends of soft summer shoots in order to give them a chance of ripening what is left. When an old Tea looks worn out, if cut right down in March or April it will often throw out vigorous young growth, and quite renew its life. [Illustration: PART OF A BUSH OF ROSA POLYANTHA.] [Illustration: GARLAND-ROSE, SHOWING NATURAL WAY OF GROWTH.] Within the first days of June we can generally pick some Sweet Peas from the rows sown in the second week of September. They are very much stronger than those sown in spring. By November they are four inches high, and seem to gain strength and sturdiness during the winter; for as soon as spring comes they shoot up with great vigour, and we know that the spray used to support them must be two feet higher than for those that are spring-sown. The flower-stalks are a foot long, and many have four flowers on a stalk. They are sown in shallow trenches; in spring they are earthed up very slightly, but still with a little trench at the base of the plants. A few doses of liquid manure are a great help when they are getting towards blooming strength. I am very fond of the Elder-tree. It is a sociable sort of thing; it seems to like to grow near human habitations. In my own mind it is certainly the tree most closely associated with the pretty old cottage and farm architecture of my part of the country; no bush or tree, not even the apple, seems to group so well or so closely with farm buildings. When I built a long thatched shed for the many needs of the garden, in the region of pits and frames, compost, rubbish and burn-heap, I planted Elders close to the end of the building and on one side of the yard. They look just right, and are, moreover, every year loaded with their useful fruit. This is ripe quite early in September, and is made into Elder wine, to be drunk hot in winter, a comfort by no means to be despised. My trees now give enough for my own wants, and there are generally a few acceptable bushels to spare for my cottage neighbours. About the middle of the month the Virginian Cowslip (_Mertensia virginica_) begins to turn yellow before dying down. Now is the time to look out for the seeds. A few ripen on the plant, but most of them fall while green, and then ripen in a few days while lying on the ground. I shake the seeds carefully out, and leave them lying round the parent-plant; a week later, when they will be ripe, they are lightly scratched into the ground. Some young plants of last year's growth I mark with a bit of stick, in case of wanting some later to plant elsewhere, or to send away; the plant dies away completely, leaving no trace above ground, so that if not marked it would be difficult to find what is wanted. [Illustration: LILAC MARIE LEGRAYE. (_See page 23._)] [Illustration: FLOWERING ELDER AND PATH FROM GARDEN TO COPSE.] This is also the time for pulling to pieces and replanting that good spring plant, the large variety of _Myosotis dissitiflora_; I always make sure of divisions, as seed does not come true. _Primula rosea_ should also be divided now, and planted to grow on in a cool place, such as the foot of a north or east wall, or be put at once in its place in some cool, rather moist spot in the rock-garden. Two-year-old plants come up with thick clumps of matted root that is now useless. I cut off the whole mass of old root about an inch below the crown, when it can easily be divided into nice little bits for replanting. Many other spring-flowering plants may with advantage be divided now, such as Aubrietia, Arabis, Auricula, Tiarella, and Saxifrage. The young Primrose plants, sown in March, have been planted out in their special garden, and are looking well after some genial rain. The great branching Mullein, _Verbascum olympicum_, is just going out of bloom, after making a brilliant display for a fortnight. It is followed by the other of the most useful tall, yellow-flowered kinds, _V. phlomoides_. Both are seen at their best either quite early in the morning, or in the evening, or in half-shade, as, like all their kind, they do not expand their bloom in bright sunshine. Both are excellent plants on poor soils. _V. olympicum_, though classed as a biennial, does not come to flowering strength till it is three or four years old; but meanwhile the foliage is so handsome that even if there were no flower it would be a worthy garden plant. It does well in any waste spaces of poor soil, where, by having plants of all ages, there will be some to flower every year. The Mullein moth is sure to find them out, and it behoves the careful gardener to look for and destroy the caterpillars, or he may some day find, instead of his stately Mulleins, tall stems only clothed with unsightly grey rags. The caterpillars are easily caught when quite small or when rather large; but midway in their growth, when three-quarters of an inch long, they are wary, and at the approach of the avenging gardener they will give a sudden wriggling jump, and roll down into the lower depths of the large foliage, where they are difficult to find. But by going round the plants twice a day for about a week they can all be discovered. The white variety of the French Willow (_Epilobium angustifolium_) is a pretty plant in the edges of the copse, good both in sun and shade, and flourishing in any poor soil. In better ground it grows too rank, running quickly at the root and invading all its neighbours, so that it should be planted with great caution; but when grown on poor ground it flowers at from two feet to four feet high, and its whole aspect is improved by the proportional amount of flower becoming much larger. Towards the end of June the bracken that covers the greater part of the ground of the copse is in full beauty. No other manner of undergrowth gives to woodland in so great a degree the true forest-like character. This most ancient plant speaks of the old, untouched land of which large stretches still remain in the south of England--land too poor to have been worth cultivating, and that has therefore for centuries endured human contempt. In the early part of the present century, William Cobbett, in his delightful book, "Rural Rides," speaking of the heathy headlands and vast hollow of Hindhead, in Surrey, calls it "certainly the most villainous spot God ever made." This gives expression to his view, as farmer and political economist, of such places as were incapable of cultivation, and of the general feeling of the time about lonely roads in waste places, as the fields for the lawless labours of smuggler and highwayman. Now such tracts of natural wild beauty, clothed with stretches of Heath and Fern and Whortleberry, with beds of Sphagnum Moss, and little natural wild gardens of curious and beautiful sub-aquatic plants in the marshy hollows and undrained wastes, are treasured as such places deserve to be, especially when they still remain within fifty miles of a vast city. The height to which the bracken grows is a sure guide to the depth of soil. On the poorest, thinnest ground it only reaches a foot or two; but in hollow places where leaf-mould accumulates and surface soil has washed in and made a better depth, it grows from six feet to eight feet high, and when straggling up through bushes to get to the light a frond will sometimes measure as much as twelve feet. The old country people who have always lived on the same poor land say, "Where the farn grows tall anything will grow"; but that only means that there the ground is somewhat better and capable of cultivation, as its presence is a sure indication of a sandy soil. The timber-merchants are shy of buying oak trees felled from among it, the timber of trees grown on the wealden clay being so much better. CHAPTER VIII JULY Scarcity of flowers -- Delphiniums -- Yuccas -- Cottager's way of protecting tender plants -- Alströmerias -- Carnations -- Gypsophila -- _Lilium giganteum_ -- Cutting fern-pegs. After the wealth of bloom of June, there appear to be but few flowers in the garden; there seems to be a time of comparative emptiness between the earlier flowers and those of autumn. It is true that in the early days of July we have Delphiniums, the grandest blues of the flower year. They are in two main groups in the flower border, one of them nearly all of the palest kind--not a solid clump, but with a thicker nucleus, thinning away for several yards right and left. Only white and pale-yellow flowers are grouped with this, and pale, fresh-looking foliage of maize and Funkia. The other group is at some distance, at the extreme western end. This is of the full and deeper blues, following a clump of Yuccas, and grouped about with things of important silvery foliage, such as Globe Artichoke and Silver Thistle (_Eryngium_). I have found it satisfactory to grow Delphiniums from seed, choosing the fine strong "Cantab" as the seed-parent, because the flowers were of a medium colour--scarcely so light as the name would imply--and because of its vigorous habit and well-shaped spike. It produced flowers of all shades of blue, and from these were derived nearly all I have in the border. I found them better for the purpose in many cases than the named kinds of which I had a fair collection. The seedlings were well grown for two years in nursery lines, worthless ones being taken out as soon as they showed their character. There is one common defect that I cannot endure--an interrupted spike, when the flowers, having filled a good bit of the spike, leave off, leaving a space of bare stem, and then go on again. If this habit proves to be persistent after the two years' trial, the plant is condemned. For my liking the spike must be well filled, but not overcrowded. Many of the show kinds are too full for beauty; the shape of the individual flower is lost. Some of the double ones are handsome, but in these the flower takes another shape, becoming more rosette-like, and thereby loses its original character. Some are of mixed colouring, a shade of lilac-pink sliding through pale blue. It is very beautiful in some cases, the respective tints remaining as clear as in an opal, but in many it only muddles the flower and makes it ineffective. Delphiniums are greedy feeders, and pay for rich cultivation and for liberal manurial mulches and waterings. In a hot summer, if not well cared for, they get stunted and are miserable objects, the flower distorted and cramped into a clumsy-looking, elongated mop-head. Though weak in growth the old _Delphinium Belladonna_ has so lovely a quality of colour that it is quite indispensable; the feeble stem should be carefully and unobtrusively staked for the better display of its incomparable blue. Some of the Yuccas will bloom before the end of the month. I have them in bold patches the whole fifteen-feet depth of the border at the extreme ends, and on each side of the pathway, where, passing from the lawn to the Pæony ground, it cuts across the border to go through the arched gateway. The kinds of Yucca are _gloriosa_, _recurva_, _flaccida_, and _filamentosa_. They are good to look at at all times of the year because of their grand strong foliage, and are the glory of the garden when in flower. One of the _gloriosa_ threw up a stout flower-spike in January. I had thought of protecting and roofing the spike, in the hope of carrying it safely through till spring, but meanwhile there came a damp day and a frosty night, and when I saw it again it was spoilt. The _Yucca filamentosa_ that I have I was told by a trusty botanist was the true plant, but rather tender, the one commonly called by that name being something else. I found it in a cottage garden, where I learnt a useful lesson in protecting plants, namely, the use of thickly-cut peaty sods. The goodwife had noticed that the peaty ground of the adjoining common, covered with heath and gorse and mossy grass, resisted frost much better than the garden or meadow, and it had been her practice for many years to get some thick dry sods with the heath left on and to pack them close round to protect tender plants. In this way she had preserved her Fuchsias of greenhouse kinds, and Calceolarias, and the Yucca in question. The most brilliant mass of flower in early July is given by the beds of _Alströmeria aurantiaca_; of this we have three distinct varieties, all desirable. There is a four feet wide bed, some forty feet long, of the kind most common in gardens, and at a distance from it a group grown from selected seed of a paler colour; seedlings of this remain true to colour, or, as gardeners say, the variety is "fixed." The third sort is from a good old garden in Ireland, larger in every way than the type, with petals of great width, and extremely rich in colour. _Alströmeria chilense_ is an equally good plant, and beds of it are beautiful in their varied colourings, all beautifully harmonious, and ranging through nearly the same tints as hardy Azaleas. These are the best of the Alströmerias for ordinary garden culture; they do well in warm, sheltered places in the poorest soil, but the soil must be deep, for the bunches of tender, fleshy roots go far down. The roots are extremely brittle, and must be carefully handled. Alströmerias are easily raised from seed, but when the seedlings are planted out the crowns should be quite four inches under the surface, and have a thick bed of leaves or some other mild mulching material over them in winter to protect them from frost, for they are Chilian plants, and demand and deserve a little surface comfort to carry them safely through the average English winter. Sea-holly (_Eryngium_) is another family of July-flowering plants that does well on poor, sandy soils that have been deeply stirred. Of these the more generally useful is _E. Oliverianum_, the _E. amethystinum_ of nurserymen, but so named in error, the true plant being rare and scarcely known in gardens. The whole plant has an admirable structure of a dry and nervous quality, with a metallic colouring and dull lustre that are in strong contrast to softer types of vegetation. The black-coated roots go down straight and deep, and enable it to withstand almost any drought. Equalling it in beauty is _E. giganteum_, the Silver Thistle, of the same metallic texture, but whitish and almost silvery. This is a biennial, and should be sown every year. A more lowly plant, but hardly less beautiful, is the wild Sea-holly of our coasts (_E. maritimum_), with leaves almost blue, and a handsome tuft of flower nearly matching them in colour. It occurs on wind-blown sandhills, but is worth a place in any garden. It comes up rather late, but endures, apparently unchanged, except for the bloom, throughout the late summer and autumn. But the flower of this month that has the firmest hold of the gardener's heart is the Carnation--the Clove Gilliflower of our ancestors. Why the good old name "Gilliflower" has gone out of use it is impossible to say, for certainly the popularity of the flower has never waned. Indeed, in the seventeenth century it seems that it was the best-loved flower of all in England; for John Parkinson, perhaps our earliest writer on garden plants, devotes to it a whole chapter in his "Paradisus Terrestris," a distinction shared by no other flower. He describes no less than fifty kinds, a few of which are still to be recognised, though some are lost. For instance, what has become of the "_great gray Hulo_" which he describes as a plant of the largest and strongest habit? The "gray" in this must refer to the colour of the leaf, as he says the flower is red; but there is also a variety called the "_blew Hulo_," with flowers of a "purplish murrey" colouring, answering to the slate colour that we know as of not unfrequent occurrence. The branch of the family that we still cultivate as "Painted Lady" is named by him "Dainty Lady," the present name being no doubt an accidental and regrettable corruption. But though some of the older sorts may be lost, we have such a wealth of good known kinds that this need hardly be a matter of regret. The old red Clove always holds its own for hardiness, beauty, and perfume; its newer and dwarfer variety, Paul Engleheart, is quite indispensable, while the beautiful salmon-coloured Raby is perhaps the most useful of all, with its hardy constitution and great quantity of bloom. But it is difficult to grow Carnations on our very poor soil; even when it is carefully prepared they still feel its starving and drying influence, and show their distaste by unusual shortness of life. _Gypsophila paniculata_ is one of the most useful plants of this time of year; its delicate masses of bloom are like clouds of flowery mist settled down upon the flower borders. Shooting up behind and among it is a tall, salmon-coloured Gladiolus, a telling contrast both in form and manner of inflorescence. Nothing in the garden has been more satisfactory and useful than a hedge of the white everlasting Pea. The thick, black roots that go down straight and deep have been undisturbed for some years, and the plants yield a harvest of strong white bloom for cutting that always seems inexhaustible. They are staked with stiff, branching spray, thrust into the ground diagonally, and not reaching up too high. This supports the heavy mass of growth without encumbering the upper blooming part. Hydrangeas are well in flower at the foot of a warm wall, and in the same position are spreading masses of the beautiful _Clematis Davidiana_, a herbaceous kind, with large, somewhat vine-like leaves, and flowers of a pale-blue colour of a delicate and uncommon quality. The blooming of the _Lilium giganteum_ is one of the great flower events of the year. It is planted in rather large straggling groups just within the fringe of the copse. In March the bulbs, which are only just underground, thrust their sharply-pointed bottle-green tips out of the earth. These soon expand into heart-shaped leaves, looking much like Arum foliage of the largest size, and of a bright-green colour and glistening surface. The groups are so placed that they never see the morning sun. They require a slight sheltering of fir-bough, or anything suitable, till the third week of May, to protect the young leaves from the late frosts. In June the flower-stem shoots up straight and tall, like a vigorous young green-stemmed tree. If the bulb is strong and the conditions suitable, it will attain a height of over eleven feet, but among the flowering bulbs of a group there are sure to be some of various heights from differently sized bulbs; those whose stature is about ten feet are perhaps the handsomest. The upper part of the stem bears the gracefully drooping great white Lily flowers, each bloom some ten inches long, greenish when in bud, but changing to white when fully developed. Inside each petal is a purplish-red stripe. In the evening the scent seems to pour out of the great white trumpets, and is almost overpowering, but gains a delicate quality by passing through the air, and at fifty yards away is like a faint waft of incense. In the evening light, when the sun is down, the great heads of white flower have a mysterious and impressive effect when seen at some distance through the wood, and by moonlight have a strangely weird dignity. The flowers only last a few days, but when they are over the beauty of the plant is by no means gone, for the handsome leaves remain in perfection till the autumn, while the growing seed-pods, rising into an erect position, become large and rather handsome objects. The rapidity and vigour of the four months' growth from bulb to giant flowering plant is very remarkable. The stem is a hollow, fleshy tube, three inches in diameter at the base, and the large radiating roots are like those of a tree. The original bulb is, of course, gone, but when the plants that have flowered are taken up at the end of November, offsets are found clustered round the root; these are carefully detached and replanted. The great growth of these Lilies could not be expected to come to perfection in our very poor, shallow soil, for doubtless in their mountain home in the Eastern Himalayas they grow in deep beds of cool vegetable earth. Here, therefore, their beds are deeply excavated, and filled to within a foot of the top with any of the vegetable rubbish of which only too much accumulates in the late autumn. Holes twelve feet across and three feet deep are convenient graves for frozen Dahlia-tops and half-hardy Annuals; a quantity of such material chopped up and tramped down close forms a cool subsoil that will comfort the Lily bulbs for many a year. The upper foot of soil is of good compost, and when the young bulbs are planted, the whole is covered with some inches of dead leaves that join in with the natural woodland carpet. [Illustration: THE GIANT LILY.] In the end of July we have some of the hottest of the summer days, only beginning to cool between six and seven in the evening. One or two evenings I go to the upper part of the wood to cut some fern-pegs for pegging Carnation layers, armed with fag-hook and knife and rubber, and a low rush-bottomed stool to sit on. The rubber is the stone for sharpening the knife--a long stone of coarse sandstone grit, such as is used for scythes. Whenever I am at work with a knife there is sure to be a rubber not far off, for a blunt knife I cannot endure, so there is a stone in each department of the garden sheds, and a whole series in the workshop, and one or two to spare to take on outside jobs. The Bracken has to be cut with a light hand, as the side-shoots that will make the hook of the peg are easily broken just at the important joint. The fronds are of all sizes, from two to eight feet long; but the best for pegs are the moderate-sized, that have not been weakened by growing too close together. Where they are crowded the main stalk is thick, but the side ones are thin and weak; whereas, where they get light and air the side branches are carried on stouter ribs, and make stronger and better-balanced pegs. The cut fern is lightly laid in a long ridge with the ends all one way, and the operator sits at the stalk end of the ridge, a nice cool shady place having been chosen. Four cuts with the knife make a peg, and each frond makes three pegs in about fifteen seconds. With the fronds laid straight and handy it goes almost rhythmically, then each group of three pegs is thrown into the basket, where they clash on to the others with a hard ringing sound. In about four days the pegs dry to a surprising hardness; they are better than wooden ones, and easier and quicker to make. People who are not used to handling Bracken should be careful how they cut a frond with a knife; they are almost sure to get a nasty little cut on the second joint of the first finger of the right hand--not from the knife, but from the cut edge of the fern. The stalk has a silicious coating, that leaves a sharp edge like a thin flake of glass when cut diagonally with a sharp knife; they should also beware how they pick or pull off a mature frond, for even if the part of the stalk laid hold of is bruised and twisted, some of the glassy structure holds together and is likely to wound the hand. CHAPTER IX AUGUST Leycesteria -- Early recollections -- Bank of choice shrubs -- Bank of Briar Roses -- Hollyhocks -- Lavender -- Lilies -- Bracken and Heaths -- The Fern-walk -- Late-blooming rock-plants -- Autumn flowers -- Tea Roses -- Fruit of _Rosa rugosa_ -- Fungi -- Chantarelle. _Leycesteria formosa_ is a soft-wooded shrub, whose beauty, without being showy, is full of charm and refinement. I remember delighting in it in the shrub-wilderness of the old home, where I first learnt to know and love many a good bush and tree long before I knew their names. There were towering Rhododendrons (all _ponticum_) and Ailanthus and Hickory and Magnolias, and then Spiræa and Snowball tree and tall yellow Azalea, and Buttercup bush and shrubby Andromedas, and in some of the clumps tall Cypresses and the pretty cut-leaved Beech, and in the edges of others some of the good old garden Roses, double Cinnamon and _R. lucida_, and Damask and Provence, Moss-rose and Sweetbriar, besides tall-grown Lilacs and Syringa. It was all rather overgrown, and perhaps all the prettier, and some of the wide grassy ways were quite shady in summer. And I look back across the years and think what a fine lesson-book it was to a rather solitary child; and when I came to plant my own shrub clump I thought I would put rather near together some of the old favourites, so here again we come back to Leycesteria, put rather in a place of honour, and near it Buttercup bush and Andromeda and Magnolias and old garden Roses. [Illustration: CISTUS FLORENTINUS.] [Illustration: THE GREAT ASPHODEL.] I had no space for a shrub wilderness, but have made a large clump for just the things I like best, whether new friends or old. It is a long, low bank, five or six paces wide, highest in the middle, where the rather taller things are planted. These are mostly Junipers and Magnolias; of the Magnolias, the kinds are _Soulangeana_, _conspicua_, _purpurea_, and _stellata_. One end of the clump is all of peat earth; here are Andromedas, Skimmeas, and on the cooler side the broad-leaved Gale, whose crushed leaves have almost the sweetness of Myrtle. One long side of the clump faces south-west, the better to suit the things that love the sun. At the farther end is a thrifty bush of _Styrax japonica_, which flowers well in hot summers, but another bush under a south wall flowers better. It must be a lovely shrub in the south of Europe and perhaps in Cornwall; here the year's growth is always cut at the tip, but it flowers well on the older wood, and its hanging clusters of white bloom are lovely. At its foot, on the sunny side, are low bushy plants of _Cistus florentinus_. I am told that this specific name is not right; but the plant so commonly goes by it that it serves the purpose of popular identification. Then comes _Magnolia stellata_, now a perfectly-shaped bush five feet through, a sheet of sweet-scented bloom in April. Much too near it are two bushes of _Cistus ladaniferus_. They were put there as little plants to grow on for a year in the shelter and comfort of the warm bank, but were overlooked at the time they ought to have been shifted, and are now nearly five feet high, and are crowding the Magnolia. I cannot bear to take them away to waste, and they are much too large to transplant, so I am driving in some short stakes diagonally and tying them down by degrees, spreading out their branches between neighbouring plants. It is an upright-growing Cistus that would soon cover a tallish wall-space, but this time it must be content to grow horizontally, and I shall watch to see whether it will flower more freely, as so many things do when trained down. Next comes a patch of the handsome _Bambusa Ragamowski_, dwarf, but with strikingly-broad leaves of a bright yellow-green colour. It seems to be a slow grower, or more probably it is slow to grow at first; Bamboos have a good deal to do underground. It was planted six years ago, a nice little plant in a pot, and now is eighteen inches high and two feet across. Just beyond it is the Mastic bush (_Caryopteris mastacanthus_), a neat, grey-leaved small shrub, crowded in September with lavender-blue flowers, arranged in spikes something like a Veronica; the whole bush is aromatic, smelling strongly like highly-refined turpentine. Then comes _Xanthoceras sorbifolia_, a handsome bush from China, of rather recent introduction, with saw-edged pinnate leaves and white flowers earlier in the summer, but now forming its bunches of fruit that might easily be mistaken for walnuts with their green shucks on. Here a wide bushy growth of _Phlomis fruticosa_ lays out to the sun, covered in early summer with its stiff whorls of hooded yellow flowers--one of the best of plants for a sunny bank in full sun in a poor soil. A little farther along, and near the path, comes the neat little _Deutzia parviflora_ and another little shrub of fairy-like delicacy, _Philadelphus microphyllus_. Behind them is _Stephanandra flexuosa_, beautiful in foliage, and two good St. John's worts, _Hypericum aureum_ and _H. Moserianum_, and again in front a Cistus of low, spreading growth, _C. halimifolius_, or something near it. One or two favourite kinds of Tree Pæonies, comfortably sheltered by Lavender bushes, fill up the other end of the clump next to the Andromedas. In all spare spaces on the sunny side of the shrub-clump is a carpeting of _Megasea ligulata_, a plant that looks well all the year round, and gives a quantity of precious flower for cutting in March and April. I was nearly forgetting _Pavia macrostachya_, now well established among the choice shrubs. It is like a bush Horse-chestnut, but more refined, the white spikes standing well up above the handsome leaves. On the cooler side of the clump is a longish planting of dwarf Andromeda, precious not only for its beauty of form and flower, but from the fine winter colouring of the leaves, and those two useful Spiræas, _S. Thunbergi_, with its countless little starry flowers, and the double _prunifolia_, the neat leaves of whose long sprays turn nearly scarlet in autumn. Then there comes a rather long stretch of _Artemisia Stelleriana_, a white-leaved plant much like _Cineraria maritima_, answering just the same purpose, but perfectly hardy. It is so much like the silvery _Cineraria_ that it is difficult to remember that it prefers a cool and even partly-shaded place. Beyond the long ridge that forms the shrub-clump is another, parallel to it and only separated from it by a path, also in the form of a long low bank. On the crown of this is the double row of cob-nuts that forms one side of the nut-alley. It leaves a low sunny bank that I have given to various Briar Roses and one or two other low, bushy kinds. Here is the wild Burnet Rose, with its yellow-white single flowers and large black hips, and its garden varieties, the Scotch Briars, double white, flesh-coloured, pink, rose, and yellow, and the hybrid briar, Stanwell Perpetual. Here also is the fine hybrid of _Rosa rugosa_, Madame George Bruant, and the lovely double _Rosa lucida_, and one or two kinds of small bush Roses from out-of-the-way gardens, and two wild Roses that have for me a special interest, as I collected them from their rocky home in the island of Capri. One is a Sweetbriar, in all ways like the native one, except that the flowers are nearly white, and the hips are larger. Last year the bush was distinctly more showy than any other of its kind, on account of the size and unusual quantity of the fruit. The other is a form of _Rosa sempervirens_, with rather large white flowers faintly tinged with yellow. [Illustration: LAVENDER HEDGE AND STEPS TO THE LOFT.] [Illustration: HOLLYHOCK, PINK BEAUTY.] Hollyhocks have been fine, in spite of the disease, which may be partly checked by very liberal treatment. By far the most beautiful is one of a pure pink colour, with a wide outer frill. It came first from a cottage garden, and has always since been treasured. I call it Pink Beauty. The wide outer petal (a heresy to the florist) makes the flower infinitely more beautiful than the all-over full-double form that alone is esteemed on the show-table. I shall hope in time to come upon the same shape of flower in white, sulphur, rose-colour, and deep blood-crimson, the colours most worth having in Hollyhocks. Lavender has been unusually fine; to reap its fragrant harvest is one of the many joys of the flower year. If it is to be kept and dried, it should be cut when as yet only a few of the purple blooms are out on the spike; if left too late, the flower shakes off the stalk too readily. Some plantations of _Lilium Harrisi_ and _Lilium auratum_ have turned out well. Some of the _Harrisi_ were grouped among tufts of the bright-foliaged _Funkia grandiflora_ on the cool side of a Yew hedge. Just at the foot of the hedge is _Tropæolum speciosum_, which runs up into it and flowers in graceful wreaths some feet above the ground. The masses of pure white lily and cool green foliage below are fine against the dark, solid greenery of the Yew, and the brilliant flowers above are like little jewels of flame. The Bermuda Lilies (_Harrisi_) are intergrouped with _L. speciosum_, which will follow them when their bloom is over. The _L. auratum_ were planted among groups of Rhododendrons; some of them are between tall Rhododendrons, and have large clumps of Lady Fern (_Filix foemina_) in front, but those that look best are between and among Bamboos (_B. Metake_); the heavy heads of flower borne on tall stems bend gracefully through the Bamboos, which just give them enough support. Here and there in the copse, among the thick masses of green Bracken, is a frond or two turning yellow. This always happens in the first or second week of August, though it is no indication of the approaching yellowing of the whole. But it is taken as a signal that the Fern is in full maturity, and a certain quantity is now cut to dry for protection and other winter uses. Dry Bracken lightly shaken over frames is a better protection than mats, and is almost as easily moved on and off. The Ling is now in full flower, and is more beautiful in the landscape than any of the garden Heaths; the relation of colouring, of greyish foliage and low-toned pink bloom with the dusky spaces of purplish-grey shadow, are a precious lesson to the colour-student. [Illustration: SOLOMON'S SEAL IN SPRING, IN THE UPPER PART OF THE FERN-WALK.] [Illustration: THE FERN-WALK IN AUGUST.] The fern-walk is at its best. It passes from the garden upwards to near the middle of the copse. The path, a wood-path of moss and grass and short-cut heath, is a little lower than the general level of the wood. The mossy bank, some nine feet wide, and originally cleared for the purpose, is planted with large groups of hardy Ferns, with a preponderance (due to preference) of Dilated Shield Fern and Lady Fern. Once or twice in the length of the bank are hollows, sinking at their lowest part to below the path-level, for _Osmunda_ and _Blechnum_. When rain is heavy enough to run down the path it finds its way into these hollow places. Among the groups of Fern are a few plants of true wood-character--_Linnæa_, _Trientalis_, _Goodyera_, and _Trillium_. At the back of the bank, and stretching away among the trees and underwood, are wide-spreading groups of Solomon's-seal and Wood-rush, joining in with the wild growth of Bracken and Bramble. Most of the Alpines and dwarf-growing plants, whose home is the rock-garden, bloom in May or June, but a few flower in early autumn. Of these one of the brightest is _Ruta patavina_, a dwarf plant with lemon-coloured flowers and a very neat habit of growth. It soon makes itself at home in a sunny bank in poor soil. _Pterocephalus parnassi_ is a dwarf Scabious, with small, grey foliage keeping close to the ground, and rather large flowers of a low-toned pink. The white Thyme is a capital plant, perfectly prostrate, and with leaves of a bright yellow-green, that with the white bloom give the plant a particularly fresh appearance. It looks at its best when trailing about little flat spaces between the neater of the hardy Ferns, and hanging over little rocky ledges. Somewhat farther back is the handsome dwarf _Platycodon Mariesi_, and behind it the taller Platycodons, among full-flowered bushes of _Olearia Haasti_. By the middle of August the garden assumes a character distinctly autumnal. Much of its beauty now depends on the many non-hardy plants, such as Gladiolus, Canna, and Dahlia, on Tritomas of doubtful hardiness, and on half-hardy annuals--Zinnia, Helichrysum, Sunflower, and French and African Marigold. Fine as are the newer forms of hybrid Gladiolus, the older strain of gandavensis hybrids are still the best as border flowers. In the large flower border, tall, well-shaped spikes of a good pink one look well shooting up through and between a wide-spreading patch of glaucous foliage of the smaller Yuccas, _Tritoma caulescens_, _Iris pallida_, and _Funkia Sieboldi_, while scarlet and salmon-coloured kinds are among groups of Pæonies that flowered in June, whose leaves are now taking a fine reddish colouring. Between these and the edge of the border is a straggling group some yards in length of the dark-foliaged _Heuchera Richardsoni_, that will hold its satin-surfaced leaves till the end of the year. Farther back in the border is a group of the scarlet-flowered Dahlia Fire King, and behind these, Dahlias Lady Ardilaun and Cochineal, of deeper scarlet colouring. The Dahlias are planted between groups of Oriental Poppy, that flower in May and then die away till late in autumn. Right and left of the scarlet group are Tritomas, intergrouped with Dahlias of moderate height, that have orange and flame-coloured flowers. This leads to some masses of flowers of strong yellow colouring; the old perennial Sunflower, in its tall single form, and the best variety of the old double one of moderate height, the useful _H. lætiflorus_ and the tall Miss Mellish, the giant form of _Harpalium rigidum_. _Rudbeckia Newmanni_ reflects the same strong colour in the front part of the border, and all spaces are filled with orange Zinnias and African Marigolds and yellow Helichrysum. As we pass along the border the colour changes to paler yellow by means of a pale perennial Sunflower and the sulphur-coloured annual kind, with Paris Daisies, _Oenothera Lamarkiana_ and _Verbascum phlomoides_. The two last were cut down to about four feet after their earliest bloom was over, and are now again full of profusely-flowered lateral growths. At the farther end of the border we come again to glaucous foliage and pale-pink flower of Gladiolus and Japan Anemone. It is important in such a border of rather large size, that can be seen from a good space of lawn, to keep the flowers in rather large masses of colour. No one who has ever done it, or seen it done, will go back to the old haphazard sprinkle of colouring without any thought of arrangement, such as is usually seen in a mixed border. There is a wall of sandstone backing the border, also planted in relation to the colour-massing in the front space. This gives a quiet background of handsome foliage, with always in the flower season some show of colour in one part or another of its length. Just now the most conspicuous of its clothing shrubs or of the somewhat tall growing flowers at its foot are a fine variety of _Bignonia radicans_, a hardy Fuchsia, the Claret Vine covering a good space, with its red-bronze leaves and clusters of blue-black grapes, the fine hybrid Crinums and _Clerodendron foetidum_. Tea Roses have been unusually lavish of autumn bloom, and some of the garden climbing Roses, hybrids of China and Noisette, have been of great beauty, both growing and as room decoration. Many of them flower in bunches at the end of the shoots; whole branches, cut nearly three feet long, make charming arrangements in tall glasses or high vases of Oriental china. Perhaps their great autumnal vigour is a reaction from the check they received in the earlier part of the year, when the bloom was almost a failure from the long drought and the accompanying attacks of blight and mildew. The great hips of the Japanese _Rosa rugosa_ are in perfection; they have every ornamental quality--size, form, colour, texture, and a delicate waxlike bloom; their pulp is thick and luscious, and makes an excellent jam. The quantity of fungous growth this year is quite remarkable. The late heavy rain coming rather suddenly on the well-warmed earth has no doubt brought about their unusual size and abundance; in some woodland places one can hardly walk without stepping upon them. Many spots in the copse are brilliant with large groups of the scarlet-capped Fly Agaric (_Amanita muscaria_). It comes out of the ground looking like a dark scarlet ball, generally flecked with raised whitish spots; it quickly rises on its white stalk, the ball changing to a brilliant flat disc, six or seven inches across, and lasting several days in beauty. But the most frequent fungus is the big brown _Boletus_, in size varying from a small bun to a dinner-plate. Some kinds are edible, but I have never been inclined to try them, being deterred by their coarse look and uninviting coat of slimy varnish. And why eat doubtful _Boletus_ when one can have the delicious Chantarelle (_Cantharellus cibarius_), also now at its best? In colour and smell it is like a ripe apricot, perfectly wholesome, and, when rightly cooked, most delicate in flavour and texture. It should be looked for in cool hollows in oak woods; when once found and its good qualities appreciated, it will never again be neglected. CHAPTER X SEPTEMBER Sowing Sweet Peas -- Autumn-sown annuals -- Dahlias -- Worthless kinds -- Staking -- Planting the rock-garden -- Growing small plants in a wall -- The old wall -- Dry-walling -- How built -- How planted -- Hyssop -- A destructive storm -- Berries of Water-elder -- Beginning ground-work. In the second week of September we sow Sweet Peas in shallow trenches. The flowers from these are larger and stronger and come in six weeks earlier than from those sown in the spring; they come too at a time when they are especially valuable for cutting. Many other hardy Annuals are best sown now. Some indeed, such as the lovely _Collinsia verna_ and the large white Iberis, only do well if autumn-sown. Among others, some of the most desirable are Nemophila, Platystemon, Love-in-a-Mist, Larkspurs, Pot Marigold, Virginian Stock, and the delightful Venus's Navel-wort (_Omphalodes linifolia_). I always think this daintily beautiful plant is undeservedly neglected, for how seldom one sees it. It is full of the most charming refinement, with its milk-white bloom and grey-blue leaf and neat habit of growth. Any one who has never before tried Annuals autumn-sown would be astonished at their vigour. A single plant of Nemophila will often cover a square yard with its beautiful blue bloom; and then, what a gain it is to have these pretty things in full strength in spring and early summer, instead of waiting to have them in a much poorer state later in the year, when other flowers are in plenty. Hardy Poppies should be sown even earlier; August is the best time. Dahlias are now at their full growth. To make a choice for one's own garden, one must see the whole plant growing. As with many another kind of flower, nothing is more misleading than the evidence of the show-table, for many that there look the best, and are indeed lovely in form and colour as individual blooms, come from plants that are of no garden value. For however charming in humanity is the virtue modesty, and however becoming is the unobtrusive bearing that gives evidence of its possession, it is quite misplaced in a Dahlia. Here it becomes a vice, for the Dahlia's first duty in life is to flaunt and to swagger and to carry gorgeous blooms well above its leaves, and on no account to hang its head. Some of the delicately-coloured kinds lately raised not only hang their heads, but also hide them away among masses of their coarse foliage, and are doubly frauds, looking everything that is desirable in the show, and proving worthless in the garden. It is true that there are ways of cutting out superfluous green stuff and thereby encouraging the blooms to show up, but at a busy season, when rank leafage grows fast, one does not want to be every other day tinkering at the Dahlias. Careful and strong staking they must always have, not forgetting one central stake to secure the main growth at first. It is best to drive this into the hole made for the plant before placing the root, to avoid the danger of sending the point of the stake through the tender tubers. Its height out of the ground should be about eighteen inches less than the expected stature of the plant. As the Dahlia grows, there should be at least three outer stakes at such distance from the middle one as may suit the bulk and habit of the plant; and it is a good plan to have wooden hoops to tie to these, so as to form a girdle round the whole plant, and for tying out the outer branches. The hoop should be only loosely fastened--best with roomy loops of osier, so that it may be easily shifted up with the growth of the plant. We make the hoops in the winter of long straight rent rods of Spanish Chestnut, bending them while green round a tub, and tying them with tarred twine or osier bands. They last several years. All this care in staking the Dahlias is labour well bestowed, for when autumn storms come the wind has such a power of wrenching and twisting, that unless the plant, now grown into a heavy mass of succulent vegetation, is braced by firm fixing at the sides, it is in danger of being broken off short just above the ground, where its stem has become almost woody, and therefore brittle. Now is the moment to get to work on the rock-garden; there is no time of year so precious for this work as September. Small things planted now, while the ground is still warm, grow at the root at once, and get both anchor-hold and feeding-hold of the ground before frost comes. Those that are planted later do not take hold, and every frost heaves them up, sometimes right out of the ground. Meanwhile those that have got a firm root-hold are growing steadily all the winter, underground if not above; and when the first spring warmth comes they can draw upon the reserve of strength they have been hoarding up, and make good growth at once. Except in the case of a rockery only a year old, there is sure to be some part that wants to be worked afresh, and I find it convenient to do about a third of the space every year. Many of the indispensable Alpines and rock-plants of lowly growth increase at a great rate, some spreading over much more than their due space, the very reason of this quick-spreading habit being that they are travelling to fresh pasture; many of them prove it clearly by dying away in the middle of the patch, and only showing vigorous vitality at the edges. Such plants as _Silene alpestris_, _Hutchinsia alpina_, _Pterocephalus_, the dwarf alpine kinds of _Achillea_ and _Artemisia_, _Veronica_ and _Linaria_, and the mossy Saxifrages, in my soil want transplanting every two years, and the silvery Saxifrages every three years. As in much else, one must watch what happens in one's own garden. We practical gardeners have no absolute knowledge of the constitution of the plant, still less of the chemistry of the soil, but by the constant exercise of watchful care and helpful sympathy we acquire a certain degree of instinctive knowledge, which is as valuable in its way, and probably more applicable to individual local conditions, than the tabulated formulas of more orthodox science. One of the best and simplest ways of growing rock-plants is in a loose wall. In many gardens an abrupt change of level makes a retaining wall necessary, and when I see this built in the usual way as a solid structure of brick and mortar--unless there be any special need of the solid wall--I always regret that it is not built as a home for rock-plants. An exposure to north or east and the cool backing of a mass of earth is just what most Alpines delight in. A dry wall, which means a wall without mortar, may be anything between a wall and a very steep rock-work, and may be built of brick or of any kind of local stone. I have built and planted a good many hundred yards of dry walling with my own hands, both at home and in other gardens, and can speak with some confidence both of the pleasure and interest of the actual making and planting, and of the satisfactory results that follow. The best example I have to show in my own garden is the so-called "Old Wall," before mentioned. It is the bounding and protecting fence of the Pæony ground on its northern side, and consists of a double dry wall with earth between. An old hedge bank that was to come away was not far off, within easy wheeling distance. So the wall was built up on each side, and as it grew, the earth from the hedge was barrowed in to fill up. A dry wall needs very little foundation; two thin courses underground are quite enough. The point of most structural importance is to keep the earth solidly trodden and rammed behind the stones of each course and throughout its bulk, and every two or three courses to lay some stones that are extra long front and back, to tie the wall well into the bank. A local sandstone is the walling material. In the pit it occurs in separate layers, with a few feet of hard sand between each. The lowest layer, sometimes thirty to forty feet down, is the best and thickest, but that is good building stone, and for dry walling we only want "tops" or "seconds," the later and younger formations of stone in the quarry. The very roughness and almost rotten state of much of this stone makes it all the more acceptable as nourishment and root-hold to the tiny plants that are to grow in its chinks, and that in a few months will change much of the rough rock-surface to green growth of delicate vegetation. Moreover, much of the soft sandy stone hardens by exposure to weather; and even if a stone or two crumbles right away in a few years' time, the rest will hold firmly, and the space left will make a little cave where some small fern will live happily. The wall is planted as it is built with hardy Ferns--_Blechnum_, Polypody, Hartstongue, _Adiantum_, _Ceterach_, _Asplenium_, and _Ruta muraria_. The last three like lime, so a barrow of old mortar-rubbish is at hand, and the joint where they are to be planted has a layer of their favourite soil. Each course is laid fairly level as to its front top edge, stones of about the same thickness going in course by course. The earth backing is then carefully rammed into the spaces at the uneven backs of the stones, and a thin layer of earth over the whole course, where the mortar would have been in a built wall, gives both a "bed" for the next row of stones and soil for the plants that are to grow in the joints. [Illustration: JACK. (_See page 79._)] [Illustration: THE "OLD WALL."] The face of the wall slopes backward on both sides, so that its whole thickness of five feet at the bottom draws in to four feet at the top. All the stones are laid at a right angle to the plane of the inclination--that is to say, each stone tips a little down at the back, and its front edge, instead of being upright, faces a little upward. It follows that every drop of gentle rain that falls on either side of the wall is carried into the joints, following the backward and downward pitch of the stones, and then into the earth behind them. The mass of earth in the middle of the wall gives abundant root-room for bushes, and is planted with bush Roses of three kinds, of which the largest mass is of _Rosa lucida_. Then there is a good stretch of Berberis; then Scotch Briars, and in one or two important places Junipers; then more Berberis, and Ribes, and the common Barberry, and neat bushes of _Olearia Haastii_. The wall was built seven years ago, and is now completely clothed. It gives me a garden on the top and a garden on each side, and though its own actual height is only 4-1/2 feet, yet the bushes on the top make it a sheltering hedge from seven to ten feet high. One small length of three or four yards of the top has been kept free of larger bushes, and is planted on its northern edge with a very neat and pretty dwarf kind of Lavender, while on the sunny side is a thriving patch of the hardy Cactus (_Opuntia Raffinesquiana_). Just here, in the narrow border at the foot of the wall, is a group of the beautiful _Crinum Powelli_, while a white Jasmine clothes the face of the wall right and left, and rambles into the Barberry bushes just beyond. It so happened that these things had been planted close together because the conditions of the place were likely to favour them, and not, as is my usual practice, with any intentional idea of harmonious grouping. I did not even remember that they all flower in July, and at nearly the same time; and one day seeing them all in bloom together, I was delighted to see the success of the chance arrangement, and how pretty it all was, for I should never have thought of grouping together pink and lavender, yellow and white. The northern face of the wall, beginning at its eastern end, is planted thus: For a length of ten or twelve paces there are Ferns, Polypody and Hartstongue, and a few _Adiantum nigrum_, with here and there a Welsh Poppy. There is a clump of the wild Stitchwort that came by itself, and is so pretty that I leave it. At the foot of the wall are the same, but more of the Hartstongue; and here it grows best, for not only is the place cooler, but I gave it some loamy soil, which it loves. Farther along the Hartstongue gives place to the wild Iris (_I. foetidissima_), a good long stretch of it. Nothing, to my mind, looks better than these two plants at the base of a wall on the cool side. In the upper part of the wall are various Ferns, and that interesting plant, Wall Pennywort (_Cotyledon umbilicus_). It is a native plant, but not found in this neighbourhood; I brought it from Cornwall, where it is so plentiful in the chinks of the granite stone-fences. It sows itself and grows afresh year after year, though I always fear to lose it in one of our dry summers. Next comes the common London Pride, which I think quite the most beautiful of the Saxifrages of this section. If it was a rare thing, what a fuss we should make about it! The place is a little dry for it, but all the same, it makes a handsome spreading tuft hanging over the face of the wall. When its pink cloud of bloom is at its best, I always think it the prettiest thing in the garden. Then there is the Yellow Everlasting (_Gnaphalium orientale_), a fine plant for the upper edge of the wall, and even better on the sunny side, and the white form of _Campanula cæspitosa_, with its crowd of delicate little white bells rising in June, from the neatest foliage of tender but lively green. Then follow deep-hanging curtains of Yellow Alyssum and of hybrid rock Pinks. The older plants of Alyssum are nearly worn out, but there are plenty of promising young seedlings in the lower joints. [Illustration: ERINUS ALPINUS, CLOTHING STEPS IN ROCK-WALL.] Throughout the wall there are patches of Polypody Fern, one of the best of cool wall-plants, its creeping root-stock always feeling its way along the joints, and steadily furnishing the wall with more and more of its neat fronds; it is all the more valuable for being at its best in early winter, when so few ferns are to be seen. Every year, in some bare places, I sow a little seed of _Erinus alpinus_, always trying for places where it will follow some other kind of plant, such as a place where rock Pink or Alyssum has been. All plants are the better for this sort of change. In the seven years that the wall has stood, the stones have become weathered, and the greater part of the north side, wherever the stone work shows, is hoary with mosses, and looks as if it might have been standing for a hundred years. The sunny side is nearly clear of moss, and I have planted very few things in its face, because the narrow border at its foot is so precious for shrubs and plants that like a warm, sheltered place. Here are several Choisyas and Sweet Verbenas, also _Escallonia_, _Stuartia_, and _Styrax_, and a long straggling group of some very fine Pentstemons. In one space that was fairly clear I planted a bit of Hyssop, an old sweet herb whose scent I delight in; it grows into a thick bush-like plant full of purple flower in the late summer, when it attracts quantities of bumble-bees. It is a capital wall-plant, and has sown its own seed, till there is a large patch on the top and some in its face, and a broadly-spreading group in the border below. It is one of the plants that was used in the old Tudor gardens for edgings; the growth is close and woody at the base, and it easily bears clipping into shape. The fierce gales and heavy rains of the last days of September wrought sad havoc among the flowers. Dahlias were virtually wrecked. Though each plant had been tied to three stakes, their masses of heavy growth could not resist the wrenching and twisting action of the wind, and except in a few cases where they were well sheltered, their heads lay on the ground, the stems broken down at the last tie. If anything about a garden could be disheartening, it would be its aspect after such a storm of wind. Wall shrubs, only lately made safe, as we thought, have great gaps torn out of them, though tied with tarred string to strong iron staples, staples and all being wrenched out. Everything looks battered, and whipped, and ashamed; branches of trees and shrubs lie about far from their sources of origin; green leaves and little twigs are washed up into thick drifts; apples and quinces, that should have hung till mid-October, lie bruised and muddy under the trees. Newly-planted roses and hollies have a funnel-shaped hole worked in the ground at their base, showing the power of the wind to twist their heads, and giving warning of a corresponding disturbance of the tender roots. There is nothing to be done but to look round carefully and search out all disasters and repair them as well as may be, and to sweep up the wreckage and rubbish, and try to forget the rough weather, and enjoy the calm beauty of the better days that follow, and hope that it may be long before such another angry storm is sent. And indeed a few quiet days of sunshine and mild temperature work wonders. In a week one would hardly know that the garden had been so cruelly torn about. Fresh flowers take the place of bruised ones, and wholesome young growths prove the enduring vitality of vegetable life. Still we cannot help feeling, towards the end of September, that the flower year is nearly at an end, though the end is a gorgeous one, with its strong yellow masses of the later perennial Sunflowers and Marigolds, Goldenrod, and a few belated Gladioli; the brilliant foliage of Virginian Creepers, the leaf-painting of _Vitis Coignettii_, and the strong crimson of the Claret Vine. The Water-elder (_Viburnum opulus_) now makes a brave show in the edge of the copse. It is without doubt the most beautiful berry-bearing shrub of mid-September. The fruit hangs in ample clusters from the point of every branch and of every lateral twig, in colour like the brightest of red currants, but with a translucent lustre that gives each separate berry a much brighter look; the whole bush shows fine warm colouring, the leaves having turned to a rich red. Perhaps it is because it is a native that this grand shrub or small tree is generally neglected in gardens, and is almost unknown in nurserymen's catalogues. It is the parent of the well-known Guelder-Rose, which is merely its double-flowered form. But the double flower leaves no berry, its familiar white ball being formed of the sterile part of the flower only, and the foliage of the garden kind does not assume so bright an autumn colouring. The nights are growing chilly, with even a little frost, and the work for the coming season of dividing and transplanting hardy plants has already begun. Plans are being made for any improvements or alterations that involve ground work. Already we have been at work on some broad grass rides through the copse that were roughly levelled and laid with grass last winter. The turf has been raised and hollows filled in, grass seed sown in bare patches, and the whole beaten and rolled to a good surface, and the job put out of hand in good time before the leaves begin to fall. CHAPTER XI OCTOBER Michaelmas Daisies -- Arranging and staking -- Spindle-tree -- Autumn colour of Azaleas -- Quinces -- Medlars -- Advantage of early planting of shrubs -- Careful planting -- Pot-bound roots -- Cypress hedge -- Planting in difficult places -- Hardy flower border -- Lifting Dahlias -- Dividing hardy plants -- Dividing tools -- Plants difficult to divide -- Periwinkles -- Sternbergia -- Czar Violets -- Deep cultivation for _Lilium giganteum_. The early days of October bring with them the best bloom of the Michaelmas Daisies, the many beautiful garden kinds of the perennial Asters. They have, as they well deserve to have, a garden to themselves. Passing along the wide path in front of the big flower border, and through the pergola that forms its continuation, with eye and brain full of rich, warm colouring of flower and leaf, it is a delightful surprise to pass through the pergola's last right-hand opening, and to come suddenly upon the Michaelmas Daisy garden in full beauty. Its clean, fresh, pure colouring, of pale and dark lilac, strong purple, and pure white, among masses of pale-green foliage, forms a contrast almost startling after the warm colouring of nearly everything else; and the sight of a region where the flowers are fresh and newly opened, and in glad spring-like profusion, when all else is on the verge of death and decay, gives an impression of satisfying refreshment that is hardly to be equalled throughout the year. Their special garden is a wide border on each side of a path, its length bounded on one side by a tall hedge of filberts, and on the other side by clumps of yew, holly, and other shrubs. It is so well sheltered that the strongest wind has its destructive power broken, and only reaches it as a refreshing tree-filtered breeze. The Michaelmas Daisies are replanted every year as soon as their bloom is over, the ground having been newly dug and manured. The old roots, which will have increased about fourfold, are pulled or chopped to pieces, nice bits with about five crowns being chosen for replanting; these are put in groups of three to five together. Tall-growing kinds like _Novi Belgi_ Robert Parker are kept rather towards the back, while those of delicate and graceful habit, such as _Cordifolius elegans_ and its good variety Diana are allowed to come forward. The fine dwarf _Aster amellus_ is used in rather large quantity, coming quite to the front in some places, and running in and out between the clumps of other kinds. Good-sized groups of _Pyrethrum uliginosum_ are given a place among the Asters, for though of quite another family, they are Daisies, and bloom at Michaelmas, and are admirable companions to the main occupants of the borders. The only other plants admitted are white Dahlias, the two differently striped varieties of _Eulalia japonica_, the fresh green foliage of Indian Corn, and the brilliant light-green leafage of _Funkia grandiflora_. Great attention is paid to staking the Asters. Nothing is more deplorable than to see a neglected, overgrown plant, at the last moment, when already half blown down, tied up in a tight bunch to one stake. When we are cutting underwood in the copse in the winter, special branching spray is looked out for our Michaelmas Daisies and cut about four feet or five feet long, with one main stem and from two to five branches. Towards the end of June and beginning of July these are thrust firmly into the ground among the plants, and the young growths are tied out so as to show to the best advantage. Good kinds of Michaelmas Daisies are now so numerous that in selecting those for the special garden it is well to avoid both the ones that bloom earliest and also the very latest, so that for about three weeks the borders may show a well-filled mass of bloom. [Illustration: BORDERS OF MICHAELMAS DAISIES.] The bracken in the copse stands dry and dead, but when leaves are fluttering down and the chilly days of mid-October are upon us, its warm, rusty colouring is certainly cheering; the green of the freshly grown mossy carpet below looks vividly bright by contrast. Some bushes of Spindle-tree (_Euonymus europæus_) are loaded with their rosy seed-pods; some are already burst, and show the orange-scarlet seeds--an audacity of colouring that looks all the brighter for the even, lustreless green of the leaves and of the green-barked twigs and stems. The hardy Azaleas are now blazing masses of crimson, almost scarlet leaf; the old _A. pontica_, with its large foliage, is as bright as any. With them are grouped some of the North American Vacciniums and Andromedas, with leaves almost as bright. The ground between the groups of shrubs is knee-deep in heath. The rusty-coloured withered bloom of the wild heath on its purplish-grey masses and the surrounding banks of dead fern make a groundwork and background of excellent colour-harmony. How seldom does one see Quinces planted for ornament, and yet there is hardly any small tree that better deserves such treatment. Some Quinces planted about eight years ago are now perfect pictures, their lissome branches borne down with the load of great, deep-yellow fruit, and their leaves turning to a colour almost as rich and glowing. The old English rather round-fruited kind with the smooth skin is the best both for flavour and beauty--a mature tree without leaves in winter has a remarkably graceful, arching, almost weeping growth. The other kind is of a rather more rigid form, and though its woolly-coated, pear-shaped fruits are larger and strikingly handsome, the whole tree has a coarser look, and just lacks the attractive grace of the other. They will do fairly well almost anywhere, though they prefer a rich, loamy soil and a cool, damp, or even swampy place. The Medlar is another of the small fruiting trees that is more neglected than it should be, as it well deserves a place among ornamental shrubs. Here it is a precious thing in the region where garden melts into copse. The fruit-laden twigs are just now very attractive, and its handsome leaves can never be passed without admiration. Close to the Medlars is a happy intergrowth of the wild Guelder-Rose, still bearing its brilliant clusters, a strong-growing and far-clambering garden form of _Rosa arvensis_, full of red hips, Sweetbriar, and Holly--a happy tangle of red-fruited bushes, all looking as if they were trying to prove, in friendly emulation, which can make the bravest show of red-berried wild-flung wreath, or bending spray, or stately spire; while at their foot the bright colour is repeated by the bending, berried heads of the wild Iris, opening like fantastic dragons' mouths, and pouring out the red bead-like seeds upon the ground; and, as if to make the picture still more complete, the leaves of the wild Strawberry that cover the ground with a close carpet have also turned to a crimson, and here and there to an almost scarlet colour. During the year I make careful notes of any trees or shrubs that will be wanted, either to come from the nursery or to be transplanted within my own ground, so as to plant them as early as possible. Of the two extremes it is better to plant too early than too late. I would rather plant deciduous trees before the leaves are off than wait till after Christmas, but of all planting times the best is from the middle of October till the end of November, and the same time is the best for all hardy plants of large or moderate size. I have no patience with slovenly planting. I like to have the ground prepared some months in advance, and when the proper time comes, to do the actual planting as well as possible. The hole in the already prepared ground is taken out so that the tree shall stand exactly right for depth, though in this dry soil it is well to make the hole an inch or two deeper, in order to leave the tree standing in the centre of a shallow depression, to allow of a good watering now and then during the following summer. The hole must be made wide enough to give easy space for the most outward-reaching of the roots; they must be spread out on all sides, carefully combing them out with the fingers, so that they all lay out to the best advantage. Any roots that have been bruised, or have broken or jagged ends, are cut off with a sharp knife on the homeward side of the injury. Most gardeners when they plant, after the first spadeful or two has been thrown over the root, shake the bush with an up and down joggling movement. This is useful in the case of plants with a good lot of bushy root, such as Berberis, helping to get the grains of earth well in among the root; but in tree planting, where the roots are laid out flat, it is of course useless. In our light soil, the closer and firmer the earth is made round the newly-planted tree the better, and strong staking is most important, in order to save the newly-placed root from disturbance by dragging. Some trees and shrubs one can only get from nurseries in pots. This is usually the case with Ilex, Escallonia, and Cydonia. Such plants are sure to have the roots badly matted and twisted. The main root curls painfully round and round inside the imprisoning pot, but if it is a clever root it works its way out through the hole in the bottom, and even makes quite nice roots in the bed of ashes it has stood on. In this case, as these are probably its best roots, we do not attempt to pull it back through the hole, but break the pot to release it without hurt. If it is possible to straighten the pot-curled root, it is best to do so; in any case, the small fibrous ones can be laid out. Often the potful of roots is so hard and tight that it cannot be disentangled by the hand; then the only way is to soften it by gentle bumping on the bench, and then to disengage the roots by little careful digs all round with a blunt-pointed stick. If this is not done, and the plant is put in in its pot-bound state, it never gets on; it would be just as well to throw it away at once. Nine years ago a hedge of Lawson's Cypress was planted on one side of the kitchen garden. Three years later, when the trees had made some growth, I noticed in the case of three or four that they were quite bare of branches on one side all the way up for a width of about one-sixth of the circumference, leaving a smooth, straight, upright strip. Suspecting the cause, I had them up, and found in every case that the root just below the bare strip had been doubled under the stem, and had therefore been unable to do its share of the work. Nothing could have pointed out more clearly the defect in the planting. There are cases where ground cannot be prepared as one would wish, and where one has to get over the difficulty the best way one can. Such a case occurred when I had to plant some Yews and Savins right under a large Birch-tree. The Birch is one of several large ones that nearly surround the lawn. This one stands just within the end of a large shrub-clump, near the place of meeting of some paths with the grass and with some planting; here some further planting was wanted of dark-leaved evergreens. There is no tree more ground-robbing than a Birch, and under the tree in question the ground was dust-dry, extremely hard, and nothing but the poorest sand. Looking at the foot of a large tree one can always see which way the main roots go, and the only way to get down any depth is to go between these and not many feet away from the trunk. Farther away the roots spread out and would receive more injury. So the ground was got up the best way we could, and the Yews and Savins planted. Now, after some six years, they are healthy and dark-coloured, and have made good growth. But in such a place one cannot expect the original preparation of the ground, such as it was, to go for much. The year after planting they had some strong, lasting manure just pricked in over the roots--stuff from the shoeing-forge, full of hoof-parings. Hoof-parings are rich in ammonia, and decay slowly. Every other year they have either a repetition of this or some cooling cow manure. The big Birch no doubt gets some of it, though its hungriest roots are farther afield, but the rich colour of the shrubs shows that they are well nourished. As soon as may be in November the big hardy flower-border has to be thoroughly looked over. The first thing is to take away all "soft stuff." This includes all dead annuals and biennials and any tender things that have been put in for the summer, also Paris Daisies, Zinnias, French and African Marigolds, Helichrysums, Mulleins, and a few Geraniums. Then Dahlias are cut down. The waste stuff is laid in big heaps on the edge of the lawn just across the footpath, to be loaded into the donkey-cart and shot into some large holes that have been dug up in the wood, whose story will be told later. The Dahlias are now dug up from the border, and others collected from different parts of the garden. The labels are tied on to the short stumps that remain, and the roots are laid for a time on the floor of a shed. If the weather has been rainy just before taking them up, it is well to lay them upside down, so that any wet there may be about the bases of the large hollow stalks may drain out. They are left for perhaps a fortnight without shaking out the earth that holds between the tubers, so that they may be fairly dry before they are put away for the winter in a cellar. Then we go back to the flower border and dig out all the plants that have to be divided every year. It will also be the turn for some others that only want division every two or three or more years, as the case may be. First, out come all the perennial Sunflowers. These divide themselves into two classes; those whose roots make close clumpy masses, and those that throw out long stolons ending in a blunt snout, which is the growing crown for next year. To the first division belong the old double Sunflower (_Helianthus multiflorus_), of which I only keep the well-shaped variety Soleil d'Or, and the much taller large-flowered single kind, and a tall pale-yellow flowered one with a dark stem, whose name I do not know. It is not one of the kinds thought much of, and as usually grown has not much effect; but I plant it at the back and pull it down over other plants that have gone out of flower, so that instead of having only a few flowers at the top of a rather bare stem eight feet high, it is a spreading cloud of pale yellow bloom; the training down, as in the case of so many other plants, inducing it to throw up a short flowering stalk from the axil of every leaf along the stem. The kinds with the running roots are _Helianthus rigidus_, and its giant variety Miss Mellish, _H. decapetalus_ and _H. lætiflorus_. I do not know how it may be in other gardens, but in mine these must be replanted every year. Phloxes must also be taken up. They are always difficult here, unless the season is unusually rainy; in dry summers, even with mulching and watering, I cannot keep them from drying up. The outside pieces are cut off and the woody middle thrown away. It is surprising what a tiny bit of Phlox will make a strong flowering plant in one season. The kinds I like best are the pure whites and the salmon-reds; but two others that I find very pretty and useful are Eugénie, a good mauve, and Le Soleil, a strong pink, of a colour as near a really good pink as in any Phlox I know. Both of these have a neat and rather short habit of growth. I do not have many Michaelmas Daisies in the flower border, only some early ones that flower within September; of these there are the white-flowered _A. paniculatus_, _Shortii_, _acris_, and _amellus_. These of course come up, and any patches of Gladiolus are collected, to be dried for a time and then stored. The next thing is to look through the border for the plants that require occasional renewal. In the front I find that a longish patch of _Heuchera Richardsoni_ has about half the plants overgrown. These must come up, and are cut to pieces. It is not a nice plant to divide; it has strong middle crowns, and though there are many side ones, they are attached to the main ones too high up to have roots of their own; but I boldly slice down the main stocky stem with straight downward cuts, so as to give a piece of the thick stock to each side bit. I have done this both in winter and spring, and find the spring rather the best, if not followed by drought. Groups of _Anemone japonica_ and of _Polygonum compactum_ are spreading beyond bounds and must be reduced. Neither of these need be entirely taken up. Without going into further detail, it may be of use to note how often I find it advisable to lift and divide some of the more prominent hardy plants. Every year I divide Michaelmas Daisies, Goldenrod, _Helianthus_, _Phlox_, _Chrysanthemum maximum_, _Helenium pumilum_, _Pyrethrum uliginosum_, _Anthemis tinctoria_, _Monarda_, _Lychnis_, _Primula_, except _P. denticulata_, _rosea_, and _auricula_, which stand two years. Every two years, White Pinks, Cranesbills, _Spiræa_, _Aconitum_, _Gaillardia_, _Coreopsis_, _Chrysanthemum indicum_, _Galega_, _Doronicum_, _Nepeta_, _Geum aureum_, _Oenothera Youngi_, and _Oe. riparia_. Every three years, _Tritoma_, _Megasea_, _Centranthus_, _Vinca_, _Iris_, _Narcissus_. A plasterer's hammer is a tool that is very handy for dividing plants. It has a hammer on one side of the head, and a cutting blade like a small chopper on the other. With this and a cold chisel and a strong knife one can divide any roots in comfort. I never divide things by brutally chopping them across with a spade. Plants that have soft fleshy tubers like Dahlias and Pæonies want the cold chisel; it can be cleverly inserted among the crowns so that injury to the tubers is avoided, and it is equally useful in the case of some plants whose points of attachment are almost as hard as wire, like _Orobus vernus_, or as tough as a door-mat, like _Iris graminia_. The Michaelmas Daisies of the _Novæ Angliæ_ section make root tufts too close and hard to be cut with a knife, and here the chopper of the plasterer's hammer comes in. Where the crowns are closely crowded, as in this Aster, I find it best to chop at the bottom of the tuft, among the roots; when the chopper has cut about two-thirds through, the tuft can be separated with the hands, dividing naturally between the crowns, whereas if chopped from the top many crowns would have been spoilt. Tritomas want dividing with care; it always looks as if one could pull every crown apart, but there is a tender point at the "collar," where they easily break off short; with these also it is best to chop from below or to use the chisel, making the cut well down in the yellow rooty region. Veratrums divide much in the same way, wanting a careful cut low down, the points of their crowns being also very easy to break off. The Christmas Rose is one of the most awkward plants to divide successfully. It cannot be done in a hurry. The only safe way is to wash the clumps well out and look carefully for the points of attachment, and cut them either with knife or chisel, according to their position. In this case the chisel should be narrower and sharper. Three-year-old tufts of St. Bruno's Lily puzzled me at first. The rather fleshy roots are so tightly interlaced that cutting is out of the question; but I found out that if the tuft is held tight in the two hands, and the hands are worked opposite ways with a rotary motion of about a quarter of a circle, that they soon come apart without being hurt in the least. Delphiniums easily break off at the crown if they are broken up by hand, but the roots cut so easily that it ought not to be a difficulty. There are some plants in whose case one can never be sure whether they will divide well or not, such as Oriental Poppies and _Eryngium Oliverianum_. They behave in nearly the same way. Sometimes a Poppy or an Eryngium comes up with one thick root, impossible to divide, while the next door plant has a number of roots that are ready to drop apart like a bunch of Salsafy. Everlasting Peas do nearly the same. One may dig up two plants--own brothers of say seven years old--and a rare job it is, for they go straight down into the earth nearly a yard deep. One of them will have a straight black post of a root 2-1/2 inches thick without a break of any sort till it forks a foot underground, while the other will be a sort of loose rope of separate roots from half to three-quarters of an inch thick, that if carefully followed down and cleverly dissected where they join, will make strong plants at once. But the usual way to get young plants of Everlasting Pea is to look out in earliest spring for the many young growths that will be shooting, for these if taken off with a good bit of the white underground stem will root under a hand-light. Most of the Primrose tribe divide pleasantly and easily: the worst are the _auricula_ section; with these, for outdoor planting, one often has to slice a main root down to give a share of root to the offset. When one is digging up plants with running roots, such as Gaultheria, Honeysuckle, Polygonum, Scotch Briars, and many of the _Rubus_ tribe, or what is better, if one person is digging while another pulls up, it never does for the one who is pulling to give a steady haul; this is sure to end in breakage, whereas a root comes up willingly and unharmed in loosened ground to a succession of firm but gentle tugs, and one soon learns to suit the weight of the pulls to the strength of the plant, and to learn its breaking strain. Towards the end of October outdoor flowers in anything like quantity cannot be expected, and yet there are patches of bloom here and there in nearly every corner of the garden. The pretty Mediterranean Periwinkle (_Vinca acutiflora_) is in full bloom. As with many another southern plant that in its own home likes a cool and shady place, it prefers a sunny one in our latitude. The flowers are of a pale and delicate grey-blue colour, nearly as large as those of the common _Vinca major_, but they are borne more generously as to numbers on radical shoots that form thick, healthy-looking tufts of polished green foliage. It is not very common in gardens, but distinctly desirable. In the bulb-beds the bright-yellow _Sternbergia lutea_ is in flower. At first sight it looks something like a Crocus of unusually firm and solid substance; but it is an Amaryllis, and its pure and even yellow colouring is quite unlike that of any of the Crocuses. The numerous upright leaves are thick, deep green, and glossy. It flowers rather shyly in our poor soil, even in well-made beds, doing much better in chalky ground. Czar Violets are giving their fine and fragrant flowers on stalks nine inches long. To have them at their best they must be carefully cultivated and liberally enriched. No plants answer better to good treatment, or spoil more quickly by neglect. A miserable sight is a forgotten violet-bed where they have run together into a tight mat, giving only few and poor flowers. I have seen the owner of such a bed stand over it and blame the plants, when he should have laid the lash on his own shoulders. Violets must be replanted every year. When the last rush of bloom in March is over, the plants are pulled to pieces, and strong single crowns from the outer edges of the clumps, or from the later runners, are replanted in good, well-manured soil, in such a place as will be somewhat shaded from summer sun. There should be eighteen inches between each plant, and as they make their growth, all runners should be cut off until August. They are encouraged by liberal doses of liquid manure from time to time, and watered in case of drought; and the heart of the careful gardener is warmed and gratified when friends, seeing them at midsummer, say (as has more than once happened), "What a nice batch of young Hollyhocks!" In such a simple matter as the culture of this good hardy Violet, my garden, though it is full of limitations, and in all ways falls short of any worthy ideal, enables me here and there to point out something that is worth doing, and to lay stress on the fact that the things worth doing are worth taking trouble about. But it is a curious thing that many people, even among those who profess to know something about gardening, when I show them something fairly successful--the crowning reward of much care and labour--refuse to believe that any pains have been taken about it. They will ascribe it to chance, to the goodness of my soil, and even more commonly to some supposed occult influence of my own--to anything rather than to the plain fact that I love it well enough to give it plenty of care and labour. They assume a tone of complimentary banter, kindly meant no doubt, but to me rather distasteful, to this effect: "Oh yes, of course it will grow for you; anything will grow for you; you have only to look at a thing and it will grow." I have to pump up a laboured smile and accept the remark with what grace I can, as a necessary civility to the stranger that is within my gates, but it seems to me evident that those who say these things do not understand the love of a garden. I could not help rejoicing when such a visitor came to me one October. I had been saying how necessary good and deep cultivation was, especially in so very poor and shallow a soil as mine. Passing up through the copse where there were some tall stems of _Lilium giganteum_ bearing the great upturned pods of seed, my visitor stopped and said, "I don't believe a word about your poor soil--look at the growth of that Lily. Nothing could make that great stem ten feet high in a poor soil, and there it is, just stuck into the wood!" I said nothing, knowing that presently I could show a better answer than I could frame in words. A little farther up in the copse we came upon an excavation about twelve feet across and four deep, and by its side a formidable mound of sand, when my friend said, "Why are you making all this mess in your pretty wood? are you quarrying stone, or is it for the cellar of a building? and what on earth are you going to do with that great heap of sand? why, there must be a dozen loads of it." That was my moment of secret triumph, but I hope I bore it meekly as I answered, "I only wanted to plant a few more of those big Lilies, and you see in my soil they would not have a chance unless the ground was thoroughly prepared; look at the edge of the scarp and see how the solid yellow sand comes to within four inches of the top; so I have a big wide hole dug; and look, there is the donkey-cart coming with the first load of Dahlia-tops and soft plants that have been for the summer in the south border. There will be several of those little cartloads, each holding three barrowfuls. As it comes into the hole, the men will chop it with the spade and tread it down close, mixing in a little sand. This will make a nice cool, moist bottom of slowly-rotting vegetable matter. Some more of the same kind of waste will come from the kitchen garden--cabbage-stumps, bean-haulm, soft weeds that have been hoed up, and all the greenest stuff from the rubbish-heap. Every layer will be chopped and pounded, and tramped down so that there should be as little sinking as possible afterwards. By this time the hole will be filled to within a foot of the top; and now we must get together some better stuff--road-scrapings and trimmings mixed with some older rubbish-heap mould, and for the top of all, some of our precious loam, and the soil of an old hotbed and some well-decayed manure, all well mixed, and then we are ready for the Lilies. They are planted only just underground, and then the whole bed has a surfacing of dead leaves, which helps to keep down weeds, and also looks right with the surrounding wild ground. The remains of the heap of sand we must deal with how we can; but there are hollows here and there in the roadway and paths, and a place that can be levelled up in the rubbish-yard, and some kitchen-garden paths that will bear raising, and so by degrees it is disposed of." CHAPTER XII NOVEMBER Giant Christmas Rose -- Hardy Chrysanthemums -- Sheltering tender shrubs -- Turfing by inoculation -- Transplanting large trees -- Sir Henry Steuart's experience early in the century -- Collecting fallen leaves -- Preparing grubbing tools -- Butcher's Broom -- Alexandrian Laurel -- Hollies and Birches -- A lesson in planting. The giant Christmas Rose (_Helleborus maximus_) is in full flower; it is earlier than the true Christmas Rose, being at its best by the middle of November. It is a large and massive flower, but compared with the later kinds has a rather coarse look. The bud and the back of the flower are rather heavily tinged with a dull pink, and it never has the pure-white colouring throughout of the later ones. I have taken some pains to get together some really hardy November-blooming Chrysanthemums. The best of all is a kind frequent in neighbouring cottage-gardens, and known hereabouts as Cottage Pink. I believe it is identical with Emperor of China, a very old sort that used to be frequent in greenhouse cultivation before it was supplanted by the many good kinds now grown. But its place is not indoors, but in the open garden; if against a south or west wall, so much the better. Perhaps one year in seven the bloom may be spoilt by such a severe frost as that of October 1895, but it will bear unharmed several degrees of frost and much rain. I know no Chrysanthemum of so true a pink colour, the colour deepening to almost crimson in the centre. After the first frost the foliage of this kind turns to a splendid colour, the green of the leaves giving place to a rich crimson that sometimes clouds the outer portion of the leaf, and often covers its whole expanse. The stiff, wholesome foliage adds much to the beauty of the outdoor kinds, contrasting most agreeably with the limp, mildewed leafage of those indoors. Following Cottage Pink is a fine pompone called Soleil d'Or, in colour the richest deep orange, with a still deeper and richer coloured centre. The beautiful crimson Julie Lagravère flowers at the same time. Both are nearly frost-proof, and true hardy November flowers. The first really frosty day we go to the upper part of the wood and cut out from among the many young Scotch Firs as many as we think will be wanted for sheltering plants and shrubs of doubtful hardiness. One section of the high wall at the back of the flower border is planted with rather tender things, so that the whole is covered with sheltering fir-boughs. Here are Loquat, Fuchsia, Pomegranate, _Edwardsia_, _Piptanthus_, and _Choisya_, and in the narrow border at the foot of the wall, _Crinum_, _Nandina_, _Clerodendron_, and _Hydrangea_. In the broad border in front of the wall nothing needs protection except Tritomas; these have cones of coal-ashes heaped over each plant or clump. The Crinums also have a few inches of ashes over them. Some large Hydrangeas in tubs are moved to a sheltered place and put close together, a mound of sand being shovelled up all round to nearly the depth of the tubs; then a wall is made of thatched hurdles, and dry fern is packed well in among the heads of the plants. They would be better in a frost-proof shed, but we have no such place to spare. The making of a lawn is a difficulty in our very poor sandy soil. In this rather thickly-populated country the lords of the manor had been so much pestered for grants of road-side turf, and the privilege when formerly given had been so much abused, that they have agreed together to refuse all applications. Opportunities of buying good turf do not often occur, and sowing is slow, and not satisfactory. I am told by a seedsman of the highest character that it is almost impossible to get grass seed clean and true to name from the ordinary sources; the leading men therefore have to grow their own. In my own case, having some acres of rough heath and copse where the wild grasses are of fine-leaved kinds, I made the lawn by inoculation. The ground was trenched and levelled, then well trodden and raked, and the surface stones collected. Tufts of the wild grass were then forked up, and were pulled into pieces about the size of the palm of one's hand, and laid down eight inches apart, and well rolled in. During the following summer we collected seed of the same grasses to sow early in spring in any patchy or bare places. One year after planting the patches had spread to double their size, and by the second year had nearly joined together. The grasses were of two kinds only, namely, Sheep's Fescue (_Festuca ovina_) and Crested Dog's-tail (_Agrostis canina_). They make a lawn of a quiet, low-toned colour, never of the bright green of the rather coarser grasses; but in this case I much prefer it; it goes better with the Heath and Fir and Bracken that belong to the place. In point of labour, a lawn made of these fine grasses has the great merit of only wanting mowing once in three weeks. * * * * * I have never undertaken the transplanting of large trees, but there is no doubt that it may be done with success, and in laying out a new place where the site is bare, if suitable trees are to be had, it is a plan much to be recommended. It has often been done of late years, but until a friend drew my attention to an article in the _Quarterly Review_, dated March 1828, I had no idea that it had been practised on a large scale so early in the century. The article in question was a review of "The Planter's Guide," by Sir Henry Steuart, Bart., LL.D. (Edinburgh, 1828.) It quoted the opinion and observation of a committee of gentlemen, among whom was Sir Walter Scott, who visited Allanton (Sir Henry Steuart's place) in September 1828, when the trees had been some years planted. They found them growing "with vigour and luxuriance, and in the most exposed situations making shoots of eighteen inches.... From the facts which they witnessed the committee reported it as their unanimous opinion that the art of transplantation, as practised by Sir Henry Steuart, is calculated to accelerate in an extraordinary degree the power of raising wood, whether for beauty or shelter." The reviewer then quotes the method of transplantation, describing the extreme care with which the roots are preserved, men with picks carefully trying round the ground beneath the outer circumference of the branches for the most outlying rootlets, and then gradually approaching the bole. The greatest care was taken not to injure any root or fibre, these as they were released from the earth being tied up, and finally the transplanting machine, consisting of a strong pole mounted on high wheels, was brought close to the trunk and attached to it, and the tree when lowered, carefully transported to its new home. Every layer of roots was then replanted with the utmost care, with delicate fingering and just sufficient ramming, and in the end the tree stood without any artificial support whatever, and in positions exposed to the fiercest gales. The average size of tree dealt with seems to have had a trunk about a foot in diameter, but some were removed with complete success whose trunks were two feet thick. In order that his trees might be the better balanced in shape, Sir Henry boldly departed from the older custom of replanting a tree in its original aspect, for he reversed the aspect, so that the more stunted and shorter-twigged weather side now became the lee side, and could grow more freely. He insists strongly on the wisdom of transplanting only well-weathered trees, and not those of tender constitution that had been sheltered by standing among other close growths, pointing out that these have a tenderer bark and taller top and roots less well able to bear the strain of wind and weather in the open. He reckons that a transplanted tree is in full new growth by the fourth or fifth year, and that an advantage equal to from thirty to forty years' growth is gained by the system. As for the expense of the work, Sir Henry estimated that his largest trees each cost from ten to thirteen shillings to take up, remove half a mile, and replant. In the case of large trees the ground that was to receive them was prepared a twelvemonth beforehand. * * * * * Now, in the third week of November, the most pressing work is the collecting of leaves for mulching and leaf-mould. The oaks have been late in shedding their leaves, and we have been waiting till they are down. Oak-leaves are the best, then hazel, elm, and Spanish chestnut. Birch and beech are not so good; beech-leaves especially take much too long to decay. This is, no doubt, the reason why nothing grows willingly under beeches. Horse and cart and three hands go out into the lanes for two or three days, and the loads that come home go three feet deep into the bottom of a range of pits. The leaves are trodden down close and covered with a layer of mould, in which winter salad stuff is immediately planted. The mass of leaves will soon begin to heat, and will give a pleasant bottom-heat throughout the winter. Other loads of leaves go into an open pen about ten feet square and five feet deep. Two such pens, made of stout oak post and rail and upright slabs, stand side by side in the garden yard. The one newly filled has just been emptied of its two-year-old leaf-mould, which has gone as a nourishing and protecting mulch over beds of Daffodils and choice bulbs and Alströmerias, some being put aside in reserve for potting and various uses. The other pen remains full of the leaves of last year, slowly rotting into wholesome plant-food. With works of wood-cutting and stump-grubbing near at hand, we look over the tools and see that all are in readiness for winter work. Axes and hand-bills are ground, fag-hooks sharpened, picks and mattocks sent to the smithy to be drawn out, the big cross-cut saw fresh sharpened and set, and the hand-saws and frame-saws got ready. The rings of the bittle are tightened and wedged up, so that its heavy head may not split when the mighty blows, flung into the tool with a man's full strength, fall on the heads of the great iron wedges. [Illustration: PENS FOR STORING DEAD LEAVES.] [Illustration: CAREFUL WILD-GARDENING--WHITE FOXGLOVES AT THE EDGE OF THE FIR WOOD. (_See page 270._)] Some thinning of birch-trees has to be done in the lowest part of the copse, not far from the house. They are rather evenly distributed on the ground, and I wish to get them into groups by cutting away superfluous trees. On the neighbouring moorland and heathy uplands they are apt to grow naturally in groups, the individual trees generally bending outward towards the free, open space, the whole group taking a form that is graceful and highly pictorial. I hope to be able to cut out trees so as to leave the remainder standing in some such way. But as a tree once cut cannot be put up again, the condemned ones are marked with bands of white paper right round the trunks, so that they can be observed from all sides, thus to give a chance of reprieve to any tree that from any point of view may have pictorial value. Frequent in some woody districts in the south of England, though local, is the Butcher's Broom (_Ruscus aculeatus_). Its stiff green branches that rise straight from the root bear small, hard leaves, armed with a sharp spine at the end. The flower, which comes in early summer, is seated without stalk in the middle of the leaf, and is followed by a large red berry. In country places where it abounds, butchers use the twigs tied in bunches to brush the little chips of meat off their great chopping-blocks, that are made of solid sections of elm trees, standing three and a half feet high and about two and a half feet across. Its beautiful garden relative, the Alexandrian or Victory Laurel (_Ruscus racemosus_), is also now just at its best. Nothing makes a more beautiful wreath than two of its branches, suitably arched and simply bound together near the butts and free ends. It is not a laurel, but a _Ruscus_, the name laurel having probably grown on to it by old association with any evergreen suitable for a victor's wreath. It is a slow-growing plant, but in time makes handsome tufts of its graceful branches. Few plants are more exquisitely modelled, to use a term familiar to the world of fine art, or give an effect of more delicate and perfect finish. It is a valuable plant in a shady place in good, cool soil. Early in summer, when the young growths appear, the old, then turning rusty, should be cut away. No trees group together more beautifully than Hollies and Birches. One such happy mixture in one part of the copse suggested further plantings of Holly, Birches being already in abundance. Every year some more Hollies are planted; those put in nine years ago are now fifteen feet high, and are increasing fast. They are slow to begin growth after transplanting, perhaps because in our very light soil they cannot be moved with a "ball"; all the soil shakes away, and leaves the root naked; but after about three years, when the roots have got good hold and begun to ramble, they grow away well. The trunk of an old Holly has a smooth pale-grey bark, and sometimes a slight twist, that makes it look like the gigantic bone of some old-world monster. The leaves of some old trees, especially if growing in shade, change their shape, losing the side prickles and becoming longer and nearly flat and more of a dark bottle-green colour, while the lower branches and twigs, leafless except towards their ends, droop down in a graceful line that rises again a little at the tip. [Illustration: HOLLY STEMS IN AN OLD HEDGE-ROW.] The leaves are all down by the last week of November, and woodland assumes its winter aspect; perhaps one ought rather to say, some one of its infinite variety of aspects, for those who live in such country know how many are the winter moods of forest land, and how endless are its variations of atmospheric effect and pictorial beauty--variations much greater and more numerous than are possible in summer. With the wind in the south-west and soft rain about, the twigs of the birches look almost crimson, while the dead bracken at their foot, half-draggled and sodden with wet, is of a strong, dark rust colour. Now one sees the full value of the good evergreens, and, rambling through woodland, more especially of the Holly, whether in bush or tree form, with its masses of strong green colour, dark and yet never gloomy. Whether it is the high polish of the leaves, or the lively look of their wavy edges, with the short prickles set alternately up and down, or the brave way the tree has of shooting up among other thick growth, or its massive sturdiness on a bare hillside, one cannot say, but a Holly in early winter, even without berries, is always a cheering sight. John Evelyn is eloquent in his praise of this grand evergreen, and lays special emphasis on this quality of cheerfulness. Near my home is a little wild valley, whose planting, wholly done by Nature, I have all my life regarded with the most reverent admiration. The arable fields of an upland farm give place to hazel copses as the ground rises. Through one of these a deep narrow lane, cool and dusky in summer from its high steep banks and over-arching foliage, leads by a rather sudden turn into the lower end of the little valley. Its grassy bottom is only a few yards wide, and its sides rise steeply right and left. Looking upward through groups of wild bushes and small trees, one sees thickly-wooded ground on the higher levels. The soil is of the very poorest; ridges of pure yellow sand are at the mouths of the many rabbit-burrows. The grass is of the short fine kinds of the heathy uplands. Bracken grows low, only from one to two feet high, giving evidence of the poverty of the soil, and yet it seems able to grow in perfect beauty clumps of Juniper and Thorn and Holly, and Scotch Fir on the higher ground. On the steeply-rising banks are large groups of Juniper, some tall, some spreading, some laced and wreathed about with tangles of Honeysuckle, now in brown winter dress, and there are a few bushes of Spindle-tree, whose green stems and twigs look strangely green in winter. The Thorns stand some singly, some in close companionship, impenetrable masses of short-twigged prickly growth, with here and there a wild Rose shooting straight up through the crowded branches. One thinks how lovely it will be in early June, when the pink Rose-wreaths are tossing out of the foamy sea of white Thorn blossom. The Hollies are towering masses of health and vigour. Some of the groups of Thorn and Holly are intermingled; all show beautiful arrangements of form and colour, such as are never seen in planted places. The track in the narrow valley trends steadily upwards and bears a little to the right. High up on the left-hand side is an old wood of Scotch Fir. A few detached trees come half-way down the valley bank to meet the gnarled, moss-grown Thorns and the silver-green Junipers. As the way rises some Birches come in sight, also at home in the sandy soil. Their graceful, lissome spray moving to the wind looks active among the stiffer trees, and their white stems shine out in startling contrast to the other dusky foliage. So the narrow track leads on, showing the same kinds of tree and bush in endless variety of beautiful grouping, under the sombre half-light of the winter day. It is afternoon, and as one mounts higher a pale bar of yellow light gleams between the farther tree-stems, but all above is grey, with angry, blackish drifts of ragged wrack. Now the valley opens out to a nearly level space of rough grass, with grey tufts that will be pink bell-heather in summer, and upstanding clumps of sedge that tell of boggy places. In front and to the right are dense fir-woods. To the left is broken ground and a steep-sided hill, towards whose shoulder the track rises. Here are still the same kinds of trees, but on the open hillside they have quite a different effect. Now I look into the ruddy heads of the Thorns, bark and fruit both of rich warm colouring, and into the upper masses of the Hollies, also reddening into wealth of berry. [Illustration: WILD JUNIPERS.] Throughout the walk, pacing slowly but steadily for nearly an hour, only these few kinds of trees have been seen, Juniper, Holly, Thorn, Scotch Fir, and Birch (a few small Oaks excepted), and yet there has not been once the least feeling of monotony, nor, returning downward by the same path, could one wish anything to be altered or suppressed or differently grouped. And I have always had the same feeling about any quite wild stretch of forest land. Such a bit of wild forest as this small valley and the hilly land beyond are precious lessons in the best kind of tree and shrub planting. No artificial planting can ever equal that of Nature, but one may learn from it the great lesson of the importance of moderation and reserve, of simplicity of intention, and directness of purpose, and the inestimable value of the quality called "breadth" in painting. For planting ground is painting a landscape with living things; and as I hold that good gardening takes rank within the bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity. And his difficulties are not slight ones, for his living picture must be right from all points, and in all lights. [Illustration: WILD JUNIPERS.] No doubt the planting of a large space with a limited number of kinds of trees cannot be trusted to all hands, for in those of a person without taste or the more finely-trained perceptions the result would be very likely dull or even absurd. It is not the paint that make the picture, but the brain and heart and hand of the man who uses it. CHAPTER XIII DECEMBER The woodman at work -- Tree-cutting in frosty weather -- Preparing sticks and stakes -- Winter Jasmine -- Ferns in the wood-walk -- Winter colour of evergreen shrubs -- Copse-cutting -- Hoop-making -- Tools used -- Sizes of hoops -- Men camping out -- Thatching with hoop-chips -- The old thatcher's bill. It is good to watch a clever woodman and see how much he can do with his simple tools, and how easily one man alone can deal with heavy pieces of timber. An oak trunk, two feet or more thick, and weighing perhaps a ton, lies on the ground, the branches being already cut off. He has to cleave it into four, and to remove it to the side of a lane one hundred feet away. His tools are an axe and one iron wedge. The first step is the most difficult--to cut such a nick in the sawn surface of the butt of the trunk as will enable the wedge to stick in. He holds the wedge to the cut and hammers it gently with the back of the axe till it just holds, then he tries a moderate blow, and is quite prepared for what is almost sure to happen--the wedge springs out backwards; very likely it springs out for three or four trials, but at last the wedge bites and he can give it the dexterous, rightly-placed blows that slowly drive it in. Before the wedge is in half its length a creaking sound is heard; the fibres are beginning to tear, and a narrow rift shows on each side of the iron. A few more strokes and the sound of the rending fibres is louder and more continuous, with sudden cracking noises, that tell of the parting of larger bundles of fibres, that had held together till the tremendous rending power of the wedge at last burst them asunder. Now the man looks out a bit of strong branch about four inches thick, and with the tree-trunk as a block and the axe held short in one hand as a chopper, he makes a wooden wedge about twice the size of the iron one, and drives it into one of the openings at its side. For if you have only one iron wedge, and you drive it tight into your work, you can neither send it farther nor get it out, and you feel and look foolish. The wooden wedge driven in releases the iron one, which is sent in afresh against the side of the wedge of oak, the trunk meanwhile rending slowly apart with much grieving and complaining of the tearing fibres. As the rent opens the axe cuts across diagonal bundles of fibres that still hold tightly across the widening rift. And so the work goes on, the man unconsciously exercising his knowledge of his craft in placing and driving the wedges, the helpless wood groaning and creaking and finally falling apart as the last holding fibres are severed by the axe. Meanwhile the raw green wood gives off a delicious scent, sweet and sharp and refreshing, not unlike the smell of apples crushing in the cider-press. [Illustration: THE WOODMAN.] The woodman has still to rend the two halves of the trunk, but the work is not so heavy and goes more quickly. Now he has to shift them to the side of the rough track that serves as a road through the wood. They are so heavy that two men could barely lift them, and he is alone. He could move them with a lever, that he could cut out of a straight young tree, a foot or so at a time at each end, but it is a slow and clumsy way; besides, the wood is too much encumbered with undergrowth. So he cuts two short pieces from a straight bit of branch four inches or five inches thick, levers one of his heavy pieces so that one end points to the roadway, prises up this end and kicks one of his short pieces under it close to the end, settling it at right angles with gentle kicks. The other short piece is arranged in the same way, a little way beyond the middle of the length of quartered trunk. Now, standing behind it, he can run the length easily along on the two rollers, till the one nearest him is left behind; this one is then put under the front end of the weight, and so on till the road is reached. Trees that stand where paths are to come, or that for any reason have to be removed, root and all, are not felled with axe or saw, but are grubbed down. The earth is dug away next to the tree, gradually exposing the roots; these are cut through with axe or mattock close to the butt, and again about eighteen inches away, so that by degrees a deep trench, eighteen inches wide, is excavated round the butt. A rope is fastened at the right distance up the trunk, when, if the tree does not hold by a very strong tap-root, a succession of steady pulls will bring it down; the weight of the top thus helping to prise the heavy butt out of the ground. We come upon many old stumps of Scotch fir, the remains of the original wood; they make capital firewood, though some burn rather too fiercely, being full of turpentine. Many are still quite sound, though it must be six-and-twenty years since they were felled. They are very hard to grub, with their thick taproots and far-reaching laterals, and still tougher to split up, their fibres are so much twisted, and the dark-red heart-wood has become hardened till it rings to a blow almost like metal. But some, whose roots have rotted, come up more easily, and with very little digging may be levered out of the ground with a long iron stone-bar, such as they use in the neighbouring quarries, putting the point of the bar under the "stam," and having a log of wood for a hard fulcrum. Or a stout young stem of oak or chestnut is used for a lever, passing a chain under the stump and over the middle of the bar and prising upwards with the lever. "Stam" is the word always used by the men for any stump of a tree left in the ground. [Illustration: GRUBBING A TREE-STUMP.] [Illustration: FELLING AND GRUBBING TOOLS. (_See page 150._)] A spell of frosty days at the end of December puts a stop to all planting and ground work. Now we go into the copse and cut the trees that have been provisionally marked, judged, and condemned, with the object of leaving the remainder standing in graceful groups. The men wonder why I cut some of the trees that are best and straightest and have good tops, and leave those with leaning stems. Anything of seven inches or less diameter is felled with the axe, but thicker trees with the cross-cut saw. For these our most active fellow climbs up the tree with a rope, and makes it fast to the trunk a good way up, then two of them, kneeling, work the saw. When it has cut a third of the way through, the rope is pulled on the side opposite the cut to keep it open and let the saw work free. When still larger trees are sawn down this is done by driving in a wedge behind the saw, when the width of the saw-blade is rather more than buried in the tree. When the trunk is nearly sawn through, it wants care and judgment to see that the saw does not get pinched by the weight of the tree; the clumsy workman who fails to clear his saw gets laughed at, and probably damages his tool. Good straight trunks of oak and chestnut are put aside for special uses; the rest of the larger stuff is cut into cordwood lengths of four feet. The heaviest of these are split up into four pieces to make them easier to load and carry away, and eventually to saw up into firewood. The best of the birch tops are cut into pea-sticks, a clever, slanting cut with the hand-bill leaving them pointed and ready for use. Throughout the copse are "stools" of Spanish chestnut, cut about once in five years. From this we get good straight stakes for Dahlias and Hollyhocks, also beanpoles; while the rather straight-branched boughs are cut into branching sticks for Michaelmas Daisies, and special lengths are got ready for various kinds of plants--Chrysanthemums, Lilies, Pæonies and so on. To provide all this in winter, when other work is slack or impossible, is an important matter in the economy of a garden, for all gardeners know how distressing and harassing it is to find themselves without the right sort of sticks or stakes in summer, and what a long job it then seems to have to look them up and cut them, of indifferent quality, out of dry faggots. By the plan of preparing all in winter no precious time is lost, and a tidy withe-bound bundle of the right sort is always at hand. The rest of the rough spray and small branching stuff is made up into faggots to be chopped up for fire-lighting; the country folk still use the old word "bavin" for faggots. The middle-sized branches--anything between two inches and six inches in diameter--are what the woodmen call "top and lop"; these are also cut into convenient lengths, and are stacked in the barn, to be cut into billets for next year's fires in any wet or frosty weather, when outdoor work is at a standstill. What a precious winter flower is the yellow Jasmine (_Jasminum nudiflorum_). Though hard frost spoils the flowers then expanded, as soon as milder days come the hosts of buds that are awaiting them burst into bloom. Its growth is so free and rapid that one has no scruple about cutting it freely; and great branching sprays, cut a yard or more long, arranged with branches of Alexandrian Laurel or other suitable foliage--such as Andromeda or Gaultheria--are beautiful as room decoration. Christmas Roses keep on flowering bravely, in spite of our light soil and frequent summer drought, both being unfavourable conditions; but bravest of all is the blue Algerian Iris (_Iris stylosa_), flowering freely as it does, at the foot of a west wall, in all open weather from November till April. In the rock-garden at the edge of the copse the creeping evergreen _Polygala chamæbuxus_ is quite at home in beds of peat among mossy boulders. Where it has the ground to itself, this neat little shrub makes close tufts only four inches or five inches high, its wiry branches being closely set with neat, dark-green, box-like leaves; though where it has to struggle for life among other low shrubs, as may often be seen in the Alps, the branches elongate, and will run bare for two feet or three feet to get the leafy end to the light. Even now it is thickly set with buds and has a few expanded flowers. This bit of rock-garden is mostly planted with dwarf shrubs--_Skimmia_, Bog-myrtle, Alpine Rhododendrons, _Gaultheria_, and _Andromeda_, with drifts of hardy ferns between, and only a few "soft" plants. But of these, two are now conspicuously noticeable for foliage--the hardy Cyclamens and the blue Himalayan Poppy (_Meconopsis Wallichi_). Every winter I notice how bravely the pale woolly foliage of this plant bears up against the early winter's frost and wet. The wood-walk, whose sloping banks are planted with hardy ferns in large groups, shows how many of our common kinds are good plants for the first half of the winter. Now, only a week before Christmas, the male fern is still in handsome green masses; _Blechnum_ is still good, and common Polypody at its best. The noble fronds of the Dilated Shield-fern are still in fairly good order, and _Ceterach_ in rocky chinks is in fullest beauty. Beyond, in large groups, are prosperous-looking tufts of the Wood-rush (_Luzula sylvatica_); then there is wood as far as one can see, here mostly of the silver-stemmed Birch and rich green Holly, with the woodland carpet of dusky low-toned bramble and quiet dead leaf and brilliant moss. By the middle of December many of the evergreen shrubs that thrive in peat are in full beauty of foliage. _Andromeda Catesbæi_ is richly coloured with crimson clouds and splashes; Skimmias are at their best and freshest, their bright, light green, leathery foliage defying all rigours of temperature or weather. Pernettyas are clad in their strongest and deepest green leafage, and show a richness and depth of colour only surpassed by that of the yew hedges. Copse-cutting is one of the harvests of the year for labouring men, and all the more profitable that it can go on through frosty weather. A handy man can earn good wages at piece-work, and better still if he can cleave and shave hoops. Hoop-making is quite a large industry in these parts, employing many men from Michaelmas to March. They are barrel-hoops, made of straight poles of six years' growth. The wood used is Birch, Ash, Hazel and Spanish Chestnut. Hazel is the best, or as my friend in the business says, "Hazel, that's the master!" The growths of the copses are sold by auction in some near county town, as they stand, the buyer clearing them during the winter. They are cut every six years, and a good copse of Chestnut has been known to fetch £54 an acre. A good hoop-maker can earn from twenty to twenty-five shillings a week. He sets up his brake, while his mate, who will cleave the rods, cuts a post about three inches thick, and fixes it into the ground so that it stands about three feet high. To steady it he drives in another of rather curly shape by its side, so that the tops of the two are nearly even, but the foot of the curved spur is some nine inches away at the bottom, with its top pressing hard against the upright. To stiffen it still more he makes a long withe of a straight hazel rod, which he twists into a rope by holding the butt tightly under his left foot and twisting with both hands till the fibres are wrenched open and the withe is ready to spring back and wind upon itself. With this he binds his two posts together, so that they stand perfectly rigid. On this he cleaves the poles, beginning at the top. The tool is a small one-handed adze with a handle like a hammer. A rod is usually cleft in two, so that it is only shaved on one side; but sometimes a pole of Chestnut, a very quick-growing wood, is large enough to cleave into eight, and when the wood is very clean and straight they can sometimes get two lengths of fourteen feet out of a pole. [Illustration: HOOP-MAKING IN THE WOODS.] The brake is a strong flat-shaped post of oak set up in the ground to lean a little away from the workman. It stands five and a half feet out of the ground. A few inches from its upper end it has a shoulder cut in it which acts as the fulcrum for the cross-bar that supports the pole to be shaved, and that leans down towards the man. The relative position of the two parts of the brake reminds one of the mast and yard of a lateen-rigged boat. The bar is nicely balanced by having a hazel withe bound round a groove at its upper short end, about a foot beyond the fulcrum, while the other end of the withe is tied round a heavy bit of log or stump that hangs clear of the ground and just balances the bar, so that it see-saws easily. The cleft rod that is to be shaved lies along the bar, and an iron pin that passes through the head of the brake just above the point where the bar rides over its shoulder, nips the hoop as the weight of the stroke comes upon it; the least lifting of the bar releases the hoop, which is quickly shifted onwards for a new stroke. The shaving tool is a strong two-handled draw-knife, much like the tool used by wheelwrights. It is hard work, "wunnerful tryin' across the chest." The hoops are in several standard lengths, from fourteen to two and a half feet. The longest go to the West Indies for sugar hogsheads, and some of the next are for tacking round pipes of wine. The wine is in well-made iron-hooped barrels, but the wooden hoops are added to protect them from the jarring and bumping when rolled on board ship, and generally to save them during storage and transit. These hoops are in two sizes, called large and small pipes. A thirteen-foot size go to foreign countries for training vines on. A large quantity that measure five feet six inches, and called "long pinks," are for cement barrels. A length of seven feet six inches are used for herring barrels, and are called kilderkins, after the name of the size of tub. Smaller sizes go for gunpowder barrels, and for tacking round packing-cases and tea-chests. The men want to make all the time they can in the short winter daylight, and often the work is some miles from home, so if the weather is not very cold they make huts of the bundles of rods and chips, and sleep out on the job. I always admire the neatness with which the bundles are fastened up, and the strength of the withe-rope that binds them, for sixty hoops, or thirty pairs, as they call them, of fourteen feet, are a great weight to be kept together by four slight hazel bands. [Illustration: HOOP-SHAVING.] [Illustration: SHED-ROOF, THATCHED WITH HOOP-CHIP.] In this industry there is a useful by-product in the shavings, or chips as they call them. They are eighteen inches to two feet long, and are made up into small faggots or bundles and stacked up for six months to a year to dry, and then sell readily at twopence a bundle to cut up for fire-lighting. They also make a capital thatch for sheds, a thatch nearly a foot thick, warm in winter, and cool in summer, and durable, for if well made it will last for forty years. I got a clever old thatcher to make me a hoop-chip roof for the garden shed; it was a long job, and he took his time (although it was piece-work), preparing and placing each handful of chips as carefully as if he was making a wedding bouquet. He was one of the old sort--no scamping of work for him; his work was as good as he could make it, and it was his pride and delight. The roof was prepared with strong laths nailed horizontally across the rafters as if for tiling, but farther apart; and the chips, after a number of handfuls had been duly placed and carefully poked and patted into shape, were bound down to the laths with soft tarred cord guided by an immense iron needle. The thatching, as in all cases of roof-covering, begins at the eaves, so that each following layer laps over the last. Only the ridge has to be of straw, because straw can be bent over; the chips are too rigid. When the thatch is all in place the whole is "drove," that is, beaten up close with a wooden bat that strikes against the ends of the chips and drives them up close, jamming them tight into the fastening. After six months of drying summer weather he came and drove it all over again. Thatching is done by piece-work, and paid at so much a "square" of ten by ten feet. When I asked for his bill, the old man brought it made out on a hazel stick, in a manner either traditional, or of his own devising. This is how it runs, in notches about half an inch long, and dots dug with the point of the knife. It means, "To so much work done, £4, 5s. 0d." IIXXX·I·, IIXXXX·II[V] IIII[V]XX,IIXX CHAPTER XIV LARGE AND SMALL GARDENS A well done villa garden -- A small town garden -- Two delightful gardens of small size -- Twenty acres within the walls -- A large country house and its garden -- Terrace -- Lawn -- Parterre -- Free garden -- Kitchen garden -- Buildings -- Ornamental orchard -- Instructive mixed gardens -- Mr. Wilson's at Wisley -- A window garden. The size of a garden has very little to do with its merit. It is merely an accident relating to the circumstances of the owner. It is the size of his heart and brain and goodwill that will make his garden either delightful or dull, as the case may be, and either leave it at the usual monotonous dead-level, or raise it, in whatever degree may be, towards that of a work of fine art. If a man knows much, it is more difficult for him to deal with a small space than a larger, for he will have to make the more sacrifice; but if he is wise he will at once make up his mind about what he will let go, and how he may best treat the restricted space. Some years ago I visited a small garden attached to a villa on the outskirts of a watering-place on the south coast. In ordinary hands it would have been a perfectly commonplace thing, with the usual weary mixture, and exhibiting the usual distressing symptoms that come in the train of the ministrations of the jobbing-gardener. In size it may have been a third of an acre, and it was one of the most interesting and enjoyable gardens I have ever seen, its master and mistress giving it daily care and devotion, and enjoying to the full its glad response of grateful growth. The master had built with his own hands, on one side where more privacy was wanted, high rugged walls, with spaces for many rock-loving plants, and had made the wall die away so cleverly into the rock-garden, that the whole thing looked like a garden founded on some ancient ruined structure. And it was all done with so much taste that there was nothing jarring or strained-looking, still less anything cockneyfied, but all easy and pleasant and pretty, while the happy look of the plants at once proclaimed his sympathy with them, and his comprehensive knowledge of their wants. In the same garden was a walled enclosure where Tree Pæonies and some of the hardier of the oriental Rhododendrons were thriving, and there were pretty spaces of lawn, and flower border, and shrub clump, alike beautiful and enjoyable, all within a small space, and yet not crowded--the garden of one who was a keen flower lover, as well as a world-known botanist. I am always thankful to have seen this garden, because it showed me, in a way that had never been so clearly brought home to me, how much may be done in a small space. Another and much smaller garden that I remember with pleasure was in a sort of yard among houses, in a country town. The house it belonged to, a rather high one, was on its east side, and halfway along on the south; the rest was bounded by a wall about ten feet high. Opposite the house the owner had built of rough blocks of sandstone what served as a workshop, about twelve feet long along the wall, and six feet wide within. A low archway of the same rough stone was the entrance, and immediately above it a lean-to roof sloped up to the top of the wall, which just here had been carried a little higher. The roof was of large flat sandstones, only slightly lapping over each other, with spaces and chinks where grew luxuriant masses of Polypody Fern. It was contrived with a cement bed, so that it was quite weather-tight, and the room was lighted by a skylight at one end that did not show from the garden. A small surface of lead-flat, on a level with the top of the wall, in one of the opposite angles, carried an old oil-jar, from which fell masses of gorgeous Tropæolum, and the actual surface of the flat was a garden of Stonecrops. The rounded coping of the walls, and the joints in many places (for the wall was an old one), were gay with yellow Corydalis and Snapdragons and more Stonecrops. The little garden had a few pleasant flowering bushes, Ribes and Laurustinus, a Bay and an Almond tree. In the coolest and shadiest corner were a fern-grotto and a tiny tank. The rest of the garden, only a few yards across, was laid out with a square bed in the middle, and a little path round, then a three-feet-wide border next the wall, all edged with rather tall-grown Box. The middle bed had garden Roses and Carnations, and Mignonette and Stocks. All round were well-chosen plants and shrubs, looking well and happy, though in a confined and rather airless space. Every square foot had been made the most of with the utmost ingenuity, but the ingenuity was always directed by good taste, so that nothing looked crowded or out of place. And I think of two other gardens of restricted space, both long strips of ground walled at the sides, whose owners I am thankful to count among my friends--one in the favoured climate of the Isle of Wight, a little garden where I suppose there are more rare and beautiful plants brought together within a small space than perhaps in any other garden of the same size in England; the other in a cathedral town, now a memory only, for the master of what was one of the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen now lives elsewhere. The garden was long in shape, and divided about midway by a wall. The division next the house was a quiet lawn, with a mulberry tree and a few mounded borders near the sides that were unobstrusive, and in no way spoilt the quiet feeling of the lawn space. Then a doorway in the dividing wall led to a straight path with a double flower border. I suppose there was a vegetable garden behind the borders, but of that I have no recollection, only a vivid remembrance of that brilliantly beautiful mass of flowers. The picture was good enough as one went along, especially as at the end one came first within sound and then within sight of a rushing river, one of those swift, clear, shallow streams with stony bottom that the trout love; but it was ten times more beautiful on turning to go back, for there was the mass of flowers, and towering high above it the noble mass of the giant structure--one of the greatest and yet most graceful buildings that has ever been raised by man to the glory of God. It is true that it is not every one that has the advantage of a garden bounded by a river and a noble church, but even these advantages might have been lost by vulgar or unsuitable treatment of the garden. But the mind of the master was so entirely in sympathy with the place, that no one that had the privilege of seeing it could feel that it was otherwise than right and beautiful. Both these were the gardens of clergymen; indeed, some of our greatest gardeners are, and have been, within the ranks of the Church. For have we not a brilliantly-gifted dignitary whose loving praise of the Queen of flowers has become a classic? and have we not among churchmen the greatest grower of seedling Daffodils the world has yet seen, and other names of clergymen honourably associated with Roses and Auriculas and Tulips and other good flowers, and all greatly to their bettering? The conditions of the life of a parish priest would tend to make him a good gardener, for, while other men roam about, he stays mostly at home, and to live with one's garden is one of the best ways to ensure its welfare. And then, among the many anxieties and vexations and disappointments that must needs grieve the heart of the pastor of his people, his garden, with its wholesome labour and all its lessons of patience and trust and hopefulness, and its comforting power of solace, must be one of the best of medicines for the healing of his often sorrowing soul. I do not envy the owners of very large gardens. The garden should fit its master or his tastes just as his clothes do; it should be neither too large nor too small, but just comfortable. If the garden is larger than he can individually govern and plan and look after, then he is no longer its master but its slave, just as surely as the much-too-rich man is the slave and not the master of his superfluous wealth. And when I hear of the great place with a kitchen garden of twenty acres within the walls, my heart sinks as I think of the uncomfortable disproportion between the man and those immediately around him, and his vast output of edible vegetation, and I fall to wondering how much of it goes as it should go, or whether the greater part of it does not go dribbling away, leaking into unholy back-channels; and of how the looking after it must needs be subdivided; and of how many side-interests are likely to steal in, and altogether how great a burden of anxiety or matter of temptation it must give rise to. A grand truth is in the old farmer's saying, "The master's eye makes the pig fat;" but how can any one master's eye fat that vast pig of twenty acres, with all its minute and costly cultivation, its two or three crops a year off all ground given to soft vegetables, its stoves, greenhouses, orchid and orchard houses, its vineries, pineries, figgeries, and all manner of glass structures? But happily these monstrous gardens are but few--I only know of or have seen two, but I hope never to see another. Nothing is more satisfactory than to see the well-designed and well-organised garden of the large country house, whose master loves his garden, and has good taste and a reasonable amount of leisure. I think that the first thing in such a place is to have large unbroken lawn spaces--all the better if they are continuous, passing round the south and west sides of the house. I am supposing a house of the best class, but not necessarily of the largest size. Immediately adjoining the house, except for the few feet needed for a border for climbing plants, is a broad walk, dry and smooth, and perfectly level from end to end. This, in the case of many houses, and nearly always with good effect, is raised two or three feet above the garden ground, and if the architecture of the house demands it, has a retaining wall surmounted by a balustrade of masonry and wrought stone. Broad and shallow stone steps lead down to the turf both at the end of the walk and in the middle of the front of the house, the wider and shallower the better, and at the foot of the wall may be a narrow border for a few climbing plants that will here and there rise above the coping of the parapet. I do not think it desirable where there are stone balusters or other distinct architectural features to let them be smothered with climbing plants, but that there should be, say, a _Pyrus japonica_ or an Escallonia, and perhaps a white Jasmine, and on a larger space perhaps a cut-leaved or a Claret Vine. Some of the best effects of the kind I have seen were where the bush, being well established, rose straight out of the grass, the border being unnecessary except just at the beginning. The large lawn space I am supposing stretches away a good distance from the house, and is bounded on the south and west by fine trees; away beyond that is all wild wood. On summer afternoons the greater part of the lawn expanse is in cool shade, while winter sunsets show through the tree stems. Towards the south-east the wood would pass into shrub plantations, and farther still into garden and wild orchard (of which I shall have something to say presently). At this end of the lawn would be the brilliant parterre of bedded plants, seen both from the shaded lawn and from the terrace, which at this end forms part of its design. Beyond the parterre would be a distinct division from the farther garden, either of Yew or Box hedge, with bays for seats, or in the case of a change of level, of another terrace wall. The next space beyond would be the main garden for hardy plants, at its southern end leading into the wild orchard. This would be the place for the free garden or the reserve garden, or for any of the many delightful ways in which hardy flowers can be used; and if it happened by good fortune to have a stream or any means of having running water, the possibilities of beautiful gardening would be endless. [Illustration: GARLAND-ROSE WREATHING THE END OF A TERRACE WALL.] Beyond this again would come the kitchen garden, and after that the stables and the home farm. If the kitchen garden had a high wall, and might be entered on this side by handsome wrought-iron gates, I would approach it from the parterre by a broad grass walk bounded by large Bay trees at equal intervals to right and left. Through these to the right would be seen the free garden of hardy flowers. For the kitchen garden a space of two acres would serve a large country house with all that is usually grown within walls, but there should always be a good space outside for the rougher vegetables, as well as a roomy yard for compost, pits and frames, and rubbish. And here I wish to plead on behalf of the gardener that he should have all reasonable comforts and conveniences. Nothing is more frequent, even in good places, than to find the potting and tool sheds screwed away into some awkward corner, badly lighted, much too small, and altogether inadequate, and the pits and frames scattered about and difficult to get at. Nothing is more wasteful of time, labour, or temper. The working parts of a large garden form a complicated organisation, and if the parts of the mechanism do not fit and work well, and are not properly eased and oiled, still more, if any are missing, there must be disastrous friction and damage and loss of power. In designing garden buildings, I always strongly urge in connection with the heating system a warmed potting shed and a comfortable messroom for the men, and over this a perfectly dry loft for drying and storing such matters as shading material, nets, mats, ropes, and sacks. If this can be warmed, so much the better. There must also be a convenient and quite frost-proof place for winter storing of vegetable roots and such plants as Dahlias, Cannas, and Gladiolus; and also a well-lighted and warmed workshop for all the innumerable jobs put aside for wet weather, of which the chief will be repainting and glazing of lights, repairing implements, and grinding and setting tools. This shop should have a carpenter's bench and screw, and a smith's anvil, and a proper assortment of tools. Such arrangements, well planned and thought out, will save much time and loss of produce, besides helping to make all the people employed more comfortable and happy. I think that a garden should never be large enough to be tiring, that if a large space has to be dealt with, a great part had better be laid out in wood. Woodland is always charming and restful and enduringly beautiful, and then there is an intermediate kind of woodland that should be made more of--woodland of the orchard type. Why is the orchard put out of the way, as it generally is, in some remote region beyond the kitchen garden and stables? I should like the lawn, or the hardy flower garden, or both, to pass directly into it on one side, and to plant a space of several acres, not necessarily in the usual way, with orchard standards twenty-five feet apart in straight rows (though in many places the straight rows might be best), but to have groups and even groves of such things as Medlars and Quinces, Siberian and Chinese Crabs, Damsons, Prunes, Service trees, and Mountain Ash, besides Apples, Pears, and Cherries, in both standard and bush forms. Then alleys of Filbert and Cob-nut, and in the opener spaces tangles or brakes of the many beautiful bushy things allied to the Apple and Plum tribe--_Cydonia_ and _Prunus triloba_ and _Cratægus_ of many kinds (some of them are tall bushes or small trees with beautiful fruits); and the wild Blackthorn, which, though a plum, is so nearly related to pear that pears may be grafted on it. And then brakes of Blackberries, especially of the Parsley-leaved kind, so free of growth and so generous of fruit. How is it that this fine native plant is almost invariably sold in nurseries as an American bramble? If I am mistaken in this I should be glad to be corrected, but I believe it to be only the cut-leaved variety of the native _Rubus affinis_. I have tried the best of the American kinds, and with the exception of one year, when I had a few fine fruits from Kittatinny, they had been a failure, whereas invariably when people have told me that their American Blackberries have fruited well, I have found them to be the Parsley-leaved. Some members of the large Rose-Apple-Plum tribe grow to be large forest trees, and in my wild orchard they would go in the farther parts. The Bird-cherry (_Prunus padus_) grows into a tree of the largest size. A Mountain Ash will sometimes have a trunk two feet in diameter, and a head of a size to suit. The American kind, its near relation, but with larger leaves and still grander masses of berries, is a noble small tree; and the native white Beam should not be forgotten, and choice places should be given to Amelanchier and the lovely double Japan Apple (_Pyrus malus floribunda_). To give due space and effect to all these good things my orchard garden would run into a good many acres, but every year it would be growing into beauty and profit. The grass should be left rough, and plentifully planted with Daffodils, and with Cowslips if the soil is strong. The grass would be mown and made into hay in June, and perhaps mown once more towards the end of September. Under the nut-trees would be Primroses and the garden kinds of wood Hyacinths and Dogtooth Violets and Lily of the Valley, and perhaps Snowdrops, or any of the smaller bulbs that most commended themselves to the taste of the master. Such an orchard garden, well-composed and beautifully grouped, always with that indispensable quality of good "drawing," would not only be a source of unending pleasure to those who lived in the place, but a valuable lesson to all who saw it; for it would show the value of the simple and sensible ways of using a certain class of related trees and bushes, and of using them with a deliberate intention of making the best of them, instead of the usual meaningless-nohow way of planting. This, in nine cases out of ten, means either ignorance or carelessness, the planter not caring enough about the matter to take the trouble to find out what is best to be done, and being quite satisfied with a mixed lot of shrubs, as offered in nursery sales, or with the choice of the nurseryman. I do not presume to condemn all mixed planting, only stupid and ignorant mixed planting. It is not given to all people to take their pleasures alike; and I have in my mind four gardens, all of the highest interest, in which the planting is all mixed; but then the mixture is of admirable ingredients, collected and placed on account of individual merit, and a ramble round any one of these in company with its owner is a pleasure and a privilege that one cannot prize too highly. Where the garden is of such large extent that experimental planting is made with a good number of one good thing at a time, even though there was no premeditated intention of planting for beautiful effect, the fact of there being enough plants to fall into large groups, and to cover some extent of ground, produces numbers of excellent results. I remember being struck with this on several occasions when I have had the happiness of visiting Mr. G. F. Wilson's garden at Wisley, a garden which I take to be about the most instructive it is possible to see. In one part, where the foot of the hill joined the copse, there were hosts of lovely things planted on a succession of rather narrow banks. Almost unthinkingly I expressed the regret I felt that so much individual beauty should be there without an attempt to arrange it for good effect. Mr. Wilson stopped, and looking at me straight with a kindly smile, said very quietly, "That is your business, not mine." In spite of its being a garden whose first object is trial and experiment, it has left in my memory two pictures, among several lesser ones, of plant-beauty that will stay with me as long as I can remember anything, one an autumn and one a spring picture--the hedge of _Rosa rugosa_ in full fruit, and a plantation of _Primula denticulata_. The Primrose was on a bit of level ground, just at the outer and inner edges of the hazel copse. The plants were both grouped and thinly sprinkled, just as nature plants--possibly they grew directly there from seed. They were in superb and luxuriant beauty in the black peaty-looking half-boggy earth, the handsome leaves of the brilliant colour and large size that told of perfect health and vigour, and the large round heads of pure lilac flower carried on strong stalks that must have been fifteen inches high. I never saw it so happy and so beautiful. It is a plant I much admire, and I do the best I can for it on my dry hill; but the conditions of my garden do not allow of any approach to the success of the Wisley plants; still I have treasured that lesson among many others I have brought away from that good garden, and never fail to advise some such treatment when I see the likely home for it in other places. [Illustration: A ROADSIDE COTTAGE GARDEN.] Some of the most delightful of all gardens are the little strips in front of roadside cottages. They have a simple and tender charm that one may look for in vain in gardens of greater pretension. And the old garden flowers seem to know that there they are seen at their best; for where else can one see such Wallflowers, or Double Daisies, or White Rose bushes; such clustering masses of perennial Peas, or such well-kept flowery edgings of Pink, or Thrift, or London Pride? Among a good many calls for advice about laying out gardens, I remember an early one that was of special interest. It was the window-box of a factory lad in one of the great northern manufacturing towns. He had advertised in a mechanical paper that he wanted a tiny garden, as full of interest as might be, in a window-box; he knew nothing--would somebody help him with advice? So advice was sent and the box prepared. If I remember rightly the size was three feet by ten inches. A little later the post brought him little plants of mossy and silvery saxifrages, and a few small bulbs. Even some stones were sent, for it was to be a rock-garden, and there were to be two hills of different heights with rocky tops, and a longish valley with a sunny and a shady side. It was delightful to have the boy's letters, full of keen interest and eager questions, and only difficult to restrain him from killing his plants with kindness, in the way of liberal doses of artificial manure. The very smallness of the tiny garden made each of its small features the more precious. I could picture his feeling of delightful anticipation when he saw the first little bluish blade of the Snowdrop patch pierce its mossy carpet. Would it, could it really grow into a real Snowdrop, with the modest, milk-white flower and the pretty green hearts on the outside of the inner petals, and the clear green stripes within? and would it really nod him a glad good-morning when he opened his window to greet it? And those few blunt reddish horny-looking snouts just coming through the ground, would they really grow into the brilliant blue of the early Squill, that would be like a bit of midsummer sky among the grimy surroundings of the attic window, and under that grey, soot-laden northern sky? I thought with pleasure how he would watch them in spare minutes of the dinner-hour spent at home, and think of them as he went forward and back to his work, and how the remembrance of the tender beauty of the full-blown flower would make him glad, and lift up his heart while "minding his mule" in the busy restless mill. CHAPTER XV BEGINNING AND LEARNING The ignorant questioner -- Beginning at the end -- An example -- Personal experience -- Absence of outer help -- Johns' "Flowers of the Field" -- Collecting plants -- Nurseries near London -- Wheel-spokes as labels -- Garden friends -- Mr. Robinson's "English Flower-Garden" -- Mr. Nicholson's "Dictionary of Gardening" -- One main idea desirable -- Pictorial treatment -- Training in fine art -- Adapting from Nature -- Study of colour -- Ignorant use of the word "artistic." Many people who love flowers and wish to do some practical gardening are at their wit's end to know what to do and how to begin. Like a person who is on skates for the first time, they feel that, what with the bright steel runners, and the slippery surface, and the sense of helplessness, there are more ways of tumbling about than of progressing safely in any one direction. And in gardening the beginner must feel this kind of perplexity and helplessness, and indeed there is a great deal to learn, only it is pleasant instead of perilous, and the many tumbles by the way only teach and do not hurt. The first few steps are perhaps the most difficult, and it is only when we know something of the subject and an eager beginner comes with questions that one sees how very many are the things that want knowing. And the more ignorant the questioner, the more difficult it is to answer helpfully. When one knows, one cannot help presupposing some sort of knowledge on the part of the querist, and where this is absent the answer we can give is of no use. The ignorance, when fairly complete, is of such a nature that the questioner does not know what to ask, and the question, even if it can be answered, falls upon barren ground. I think in such cases it is better to try and teach one simple thing at a time, and not to attempt to answer a number of useless questions. It is disheartening when one has tried to give a careful answer to have it received with an Oh! of boredom or disappointment, as much as to say, You can't expect me to take all that trouble; and there is the still more unsatisfactory sort of applicant, who plies a string of questions and will not wait for the answers! The real way is to try and learn a little from everybody and from every place. There is no royal road. It is no use asking me or any one else how to dig--I mean sitting indoors and asking it. Better go and watch a man digging, and then take a spade and try to do it, and go on trying till it comes, and you gain the knack that is to be learnt with all tools, of doubling the power and halving the effort; and meanwhile you will be learning other things, about your own arms and legs and back, and perhaps a little robin will come and give you moral support, and at the same time keep a sharp look-out for any worms you may happen to turn up; and you will find out that there are all sorts of ways of learning, not only from people and books, but from sheer trying. I remember years ago having to learn to use the blow-pipe, for soldering and other purposes connected with work in gold and silver. The difficult part of it is to keep up the stream of air through the pipe while you are breathing the air in; it is easy enough when you only want a short blast of a few seconds, within the compass of one breath or one filling of the bellows (lungs), but often one has to go on blowing through several inspirations. It is a trick of muscular action. My master who taught me never could do it himself, but by much trying one day I caught the trick. The grand way to learn, in gardening as in all things else, is to wish to learn, and to be determined to find out--not to think that any one person can wave a wand and give the power and knowledge. And there will be plenty of mistakes, and there must be, just as children must pass through the usual childish complaints. And some people make the mistake of trying to begin at the end, and of using recklessly what may want the utmost caution, such, for instance, as strong chemical manures. Some ladies asked me why their plant had died. They had got it from the very best place, and they were sure they had done their very best for it, and--there it was, dead. I asked what it was, and how they had treated it. It was some ordinary border plant, whose identity I now forget; they had made a nice hole with their new trowel, and for its sole benefit they had bought a tin of Concentrated Fertiliser. This they had emptied into the hole, put in the plant, and covered it up and given it lots of water, and--it had died! And yet these were the best and kindest of women, who would never have dreamed of feeding a new-born infant on beefsteaks and raw brandy. But they learned their lesson well, and at once saw the sense when I pointed out that a plant with naked roots just taken out of the ground or a pot, removed from one feeding-place and not yet at home in another, or still more after a journey, with the roots only wrapped in a little damp moss and paper, had its feeding power suspended for a time, and was in the position of a helpless invalid. All that could be done for it then was a little bland nutriment of weak slops and careful nursing; if the planting took place in the summer it would want shading and only very gentle watering, until firm root-hold was secured and root-appetite became active, and that in rich and well-prepared garden ground such as theirs strong artificial manure was in any case superfluous. When the earlier ignorances are overcome it becomes much easier to help and advise, because there is more common ground to stand on. In my own case, from quite a small child, I had always seen gardening going on, though not of a very interesting kind. Nothing much was thought of but bedding plants, and there was a rather large space on each side of the house for these, one on gravel and one on turf. But I had my own little garden in a nook beyond the shrubbery, with a seat shaded by a _Boursault elegans_ Rose, which I thought then, and still think, one of the loveliest of its kind. But my first knowledge of hardy plants came through wild ones. Some one gave me that excellent book, the Rev. C. A. Johns' "Flowers of the Field." For many years I had no one to advise me (I was still quite small) how to use the book, or how to get to know (though it stared me in the face) how the plants were in large related families, and I had not the sense to do it for myself, nor to learn the introductory botanical part, which would have saved much trouble afterwards; but when I brought home my flowers I would take them one by one and just turn over the pages till I came to the picture that looked something like. But in this way I got a knowledge of individuals, and afterwards the idea of broad classification and relationship of genera to species may have come all the easier. I always think of that book as the most precious gift I ever received. I distinctly trace to its teaching my first firm steps in the path of plant knowledge, and the feeling of assured comfort I had afterwards in recognising the kinds when I came to collect garden plants; for at that time I had no other garden book, no means of access to botanic gardens or private collections, and no helpful adviser. One copy of "Johns" I wore right out; I have now two, of which one is in its second binding, and is always near me for reference. I need hardly say that this was long before the days of the "English Flower-Garden," or its helpful predecessor, "Alpine Plants." By this time I was steadily collecting hardy garden plants wherever I could find them, mostly from cottage gardens. Many of them were still unknown to me by name, but as the collection increased I began to compare and discriminate, and of various kinds of one plant to throw out the worse and retain the better, and to train myself to see what made a good garden plant, and about then began to grow the large yellow and white bunch Primroses, whose history is in another chapter. And then I learnt that there were such places (though then but few) as nurseries, where such plants as I had been collecting in the cottage gardens, and even better, were grown. And I went to Osborne's at Fulham (now all built over), and there saw the original tree of the fine Ilex known as the Fulham Oak, and several spring-flowering bulbs I had never seen before, and what I felt sure were numbers of desirable summer-flowering plants, but not then in bloom. Soon after this I began to learn something about Daffodils, and enjoyed much kind help from Mr. Barr, visiting his nursery (then at Tooting) several times, and sometimes combining a visit to Parker's nursery just over the way, a perfect paradise of good hardy plants. I shall never forget my first sight here of the Cape Pondweed (_Aponogeton distachyon_) in full flower and great vigour in the dipping tanks, and overflowing from them into the ditches. Also I was delighted to see the use as labels of old wheel-spokes. I could not help feeling that if one had been a spoke of a cab-wheel, and had passed all one's working life in being whirled and clattered over London pavements, defiled with street mud, how pleasant a way to end one's days was this; to have one's felloe end pointed and dipped in nice wholesome rot-resisting gas-tar and thrust into the quiet cool earth, and one's nave end smoothed and painted and inscribed with some such soothing legend as _Vinca minor_ or _Dianthus fragrans_! Later I made acquaintance with several of the leading amateur and professional gardeners, and with Mr. Robinson, and to their good comradeship and kindly willingness to let me "pick their brains" I owe a great advance in garden lore. Moreover, what began by the drawing together of a common interest has grown into a still greater benefit, for several acquaintances so made have ripened into steady and much-valued friendships. It has been a great interest to me to have had the privilege of watching the gradual growth, through its several editions, of Mr. Robinson's "English Flower-Garden," the one best and most helpful book of all for those who want to know about hardy flowers, offering as it does in the clearest and easiest way a knowledge of the garden-treasures of the temperate world. No one who has not had occasional glimpses behind the scenes can know how much labour and thought such a book represents, to say nothing of research and practical experiment, and of the trouble and great expense of producing the large amount of pictorial illustration. Another book, though on quite different lines, that I find most useful is Mr. Nicholson's "Illustrated Dictionary of Gardening," in eight handy volumes. It covers much the same ground as the useful old Johnson's "Gardener's Dictionary," but is much more complete and comprehensive, and is copiously illustrated with excellent wood-cuts. It is the work of a careful and learned botanist, treating of all plants desirable for cultivation from all climates, and teaching all branches of practical horticulture and such useful matters as means of dealing with insect pests. The old "Johnson" is still a capital book in one volume; mine is rather out of date, being the edition of 1875, but it has been lately revised and improved. It would be delightful to possess, or to have easy access to, a good botanical library; still, for all the purposes of the average garden lover, these books will suffice. I think it is desirable, when a certain degree of knowledge of plants and facility of dealing with them has been acquired, to get hold of a clear idea of what one most wishes to do. The scope of the subject is so wide, and there are so many ways to choose from, that having one general idea helps one to concentrate thought and effort that would otherwise be wasted by being diluted and dribbled through too many probable channels of waste. Ever since it came to me to feel some little grasp of knowledge of means and methods, I have found that my greatest pleasure, both in garden and woodland, has been in the enjoyment of beauty of a pictorial kind. Whether the picture be large as of a whole landscape, or of lesser extent as in some fine single group or effect, or within the space of only a few inches as may be seen in some happily-disposed planting of Alpines, the intention is always the same; or whether it is the grouping of trees in the wood by the removal of those whose lines are not wanted in the picture, or in the laying out of broad grassy ways in woody places, or by ever so slight a turn or change of direction in a wood path, or in the alteration of some arrangement of related groups for form or for massing of light and shade, or for any of the many local conditions that guide one towards forming a decision, the intention is still always the same--to try and make a beautiful garden-picture. And little as I can as yet boast of being able to show anything like the number of these I could wish, yet during the flower-year there is generally something that at least in part answers to the effort. I do not presume to urge the acceptance of my own particular form of pleasure in a garden on those to whom, from different temperament or manner of education, it would be unwelcome; I only speak of what I feel, and to a certain degree understand; but I had the advantage in earlier life of some amount of training in appreciation of the fine arts, and this, working upon an inborn feeling of reverent devotion to things of the highest beauty in the works of God, has helped me to an understanding of their divinely-inspired interpretations by the noblest minds of men, into those other forms that we know as works of fine art. And so it comes about that those of us who feel and understand in this way do not exactly attempt to imitate Nature in our gardens, but try to become well acquainted with her moods and ways, and then discriminate in our borrowing, and so interpret her methods as best we may to the making of our garden-pictures. I have always had great delight in the study of colour, as the word is understood by artists, which again is not a positive matter, but one of relation and proportion. And when one hears the common chatter about "artistic colours," one receives an unpleasant impression about the education and good taste of the speaker; and one is reminded of an old saying which treats of the unwisdom of rushing in "where angels fear to tread," and of regret that a good word should be degraded by misuse. It may be safely said that no colour can be called artistic in itself; for, in the first place, it is bad English, and in the second, it is nonsense. Even if the first objection were waived, and the second condoned, it could only be used in a secondary sense, as signifying something that is useful and suitable and right in its place. In this limited sense the scarlet of the soldier's coat, and of the pillar-box and mail-cart, and the bright colours of flags, or of the port and starboard lights of ships, might be said to be just so far "artistic" (again if grammar would allow), as they are right and good in their places. But then those who use the word in the usual ignorant, random way have not even this simple conception of its meaning. Those who know nothing about colour in the more refined sense (and like a knowledge of everything else it wants learning) get no farther than to enjoy it only when most crude and garish--when, as George Herbert says, it "bids the rash gazer wipe his eye," or when there is some violent opposition of complementary colour--forgetting, or not knowing, that though in detail the objects brought together may make each other appear brighter, yet in the mass, and especially when mixed up, the one actually neutralises the other. And they have no idea of using the colour of flowers as precious jewels in a setting of quiet environment, or of suiting the colour of flowering groups to that of the neighbouring foliage, thereby enhancing the value of both, or of massing related or harmonious colourings so as to lead up to the most powerful and brilliant effects; and yet all these are just the ways of employing colour to the best advantage. But the most frequent fault, whether in composition or in colour, is the attempt to crowd too much into the picture; the simpler effect obtained by means of temperate and wise restraint is always the more telling. CHAPTER XVI THE FLOWER-BORDER AND PERGOLA The flower-border -- The wall and its occupants -- _Choisya ternata_ -- Nandina -- Canon Ellacombe's garden -- Treatment of colour-masses -- Arrangement of plants in the border -- Dahlias and Cannas -- Covering bare places -- The pergola -- How made -- Suitable climbers -- Arbours of trained Planes -- Garden houses. I have a rather large "mixed border of hardy flowers." It is not quite so hopelessly mixed as one generally sees, and the flowers are not all hardy; but as it is a thing everybody rightly expects, and as I have been for a good many years trying to puzzle out its wants and ways, I will try and describe my own and its surroundings. There is a sandstone wall of pleasant colour at the back, nearly eleven feet high. This wall is an important feature in the garden, as it is the dividing line between the pleasure garden and the working garden; also, it shelters the pleasure garden from the sweeping blasts of wind from the north-west, to which my ground is much exposed, as it is all on a gentle slope, going downward towards the north. At the foot of the wall is a narrow border three feet six inches wide, and then a narrow alley, not a made path, but just a way to go along for tending the wall shrubs, and for getting at the back of the border. This little alley does not show from the front. Then the main border, fourteen feet wide and two hundred feet long. About three-quarters of the way along a path cuts through the border, and passes by an arched gateway in the wall to the Pæony garden and the working garden beyond. Just here I thought it would be well to mound up the border a little, and plant with groups of Yuccas, so that at all times of the year there should be something to make a handsome full-stop to the sections of the border, and to glorify the doorway. The two extreme ends of the border are treated in the same way with Yuccas on rather lesser mounds, only leaving space beyond them for the entrance to the little alley at the back. [Illustration: A FLOWER-BORDER IN JUNE.] The wall and border face two points to the east of south, or, as a sailor would say, south-south-east, half-way between south and south-east. In front of the border runs a path seven feet wide, and where the border stops at the eastern end it still runs on another sixty feet, under the pergola, to the open end of a summer-house. The wall at its western end returns forward, square with its length, and hides out greenhouses, sheds, and garden yard. The path in front of the border passes through an arch into this yard, but there is no view into the yard, as it is blocked by some Yews planted in a quarter-circle. Though wall-space is always precious, I thought it better to block out this shorter piece of return wall on the garden side with a hedge of Yews. They are now nearly the height of the wall, and will be allowed to grow a little higher, and will eventually be cut into an arch over the arch in the wall. I wanted the sombre duskiness of the Yews as a rich, quiet background for the brightness of the flowers, though they are rather disappointing in May and June, when their young shoots are of a bright and lively green. At the eastern end of the border there is no return wall, but another planting of Yews equal to the depth of the border. Notched into them is a stone seat about ten feet long; as they grow they will be clipped so as to make an arching hood over the seat. The wall is covered with climbers, or with non-climbing shrubs treated as wall-plants. They do not all want the wall for warmth or protection, but are there because I want them there; because, thinking over what things would look best and give me the greatest pleasure, these came among them. All the same, the larger number of the plants on the wall do want it, and would not do without it. At the western end, the only part which is in shade for the greater part of the day, is a _Garrya elliptica_. So many of my garden friends like a quiet journey along the wall to see what is there, that I propose to do the like by my reader; so first for the wall, and then for the border. Beyond the _Garrya_, in the extreme angle, is a _Clematis montana_. When the _Garrya_ is more grown there will not be much room left for the Clematis, but then it will have become bare below, and can ramble over the wall on the north side, and, in any case, it is a plant with a not very long lifetime, and will be nearly or quite worn out before its root-space is reached or wanted by its neighbours. Next on the wall is the beautiful Rose Acacia (_Robinia hispida_). It is perfectly hardy, but the wood is so brittle that it breaks off short with the slightest weight of wind or snow or rain. I never could understand why a hardy shrub was created so brittle, or how it behaves in its native place. I look in my "Nicholson," and see that it comes from North America. Now, North America is a large place, and there may be in it favoured spots where there is no snow, and only the very gentlest rain, and so well sheltered that the wind only blows in faintest breaths; and to judge by its behaviour in our gardens, all these conditions are necessary for its well-being. This troublesome quality of brittleness no doubt accounts for its being so seldom seen in gardens. I began to think it hopeless when, after three plantings in the open, it was again wrecked, but at last had the happy idea of training it on a wall. Even there, though it is looked over and tied in twice a year, a branch or two often gets broken. But I do not regret having given it the space, as the wall could hardly have had a better ornament, so beautiful are its rosy flower-clusters and pale-green leaves. As it inclines to be leggy below, I have trained a Crimson Rambler Rose over the lower part, tying it in to any bare places in the _Robinia_. [Illustration: PATHWAY ACROSS THE SOUTH BORDER IN JULY.] [Illustration: OUTSIDE VIEW OF THE BRICK PERGOLA SHOWN AT PAGE 214, AFTER SIX YEARS' GROWTH.] Next along the wall is _Solanum crispum_, much to be recommended in our southern counties. It covers a good space of wall, and every year shoots up some feet above it; indeed it is such a lively grower that it has to endure a severe yearly pruning. Every season it is smothered with its pretty clusters of potato-shaped bloom of a good bluish-lilac colour. After these I wanted some solid-looking dark evergreens, so there is a Loquat, with its splendid foliage equalling that of _Magnolia grandiflora_, and then Black Laurustinus, Bay, and Japan Privet; and from among this dark-leaved company shoots up the tender green of a Banksian Rose, grown from seed of the single kind, the gift of my kind friend Commendatore Hanbury, whose world-famed garden of La Mortola, near Ventimiglia, probably contains the most remarkable collection of plants and shrubs that have ever been brought together by one man. This Rose has made good growth, and a first few flowers last year--seedling Roses are slow to bloom--lead me to expect a good show next season. In the narrow border at the foot of the wall is a bush of _Raphiolepis ovata_, always to me an interesting shrub, with its thick, roundish, leathery leaves and white flower-clusters, also bushes of Rosemary, some just filling the border, and some trained up the wall. Our Tudor ancestors were fond of Rosemary-covered walls, and I have seen old bushes quite ten feet high on the garden walls of Italian monasteries. Among the Rosemaries I always like, if possible, to "tickle in" a China Rose or two, the tender pink of the Rose seems to go so well with the dark but dull-surfaced Rosemary. Then still in the wall-border comes a long straggling mass of that very pretty and interesting herbaceous Clematis, _C. Davidiana_. The colour of its flower always delights me; it is of an unusual kind of greyish-blue, of very tender and lovely quality. It does well in this warm border, growing about three feet high. Then on the wall come _Pyrus Maulei_ and _Chimonanthus_, Claret-Vine, and the large-flowered _Ceanothus_ Gloire de Versailles, hardy _Fuchsia_, and _Magnolia Soulangeana_, ending with a big bush of _Choisya ternata_, and rambling above it a very fine kind of _Bignonia grandiflora_. Then comes the archway, flanked by thick buttresses. A Choisya was planted just beyond each of these, but it has grown wide and high, spreading across the face of the buttress on each side, and considerably invading the pathway. There is no better shrub here than this delightful Mexican plant; its long whippy roots ramble through our light soil with every sign of enjoyment; it always looks clean and healthy and well dressed, and as for its lovely and deliciously sweet flowers, we cut them by the bushel, and almost by the faggot, and the bushes scarcely look any the emptier. Beyond the archway comes the shorter length of wall and border. For convenience I planted all slightly tender things together on this bit of wall and border; then we make one job of covering the whole with fir-boughs for protection in winter. On the wall are _Piptanthus nepalensis_, _Cistus ladaniferus_, _Edwardsia grandiflora_, and another Loquat, and in the border a number of Hydrangeas, _Clerodendron foetidum_, _Crinums_, and _Nandina domestica_, the Chinese so-called sacred Bamboo. It is not a Bamboo at all, but allied to _Berberis_; the Chinese plant it for good luck near their houses. If it is as lucky as it is pretty, it ought to do one good! I first made acquaintance with this beautiful plant in Canon Ellacombe's most interesting garden at Bitton, in Gloucestershire, where it struck me as one of the most beautiful growing things I had ever seen, the beauty being mostly in the form and colouring of the leaves. It is not perhaps a plant for everybody, and barely hardly; it seems slow to get hold, and its full beauty only shows when it is well established, and throws up its wonderfully-coloured leaves on tall bamboo-like stalks. There is nothing much more difficult to do in outdoor gardening than to plant a mixed border well, and to keep it in beauty throughout the summer. Every year, as I gain more experience, and, I hope, more power of critical judgment, I find myself tending towards broader and simpler effects, both of grouping and colour. I do not know whether it is by individual preference, or in obedience to some colour-law that I can instinctively feel but cannot pretend even to understand, and much less to explain, but in practice I always find more satisfaction and facility in treating the warm colours (reds and yellows) in graduated harmonies, culminating into gorgeousness, and the cool ones in contrasts; especially in the case of blue, which I like to use either in distinct but not garish contrasts, as of full blue with pale yellow, or in separate cloud-like harmonies, as of lilac and pale purple with grey foliage. I am never so much inclined to treat the blues, purples, and lilacs in gradations together as I am the reds and yellows. Purples and lilacs I can put together, but not these with blues; and the pure blues always seem to demand peculiar and very careful treatment. The western end of the flower-border begins with the low bank of Yuccas, then there are some rather large masses of important grey and glaucous foliage and pale and full pink flower. The foliage is mostly of the Globe Artichoke, and nearer the front of _Artemisia_ and _Cineraria maritima_. Among this, pink Canterbury Bell, Hollyhock, Phlox, Gladiolus, and Japan Anemone, all in pink colourings, will follow one another in due succession. Then come some groups of plants bearing whitish and very pale flowers, _Polygonum compactum_, _Aconitum lycoctonum_, Double Meadowsweet, and other Spiræas, and then the colour passes to pale yellow of Mulleins, and with them the palest blue Delphiniums. Towards the front is a wide planting of _Iris pallida dalmatica_, its handsome bluish foliage showing as outstanding and yet related masses with regard to the first large group of pale foliage. Then comes the pale-yellow _Iris flavescens_, and meanwhile the group of Delphinium deepens into those of a fuller blue colour, though none of the darkest are here. Then more pale yellow of Mullein, Thalictrum, and Paris Daisy, and so the colour passes to stronger yellows. These change into orange, and from that to brightest scarlet and crimson, coming to the fullest strength in the Oriental Poppies of the earlier year, and later in Lychnis, Gladiolus, Scarlet Dahlia, and Tritoma. The colour-scheme then passes again through orange and yellow to the paler yellows, and so again to blue and warm white, where it meets one of the clumps of Yuccas flanking the path that divides this longer part of the border from the much shorter piece beyond. This simple procession of colour arrangement has occupied a space of a hundred and sixty feet, and the border is all the better for it. The short length of border beyond the gateway has again Yuccas and important pale foliage, and a preponderance of pink bloom, Hydrangea for the most part; but there are a few tall Mulleins, whose pale-yellow flowers group well with the ivory of the Yucca spikes and the clear pink of the tall Hollyhocks. These all show up well over the masses of grey and glaucous foliage, and against the rich darkness of dusky Yew. Dahlias and Cannas have their places in the mixed border. When it is being dismantled in the late autumn all bare places are well dug and enriched, so that when it comes to filling-up time, at the end of May, I know that every spare bit of space is ready and at the time of preparation I mark places for special Dahlias, according to colour, and for groups of the tall Cannas where I want grand foliage. There are certain classes of plants that are quite indispensable, but that leave a bare or shabby-looking place when their bloom is over. How to cover these places is one of the problems that have to be solved. The worst offender is Oriental Poppy; it becomes unsightly soon after blooming, and is quite gone by midsummer. I therefore plant _Gypsophila paniculata_ between and behind the Poppy groups, and by July there is a delicate cloud of bloom instead of large bare patches. _Eryngium Oliverianum_ has turned brown by the beginning of July, but around the group some Dahlias have been planted, that will be gradually trained down over the space of the departed Sea-Holly, and other Dahlias are used in the same way to mask various weak places. There is a perennial Sunflower, with tall black stems, and pale-yellow flowers quite at the top, an old garden sort, but not very good as usually grown; this I find of great value to train down, when it throws up a short flowering stem from each joint, and becomes a spreading sheet of bloom. One would rather not have to resort to these artifices of sticking and training; but if a certain effect is wanted, all such means are lawful, provided that nothing looks stiff or strained or unsightly; and it is pleasant to exercise ingenuity and to invent ways to meet the needs of any case that may arise. But like everything else, in good gardening it must be done just right, and the artist-gardener finds that hardly the placing of a single plant can be deputed to any other hand than his own; for though, when it is done, it looks quite simple and easy, he must paint his own picture himself--no one can paint it for him. I have no dogmatic views about having in the so-called hardy flower-border none but hardy flowers. All flowers are welcome that are right in colour, and that make a brave show where a brave show is wanted. It is of more importance that the border should be handsome than that all its occupants should be hardy. Therefore I prepare a certain useful lot of half-hardy annuals, and a few of what have come to be called bedding-plants. I like to vary them a little from year to year, because in no one season can I get in all the good flowers that I should like to grow; and I think it better to leave out some one year and have them the next, than to crowd any up, or to find I have plants to put out and no space to put them in. But I nearly always grow these half-hardy annuals; orange African Marigold, French Marigold, sulphur Sunflower, orange and scarlet tall Zinnia, Nasturtiums, both dwarf and trailing, _Nicotiana affinis_, Maize, and Salpiglossis. Then Stocks and China Asters. The Stocks are always the large white and flesh-coloured summer kinds, and the Asters, the White Comet, and one of the blood-red or so-called scarlet sorts. Then I have yellow Paris Daisies, _Salvia patens_, Heliotrope, _Calceolaria amplexicaulis_, Geraniums, scarlet and salmon-coloured and ivy-leaved kinds, the best of these being the pink Madame Crousse. [Illustration: END OF FLOWER-BORDER AND ENTRANCE OF PERGOLA.] [Illustration: SOUTH BORDER DOOR AND YUCCAS IN AUGUST.] The front edges of the border are also treated in rather a large way. At the shadier end there is first a long straggling bordering patch of _Anemone sylvestris_. When it is once above ground the foliage remains good till autumn, while its soft white flower comes right with the colour of the flowers behind. Then comes a long and large patch of the larger kind of _Megasea cordifolia_, several yards in length, and running back here and there among taller plants. I am never tired of admiring the fine solid foliage of this family of plants, remaining, as it does, in beauty both winter and summer, and taking on a splendid winter colouring of warm red bronze. It is true that the flowers of the two best-known kinds, _M. cordifolia_ and _M. crassifolia_, are coarse-looking blooms of a strong and rank quality of pink colour, but the persistent beauty of the leaves more than compensates; and in the rather tenderer kind, _M. ligulata_ and its varieties, the colour of the flower is delightful, of a delicate good pink, with almost scarlet stalks. There is nothing flimsy or temporary-looking about the Megaseas, but rather a sort of grave and monumental look that specially fits them for association with masonry, or for any place where a solid-looking edging or full-stop is wanted. To go back to those in the edge of the border: if the edging threatens to look too dark and hard, I plant among or just behind the plants that compose it, pink or scarlet Ivy Geranium or trailing Nasturtium, according to the colour demanded by the neighbouring group. _Heuchera Richardsoni_ is another good front-edge plant; and when we come to the blue and pale-yellow group there is a planting of _Funkia grandiflora_, whose fresh-looking pale-green leaves are delightful with the brilliant light yellow of _Calceolaria amplexicaulis_, and the farther-back planting of pale-blue Delphinium, Mullein, and sulphur Sunflower; while the same colour of foliage is repeated in the fresh green of the Indian Corn. Small spaces occur here and there along the extreme front edge, and here are planted little jewels of colour, of blue Lobelia, or dwarf Nasturtium, or anything of the colour that the place demands. The whole thing sounds much more elaborate than it really is; the trained eye sees what is wanted, and the trained hand does it, both by an acquired instinct. It is painting a picture with living plants. I much enjoy the pergola at the end of the sunny path. It is pleasant while walking in full sunshine, and when that sunny place feels just a little too hot, to look into its cool depth, and to feel that one has only to go a few steps farther to be in shade, and to feel that little air of wind that the moving summer clouds say is not far off, and is only unfelt just here because it is stopped by the wall. It feels wonderfully dark at first, this gallery of cool greenery, passing into it with one's eyes full of light and colour, and the open-sided summer-house at the end looks like a black cavern; but on going into it, and sitting down on one of its broad, low benches, one finds that it is a pleasant subdued light, just right to read by. The pergola has two openings out of it on the right, and one on the left. The first way out on the right is straight into the nut-walk, which leads up to very near the house. The second goes up two or three low, broad steps made of natural sandstone flags, between groups of Ferns, into the Michaelmas Daisy garden. The opening on the left leads into a quiet space of grass the width of the flower and wall border (twenty feet), having only some peat-beds planted with Kalmia. This is backed by a Yew hedge in continuation of the main wall, and it will soon grow into a cool, quiet bit of garden, seeming to belong to the pergola. Now, standing midway in the length of the covered walk, with the eye rested and refreshed by the leafy half-light, on turning round again towards the border it shows as a brilliant picture through the bowery framing, and the value of the simple method of using the colours is seen to full advantage. I do not like a mean pergola, made of stuff as thin as hop-poles. If means or materials do not admit of having anything better, it is far better to use these in some other simple way, of which there are many to choose from--such as uprights at even intervals, braced together with a continuous rail at about four feet from the ground, and another rail just clear of the ground, and some simple trellis of the smaller stuff between these two rails. This is always pretty at the back of a flower-border in any modest garden. But a pergola should be more seriously treated, and the piers at any rate should be of something rather large--either oak stems ten inches thick, or, better still, of fourteen-inch brickwork painted with lime-wash to a quiet stone-colour. In Italy the piers are often of rubble masonry, either round or square in section, coated with very coarse plaster, and lime-washed white. For a pergola of moderate size the piers should stand in pairs across the path, with eight feet clear between. Ten feet from pier to pier along the path is a good proportion, or anything from eight to ten feet, and they should stand seven feet two inches out of the ground. Each pair should be tied across the top with a strong beam of oak, either of the natural shape, or roughly adzed on the four faces; but in any case, the ends of the beams, where they rest on the top of the piers, should be adzed flat to give them a firm seat. If the beams are slightly curved or cambered, as most trunks of oak are, so much the better, but they must always be placed camber side up. The pieces that run along the top, with the length of the path, may be of any branching tops of oak, or of larch poles. These can easily be replaced as they decay; but the replacing of a beam is a more difficult matter, so that it is well to let them be fairly durable from the beginning. [Illustration: STONE-BUILT PERGOLA WITH WROUGHT OAK BEAMS.] [Illustration: PERGOLA WITH BRICK PIERS AND BEAMS OF ROUGH OAK. (_See opposite page 202._)] The climbers I find best for covering the pergola are Vines, Jasmine, Aristolochia, Virginia Creeper, and Wistaria. Roses are about the worst, for they soon run up leggy, and only flower at the top out of sight. A sensible arrangement, allied to the pergola, and frequent in Germany and Switzerland, is made by planting young Planes, pollarding them at about eight feet from the ground, and training down the young growths horizontally till they have covered the desired roof-space. There is much to be done in our better-class gardens in the way of pretty small structures thoroughly well-designed and built. Many a large lawn used every afternoon in summer as a family playground and place to receive visitors would have its comfort and usefulness greatly increased by a pretty garden-house, instead of the usual hot and ugly, crampy and uncomfortable tent. But it should be thoroughly well designed to suit the house and garden. A pigeon-cote would come well in the upper part, and the face or faces open to the lawn might be closed in winter with movable shutters, when it would make a useful store-place for garden seats and much else. CHAPTER XVII THE PRIMROSE GARDEN It must be some five-and-twenty years ago that I began to work at what I may now call my own strain of Primroses, improving it a little every year by careful selection of the best for seed. The parents of the strain were a named kind, called Golden Plover, and a white one, without name, that I found in a cottage garden. I had also a dozen plants about eight or nine years ago from a strong strain of Mr. Anthony Waterer's that was running on nearly the same lines; but a year later, when I had flowered them side by side, I liked my own one rather the best, and Mr. Waterer, seeing them soon after, approved of them so much that he took some to work with his own. I hold Mr. Waterer's strain in great admiration, and, though I tried for a good many years, never could come near him in red colourings. But as my own taste favoured the delicately-shaded flowers, and the ones most liked in the nursery seemed to be those with strongly contrasting eye, it is likely that the two strains may be working still farther apart. They are, broadly speaking, white and yellow varieties of the strong bunch-flowered or Polyanthus kind, but they vary in detail so much, in form, colour, habit, arrangement, and size of eye and shape of edge, that one year thinking it might be useful to classify them I tried to do so, but gave it up after writing out the characters of sixty classes! Their possible variation seems endless. Every year among the seedlings there appear a number of charming flowers with some new development of size, or colour of flower, or beauty of foliage, and yet all within the narrow bounds of--white and yellow Primroses. [Illustration: EVENING IN THE PRIMROSE GARDEN.] Their time of flowering is much later than that of the true or single-stalked Primrose. They come into bloom early in April, though a certain number of poorly-developed flowers generally come much earlier, and they are at their best in the last two weeks of April and the first days of May. When the bloom wanes, and is nearly overtopped by the leaves, the time has come that I find best for dividing and replanting. The plants then seem willing to divide, some almost falling apart in one's hands, and the new roots may be seen just beginning to form at the base of the crown. The plants are at the same time relieved of the crowded mass of flower-stem, and, therefore, of the exhausting effort of forming seed, a severe drain on their strength. A certain number will not have made more than one strong crown, and a few single-crown plants have not flowered; these, of course, do not divide. During the flowering time I keep a good look-out for those that I judge to be the most beautiful and desirable, and mark them for seed. These are also taken up, but are kept apart, the flower stems reduced to one or two of the most promising, and they are then planted in a separate place--some cool nursery corner. I find that the lifting and replanting in no way checks the growth or well-being of the seed-pods. I remember some years ago a warm discussion in the gardening papers about the right time to sow the seed. Some gardeners of high standing were strongly for sowing it as soon as ripe, while others equally trustworthy advised holding it over till March. I have tried both ways, and have satisfied myself that it is a matter for experiment and decision in individual gardens. As nearly as I can make out, it is well in heavy soils to sow when ripe, and in light ones to wait till March. In some heavy soils Primroses stand well for two years without division; whereas in light ones, such as mine, they take up the food within reach in a much shorter time, so that by the second year the plant has become a crowded mass of weak crowns that only throw up poor flowers, and are by then so much exhausted that they are not worth dividing afterwards. In my own case, having tried both ways, I find the March sown ones much the best. The seed is sown in boxes in cold frames, and pricked out again into boxes when large enough to handle. The seedlings are planted out in June, when they seem to go on without any check whatever, and are just right for blooming next spring. The Primrose garden is in a place by itself--a clearing half shaded by Oak, Chestnut, and Hazel. I always think of the Hazel as a kind nurse to Primroses; in the copses they generally grow together, and the finest Primrose plants are often nestled close in to the base of the nut-stool. Three paths run through the Primrose garden, mere narrow tracks between the beds, converging at both ends, something like the lines of longitude on a globe, the ground widening in the middle where there are two good-sized Oaks, and coming to a blunt point at each end, the only other planting near it being two other long-shaped strips of Lily of the Valley. Every year, before replanting, the Primrose ground is dug over and well manured. All day for two days I sit on a low stool dividing the plants; a certain degree of facility and expertness has come of long practice. The "rubber" for frequent knife-sharpening is in a pail of water by my side; the lusciously fragrant heap of refuse leaf and flower-stem and old stocky root rises in front of me, changing its shape from a heap to a ridge, as when it comes to a certain height and bulk I back and back away from it. A boy feeds me with armfuls of newly-dug-up plants, two men are digging-in the cooling cow-dung at the farther end, and another carries away the divided plants tray by tray, and carefully replants them. The still air, with only the very gentlest south-westerly breath in it, brings up the mighty boom of the great ship guns from the old seaport, thirty miles away, and the pheasants answer to the sound as they do to thunder. The early summer air is of a perfect temperature, the soft coo of the wood-dove comes down from the near wood, the nightingale sings almost overhead, but--either human happiness may never be quite complete, or else one is not philosophic enough to contemn life's lesser evils, for--oh, the midges! CHAPTER XVIII COLOURS OF FLOWERS I am always surprised at the vague, not to say reckless, fashion in which garden folk set to work to describe the colours of flowers, and at the way in which quite wrong colours are attributed to them. It is done in perfect good faith, and without the least consciousness of describing wrongly. In many cases it appears to be because the names of certain substances have been used conventionally or poetically to convey the idea of certain colours. And some of these errors are so old that they have acquired a kind of respectability, and are in a way accepted without challenge. When they are used about familiar flowers it does not occur to one to detect them, because one knows the flower and its true colour; but when the same old error is used in the description of a new flower, it is distinctly misleading. For instance, when we hear of golden buttercups, we know that it means bright-yellow buttercups; but in the case of a new flower, or one not generally known, surely it is better and more accurate to say bright yellow at once. Nothing is more frequent in plant catalogues than "bright golden yellow," when bright yellow is meant. Gold is not bright yellow. I find that a gold piece laid on a gravel path, or against a sandy bank, nearly matches it in colour; and I cannot think of any flower that matches or even approaches the true colour of gold, though something near it may be seen in the pollen-covered anthers of many flowers. A match for gold may more nearly be found among dying beech leaves, and some dark colours of straw or dry grass bents, but none of these when they match the gold are bright yellow. In literature it is quite another matter; when the poet or imaginative writer says, "a field of golden buttercups," or "a golden sunset," he is quite right, because he appeals to our artistic perception, and in such case only uses the word as an image of something that is rich and sumptuous and glowing. The same irrelevance of comparison seems to run through all the colours. Flowers of a full, bright-blue colour are often described as of a "brilliant amethystine blue." Why amethystine? The amethyst, as we generally see it, is a stone of a washy purple colour, and though there are amethysts of a fine purple, they are not so often seen as the paler ones, and I have never seen one even faintly approaching a really blue colour. What, therefore, is the sense of likening a flower, such as a Delphinium, which is really of a splendid pure-blue colour, to the duller and totally different colour of a third-rate gem? Another example of the same slip-slop is the term flame-coloured, and it is often preceded by the word "gorgeous." This contradictory mixture of terms is generally used to mean bright scarlet. When I look at a flame, whether of fire or candle, I see that the colour is a rather pale yellow, with a reddish tinge about its upper forks, and side wings often of a bluish white--no scarlet anywhere. The nearest approach to red is in the coals, not in the flame. In the case of the candle, the point of the wick is faintly red when compared with the flame, but about the flame there is no red whatever. A distant bonfire looks red at night, but I take it that the apparent redness is from seeing the flames through damp atmosphere, just as the harvest-moon looks red when it rises. And the strange thing is that in all these cases the likeness to the unlike, and much less bright, colour is given with an air of conferring the highest compliment on the flower in question. It is as if, wishing to praise some flower of a beautiful blue, one called it a brilliant slate-roof blue. This sounds absurd, because it is unfamiliar, but the unsuitability of the comparison is scarcely greater than in the examples just quoted. It seems most reasonable in describing the colour of flowers to look out for substances whose normal colour shows but little variation--such, for example, as sulphur. The colour of sulphur is nearly always the same. Citron, lemon, and canary are useful colour-names, indicating different strengths of pure pale yellow, inclining towards a tinge of the palest green. Gentian-blue is a useful word, bringing to mind the piercingly powerful hue of the Gentianella. So also is turquoise-blue, for the stone has little variety of shade, and the colour is always of the same type. Forget-me-not blue is also a good word, meaning the colour of the native water Forget-me-not. Sky-blue is a little vague, though it has come by the "crystallising" force of usage to stand for a blue rather pale than full, and not far from that of the Forget-me-not; indeed, I seem to remember written passages in which the colours of flower and firmament were used reciprocally, the one in describing the other. Cobalt is a word sometimes used, but more often misused, for only water-colour painters know just what it represents, and it is of little use, as it so rarely occurs among flowers. Crimson is a word to beware of; it covers such a wide extent of ground, and is used so carelessly in plant-catalogues, that one cannot know whether it stands for a rich blood colour or for a malignant magenta. For the latter class of colour the term amaranth, so generally used in French plant-lists, is extremely useful, both as a definition and a warning. Salmon is an excellent colour-word, copper is also useful, the two covering a limited range of beautiful colouring of the utmost value. Blood-red is also accurately descriptive. Terra-cotta is useful but indefinite, as it may mean anything between brick-red and buff. Red-lead, if it would be accepted as a colour-word, would be useful, denoting the shades of colour between the strongest orange and the palest scarlet, frequent in the lightest of the Oriental Poppies. Amber is a misleading word, for who is to know when it means the transparent amber, whose colour approaches that of resin, or the pale, almost opaque, dull-yellow kind. And what is meant by coral-red? It is the red of the old-fashioned dull-scarlet coral, or of the pink kind more recently in favour. The terms bronze and smoke may well be used in their place, as in describing or attempting to describe the wonderful colouring of such flowers as Spanish Iris, and the varieties of Iris of the _squalens_ section. But often in describing a flower a reference to texture much helps and strengthens the colour-word. I have often described the modest little _Iris tuberosa_ as a flower made of green satin and black velvet. The green portion is only slightly green, but is entirely green satin, and the black of the velvet is barely black, but is quite black-velvet-like. The texture of the flower of _Ornithogalum nutans_ is silver satin, neither very silvery nor very satin-like, and yet so nearly suggesting the texture of both that the words may well be used in speaking of it. Indeed, texture plays so important a part in the appearance of colour-surface, that one can hardly think of colour without also thinking of texture. A piece of black satin and a piece of black velvet may be woven of the same batch of material, but when the satin is finished and the velvet cut, the appearance is often so dissimilar that they may look quite different in colour. A working painter is never happy if you give him an oil-colour pattern to match in distemper; he must have it of the same texture, or he will not undertake to get it like. What a wonderful range of colouring there is in black alone to a trained colour-eye! There is the dull brown-black of soot, and the velvety brown-black of the bean-flower's blotch; to my own eye, I have never found anything so entirely black in a natural product as the patch on the lower petals of _Iris iberica_. Is it not Ruskin who says of Velasquez, that there is more colour in his black than in many another painter's whole palette? The blotch of the bean-flower appears black at first, till you look at it close in the sunlight, and then you see its rich velvety texture, so nearly like some of the brown-velvet markings on butterflies' wings. And the same kind of rich colour and texture occurs again on some of the tough flat half-round funguses, marked with shaded rings, that grow out of old posts, and that I always enjoy as lessons of lovely colour-harmony of grey and brown and black. Much to be regretted is the disuse of the old word murrey, now only employed in heraldry. It stands for a dull red-purple, such as appears in the flower of the Virginian Allspice, and in the native Hound's-tongue, and often in seedling Auriculas. A fine strong-growing border Auricula was given to me by my valued friend the Curator of the Trinity College Botanic Garden, Dublin, to which he had given the excellently descriptive name, "Old Murrey." Sage-green is a good colour-word, for, winter or summer, the sage-leaves change but little. Olive-green is not so clear, though it has come by use to stand for a brownish green, like the glass of a wine-bottle held up to the light, but perhaps bottle-green is the better word. And it is not clear what part or condition of the olive is meant, for the ripe fruit is nearly black, and the tree in general, and the leaf in detail, are of a cool-grey colour. Perhaps the colour-word is taken from the colour of the unripe fruit pickled in brine, as we see them on the table. Grass-green any one may understand, but I am always puzzled by apple-green. Apples are of so many different greens, to say nothing of red and yellow; and as for pea-green, I have no idea what it means. I notice in plant-lists the most reckless and indiscriminate use of the words purple, violet, mauve, lilac, and lavender, and as they are all related, I think they should be used with the greater caution. I should say that mauve and lilac cover the same ground; the word mauve came into use within my recollection. It is French for mallow, and the flower of the wild plant may stand as the type of what the word means. Lavender stands for a colder or bluer range of pale purples, with an inclination to grey; it is a useful word, because the whole colour of the flower spike varies so little. Violet stands for the dark garden violet, and I always think of the grand colour of _Iris reticulata_ as an example of a rich violet-purple. But purple equally stands for this, and for many shades redder. Snow-white is very vague. There is nearly always so much blue about the colour of snow, from its crystalline surface and partial transparency, and the texture is so unlike that of any kind of flower, that the comparison is scarcely permissible. I take it that the use of "snow-white" is, like that of "golden-yellow," more symbolical than descriptive, meaning any white that gives an impression of purity. Nearly all white flowers are yellowish-white, and the comparatively few that are bluish-white, such, for example, as _Omphalodes verna_, are of a texture so different from snow that one cannot compare them at all. I should say that most white flowers are near the colour of chalk; for although the word chalky-white has been used in rather a contemptuous way, the colour is really a very beautiful warm white, but by no means an intense white. The flower that always looks to me the whitest is that of _Iberis sempervirens_. The white is dead and hard, like a piece of glazed stoneware, quite without play or variation, and hence uninteresting. CHAPTER XIX THE SCENTS OF THE GARDEN The sweet scents of a garden are by no means the least of its many delights. Even January brings _Chimonanthus fragrans_, one of the sweetest and strongest scented of the year's blooms--little half-transparent yellowish bells on an otherwise naked-looking wall shrub. They have no stalks, but if they are floated in a shallow dish of water, they last well for several days, and give off a powerful fragrance in a room. During some of the warm days that nearly always come towards the end of February, if one knows where to look in some sunny, sheltered corner of a hazel copse, there will be sure to be some Primroses, and the first scent of the year's first Primrose is no small pleasure. The garden Primroses soon follow, and, meanwhile, in all open winter weather there have been Czar Violets and _Iris stylosa_, with its delicate scent, faintly violet-like, but with a dash of tulip. _Iris reticulata_ is also sweet, with a still stronger perfume of the violet character. But of all Irises I know, the sweetest to smell is a later blooming one, _I. graminea_. Its small purple flowers are almost hidden among the thick mass of grassy foliage which rises high above the bloom; but they are worth looking for, for the sake of the sweet and rather penetrating scent, which is exactly like that of a perfectly-ripened plum. All the scented flowers of the Primrose tribe are delightful--Primrose, Polyanthus, Auricula, Cowslip. The actual sweetness is most apparent in the Cowslip; in the Auricula it has a pungency, and at the same time a kind of veiled mystery, that accords with the clouded and curiously-blended colourings of many of the flowers. Sweetbriar is one of the strongest of the year's early scents, and closely following is the woodland incense of the Larch, both freely given off and far-wafted, as is also that of the hardy Daphnes. The first quarter of the year also brings the bloom of most of the deciduous Magnolias, all with a fragrance nearly allied to that of the large one that blooms late in summer, but not so strong and heavy. The sweetness of a sun-baked bank of Wallflower belongs to April. Daffodils, lovely as they are, must be classed among flowers of rather rank smell, and yet it is welcome, for it means spring-time, with its own charm and its glad promise of the wealth of summer bloom that is soon to come. The scent of the Jonquil, Poeticus, and Polyanthus sections are best, Jonquil perhaps best of all, for it is without the rather coarse scent of the Trumpets and Nonsuch, and also escapes the penetrating lusciousness of _poeticus_ and _tazetta_, which in the south of Europe is exaggerated in the case of _tazetta_ into something distinctly unpleasant. What a delicate refinement there is in the scent of the wild Wood-Violet; it is never overdone. It seems to me to be quite the best of all the violet-scents, just because of its temperate quality. It gives exactly enough, and never that perhaps-just-a-trifle-too-much that may often be noticed about a bunch of frame-Violets, and that also in the south is intensified to a degree that is distinctly undesirable. For just as colour may be strengthened to a painful glare, and sound may be magnified to a torture, so even a sweet scent may pass its appointed bounds and become an overpoweringly evil smell. Even in England several of the Lilies, whose smell is delicious in open-air wafts, cannot be borne in a room. In the south of Europe a Tuberose cannot be brought indoors, and even at home I remember one warm wet August how a plant of Balm of Gilead (_Cedronella triphylla_) had its always powerful but usually agreeably aromatic smell so much exaggerated that it smelt exactly like coal-gas! A brother in Jamaica writes of the large white Jasmine: "It does not do to bring it indoors here; the scent is too strong. One day I thought there was a dead rat under the floor (a thing which did happen once), and behold, it was a glassful of fresh white Jasmine that was the offender!" While on this less pleasant part of the subject, I cannot help thinking of the horrible smell of the Dragon Arum; and yet how fitting an accompaniment it is to the plant, for if ever there was a plant that looked wicked and repellent, it is this; and yet, like Medusa, it has its own kind of fearful beauty. In this family the smell seems to accompany the appearance, and to diminish in unpleasantness as the flower increases in amiability; for in our native wild Arum the smell, though not exactly nice, is quite innocuous, and in the beautiful white Arum or _Calla_ of our greenhouses there is as little scent as a flower can well have, especially one of such large dimensions. In Fungi the bad smell is nearly always an indication of poisonous nature, so that it would seem to be given as a warning. But it has always been a matter of wonder to me why the root of the harmless and friendly Laurustinus should have been given a particularly odious smell--a smell I would rather not attempt to describe. On moist warmish days in mid-seasons I have sometimes had a whiff of the same unpleasantness from the bushes themselves; others of the same tribe have it in a much lesser degree. There is a curious smell about the yellow roots of Berberis, not exactly nasty, and a strong odour, not really offensive, but that I personally dislike, about the root of _Chrysanthemum maximum_. On the other hand, I always enjoy digging up, dividing, and replanting the _Asarums_, both the common European and the American kinds; their roots have a pleasant and most interesting smell, a good deal like mild pepper and ginger mixed, but more strongly aromatic. The same class of smell, but much fainter, and always reminding me of very good and delicate pepper, I enjoy in the flowers of the perennial Lupines. The only other hardy flowers I can think of whose smell is distinctly offensive are _Lilium pyrenaicum_, smelling like a mangy dog, and some of the _Schizanthus_, that are redolent of dirty hen-house. There is a class of scent that, though it can neither be called sweet nor aromatic, is decidedly pleasing and interesting. Such is that of Bracken and other Fern-fronds, Ivy-leaves, Box-bushes, Vine-blossom, Elder-flowers, and Fig-leaves. There are the sweet scents that are wholly delightful--most of the Roses, Honeysuckle, Primrose, Cowslip, Mignonette, Pink, Carnation, Heliotrope, Lily of the Valley, and a host of others; then there is a class of scent that is intensely powerful, and gives an impression almost of intemperance or voluptuousness, such as Magnolia, Tuberose, Gardenia, Stephanotis, and Jasmine; it is strange that these all have white flowers of thick leathery texture. In strongest contrast to these are the sweet, wholesome, wind-wafted scents of clover-field, of bean-field, and of new-mown hay, and the soft honey-scent of sun-baked heather, and of a buttercup meadow in April. Still more delicious is the wind-swept sweetness of a wood of Larch or of Scotch Fir, and the delicate perfume of young-leaved Birch, or the heavier scent of the flowering Lime. Out on the moorlands, besides the sweet heather-scent, is that of flowering Broom and Gorse and of the Bracken, so like the first smell of the sea as you come near it after a long absence. How curiously scents of flowers and leaves fall into classes--often one comes upon related smells running into one another in not necessarily related plants. There is a kind of scent that I sometimes meet with, about clumps of Brambles, a little like the waft of a Fir wood; it occurs again (quite naturally) in the first taste of blackberry jam, and then turns up again in Sweet Sultan. It is allied to the smell of the dying Strawberry leaves. The smell of the Primrose occurs again in a much stronger and ranker form in the root-stock, and the same thing happens with the Violets and Pansies; in Violets the plant-smell is pleasant, though without the high perfume of the flower; but the smell of an overgrown bed of Pansy-plants is rank to offensiveness. Perhaps the most delightful of all flower scents are those whose tender and delicate quality makes one wish for just a little more. Such a scent is that of Apple-blossom, and of some small Pansies, and of the wild Rose and the Honeysuckle. Among Roses alone the variety and degree of sweet scent seems almost infinite. To me the sweetest of all is the Provence, the old Cabbage Rose of our gardens. When something approaching this appears, as it frequently does, among the hybrid perpetuals, I always greet it as the real sweet Rose smell. One expects every Rose to be fragrant, and it is a disappointment to find that such a beautiful flower as Baroness Rothschild is wanting in the sweet scent that would be the fitting complement of its incomparable form, and to perceive in so handsome a Rose as Malmaison a heavy smell of decidedly bad quality. But such cases are not frequent. There is much variety in the scent of the Tea-Roses, the actual tea flavour being strongest in the Dijon class. Some have a powerful scent that is very near that of a ripe Nectarine; of this the best example I know is the old rose Goubault. The half-double red Gloire de Rosamène has a delightful scent of a kind that is rare among Roses. It has a good deal of the quality of that mysterious and delicious smell given off by the dying strawberry leaves, aromatic, pungent, and delicately refined, searching and powerful, and yet subtle and elusive--the best sweet smell of all the year. One cannot have it for the seeking; it comes as it will--a scent that is sad as a forecast of the inevitable certainty of the flower-year's waning, and yet sweet with the promise of its timely new birth. Sometimes I have met with a scent of somewhat the same mysterious and aromatic kind when passing near a bank clothed with the great St. John's Wort. As this also occurs in early autumn, I suppose it to be occasioned by the decay of some of the leaves. And there is a small yellow-flowered Potentilla that has a scent of the same character, but always freely and willingly given off--a humble-looking little plant, well worth growing for its sweetness, that much to my regret I have lost. I observe that when a Rose exists in both single and double form the scent is increased in the double beyond the proportion that one would expect. _Rosa lucida_ in the ordinary single state has only a very slight scent; in the lovely double form it is very sweet, and has acquired somewhat of the Moss-rose smell. The wild Burnet-rose (_R. spinosissima_) has very little smell; but the Scotch Briars, its garden relatives, have quite a powerful fragrance, a pale flesh-pink kind, whose flowers are very round and globe-like, being the sweetest of all. But of all the sweet scents of bush or flower, the ones that give me the greatest pleasure are those of the aromatic class, where they seem to have a wholesome resinous or balsamic base, with a delicate perfume added. When I pick and crush in my hand a twig of Bay, or brush against a bush of Rosemary, or tread upon a tuft of Thyme, or pass through incense-laden brakes of Cistus, I feel that here is all that is best and purest and most refined, and nearest to poetry, in the range of faculty of the sense of smell. The scents of all these sweet shrubs, many of them at home in dry and rocky places in far-away lower latitudes, recall in a way far more distinct than can be done by a mere mental effort of recollection, rambles of years ago in many a lovely southern land--in the islands of the Greek Archipelago, beautiful in form, and from a distance looking bare and arid, and yet with a scattered growth of lowly, sweet-smelling bush and herb, so that as you move among them every plant seems full of sweet sap or aromatic gum, and as you tread the perfumed carpet the whole air is scented; then of dusky groves of tall Cypress and Myrtle, forming mysterious shadowy woodland temples that unceasingly offer up an incense of their own surpassing fragrance, and of cooler hollows in the same lands and in the nearer Orient, where the Oleander grows like the willow of the north, and where the Sweet Bay throws up great tree-like suckers of surprising strength and vigour. It is only when one has seen it grow like this that one can appreciate the full force of the old Bible simile. Then to find oneself standing (while still on earth) in a grove of giant Myrtles fifteen feet high is like having a little chink of the door of heaven opened, as if to show a momentary glimpse of what good things may be beyond! Among the sweet shrubs from the nearer of these southern regions, one of the best for English gardens is _Cistus laurifolius_. Its wholesome, aromatic sweetness is freely given off, even in winter. In this, as in its near relative, _C. ladaniferus_, the scent seems to come from the gummy surface, and not from the body of the leaf. _Caryopteris Mastacanthus_, the Mastic plant, from China, one of the few shrubs that flower in autumn, has strongly-scented woolly leaves, something like turpentine, but more refined. _Ledum palustre_ has a delightful scent when its leaves are bruised. The wild Bog-myrtle, so common in Scotland, has almost the sweetness of the true Myrtle, as has also the broad-leaved North American kind, and the Candleberry Gale (_Comptonia asplenifolia_) from the same country. The myrtle-leaved Rhododendron is a dwarf shrub of neat habit, whose bruised leaves have also a myrtle-like smell, though it is less strong than in the Gales. I wonder why the leaves of nearly all the hardy aromatic shrubs are of a hard, dry texture; the exceptions are so few that it seems to be a law. If my copse were some acres larger I should like nothing better than to make a good-sized clearing, laying out to the sun, and to plant it with these aromatic bushes and herbs. The main planting should be of Cistus and Rosemary and Lavender, and for the shadier edges the Myrtle-leaved Rhododendron, and _Ledum palustre_, and the three Bog-myrtles. Then again in the sun would be Hyssop and Catmint, and Lavender-cotton and Southernwood, with others of the scented Artemisias, and Sage and Marjoram. All the ground would be carpeted with Thyme and Basil and others of the dwarfer sweet-herbs. There would be no regular paths, but it would be so planted that in most parts one would have to brush up against the sweet bushes, and sometimes push through them, as one does on the thinner-clothed of the mountain slopes of southern Italy. Among the many wonders of the vegetable world are the flowers that hang their heads and seem to sleep in the daytime, and that awaken as the sun goes down, and live their waking life at night. And those that are most familiar in our gardens have powerful perfumes, except the Evening Primrose (_Oenothera_), which has only a milder sweetness. It is vain to try and smell the night-given scent in the daytime; it is either withheld altogether, or some other smell, quite different, and not always pleasant, is there instead. I have tried hard in daytime to get a whiff of the night sweetness of _Nicotiana affinis_, but can only get hold of something that smells like a horse! Some of the best of the night-scents are those given by the Stocks and Rockets. They are sweet in the hand in the daytime, but the best of the sweet scent seems to be like a thin film on the surface. It does not do to smell them too vigorously, for, especially in Stocks and Wallflowers, there is a strong, rank, cabbage-like under-smell. But in the sweetness given off so freely in the summer evening there is none of this; then they only give their very best. But of all the family, the finest fragrance comes from the small annual Night-scented Stock (_Matthiola bicornis_), a plant that in daytime is almost ugly; for the leaves are of a dull-grey colour, and the flowers are small and also dull-coloured, and they are closed and droop and look unhappy. But when the sun has set the modest little plant seems to come to life; the grey foliage is almost beautiful in its harmonious relation to the half-light; the flowers stand up and expand, and in the early twilight show tender colouring of faint pink and lilac, and pour out upon the still night-air a lavish gift of sweetest fragrance; and the modest little plant that in strong sunlight looked unworthy of a place in the garden, now rises to its appointed rank and reigns supreme as its prime delight. CHAPTER XX THE WORSHIP OF FALSE GODS Several times during these notes I have spoken in a disparaging manner of the show-table; and I have not done so lightly, but with all the care and thought and power of observation that my limited capacity is worth; and, broadly, I have come to this: that shows, such as those at the fortnightly meetings of the Royal Horticultural Society, and their more important one in the early summer, whose object is to bring together beautiful flowers of all kinds, to a place where they may be seen, are of the utmost value; and that any shows anywhere for a like purpose, and especially where there are no money prizes, are also sure to be helpful. And the test question I put to myself at any show is this, Does this really help the best interests of horticulture? And as far as I can see that it does this, I think the show right and helpful; and whenever it does not, I think it harmful and misleading. The love of gardening has so greatly grown and spread within the last few years, that the need of really good and beautiful garden flowers is already far in advance of the demand for the so-called "florists" flowers, by which I mean those that find favour in the exclusive shows of Societies for the growing and exhibition of such flowers as Tulips, Carnations, Dahlias, and Chrysanthemums. In support of this I should like to know what proportion of demand there is, in Dahlias, for instance, between the show kinds, whose aim and object is the show-table, and the decorative kinds, that are indisputably better for garden use. Looking at the catalogue of a leading Dahlia nursery, I find that the decorative kinds fill ten pages, while the show kinds, including Pompones, fill only three. Is not this some indication of what is wanted in gardens? I am of opinion that the show-table is unworthily used when its object is to be an end in itself, and that it should be only a means to a better end, and that when it exhibits what has become merely a "fancy," it loses sight of its honourable position as a trustworthy exponent of horticulture, and has degenerated to a baser use. When, as in Chrysanthemum shows, the flowers on the board are of _no use anywhere but on that board_, and for the purpose of gaining a money prize, I hold that the show-table has a debased aim, and a debasing influence. Beauty, in all the best sense, is put aside in favour of set rules and measurements, and the production of a thing that is of no use or value; and individuals of a race of plants capable of producing the highest and most delightful forms of beauty, and of brightening our homes, and even gardens, during the dim days of early winter, are teased and tortured and fatted and bloated into ugly and useless monstrosities for no purpose but to gain money. And when private gardeners go to these shows and see how the prizes are awarded, and how all the glory is accorded to the first-prize bloated monster, can we wonder that the effect on their minds is confusing, if not absolutely harmful? Shows of Carnations and Pansies, where the older rules prevail, are equally misleading, where the single flowers are arrayed in a flat circle of paper. As with the Chrysanthemum, every sort of trickery is allowed in arranging the petals of the Carnation blooms: petals are pulled out or stuck in, and they are twisted about, and groomed and combed, and manipulated with special tools--"dressed," as the show-word has it--dressed so elaborately that the dressing only stops short of applying actual paint and perfumery. Already in the case of Carnations a better influence is being felt, and at the London shows there are now classes for border Carnations set up in long-stalked bunches just as they grow. It is only like this that their value as outdoor plants can be tested; for many of the show sorts have miserably weak stalks, and a very poor, lanky habit of growth. Then the poor Pansies have single blooms laid flat on white papers, and are only approved if they will lie quite flat and show an outline of a perfect circle. All that is most beautiful in a Pansy, the wing-like curves, the waved or slightly fluted radiations, the scarcely perceptible undulation of surface that displays to perfection the admirable delicacy of velvety texture; all the little tender tricks and ways that make the Pansy one of the best-loved of garden flowers; all this is overlooked, and not only passively overlooked, but overtly contemned. The show-pansy judge appears to have no eye, or brain, or heart, but to have in their place a pair of compasses with which to describe a circle! All idea of garden delight seems to be excluded, as this kind of judging appeals to no recognition of beauty for beauty's sake, but to hard systems of measurement and rigid arrangement and computation that one would think more applicable to astronomy or geometry than to any matter relating to horticulture. I do most strongly urge that beauty of the highest class should be the aim, and not anything of the nature of fashion or "fancy," and that every effort should be made towards the raising rather than the lowering of the standard of taste. The Societies which exist throughout the country are well organised; many have existed for a great number of years; they are the local sources of horticultural education, to which large circles of people naturally look for guidance; and though they produce--and especially the Rose shows--quantities of beautiful things, it cannot but be perceived by all who have had the benefit of some refinement of education, that in very many cases they either deliberately teach, or at any rate allow to be seen with their sanction, what cannot fail to be debasing to public taste. I will just take two examples to show how obvious methods of leading taste are not only overlooked, but even perverted; for it is not only in the individual blooms that much of the show-teaching is unworthy, but also in the training of the plants; so that a plant that by nature has some beauty of form, is not encouraged or even allowed to develop that beauty, but is trained into some shape that is not only foreign to its own nature, but is absolutely ugly and ungraceful, and entirely stupid. The natural habit of the Chrysanthemum is to grow in the form of several upright stems. They spring up sheaf-wise, straight upright for a time, and only bending a little outwards above, to give room for the branching heads of bloom. The stems are rather stiff, because they are half woody at the base. In the case of pot-plants it would seem right only so far to stake or train them as to give the necessary support by a few sticks set a little outwards at the top, so that each stem may lean a little over, after the manner of a Bamboo, when their clustered heads of flower would be given enough room, and be seen to the greatest advantage. But at shows, the triumph of the training art seems to be to drag the poor thing round and round over an internal scaffolding of sticks, with an infinite number of ties and cross-braces, so that it makes a sort of shapeless ball, and to arrange the flowers so that they are equally spotted all over it, by tying back some almost to snapping-point, and by dragging forward others to the verge of dislocation. I have never seen anything so ugly in the way of potted plants as a certain kind of Chrysanthemum that has incurved flowers of a heavy sort of dull leaden-looking red-purple colour trained in this manner. Such a sight gives me a feeling of shame, not unmixed with wrathful indignation. I ask myself, What is it for? and I get no answer. I ask a practical gardener what it is for, and he says, "Oh, it is one of the ways they are trained for shows." I ask him, Does he think it pretty, or is it any use? and he says, "Well, they think it makes a nice variety;" and when I press him further, and say I consider it a very nasty variety, and does he think nasty varieties are better than none, the question is beyond him, and he smiles vaguely and edges away, evidently thinking my conversation perplexing, and my company undesirable. I look again at the unhappy plant, and see its poor leaves fat with an unwholesome obesity, and seeming to say, We were really a good bit mildewed, but have been doctored up for the show by being crammed and stuffed with artificial aliment! My second example is that of _Azalea indica_. What is prettier in a room than one of these in its little tree form, a true tree, with tiny trunk and wide-spreading branches, and its absurdly large and lovely flowers? Surely it is the most perfect room ornament that we can have in tree shape in a moderate-sized pot; and where else can one see a tree loaded with lovely bloom whose individual flowers have a diameter equal to five times that of the trunk? But the show decrees that all this is wrong, and that the tiny, brittle branches must be trained stiffly round till the shape of the plant shows as a sort of cylinder. Again I ask myself, What is this for? What does it teach? Can it be really to teach with deliberate intention that instead of displaying its natural and graceful tree form it should aim at a more desirable kind of beauty, such as that of the chimney-pot or drain-pipe, and that this is so important that it is right and laudable to devote to it much time and delicate workmanship? I cannot but think, as well as hope, that the strong influences for good that are now being brought to bear on all departments of gardening may reach this class of show, for there are already more hopeful signs in the admission of classes for groups arranged for decoration. The prize-show system no doubt creates its own evils, because the judges, and those who frame the schedules, have been in most cases men who have a knowledge of flowers, but who are not people of cultivated taste, and in deciding what points are to constitute the merits of a flower they have to take such qualities as are within the clearest understanding of people of average intelligence and average education--such, for instance, as size that can be measured, symmetry that can be easily estimated, thickness of petal that can be felt, and such qualities of colour as appeal most strongly to the uneducated eye; so that a flower may possess features or qualities that endow it with the highest beauty, but that exclude it, because the hard and narrow limits of the show-laws provide no means of dealing with it. It is, therefore, thrown out, not because they have any fault to find with it, but because it does not concern them; and the ordinary gardener, to whose practice it might be of the highest value, accepting the verdict of the show-judge as an infallible guide, also treats it with contempt and neglect. Now, all this would not so much matter if it did not delude those whose taste is not sufficiently educated to enable them to form an opinion of their own in accordance with the best and truest standards of beauty; for I venture to repeat that what we have to look for for the benefit of our gardens, and for our own bettering and increase of happiness in those gardens, are things that are beautiful, rather than things that are round, or straight, or thick, still less than for those that are new, or curious, or astonishing. For all these false gods are among us, and many are they who are willing to worship. CHAPTER XXI NOVELTY AND VARIETY When I look back over thirty years of gardening, I see what an extraordinary progress there has been, not only in the introduction of good plants new to general cultivation, but also in the home production of improved kinds of old favourites. In annual plants alone there has been a remarkable advance. And here again, though many really beautiful things are being brought forward, there seems always to be an undue value assigned to a fresh development, on the score of its novelty. Now it seems to me, that among the thousands of beautiful things already at hand for garden use, there is no merit whatever in novelty or variety unless the thing new or different is distinctly more beautiful, or in some such way better than an older thing of the same class. And there seems to be a general wish among seed growers just now to dwarf all annual plants. Now, when a plant is naturally of a diffuse habit, the fixing of a dwarfer variety may be a distinct gain to horticulture--it may just make a good garden plant out of one that was formerly of indifferent quality; but there seems to me to be a kind of stupidity in inferring from this that all annuals are the better for dwarfing. I take it that the bedding system has had a good deal to do with it. It no doubt enables ignorant gardeners to use a larger variety of plants as senseless colour-masses, but it is obvious that many, if not most, of the plants are individually made much uglier by the process. Take, for example, one of the dwarfest Ageratums: what a silly little dumpy, formless, pincushion of a thing it is! And then the dwarfest of the China Asters. Here is a plant (whose chief weakness already lies in a certain over-stiffness) made stiffer and more shapeless still by dwarfing and by cramming with too many petals. The Comet Asters of later years are a much-improved type of flower, with a looser shape and a certain degree of approach to grace and beauty. When this kind came out it was a noteworthy novelty, not because it was a novelty, but because it was a better and more beautiful thing. Also among the same Asters the introduction of a better class of red colouring, first of the blood-red and then of the so-called scarlet shades, was a good variety, because it was the distinct bettering of the colour of a popular race of garden-flowers, whose red and pink colourings had hitherto been of a bad and rank quality. It is quite true that here and there the dwarf kind is a distinctly useful thing, as in the dwarf Nasturtiums. In this grand plant one is glad to have dwarf ones as well as the old trailing kinds. I even confess to a certain liking for the podgy little dwarf Snapdragons; they are ungraceful little dumpy things, but they happen to have come in some tender colourings of pale yellow and pale pink, that give them a kind of absurd prettiness, and a certain garden-value. I also look at them as a little floral joke that is harmless and not displeasing, but they cannot for a moment compare in beauty with the free-growing Snapdragon of the older type. This I always think one of the best and most interesting and admirable of garden-plants. Its beauty is lost if it is crowded up among other things in a border; it should be grown in a dry wall or steep rocky bank, where its handsome bushy growth and finely-poised spikes of bloom can be well seen. [Illustration: TALL SNAPDRAGONS GROWING IN A DRY WALL.] [Illustration: MULLEINS GROWING IN THE FACE OF DRY WALL. (_See "Old Wall," page 116._)] One of the annuals that I think is entirely spoilt by dwarfing is Love-in-a-Mist, a plant I hold in high admiration. Many years ago I came upon some of it in a small garden, of a type that I thought extremely desirable, with a double flower of just the right degree of fulness, and of an unusually fine colour. I was fortunate enough to get some seed, and have never grown any other, nor have I ever seen elsewhere any that I think can compare with it. The Zinnia is another fine annual that has been much spoilt by its would-be improvers. When a Zinnia has a hard, stiff, tall flower, with a great many rows of petals piled up one on top of another, and when its habit is dwarfed to a mean degree of squatness, it looks to me both ugly and absurd, whereas a reasonably double one, well branched, and two feet high, is a handsome plant. I also think that Stocks and Wallflowers are much handsomer when rather tall and branching. Dwarf Stocks, moreover, are invariably spattered with soil in heavy autumn rain. An example of the improver not knowing where to stop in the matter of colouring, always strikes me in the Gaillardias, and more especially in the perennial kind, that is increased by division as well as by seed. The flower is naturally of a strong orange-yellow colour, with a narrow ring of red round the centre. The improver has sought to increase the width of the red ring. Up to a certain point it makes a livelier and brighter-looking flower; but he has gone too far, and extended the red till it has become a red flower with a narrow yellow edge. The red also is of a rather dull and heavy nature, so that instead of a handsome yellow flower with a broad central ring, here is an ugly red one with a yellow border. There is no positive harm done, as the plant has been propagated at every stage of development, and one may choose what one will; but to see them together is an instructive lesson. No annual plant has of late years been so much improved as the Sweet Pea, and one reason why its charming beauty and scent are so enjoyable is, that they grow tall, and can be seen on a level with the eye. There can be no excuse whatever for dwarfing this, as has lately been done. There are already plenty of good flowering plants under a foot high, and the little dwarf white monstrosity, now being followed by coloured ones of the same habit, seems to me worthy of nothing but condemnation. It would be as right and sensible to dwarf a Hollyhock into a podgy mass a foot high, or a Pentstemon, or a Foxglove. Happily these have as yet escaped dwarfing, though I regret to see that a deformity that not unfrequently appears among garden Foxgloves, looking like a bell-shaped flower topping a stunted spike, appears to have been "fixed," and is being offered as a "novelty." Here is one of the clearest examples of a new development which is a distinct debasement of a naturally beautiful form, but which is nevertheless being pushed forward in trade: it has no merit whatever in itself, and is only likely to sell because it is new and curious. And all this parade of distortion and deformity comes about from the grower losing sight of beauty as the first consideration, or from his not having the knowledge that would enable him to determine what are the points of character in various plants most deserving of development, and in not knowing when or where to stop. Abnormal size, whether greatly above or much below the average, appeals to the vulgar and uneducated eye, and will always command its attention and wonderment. But then the production of the immense size that provokes astonishment, and the misapplied ingenuity that produces unusual dwarfing, are neither of them very high aims. And much as I feel grateful to those who improve garden flowers, I venture to repeat my strong conviction that their efforts in selection and other methods should be so directed as to keep in view the attainment of beauty in the first place, and as a point of honour; not to mere increase of size of bloom or compactness of habit--many plants have been spoilt by excess of both; not for variety or novelty as ends in themselves, but only to welcome them, and offer them, if they are distinctly of garden value in the best sense. For if plants are grown or advertised or otherwise pushed on any other account than that of their possessing some worthy form of beauty, they become of the same nature as any other article in trade that is got up for sale for the sole benefit of the seller, that is unduly lauded by advertisement, and that makes its first appeal to the vulgar eye by an exaggerated and showy pictorial representation; that will serve no useful purpose, and for which there is no true or healthy demand. No doubt much of it comes about from the unwholesome pressure of trade competition, which in a way obliges all to follow where some lead. I trust that my many good friends in the trade will understand that my remarks are not made in any personal sense whatever. I know that some of them feel much as I do on some of these points, but that in many ways they are helpless, being all bound in a kind of bondage to the general system. And there is one great evil that calls loudly for redress, but that will endure until some of the mightiest of them have the energy and courage to band themselves together and to declare that it shall no longer exist among them. CHAPTER XXII WEEDS AND PESTS Weeding is a delightful occupation, especially after summer rain, when the roots come up clear and clean. One gets to know how many and various are the ways of weeds--as many almost as the moods of human creatures. How easy and pleasant to pull up are the soft annuals like Chickweed and Groundsel, and how one looks with respect at deep-rooted things like Docks, that make one go and fetch a spade. Comfrey is another thing with a terrible root, and every bit must be got out, as it will grow again from the smallest scrap. And hard to get up are the two Bryonies, the green and the black, with such deep-reaching roots, that, if not weeded up within their first year, will have to be seriously dug out later. The white Convolvulus, one of the loveliest of native plants, has a most persistently running root, of which every joint will quickly form a new plant. Some of the worst weeds to get out are Goutweed and Coltsfoot. Though I live on a light soil, comparatively easy to clean, I have done some gardening in clay, and well know what a despairing job it is to get the bits of either of these roots out of the stiff clods. The most persistent weed in my soil is the small running Sheep's Sorrel. First it makes a patch, and then sends out thready running roots all round, a foot or more long; these, if not checked, establish new bases of operation, and so it goes on, always spreading farther and farther. When this happens in soft ground that can be hoed and weeded it matters less, but in the lawn it is a more serious matter. Its presence always denotes a poor, sandy soil of rather a sour quality. Goutweed is a pest in nearly all gardens, and very difficult to get out. When it runs into the root of some patch of hardy plant, if the plant can be spared, I find it best to send it at once to the burn-heap; or if it is too precious, there is nothing for it but to cut it all up and wash it out, to be sure that not the smallest particle of the enemy remains. Some weeds are deceiving--Sow-thistle, for instance, which has the look of promising firm hand-hold and easy extraction, but has a disappointing way of almost always breaking short off at the collar. But of all the garden weeds that are native plants I know none so persistent or so insidious as the Rampion Bell-flower (_Campanula Rapunculus_); it grows from the smallest thread of root, and it is almost impossible to see every little bit; for though the main roots are thick, and white, and fleshy, the fine side roots that run far abroad are very small, and of a reddish colour, and easily hidden in the brown earth. But some of the worst garden-weeds are exotics run wild. The common Grape Hyacinth sometimes overruns a garden and cannot be got rid of. _Sambucus ebulis_ is a plant to beware of, its long thong-like roots spreading far and wide, and coming up again far away from the parent stock. For this reason it is valuable for planting in such places as newly-made pond-heads, helping to tie the bank together. _Polygonum Sieboldi_ must also be planted with caution. The winter Heliotrope (_Petasites fragrans_) is almost impossible to get out when once it has taken hold, growing in the same way as its near relative the native Coltsfoot. But by far the most difficult plant to abolish or even keep in check that I know is _Ornithogalum nutans_. Beautiful as it is, and valuable as a cut flower, I will not have it in the garden. I think I may venture to say that in this soil, when once established, it cannot be eradicated. Each mature bulb makes a host of offsets, and the seed quickly ripens. When it is once in a garden it will suddenly appear in all sorts of different places. It is no use trying to dig it out. I have dug out the whole space of soil containing the patch, a barrow-load at a time, and sent it to the middle of the burn-heap, and put in fresh soil, and there it is again next year, nearly as thick as ever. I have dug up individual small patches with the greatest care, and got out every bulb and offset, and every bit of the whitish leaf stem, for I have such faith in its power of reproduction that I think every atom of this is capable of making a plant, only to find next year a thriving young tuft of the "grass" in the same place. And yet the bulb and underground stem are white, and the earth is brown, and I passed it all several times through my fingers, but all in vain. I confess that it beats me entirely. _Coronilla varia_ is a little plant that appears in catalogues among desirable Alpines, but is a very "rooty" and troublesome thing, and scarcely good enough for garden use, though pretty in a grassy bank where its rambling ways would not be objectionable. I once brought home from Brittany some roots of _Linaria repens_, that looked charming by a roadside, and planted them in a bit of Alpine garden, a planting that I never afterwards ceased to regret. I learnt from an old farmer a good way of getting rid of a bed of nettles--to thrash them down with a stick every time they grow up. If this is done about three times during the year, the root becomes so much weakened that it is easily forked out, or if the treatment is gone on with, the second year the nettles die. Thrashing with a stick is better than cutting, as it makes the plant bleed more; any mutilation of bruise or ragged tearing of fibre is more harmful to plant or tree than clean cutting. Of bird, beast, and insect pests we have plenty. First, and worst, are rabbits. They will gnaw and nibble anything and everything that is newly planted, even native things like Juniper, Scotch Fir, and Gorse. The necessity of wiring everything newly planted adds greatly to the labour and expense of the garden, and the unsightly grey wire-netting is an unpleasant eyesore. When plants or bushes are well established the rabbits leave them alone, though some families of plants are always irresistible--Pinks and Carnations, for instance, and nearly all Cruciferæ, such as Wallflowers, Stocks, and Iberis. The only plants I know that they do not touch are Rhododendrons and Azaleas; they leave them for the hare, that is sure to get in every now and then, and who stands up on his long hind-legs, and will eat Rose-bushes quite high up. Plants eaten by a hare look as if they had been cut with a sharp knife; there is no appearance of gnawing or nibbling, no ragged edges of wood or frayed bark, but just a straight clean cut. Field mice are very troublesome. Some years they will nibble off the flower-buds of the Lent Hellebores; when they do this they have a curious way of collecting them and laying them in heaps. I have no idea why they do this, as they neither carry them away nor eat them afterwards; there the heaps of buds lie till they rot or dry up. They once stole all my Auricula seed in the same way. I had marked some good plants for seed, cutting off all the other flowers as soon as they went out of bloom. The seed was ripening, and I watched it daily, awaiting the moment for harvesting. But a few days before it was ready I went round and found the seed was all gone; it had been cut off at the top of the stalk, so that the umbel-shaped heads had been taken away whole. I looked about, and luckily found three slightly hollow places under the bank at the back of the border where the seed-heads had been piled in heaps. In this case it looked as if it had been stored for food; luckily it was near enough to ripeness for me to save my crop. The mice are also troublesome with newly-sown Peas, eating some underground, while sparrows nibble off others when just sprouted; and when outdoor Grapes are ripening mice run up the walls and eat them. Even when the Grapes are tied in oiled canvas bags they will eat through the bags to get at them, though I have never known them to gnaw through the newspaper bags that I now use in preference, and that ripen the Grapes as well. I am not sure whether it is mice or birds that pick off the flowers of the big bunch Primroses, but am inclined to think it is mice, because the stalks are cut low down. Pheasants are very bad gardeners; what they seem to enjoy most are Crocuses--in fact, it is no use planting them. I had once a nice collection of Crocus species. They were in separate patches, all along the edge of one border, in a sheltered part of the garden, where pheasants did not often come. One day when I came to see my Crocuses, I found where each patch had been a basin-shaped excavation and a few fragments of stalk or some part of the plant. They had begun at one end and worked steadily along, clearing them right out. They also destroyed a long bed of _Anemone fulgens_. First they took the flowers, and then the leaves, and lastly pecked up and ate the roots. But we have one grand consolation in having no slugs, at least hardly any that are truly indigenous; they do not like our dry, sandy heaths. Friends are very generous in sending them with plants, so that we have a moderate number that hang about frames and pot plants, though nothing much to boast of; but they never trouble seedlings in the open ground, and for this I can never be too thankful. Alas that the beautiful bullfinch should be so dire an enemy to fruit-trees, and also the pretty little tits! but so it is; and it is a sad sight to see a well-grown fruit-tree with all its fruit-buds pecked out and lying under it on the ground in a thin green carpet. We had some fine young cherry-trees in a small orchard that we cut down in despair after they had been growing twelve years. They were too large to net, and their space could not be spared just for the mischievous fun of the birds. CHAPTER XXIII THE BEDDING FASHION AND ITS INFLUENCE It is curious to look back at the old days of bedding-out, when that and that only meant gardening to most people, and to remember how the fashion, beginning in the larger gardens, made its way like a great inundating wave, submerging the lesser ones, and almost drowning out the beauties of the many little flowery cottage plots of our English waysides. And one wonders how it all came about, and why the bedding system, admirable for its own purpose, should have thus outstepped its bounds, and have been allowed to run riot among gardens great and small throughout the land. But so it was, and for many years the fashion, for it was scarcely anything better, reigned supreme. It was well for all real lovers of flowers when some quarter of a century ago a strong champion of the good old flowers arose, and fought strenuously to stay the devastating tide, and to restore the healthy liking for the good old garden flowers. Many soon followed, and now one may say that all England has flocked to the standard. Bedding as an all-prevailing fashion is now dead; the old garden-flowers are again honoured and loved, and every encouragement is freely offered to those who will improve old kinds and bring forward others. And now that bedding as a fashion no longer exists, one can look at it more quietly and fairly, and see what its uses really are, for in its own place and way it is undoubtedly useful and desirable. Many great country-houses are only inhabited in winter, then perhaps for a week or two at Easter, and in the late summer. There is probably a house-party at Easter, and a succession of visitors in the late summer. A brilliant garden, visible from the house, dressed for spring and dressed for early autumn, is exactly what is wanted--not necessarily from any special love of flowers, but as a kind of bright and well-kept furnishing of the immediate environment of the house. The gardener delights in it; it is all routine work; so many hundreds or thousands of scarlet Geranium, of yellow Calceolaria, of blue Lobelia, of golden Feverfew, or of other coloured material. It wants no imagination; the comprehension of it is within the range of the most limited understanding; indeed its prevalence for some twenty years or more must have had a deteriorating influence on the whole class of private gardeners, presenting to them an ideal so easy of attainment and so cheap of mental effort. But bedding, though it is gardening of the least poetical or imaginative kind, can be done badly or beautifully. In the _parterre_ of the formal garden it is absolutely in place, and brilliantly-beautiful pictures can be made by a wise choice of colouring. I once saw, and can never forget, a bedded garden that was a perfectly satisfying example of colour-harmony; but then it was planned by the master, a man of the most refined taste, and not by the gardener. It was a _parterre_ that formed part of the garden in one of the fine old places in the Midland counties. I have no distinct recollection of the design, except that there was some principle of fan-shaped radiation, of which each extreme angle formed one centre. The whole garden was treated in one harmonious colouring of full yellow, orange, and orange-brown; half-hardy annuals, such as French and African Marigolds, Zinnias, and Nasturtiums, being freely used. It was the most noble treatment of one limited range of colouring I have ever seen in a garden; brilliant without being garish, and sumptuously gorgeous without the reproach of gaudiness--a precious lesson in temperance and restraint in the use of the one colour, and an admirable exposition of its powerful effect in the hands of a true artist. I think that in many smaller gardens a certain amount of bedding may be actually desirable; for where the owner of a garden has a special liking for certain classes or mixtures of plants, or wishes to grow them thoroughly well and enjoy them individually to the full, he will naturally grow them in separate beds, or may intentionally combine the beds, if he will, into some form of good garden effect. But the great fault of the bedding system when at its height was, that it swept over the country as a tyrannical fashion, that demanded, and for the time being succeeded in effecting, the exclusion of better and more thoughtful kinds of gardening; for I believe I am right in saying that it spread like an epidemic disease, and raged far and wide for nearly a quarter of a century. Its worst form of all was the "ribbon border," generally a line of scarlet Geranium at the back, then a line of Calceolaria, then a line of blue Lobelia, and lastly, a line of the inevitable Golden Feather Feverfew, or what our gardener used to call Featherfew. Could anything be more tedious or more stupid? And the ribbon border was at its worst when its lines were not straight, but waved about in weak and silly sinuations. And when bedding as a fashion was dead, when this false god had been toppled off his pedestal, and his worshippers had been converted to better beliefs, in turning and rending him they often went too far, and did injustice to the innocent by professing a dislike to many a good plant, and renouncing its use. It was not the fault of the Geranium or of the Calceolaria that they had been grievously misused and made to usurp too large a share of our garden spaces. Not once but many a time my visitors have expressed unbounded surprise when they saw these plants in my garden, saying, "I should have thought that you would have despised Geraniums." On the contrary, I love Geraniums. There are no plants to come near them for pot, or box, or stone basket, or for massing in any sheltered place in hottest sunshine; and I love their strangely-pleasant smell, and their beautiful modern colourings of soft scarlet and salmon-scarlet and salmon-pink, some of these grouping beautifully together. I have a space in connection with some formal stonework of steps, and tank, and paved walks, close to the house, on purpose for the summer placing of large pots of Geranium, with sometimes a few Cannas and Lilies. For a quarter of the year it is one of the best things in the garden, and delightful in colour. Then no plant does so well or looks so suitable in some earthen pots and boxes from Southern Italy that I always think the best that were ever made, their shape and well-designed ornament traditional from the Middle Ages, and probably from an even more remote antiquity. [Illustration: GERANIUMS IN NEAPOLITAN POTS.] There are, of course, among bedding Geraniums many of a bad, raw quality of colour, particularly among cold, hard pinks, but there are so many to choose from that these can easily be avoided. I remember some years ago, when the bedding fashion was going out, reading some rather heated discussions in the gardening papers about methods of planting out and arranging various tender but indispensable plants. Some one who had been writing about the errors of the bedding system wrote about planting some of these in isolated masses. He was pounced upon by another, who asked, "What is this but bedding?" The second writer was so far justified, in that it cannot be denied that any planting in beds is bedding. But then there is bedding and bedding--a right and a wrong way of applying the treatment. Another matter that roused the combative spirit of the captious critic was the filling up of bare spaces in mixed borders with Geraniums, Calceolarias, and other such plants. Again he said, "What is this but bedding? These are bedding plants." When I read this it seemed to me that his argument was, These plants may be very good plants in themselves, but because they have for some years been used wrongly, therefore they must not now be used rightly! In the case of my own visitors, when they have expressed surprise at my having "those horrid old bedding plants" in my garden, it seemed quite a new view when I pointed out that bedding plants were only passive agents in their own misuse, and that a Geranium was a Geranium long before it was a bedding plant! But the discussion raised in my mind a wish to come to some conclusion about the difference between bedding in the better and worse sense, in relation to the cases quoted, and it appeared to me to be merely in the choice between right and wrong placing--placing monotonously or stupidly, so as merely to fill the space, or placing with a feeling for "drawing" or proportion. For I had very soon found out that, if I had a number of things to plant anywhere, whether only to fill up a border or as a detached group, if I placed the things myself, carefully exercising what power of discrimination I might have acquired, it looked fairly right, but that if I left it to one of my garden people (a thing I rarely do) it looked all nohow, or like bedding in the worst sense of the word. [Illustration: SPACE IN STEP AND TANK-GARDEN FOR LILIES, CANNAS, AND GERANIUMS.] [Illustration: HYDRANGEAS IN TUBS, IN A PART OF THE SAME GARDEN.] Even the better ways of gardening do not wholly escape the debasing influence of fashion. Wild gardening is a delightful, and in good hands a most desirable, pursuit, but no kind of gardening is so difficult to do well, or is so full of pitfalls and of paths of peril. Because it has in some measure become fashionable, and because it is understood to mean the planting of exotics in wild places, unthinking people rush to the conclusion that they can put any garden plants into any wild places, and that that is wild gardening. I have seen woody places that were already perfect with their own simple charm just muddled and spoilt by a reckless planting of garden refuse, and heathy hillsides already sufficiently and beautifully clothed with native vegetation made to look lamentably silly by the planting of a nurseryman's mixed lot of exotic Conifers. In my own case, I have always devoted the most careful consideration to any bit of wild gardening I thought of doing, never allowing myself to decide upon it till I felt thoroughly assured that the place seemed to ask for the planting in contemplation, and that it would be distinctly a gain in pictorial value; so there are stretches of Daffodils in one part of the copse, while another is carpeted with Lily of the Valley. A cool bank is covered with Gaultheria, and just where I thought they would look well as little jewels of beauty, are spreading patches of Trillium and the great yellow Dog-tooth Violet. Besides these there are only some groups of the Giant Lily. Many other exotic plants could have been made to grow in the wooded ground, but they did not seem to be wanted; I thought where the copse looked well and complete in itself it was better left alone. But where the wood joins the garden some bold groups of flowering plants are allowed, as of Mullein in one part and Foxglove in another; for when standing in the free part of the garden, it is pleasant to project the sight far into the wood, and to let the garden influences penetrate here and there, the better to join the one to the other. [Illustration: MULLEIN (VERBASCUM PHLOMOIDES) AT THE EDGE OF THE FIR WOOD.] [Illustration: A GRASS PATH IN THE COPSE.] Under the Bracken in both pictures is a wide planting of Lily of the Valley, flowering in May before the Fern is up. (_See page 61._) CHAPTER XXIV MASTERS AND MEN Now that the owners of good places are for the most part taking a newly-awakened and newly-educated pleasure in the better ways of gardening, a frequent source of difficulty arises from the ignorance and obstructiveness of gardeners. The owners have become aware that their gardens may be sources of the keenest pleasure. The gardener may be an excellent man, perfectly understanding the ordinary routine of garden work; he may have been many years in his place; it is his settled home, and he is getting well on into middle life; but he has no understanding of the new order of things, and when the master, perfectly understanding what he is about, desires that certain things shall be done, and wishes to enjoy the pleasure of directing the work himself, and seeing it grow under his hand, he resents it as an interference, and becomes obstructive, or does what is required in a spirit of such sullen acquiescence that it is equal to open opposition. And I have seen so many gardens and gardeners that I have come to recognise certain types; and this one, among men of a certain age, is unfortunately frequent. Various degrees of ignorance and narrow-mindedness must no doubt be expected among the class that produces private gardeners. Their general education is not very wide to begin with, and their training is usually all in one groove, and the many who possess a full share of vanity get to think that, because they have exhausted the obvious sources of experience that have occurred within their reach, there is nothing more to learn, or to know, or to see, or to feel, or to enjoy. It is in this that the difficulty lies. The man has no doubt done his best through life; he has performed his duties well and faithfully, and can render a good account of his stewardship. It is no fault of his that more means of enlarging his mind have not been within his grasp, and, to a certain degree, he may be excused for not understanding that there is anything beyond; but if he is naturally vain and stubborn his case is hopeless. If, on the other hand, he is wise enough to know that he does not know everything, and modest enough to acknowledge it, as do all the greatest and most learned of men, he will then be eager to receive new and enlarged impressions, and his willing and intelligent co-operation will be a new source of interest in life both to himself and his employer, as well as a fresh spring of vitality in the life of the garden. I am speaking of the large middle class of private gardeners, not of those of the highest rank, who have among them men of good education and a large measure of refinement. From among these I think of the late Mr. Ingram of the Belvoir Castle gardens, with regret as for a personal friend, and also as of one who was a true garden artist. But most people who have fair-sized gardens have to do with the middle class of gardener, the man of narrow mental training. The master who, after a good many years of active life, is looking forward to settling in his home and improving and enjoying his garden, has had so different a training, a course of teaching so immeasurably wider and more enlightening. As a boy he was in a great public school, where, by wholesome friction with his fellows, he had any petty or personal nonsense knocked out of him while still in his early "teens." Then he goes to college, and whether studiously inclined or not, he is already in the great world, always widening his ideas and experience. Then perhaps he is in one of the active professions, or engaged in scientific or intellectual research, or in diplomacy, his ever-expanding intelligence rubbing up against all that is most enlightened and astute in men, or most profoundly inexplicable in matter. He may be at the same time cultivating his taste for literature and the fine arts, searching the libraries and galleries of the civilised world for the noblest and most divinely-inspired examples of human work, seeing with an eye that daily grows more keenly searching, and receiving and holding with a brain that ever gains a firmer grasp, and so acquires some measure of the higher critical faculty. He sees the ruined gardens of antiquity, colossal works of the rulers of Imperial Rome, and the later gardens of the Middle Ages (direct descendants of those greater and older ones), some of them still among the most beautiful gardens on earth. He sees how the taste for gardening grew and travelled, spreading through Europe and reaching England, first, no doubt, through her Roman invaders. He becomes more and more aware of what great and enduring happiness may be enjoyed in a garden, and how all that he can learn of it in the leisure intervals of his earlier maturity, and then in middle life, will help to brighten his later days, when he hopes to refine and make better the garden of the old home by a reverent application of what he has learnt. He thinks of the desecrated old bowling-green, cut up to suit the fashion of thirty years ago into a patchwork of incoherent star and crescent shaped beds; of how he will give it back its ancient character of unbroken repose; he thinks how he will restore the string of fish-ponds in the bottom of the wooded valley just below, now a rushy meadow with swampy hollows that once were ponds, and humpy mounds, ruins of the ancient dikes; of how the trees will stand reflected in the still water; and how he will live to see again in middle hours of summer days, as did the monks of old, the broad backs of the golden carp basking just below the surface of the sun-warmed water. And such a man as this comes home some day and finds the narrow-minded gardener, who believes that he already knows all that can be known about gardening, who thinks that the merely technical part, which he perfectly understands, is all that there is to be known and practised, and that his crude ideas about arrangement of flowers are as good as those of any one else. And a man of this temperament cannot be induced to believe, and still less can he be made to understand, that all that he knows is only the means to a further and higher end, and that what he can show of a completed garden can only reach to an average dead-level of dulness compared with what may come of the life-giving influence of one who has the mastery of the higher garden knowledge. Moreover, he either forgets, or does not know, what is the main purpose of a garden, namely, that it is to give its owner the best and highest kind of earthly pleasure. Neither is he enlightened enough to understand that the master can take a real and intelligent interest in planning and arranging, and in watching the working out in detail. His small-minded vanity can only see in all this a distrust in his own powers and an intentional slight cast on his ability, whereas no such idea had ever entered the master's mind. Though there are many of this kind of gardener (and with their employers, if they have the patience to retain them in their service, I sincerely condole), there are happily many of a widely-different nature, whose minds are both supple and elastic and intelligently receptive, who are eager to learn and to try what has not yet come within the range of their experience, who show a cheerful readiness to receive a fresh range of ideas, and a willing alacrity in doing their best to work them out. Such a servant as this warms his master's heart, and it would do him good to hear, as I have many times heard, the terms in which the master speaks of him. For just as the educated man feels contempt for the vulgar pretension that goes with any exhibition of ignorant vanity, so the evidence of the higher qualities commands his respect and warm appreciation. Among the gardeners I have known, five such men come vividly to my recollection--good men all, with a true love of flowers, and its reflection of happiness written on their kindly faces. But then, on the other hand, frequent causes of irritation arise between master and man from the master's ignorance and unreasonable demands. For much as the love of gardening has grown of late, there are many owners who have no knowledge of it whatever. I have more than once had visitors who complained of their gardeners, as I thought quite unreasonably, on their own showing. For it is not enough to secure the services of a thoroughly able man, and to pay good wages, and to provide every sort of appliance, if there is no reasonable knowledge of what it is right and just to expect. I have known a lady, after paying a round of visits in great houses, complain of her gardener. She had seen at one place remarkably fine forced strawberries, at another some phenomenal frame Violets, and at a third immense Malmaison Carnations; whereas her own gardener did not excel in any of these, though she admitted that he was admirable for Grapes and Chrysanthemums. "If the others could do all these things to perfection," she argued, "why could not he do them?" She expected her gardener to do equally well all that she had seen best done in the other big places. It was in vain that I pleaded in defence of her man that all gardeners were human creatures, and that it was in the nature of such creatures to have individual aptitudes and special preferences, and that it was to be expected that each man should excel in one thing, or one thing at a time, and so on; but it was of no use, and she would not accept any excuse or explanation. I remember another example of a visitor who had a rather large place, and a gardener who had as good a knowledge of hardy plants as one could expect. My visitor had lately got the idea that he liked hardy flowers, though he had scarcely thrown off the influence of some earlier heresy which taught that they were more or less contemptible--the sort of thing for cottage gardens; still, as they were now in fashion, he thought he had better have them. We were passing along my flower-border, just then in one of its best moods of summer beauty, and when its main occupants, three years planted, had come to their full strength, when, speaking of a large flower-border he had lately had made, he said, "I told my fellow last autumn to get anything he liked, and yet it is perfectly wretched. It is not as if I wanted anything out of the way; I only want a lot of common things like that," waving a hand airily at my precious border, while scarcely taking the trouble to look at it. And I have had another visitor of about the same degree of appreciative insight, who, contemplating some cherished garden picture, the consummation of some long-hoped-for wish, the crowning joy of years of labour, said, "Now look at that; it is just right, and yet it is quite simple--there is absolutely nothing in it; now, why can't my man give me that?" I am far from wishing to disparage or undervalue the services of the honest gardener, but I think that on this point there ought to be the clearest understanding; that the master must not expect from the gardener accomplishments that he has no means of acquiring, and that the gardener must not assume that his knowledge covers all that can come within the scope of the widest and best practice of his craft. There are branches of education entirely out of his reach that can be brought to bear upon garden planning and arrangement down to the very least detail. What the educated employer who has studied the higher forms of gardening can do or criticise, he cannot be expected to do or understand; it is in itself almost the work of a lifetime, and only attainable, like success in any other fine art, by persons of, firstly, special temperament and aptitude; and, secondly, by their unwearied study and closest application. But the result of knowledge so gained shows itself throughout the garden. It may be in so simple a thing as the placing of a group of plants. They can be so placed by the hand that knows, that the group is in perfect drawing in relation to what is near; while by the ordinary gardener they would be so planted that they look absurd, or unmeaning, or in some way awkward and unsightly. It is not enough to cultivate plants well; they must also be used well. The servant may set up the canvas and grind the colours, and even set the palette, but the master alone can paint the picture. It is just the careful and thoughtful exercise of the higher qualities that makes a garden interesting, and their absence that leaves it blank, and dull, and lifeless. I am heartily in sympathy with the feeling described in these words in a friend's letter, "I think there are few things so interesting as to see in what way a person, whose perceptions you think fine and worthy of study, will give them expression in a garden." INDEX Adonis vernalis, 52 Alcohol, its gravestone, 12 Alexandrian laurel, 16 Alströmerias, best kinds, how to plant, 92 Amelanchier, 52, 182 Ampelopsis, 43 Andromeda Catesbæi, 37; A. floribunda and A. japonica, 50; autumn colouring, 128, 165 Anemone fulgens, 57; japonica, 109, 207 Aponogeton, 194 Apple, Wellington, 12; apple-trees, beauty of form, 25 Aristolochia Sipho, 43 Arnebia echioides, 56 Aromatic plants, 235 Artemisia Stelleriana, 104 Arum, wild, leaves with cut daffodils, 58 Auriculas, 54; seed stolen by mice, 260 Autumn-sown annuals, 113 Azaleas, arrangement for colour, 69; A. occidentalis, 70; autumn colouring, 128; as trained for shows, 246 Bambusa Ragamowski, 102 Beauty of woodland in winter, 7, 153 Beauty the first aim in gardening, 2, 196, 244, 248, 253, 254 Bedding-out as a fashion, 263 and onward; bedding rightly used, 265 Berberis for winter decoration, 16; its many merits, 21 Bignonia radicans, large-flowered variety, 110 Birch, its graceful growth, 8; colour of bark, 9; fragrance in April, 51; grouped with holly, 152 Bird-cherry, 182 Bitton, Canon Ellacombe's garden at, 206 Blue-eyed Mary, 44 Books on gardening, 192 and onward Border plants, their young growth in April, 51 Bracken, 87; cut into layering-pegs, 98; careful cutting, 99; when at its best to cut, 106; autumn colouring, 127 Bramble, colour of leaves in winter, 20; in forest groups, 44; in orchard, 181; American kinds, 182 Briar roses, 80, 104 Bryony, the two wild kinds, 43 Bulbous plants, early blooming, how best to plant, 49 Bullfinch, a garden enemy, 262 Butcher's broom, 151 Cactus, hardy, on rock-wall, 119 Caltha palustris, 52 Campanula rapunculus, 257 Cardamine trifoliata, 50 Carnations, 94; at shows, 243 Caryopteris mastacanthus, 102 Ceanothus, Gloire de Versailles, 205 Cheiranthus, alpine kinds, 62 Chimonanthus fragrans, 229 Chionodoxa sardensis and C. Lucilliæ, 32 Choisya ternata, 63, 71, 205 Christmas rose, giant kind, 144 Chrysanthemums, hardy kinds, 144; as trained at shows, 245 Cistus laurifolius, 37; C. florentinus, 101; C. ladaniferus, 102, 206 Claret vine, 110 Clematis cirrhosa, 14; C. flammula when to train, 24; wild clematis in trees and hedges, 43; C. montana, 71, 203; C. Davidiana, 95, 205 Clergymen as gardeners, 175 Clerodendron foetidum, 110, 206 Climbing plants, 202; for pergola, 215 Colour, of woodland in winter, 19; of leaves of some garden plants, 21; colour-grouping of rhododendrons, 66; of azaleas, 69; colour of foliage of tree pæonies, 73; colour arrangement in the flower-border, 89, 109, 207; colour of bracken in October, 127; of azaleas and andromedas in autumn, 128; of bark of holly, 152; study of, 197; of flowers, how described, 221 and onward Copse-cutting, 166 Corchorus japonicus, 50 Coronilla varia, 259 Corydalis capnoides, 50 Cottage gardens, 4, 185; roses in, 79 Cottager's way of protecting tender plants, 91 Cowslips, 59 Crinums, 206 Crinums, hybrid, 110, 119; protecting, 146 Crocuses, eaten by pheasants, 261 Daffodils in the copse, 34; planted in old pack-horse tracks, 48 Dahlias, staking, 114; digging up, 133 Delphiniums, 89; grown from seed, 90; D. Belladonna, 91 Dentaria pinnata, 46 Deutzia parviflora, 103 Digging up plants, 139 Discussions about treatment of certain plants, 3 Dividing tough-rooted plants, 53; spring-blooming plants, 85; how often, 136; suitable tools, 136 and onward Dog-tooth violets, 33, 47 Doronicum, 53 Dressing of show flowers, 243 Dried flowers, 17 Dwarfing annuals, 249 Edwardsia grandiflora, 206 Elder trees, 83; elder-wine, 84 Epilobium angustifolium, white variety, 86 Epimedium pinnatum, 16, 46 Erinus alpinus, sown in rock-wall, 121 Eryngium giganteum, 93; E. maritimum, 93; E. Oliverianum, 93, 209. Eulalia japonica, flowers dried, 17 Evergreen branches for winter decoration, 16 Everlasting pea, dividing and propagating, 138 Experimental planting, 183 Felling trees, 162 Fern Filix foemina in rhododendron beds, 37, 106; Dicksonia punctilobulata, 62; ferns in rock-wall, 120; polypody, 121, 165 Fern-pegs for layering carnations, 98 Fern-walk, suitable plants among groups of ferns, 107 Flower border, 133, 200 Forms of deciduous trees, beauty of, 25 Forsythia suspensa and F. viridissima, 50 Forget-me-not, large kind, 53 Foxgloves, 270 Fungi, Amanita, Boletus, Chantarelle, 111 Funkia grandiflora, 212 Galax aphylla, colour of leaves in winter, 21 Gale, broad-leaved, 101 Garden friends, 194 Garden houses, 215 Gardening, a fine art, 197 Garrya elliptica, 202 Gaultheria Shallon, value for cutting, 16; in rock-garden, 165 Geraniums as bedding plants, 266 and onward Gourds, as used by Mrs. Earle, 18 Goutweed, 257 Grape hyacinths, 49, 258 Grass, Sheep's-fescue, 69 Grasses for lawn, 147 Grey-foliaged plants, 207 Grouping plants that bloom together, 70 Grubbing, 160; tools, 150, 261 Guelder-rose as a wall-plant, 71; single kind, 129 Gypsophila paniculata, 95, 209 Half-hardy border plants in August, 108, 210 Happiness in gardening, 1, 274 Hares, as depredators, 260 Heath sods for protecting tender plants, 91 Heaths, filling up Rhododendron beds, 37; wild heath among azaleas, 69; cut short in paths, 70; ling, 106 Hellebores, caulescent kinds in the nut-walk, 9; for cutting, 57, 144; buds stolen by mice, 260. Heuchera Richardsoni, 53, 135 Holly, beauty in winter, 8; grouped with birch, 152; cheerful aspect, 154 Hollyhocks, the prettiest shape, 105 Honey-suckle, wild, 43 Hoof-parings as manure, 133 Hoop-making, 166, and onward Hop, wild, 43 Hutchinsia alpina, 50 Hyacinth (wild) in oak-wood, 60 Hydrangeas, protecting, 146; at foot of wall, 206 Hyssop, a good wall-plant, 121 Iris alata, 14; I. foetidissima, 120; I. pallida, 129 Iris stylosa, how to plant, 13; white variety, 14; time of blooming, 33, 164 Ivy, shoots for cutting, 17 Japan Privet, foliage for winter decoration, 16 Japan Quince (Cydonia or Pyrus), 50 Jasminum nudiflorum, 164 Junction of garden and wood, 34, 270 Juniper, its merits, 26; its form, action of snow, 27; power of recovery from damage, 29; beauty of colouring, 30; stems in winter dress, 31; in a wild valley, 154, and onward Kitchen-garden, 179; its sheds, 179, 180 Larch, sweetness in April, 51 Large gardens, 176 Lavender, when to cut, 105 Lawn-making, 146; lawn spaces, 177, 178 Leaf mould, 149 Learning, 5, 189, 190, 273 Lessons of the garden, 6; in wild-tree planting, 154; in orchard planting, 183; of the show-table, 241 Leucojum vernum, 33 Leycesteria formosa, 100 Lilacs, suckers, as strong feeders, good kinds, 23; standards best, 24 Lilium auratum among rhododendrons, 37, 106; among bamboos, 106 Lilium giganteum, 95; cultivation needed in poor soil, 142 Lilium Harrisi and L. speciosum, 106 Lily of the valley in the copse, 61 Linaria repens, 259 London Pride in the rock-wall, 120 Loquat, 204 Love-in-a-mist, 251 Love of gardening, 1 Luzula sylvatica, 61 Magnolia, branches indoors in winter, 16; magnolia stellata, 50; kinds in the choice shrub-bank, 101 Mai-trank, 60 Marking trees for cutting, 151 Marsh marigold, 52 Masters and men, 271 Mastic, 102 Meconopsis Wallichi, 165 Medlar, 129 Megaseas, colour of foliage, 17; M. ligulata, 103; in front edge of flower-border, 211 Mertensia virginica, 46; sowing the seed, 84 Mice, 260, 261 Michaelmas daisies, a garden to themselves, 125; planting and staking, 126; early kinds in mixed border, 135 Mixed planting, 183; mixed border, 206 Morells, 59 Mulleins (V. olympicum and V. phlomoides), 85; mullein-moth, 86, 270 Muscari of kinds, 49 Musical reverberation in wood of Scotch fir, 60 Myosotis sylvatica major, 53 Nandina domestica, 206 Narcissus cernuus, 12; N. serotinus, 14; N. princeps and N. Horsfieldi in the copse, 48 Nature's planting, 154 Nettles, to destroy, 259 Novelty, 249 Nut nursery at Calcot, 11 Nut-walk, 9; catkins, 11; suckers, 11 Oak timber, felling, 60 Old wall, 72, 116 and onward Omphalodes verna, 45 Ophiopogon spicatum for winter cutting, 16 Orchard, ornamental, 181 Orobus vernus, 52; O. aurantiacus, 62 Othonna cheirifolia, 63 Pæonies and Lent Hellebores grown together, 76 Pæony moutan grouped with Clematis montana, 70; special garden for pæonies, 72; frequent sudden deaths, 73; varieties of P. albiflora, 74; old garden kinds, 75; pæony species desirable for garden use, 75 Pansies as cut flowers, 57; at shows, 243 Parkinson's chapter on carnations, 94 Pavia macrostachya, 103 Pea, white everlasting, 95 Pergola, 212 Pernettya, 165 Pests, bird, beast, and insect, 259 Phacelia campanularia, 63 Pheasants, as depredators, 261; destroying crocuses, 261 Philadelphus microphyllus, 103 Phlomis fruticosa, 103 Phloxes, 135 Piptanthus nepalensis, 63, 206 Planes pollarded, 215 Planting early, 129; careful planting, 130; planting from pots, 131; careful tree planting, 148 Platycodon Mariesi, 108 Plume hyacinth, 49 Polygala chamæbuxus, 164 Polygonum compactum, 136; Sieboldi, 258 "Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden," 18 Primroses, white and lilac, 44; large bunch-flowered kinds as cut flowers, 58; seedlings planted out, 85; primrose garden, 216 Primula denticulata, 184 Progress in gardening, 249 Prophet-flower (Arnebia), 56 Protecting tender plants, 145 Pterocephalus parnassi, 107 Pyrus Maulei, 50 Queen wasps, 63 Quince, 128 Rabbits, 260 Ranunculus montanus, 50 Raphiolepis ovata, 204 Rhododendrons, variation in foliage, 35; R. multum maculatum, 35; plants to fill bare spaces among, 37; arrangement for colour, 64 and onward; hybrid of R. Aucklandi, 69; alpine, 165 Ribbon border, 266 Ribes, 50 Robinia hispida, 203 Rock garden, making and renewing, 115 Rock-wall, 116 and onward Rosemary, 204 Roses, pruning, tying, and training, 38; fence planted with free roses, 38; Reine Olga de Wurtemburg, 38; climbing and rambling roses, 39; Fortune's yellow, Banksian, 40; wild roses, 43; garden roses: Provence, moss, damask, R. alba, 78; roses in cottage gardens, ramblers and fountains, 79; free growth of Rosa polyantha, 80; two good, free roses for cutting, 80; Burnet rose and Scotch briars, Rosa lucida, 81; tea roses: best kinds for light soil, pegging, pruning, 82; roses collected in Capri, 105; second bloom of tea roses, 110; jam made of hips of R. rugosa, 111, 184; R. arvensis, garden form of, 129; R. Boursault elegans, 192; China, 205; their scents, 235 Ruscus aculeatus, 151; R. racemosus, 152 Ruta patavina, a late-flowering rock-plant, 107 Sambucus ebulis, 258 Satin-leaf (Heuchera Richardsoni), 53 Scilla maritima, 14; S. sibirica, S. bifolia, 32 Scents of flowers, 229 and onward Scotch fir, pollen, 53; cones opening, 54; effect of sound in fir-wood, 60 Show flowers, 242 Show-table, what it teaches, 241 Shrub-bank, 101; snug place for tender shrubs, 121 Shrub-wilderness of the old home, 100 Skimmeas, 101, 165 Slugs, 262 Smilacina bifolia, 61 Snapdragon, 251 Snowstorm of December 1886, 27 Snowy Mespilus (Amelanchier), 52 Solanum crispum, 204 Solomon's seal, 61 Spindle-tree, 127 Spiræa Thunbergi, 50, 104; S. prunifolia, 104 St. John's worts, choice, 103 Stephanandra flexuosa, 103 Sternbergia lutea, 139 Sticks and stakes, 163 Storms in autumn, 122 Styrax japonica, 101 Suckers of nuts, 11; robbers, how to remove, 24; on grafted rhododendrons, 36 Sunflowers, perennial, 134 Sweetbriar, rambling, 39; fragrance in April, 51 Sweet-leaved small shrubs, 34, 57, 101 Sweet peas, autumn sown, 83, 112 Thatching with hoop-chips, 169 Thinning the nut-walk, 10; thinning shrubs, 22; trees in copse, 151 Tiarella cordifolia, 53; colour of leaves in winter, 21 Tools for dividing, 136; for tree cutting and grubbing, 150; woodman's, 158; axe and wedge, 159; rollers, 160; cross-cut saw, 162 Training the eye, 4; training Clematis flammula, 24 Transplanting large trees, 147 Trillium grandiflorum, 61 Tritomas, protecting, 146 Tulips, show kinds and their origin, 55; T. retroflexa, 55; other good garden kinds, 56 Various ways of gardening, 3 Verbascum olympicum and V. phlomoides, 85 Villa garden, 171 Vinca acutiflora, 139 Vine, black Hamburg at Calcot, 12; as a wall-plant, 42; good garden kinds, 42; claret vine, 110, 205; Vitis Coignettii, 123 Violets, the pale St. Helena, 45; Czar, 140 Virginian cowslip, 46; its colouring, 47; sowing seed, 84 Wall pennywort, 120 Water-elder, a beautiful neglected shrub, 123 Weeds, 256 Wild gardening misunderstood, 269 Wilson, Mr. G. F.'s garden at Wisley, 184 Window garden, 185 Winter, beauty of woodland, 7 Wistaria chinensis, 43 Whortleberry under Scotch fir, 51, 61 Woodman at work, 158 Woodruff, 60 Wood-rush, 61, 165 Wood-work, 163 Xanthoceras sorbifolia, 103 Yellow everlasting, 120 Yuccas, some of the best kinds, 91; in flower-border, 201 THE END Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. Edinburgh & London Transcriber's Notes: 1. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been retained from the original. (where both are acceptable usage) 2. Inconsistencies in the use of capitalisation and spelling within botanical names have been retained from the original (where both are acceptable usage). 3. Punctuation has been normalised. 4. Page numbering format in the index has been standardised. 5. The following words have been changed: p. 52 Amelancheir to Amelanchier: The snowy Mespilus (_Amelanchier_) p. 89 at to as: such as Globe Artichoke p. 93 Olivieranum to Oliverianum: useful is _E. Oliverianum_ p. 109 Rudbekia to Rudbeckia: _Rudbeckia Newmanni_ reflects p. 110 accomypaning to accompanying: the accompanying attacks p. 100 Ailantus to Ailanthus: and Ailanthus and Hickory p. 138 Olivieranum to Oliverianum: and _Eryngium Oliverianum_. p. 206 foetidium to foetidum: Hydrangeas, _Clerodendron foetidum_ p. 209 Olivieranum to Oliverianum: _Eryngium Oliverianum_ has turned p. 281 ladaniferns to ladaniferus: C. ladaniferus, 102, 206 p. 281 Olivieranum to Oliverianum: E. Oliverianum, 93, 209 p. 285 Coignetti to Coignettii: Vitis Coignettii, 123 6. p. 170 in the bill of sale, a "letter" best described as an inverted V, is here represented by [V]: IIXXX·I·, IIXXXX·II[V] IIII[V]XX, IIXX 
47688	----	THE BROCHURE SERIES Japanese Gardens FEBRUARY, 1900 [Illustration: PLATE XI DAIMIO'S GARDEN AT SHINJIKU] THE BROCHURE SERIES OF ARCHITECTURAL ILLUSTRATION. 1900. FEBRUARY No. 2. JAPANESE GARDENS. The Japanese garden is not a flower garden, neither is it made for the purpose of cultivating plants. In nine cases out of ten there is nothing in it resembling a flower-bed. Some gardens may contain scarcely a sprig of green; some (although these are exceptional) have nothing green at all and consist entirely of rocks, pebbles and sand. Neither does the Japanese garden require any fixed allowance of space; it may cover one or many acres, it may be only ten feet square; it may, in extreme cases, be much less, and be contained in a curiously shaped, shallow, carved box set in a veranda, in which are created tiny hills, microscopic ponds and rivulets spanned by tiny humped bridges, while queer wee plants represent trees, and curiously formed pebbles stand for rocks. But on whatever scale, all true Japanese gardening is landscape gardening; that is to say, it is a living model of an actual Japanese landscape. But, though modelled upon an actual landscape, the Japanese garden is far more than a mere naturalistic imitation. To the artist every natural view may be said to convey, in its varying aspects, some particular mental impression or mood, such as the impression of peacefulness, of wildness, of solitude, or of desolation; and the Japanese gardener intends not only to present in his model the features of the veritable landscape, but also to make it express, even more saliently than the original, a dominant sentimental mood, so that it may become not only a picture, but a poem. In other words, a Japanese garden of the best type is, like any true work of art, the representation of nature as expressed through an individual artistic temperament. Through long accumulation of traditional methods, the representation of natural features in a garden model has come to be a highly conventional expression, like all Japanese art; and the Japanese garden bears somewhat the same relation to an actual landscape that a painting of a view of Fuji-yama by the wonderful Hokusai does to the actual scene--it is a representation based upon actual and natural forms, but so modified to accord with accepted canons of Japanese art, so full of mysterious symbolism only to be understood by the initiated, so expressed, in a word, in terms of the national artistic conventions, that it costs the Western mind long study to learn to appreciate its full beauty and significance. Suppose, to take a specific example, that in the actual landscape upon which the Japanese gardener chose to model his design, a pine tree grew upon the side of a hill. Upon the side of the corresponding artificial hill in his garden he would therefore plant a pine, but he would not clip and trim its branches to imitate the shape of the original, but rather, satisfied that by so placing it he had gone far enough toward the imitation of nature, he would clip his garden pine to make it correspond, as closely as circumstances might permit, with a conventional ideal pine tree shape (such a typical ideal pine tree is shown in the little drawing on page 25), a shape recognized as the model for a beautiful pine by the artistic conventions of Japan for centuries, and one familiar to every Japanese of any pretensions to culture whatsoever. And, as there are recognized ideal pine tree shapes, there are also ideal mountain shapes, ideal lake shapes, ideal water-fall shapes, ideal stone shapes, and innumerable other such ideal shapes. [Illustration: PLATE XII "RIVER VIEW," KORAKU-EN, KOISHIKAWA] In like manner in working out his design the gardener must take cognizance of a multitude of religious and ethical conventions. The flow of his streams must, for instance, follow certain cardinal directions; in the number and disposition of his principal rocks he must symbolize the nine spirits of the Buddhist pantheon. Some tree and stone combinations are regarded as fortunate, and should be introduced if possible; while other combinations are considered unlucky, and are to be as carefully avoided. [Illustration: MODEL PINE TREE] But endless and complex and bewildering to the western mind as are the rules and formulæ, æsthetic, symbolistic and religious, by which the Japanese landscape gardener is bound, it is apparent that most of them were originally based upon purely picturesque considerations, and that the earliest practitioners of this very ancient art, finding that certain types of arrangement, certain contrasts of mass or line, led to harmonious results, formulated their discoveries into rules, much as the rules of composition are formulated for us today in modern artistic treatises. Moreover, as Japanese gardening was at first, and for many years, practised only as a sacred art and by the priests of certain religious cults, it was but natural that they should impart to these laws which they had discovered symbolic and religious attributes. To preserve the arts in their purity, and to prevent the vulgar from transgressing æsthetic laws, combinations productive of beauty were represented as auspicious, and endowed with moral significance, while inharmonious arrangements were condemned as unlucky or inauspicious. It is one of the cardinal principles of Japanese philosophy, for example, that the inanimate objects of the universe are endowed with male or female attributes, and that from a proper blending of the two sex essences springs all the harmony, good fortune and beauty in this world. When, therefore, two contrasting shapes, colors, or masses, such as those of the sturdy pine tree and the graceful willow, were found conducive of a pleasing combination, they were named respectively male and female, and it became almost a religious observance to thereafter place them together in their attributed sex relations. It will be apparent, therefore, that with an art of such antiquity, originally practised as a religious ceremony, and in a country in which inherited tradition has such binding force, that there should have grown up around the craft of landscape gardening, a code of the most complex laws, rules, symbolism, formulæ and superstitions, which the artistic gardener is bound to learn and to implicitly obey. And yet it must not be considered that the art of the Japanese gardener has, through the accumulation of its limiting rules, become a mere science, or that its practice is only a mechanical expression of pre-established artistic conventions. On the contrary, the landscape gardener must be, first of all, a student and lover of nature, for his art is founded on nature; he must be next a poet, in order to appreciate and re-express in his garden the moods of nature, and he must thereafter be a lifelong student of his craft, that he may design in accordance with its established principles. But the very number of these precepts makes a wide range of choice among them possible; and in almost every instance, even the most apparently superstitious and fanciful of them will be found, upon examination, to make in some way for beauty in the final result. To those who can understand it, moreover, the mystical symbolism of a Japanese garden design is an added source of pleasure, just as a knowledge of symphonic form makes a symphony more enjoyable to the musician. "After having learned," writes Mr. Lafacdio Hearn, "something about the Japanese manner of arranging flowers, one can thereafter consider European ideas of floral decoration only as vulgarities. Somewhat in the same way, and for similar reasons, after having learned what a Japanese garden is, I can remember our costliest and most elaborate gardens at home only as ignorant displays of what wealth can accomplish in the creation of incongruities that violate nature." The Japanese artist who is called upon to design a new garden will first examine the site, and confer with his patron regarding its proposed size and character. If the site be large, and already furnished with natural hills, trees and water, the gardener will, of course, take advantage of these features. If it possess none of them, he will inquire the amount of money that can be placed at his disposal for the construction of artificial hills, lakes and the like; and this amount of money will also determine another important point, namely, the degree of elaboration with which the whole is to be treated. For all works of Japanese art whatsoever are rigorously divided into three styles, the "rough" style, the "finished" style and the "intermediate" style; and the adoption of any one style governs the degree of elaboration to which any part of the design may be carried. If the "rough" style is chosen, even the smallest accessory detail--a rustic well, or a stone lantern--must be rude to harmonize; if the "finished" style, no detail that does not correspond can be admitted,--a restriction greatly conducive to harmony, and one to which the almost invariable congruity and unity of Japanese compositions is due. [Illustration: PLATE XIII DAIMIO OF SATSUMA'S GARDEN, KAGOSHIMA] Knowing, then, the size and character of the site, and his patrons' wishes as to expense and elaboration, the landscape gardener will next choose the model landscape, or landscapes, upon which he is to base his design. He will find them divided by convention into two classes: those representing "Hill Gardens" and "Flat Gardens." (There is a third class, the "Tea Garden," but as this is of a separate genus altogether, it will be considered later.) [Illustration: DETAIL OF GARDEN, FUKAGAWA Showing some important features of arrangement close to a dwelling,--the water basin with its rock-hidden drain, the lantern, with its fire-box partially concealed by the trained branches of the pine tree.] The "Hill Garden" class is the more elaborate of the two, and that best adapted for large gardens, and for those where the natural site is undulating, or where money can be spent in artificial grading. The "Hill Garden" has many different species, such, for instance, as the "Rocky-ocean" style, which represents in general an inlet of the sea surrounded by high cliffs, the shores spread with white sea-sand, scattered with sea rocks and grown upon with pine trees trained to look as if bent and distorted with the sea wind; or the "Wide-river" style, showing a spreading stream issuing from behind a hill and running into a lake; or the "Reed-marsh" style, in which the hills are low, rounded sand dunes bordering a heath or moor in which lies a marshy pool overgrown with rushes; and many other such "styles," all well recognized, all carefully discriminated and all modelled upon actual landscapes. In any case, however, the true "Hill Garden" must present, in combination, mountain or hill, and water scenery. If on the contrary the site be small and flat, and the garden is to be less elaborate, the "Flat" style is usually chosen. The "Flat Garden" is generally supposed to represent either the floor of a mountain valley, a moor, a rural scene, or the like; and as in the case of "Hill Gardens," there are a number of well recognized and classical examples. Having, then, determined that the garden is to be of one of these types, and having also determined the degree of elaboration with which it is to be treated, the gardener will next proceed to fix the scale upon which it is to be constructed,--and this scale (a most important factor) is decided by the size of the garden area, and the number of features which must be introduced into the scene; for it is clear that if the site be large, and one in which natural hills or large bodies of water are already present, the scale will be a normal one; whereas if a whole valley, with hills, a river, a water-fall, a lake and a wooded slope is to be presented in a space of some fifty or sixty square yards, the scale of the whole must be miniature. But whatever scale is adopted, every tree, every rock, every pool, every accessory detail must be made exactly to correspond to it. A hill that might in a large garden be a natural elevation of considerable size, with full sized trees planted upon it, might in a smaller one modelled after the same design, be only a hillock, planted with dwarfed trees or shrubs; or in a still smaller area become only a clump of thick-leaved bushes trimmed to resemble a hill-shape, or even a large boulder flanked by tiny shrubs. So skilfully and completely do Japanese gardeners carry out any scale that they have determined upon, however, that Mr. Hearn describes a garden of not much above thirty yards square, that when viewed through a window from which the garden alone was visible, seemed to be really an actual and natural landscape seen from a distance,--a perfect illusion. [Illustration: PLATE XIV MERCHANT'S GARDEN, AWOMORI] Having determined upon the natural model and the scale for it, the gardener will begin by imitating on the given site the main natural land conformations of his original, building hills or grading slopes, excavating lake basins and cutting river channels. These natural features he will next proceed to elaborate, and it is in this process of elaboration that he must most carefully observe all those complex laws and conventions to which we have before alluded. [Illustration: DETAIL OF A MERCHANT'S VILLA GARDEN, FUKAGAWA Showing some characteristic garden accessories,--stepping-stones, a lantern, a common variety of bamboo fence. The lantern and plum tree conventionally mark the approach to a little shrine reached through a Shinto archway by means of a row of stepping-stones.] Almost every Japanese garden, be it hilly or flat, large or small, rough or elaborate, must be made to contain, in some form, water, rocks and vegetation, as well as such architectural accessories as bridges, pagodas, lanterns, water-basins, stepping-stones and boundary fences or hedges. Water may be made to present the sea, lakes, rivers, brooks, water-falls, springs, or combinations of them. It is not, of course, possible to imitate the open sea with any degree of realism; and when a coast scene is presented, it is customary to fashion the body of water as an ocean inlet, the supposed juncture with the sea being hidden by a cliff or hill. Lake scenes are much more common. There are six "classical" shapes into which lake forms are divided, some of them more formal for use near buildings, others more natural for use in wilder landscapes. It is an axiom that every lake, or pool, or stream represented must have both its source and outlet indicated. Sometimes the inflow is indicated by a stream issuing from behind a hillock which conceals its artificial source, sometimes a deep pool of clear water may suggest a spring, sometimes a water-fall (at least ten individual and distinct forms of water-fall are recognized as admissible into a properly planned garden) supplies the water; but water showing no inflow or outlet is termed "dead" water, and is regarded with the contempt bestowed upon all shams and falsities in art. In cases where it is impossible to introduce actual water into a garden its presence is often imitated by areas of smooth or rippled sand, the banks of the sand bed treated to simulate the banks of a natural lake or stream, and islands and bridges introduced to further the illusion. [Illustration: PLATE XV SHIRASE-NO-NIWA, NIIGATA] Extreme importance is attached to the use in gardens of natural stones, rocks and boulders; and some teachers of the craft go so far as to maintain that they constitute the skeleton of the design, and that their proper disposition and selection should receive the primary consideration. In large gardens there may be as many as one hundred and thirty-eight principal rocks and stones, each having its special name and function; but in smaller ones as few as five rocks will often suffice. Whatever the style of landscape composition, three stones, the "Guardian Stone," the "Stone of Worship," and the "Stone of the Two Deities" must never be dispensed with, their absence being regarded as inauspicious. On the same principle there are certain stone forms which are considered unlucky, and are therefore invariably avoided. The raised parts of a Japanese garden are supposed to represent the nearer eminences or distant mountains of natural scenery, and the stones which adorn them are intended to imitate either minor undulations and peaks, or rocks or boulders on their slopes. In like manner there are no less than twenty "water" stones, which have their places in lake and river scenery, as well as nine varieties of "cascade" stones alone. There are also sixteen stones which have their functions solely in the adornment of islands. After the contours of land and water and the principal rocks and stones have been arranged, the distribution of garden vegetation is considered; for the garden rocks form only the skeleton of the design and are only complete when embellished with vegetation. [Illustration: TYPICAL ARRANGEMENTS OF STONES WITH FOLIAGE] In the grounds of the larger temples, avenues and groves of trees are planted with the same formality adopted in Western gardens, but in true landscape gardening such formal arrangements are never resorted to. Indeed it is an axiom that when several trees are planted together they should never be placed in rows, but always in open and irregular groups. The rules for planting the clumps are rigidly determined; and these clumps may be disposed in double, triple or quadruple combinations, while these combinations may be again regrouped according to recognized rules based upon contrasts of form, line and color of foliage. Occasionally, when it is the designer's purpose to represent a natural forest or woodland, formulas are, of course, disregarded, and the trees are grouped together irregularly. [Illustration: TYPICAL VARIETIES OF GARDEN LANTERN] The architectural accessories of the Japanese garden,--bridges, pagodas, lanterns, water-basins, wells and boundary fences or hedges, we have no space to consider in detail. It must suffice to say that their use is rather ornamental than to aid in the landscape imitation, and that they are generally placed in the foreground of the scene. There are many beautiful designs for each of them, and their use and disposition is formally regulated. [Illustration: PLATE XVI PUBLIC GARDEN OF SHUZENJI, KUMAMATO] Important accessories in the Japanese garden are Stepping-Stones. Turf is not used in the open spaces, but these are spread with sand, either pounded smooth or raked into elaborate patterns. This sand, kept damp at all times, presents a cool and fresh surface, and to preserve its smoothness, which the marks of the Japanese wooden clogs would sadly mar, a pathway is invariably constructed across such areas with stones called "stepping-stones," or "flying stones" as they are occasionally termed, on account of the supposed resemblance in their composition to the order taken by a flight of birds. In the simpler and smaller gardens such stones form one of the principal features of the design. As nothing could be less artistic than a formal arrangement of stones at regular intervals, not to speak of the difficulty of keeping one's balance while walking upon them, the Japanese gardener therefore uses certain special stones and combinations having definite shapes and dimensions, the whole being arranged with a studied irregularity. The sketch on this page exhibits three typical arrangements. The left hand group shows stepping-stones as arranged to lead from a tea room. The centre group shows stepping-stones combined with a "pedestal stone" which marks the point from which a typical cross view in the garden is to be observed. The right hand group shows the stones near a veranda with a "shoe-removing" stone terminating the series. [Illustration: ARRANGEMENTS OF STEPPING-STONES] A third main type of garden, neither "Flat" nor "Hilly," to which we have before referred, properly speaking, is called the "Tea Garden." "Tea Gardens" are used for the performance of the "tea ceremony," and to explain the principle of its design would require a preliminary explanation of the intricacies of that ceremony itself, to which an entire volume might easily be devoted. A most cursory indication of the principal use and requirements must here suffice. "Tea Gardens" are divided into outer and inner inclosures separated by a rustic fence. The outermost inclosure contains a main entrance gate, and behind this there is often a small building in which it is sometimes the custom to change the clothing before attending the ceremony. The outer inclosure also contains a picturesque open arbor, called the "Waiting Shed," which plays an important part in tea ceremonies, for here the guests adjourn at stated intervals to allow of fresh preparations being made in the tiny tea room. The tea room is entered from the garden through a low door, about two and one-half feet square, placed in the outer wall and raised two feet from the ground, through which the guests are obliged to pass in a bending posture indicative of humility and respect. The rustic well forms an important feature of the inner garden, as do the principal lantern and the water-basin. A portion of the inner inclosure of a "Tea Garden" in the Tamagawa, or Winding-river style, showing the stream, bridge, lantern, water-basin, and an arrangement of stones, including the indispensable "Guardian Stone," is represented in the drawing on this page. All these separate features are connected, according to very rigid principles, by stepping-stones which make meandering routes between them, and form the skeleton of the whole design. [Illustration: INNER INCLOSURE OF A TEA GARDEN, "TAMAGAWA" STYLE] We can, perhaps, no better summarize this necessarily sketchy review of a complex subject, than by reproducing here, from Professor Conder's very elaborate monograph, "Landscape Gardening in Japan," (Tokio, 1893)--from which most of the information in this article has been derived, and to which the student of the subject is referred,--a figured model of an ordinary "Hill Garden" in the finished style. The numbers refer to the titles of the principal hills, stones, tree clumps and accessories, the positions of which are all relatively established by rule. [Illustration: PLATE XVII DAIMIO OF MITO'S GARDEN, HONJO] [Illustration: FIGURED MODEL OF AN ORDINARY HILL GARDEN IN THE FINISHED STYLE HILLS: 1, Near Mountain. 2, Companion Mountain. 3, Mountain Spur. 4, Near Hill. 5, Distant Peak. STONES: 1, Guardian Stone. 2, Cliff Stone. 3, Worshipping Stone. 4, View Stone. 5, Waiting Stone. 6, "Moon-Shadow" Stone. 7, Cave Stone. 8, Seat of Honor Stone. 9, Pedestal Stone. 10, Idling Stone. TREES: 1, Principal Tree. 2, "View Perfecting" Tree. 3, Tree of Solitude. 4, Cascade-Screening Tree. 5, Tree of Setting Sun. 6, Distancing Pine. 7, Stretching Pine. ACCESSORIES: A, Garden Well. B, Lantern. C, Garden Gate. D, Boarded Bridge. E, Plank Bridge. F, Stone Bridge. G, Water Basin. H, Lantern, I, Garden Shrine.] Hill 1 represents a mountain of considerable size in the middle distance, in front of which should be placed the cascade which feeds the lake; while Hills 2 and 3 are its companions, the depressions between them being planted with shrubs giving the idea of a sheltered dale. Hill 5 represents a distant peak in the perspective. The model shows ten important stones. The "Guardian Stone," 1, representing the dedication stone of the garden, occupies the most central position in the background, and in this case forms the flank of the cliff over which the cascade pours. The broad flat "Worshipping Stone," 3, indicating the place for worship, is placed in the foreground, or some open space. The "Moon-Shadow Stone," 6, occupies an important position in the distant hollow between two hills and in front of the distant peak, its name implying the sense of indistinctness and mystery attached to it. The term "tree" as used in the diagram often refers to an arrangement or clump of trees. The "Principal Tree," 1, is placed in the centre of the background, and is usually a large and striking specimen. The "View Perfecting Tree," 2, generally stands alone, and its shape is carefully trained to harmonize with the foreground accessories. The "Tree of Solitude," 3, is a group to afford a shady resting place. The "Tree of the Setting Sun," 5, is planted in the western part of the garden to intercept the direct rays of the sunset. The titles of the other features in the model will probably be found self explanatory. Errata. By an unfortunate misprint in the preceding issue of THE BROCHURE SERIES, Prof. A. D. F. Hamlin, author of the article on the "Ten Most Beautiful Buildings in the United States," was announced as Professor of Architecture in "Cornell" University, instead of in "Columbia" University. Mr. Hamlin's correct title is: "Adjunct-Professor of Architecture, Columbia University." In the same issue (page 15), it was stated that the terraces and approaches to the Capitol at Washington were the work of Mr. Edward Clark. This was an error: they were designed by Mr. Frederick Law Olmstead, and elaborated by Mr. Thomas Wisedell under Mr. Olmstead's supervision. [Illustration: PLATE XVIII DAIMIO'S GARDEN, KANAZAWA] Transcriber's Note: Small capitals have been rendered in full capitals. A number of minor spelling errors have been corrected without note. 
39049	----	Old Time Gardens [Illustration] OLD-TIME GARDENS _Newly set forth_ _by_ ALICE MORSE EARLE _A BOOK OF_ THE SWEET O' THE YEAR "_Life is sweet, brother! There's day and night, brother! both sweet things: sun, moon and stars, brother! all sweet things: There is likewise a wind on the heath._" [Illustration] NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON MACMILLAN & CO LTD MCMII _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped November, 1901. Reprinted December, 1901; January, 1902. _Norwood Press_ _J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith_ _Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._ [Illustration: TO MY DAUGHTER ALICE CLARY EARLE TO WHOSE KNOWLEDGE OF FLOWERS AND LOVE OF FLOWER LORE I OWE MANY PAGES OF THIS BOOK....] Contents CHAPTER PAGE I. COLONIAL GARDEN-MAKING 1 II. FRONT DOORYARDS 38 III. VARIED GARDENS FAIR 54 IV. BOX EDGINGS 91 V. THE HERB GARDEN 107 VI. IN LILAC TIDE 132 VII. OLD FLOWER FAVORITES 161 VIII. COMFORT ME WITH APPLES 192 IX. GARDENS OF THE POETS 215 X. THE CHARM OF COLOR 233 XI. THE BLUE FLOWER BORDER 252 XII. PLANT NAMES 280 XIII. TUSSY-MUSSIES 296 XIV. JOAN SILVER-PIN 309 XV. CHILDHOOD IN A GARDEN 326 XVI. MEETIN' SEED AND SABBATH DAY POSIES 341 XVII. SUN-DIALS 353 XVIII. GARDEN FURNISHINGS 383 XIX. GARDEN BOUNDARIES 399 XX. A MOONLIGHT GARDEN 415 XXI. FLOWERS OF MYSTERY 433 XXII. ROSES OF YESTERDAY 459 INDEX 479 List of Illustrations The end papers of this book bear a design of the flower Ambrosia. The vignette on the title-page is re-drawn from one in _The Compleat Body of Husbandry_, Thomas Hale, 1756. It represents "Love laying out the surface of the earth in a garden." The device of the dedication is an ancient garden-knot for flowers, from _A New Orchard and Garden_, William Lawson, 1608. The chapter initials are from old wood-cut initials in the English Herbals of Gerarde, Parkinson, and Cole. PAGE _Garden of Johnson Mansion, Germantown. Photographed by Henry Troth_ facing 4 _Garden at Grumblethorp, Home of Charles J. Wister, Esq., Germantown, Pennsylvania_ 7 _Garden of Bartram House, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania_ 9 _Garden of Abigail Adams, Quincy, Massachusetts_ 10 _Garden at Mount Vernon-on-the-Potomac, Virginia. Home of George Washington_ facing 12 _Gate and Hedge of Preston Garden, Columbia, South Carolina_ 15 _Fountain Path in Preston Garden, Columbia, South Carolina_ 18 _Door in Wall of Kitchen Garden at Van Cortlandt Manor. Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ facing 20 _Garden of Van Cortlandt Manor. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ facing 24 _Garden at Prince Homestead, Flushing, Long Island_ 28 _Old Dutch Garden of Bergen Homestead, Bay Ridge, Long Island_ facing 32 _Garden at Duck Cove, Narragansett, Rhode Island_ 35 _The Flowering Almond under the Window. Photographed by Eva E. Newell_ 39 _Peter's Wreath. Photographed by Eva E. Newell_ 41 _Peonies in Garden of John Robinson, Esq., Salem, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ facing 42 _White Peonies. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 42 _Yellow Day Lilies. Photographed by Clifton Johnson_ facing 48 _Orange Lilies. Photographed by Eva E. Newell_ 50 _Preston Garden, Columbia, South Carolina_ facing 54 _Box-edged Parterre at Hampton, County Baltimore, Maryland. Home of Mrs. John Ridgely. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 57 _Parterre and Clipped Box at Hampton, County Baltimore, Maryland. Home of Mrs. John Ridgely. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 60 _Garden of Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright, Waldstein, Fairfield, Connecticut. Photographed by Mabel Osgood Wright_ 63 _A Shaded Walk. In the Garden of Miss Harriet P. F. Burnside, Worcester, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ facing 64 _Roses and Larkspur in the Garden of Miss Harriet P. F. Burnside, Worcester, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ 65 _The Homely Back Yard. Photographed by Henry Troth_ facing 66 _Covered Well at Home of Bishop Berkeley, Whitehall, Newport, Rhode Island_ 68 _Kitchen Doorway and Porch at The Hedges, New Hope, County Bucks, Pennsylvania_ 70 _Greenwood, Thomasville, Georgia_ 73 _Roses and Violets in Garden of Greenwood, Thomasville, Georgia_ facing 74 _Water Garden at Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York. Home of Miss Cornelia Horsford_ 75 _Garden at Avonwood Court, Haverford, Pennsylvania. Country-seat of Charles E. Mather, Esq. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ facing 76 _Terrace Wall at Drumthwacket, Princeton, New Jersey. Country-seat of M. Taylor Pyne, Esq._ 76 _Garden at Drumthwacket, Princeton, New Jersey. Country-seat of M. Taylor Pyne, Esq._ 77 _Sun-dial at Avonwood Court, Haverford, Pennsylvania. Country-seat of Charles E. Mather, Esq. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ facing 80 _Entrance Porch and Gate to the Rose Garden at Yaddo, Saratoga, New York. Country-seat of Spencer Trask, Esq. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ 82 _Pergola and Terrace Walk in Rose Garden at Yaddo, Saratoga, New York. Country-seat of Spencer Trask, Esq. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ 83 _Statue of Christalan in Rose Garden at Yaddo, Saratoga, New York. Country-seat of Spencer Trask, Esq. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ 84 _Sun-dial in Rose Garden at Yaddo, Saratoga, New York. Country-seat of Spencer Trask, Esq. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ 86 _Bronze Dial-face in Rose Garden at Yaddo, Saratoga, New York. Country-seat of Spencer Trask, Esq. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ 87 _Ancient Pine in Garden at Yaddo, Saratoga, New York. Country-seat of Spencer Trask, Esq. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ 89 _House and Garden at Napanock, County Ulster, New York. Photographed by Edward Lamson Henry, N. A._ facing 92 _Box Parterre at Hampton, County Baltimore, Maryland. Home of Mrs. John Ridgely. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 95 _Sun-dial in Box at Broughton Castle, Banbury, England. Garden of Lady Lennox_ 98 _Sun-dial in Box at Ascott, near Leighton Buzzard, England. Country-seat of Mr. Leopold Rothschild_ facing 100 _Garden at Tudor Place, Georgetown, District of Columbia. Home of Mrs. Beverly Kennon. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 103 _Anchor-shaped Flower Beds, Kingston, Rhode Island. Photographed by Sarah P. Marchant_ 104 _Ancient Box at Tuckahoe, Virginia_ 105 _Herb Garden at White Birches, Elmhurst, Illinois_ 108 _Garden at White Birches, Elmhurst, Illinois_ 111 _Garden of Manning Homestead, Salem, Massachusetts_ facing 112 _Under the Garret Eaves of Ward Homestead, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts_ 116 _A Gatherer of Simples. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ facing 120 _Sage. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 126 _Tansy. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 129 _Garden of Mrs. Abraham Lansing, Albany, New York. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ facing 130 _Ladies' Delights. Photographed by Eva E. Newell_ 133 _Garden House and Long Walk in Garden of Hon. William H. Seward, Auburn, New York_ facing 134 _Sun-dial in Garden of Hon. William H. Seward, Auburn, New York_ 136 _Lilacs in Midsummer. In Garden of Mrs. Abraham Lansing, Albany, New York. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ facing 138 _Lilacs at Craigie House, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Home of Longfellow. Photographed by Arthur N. Wilmarth_ 141 _Box-edged Garden at Home of Longfellow, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photographed by Arthur N. Wilmarth_ 142 _Joepye-weed and Queen Anne's Laces. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 145 _Boneset. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 146 _Magnolias in Garden of William Brown, Esq., Flatbush, Long Island_ facing 148 _Lilacs at Hopewell_ 149 _Persian Lilacs and Peonies in Garden of Kimball Homestead, Portsmouth, New Hampshire_ 151 _Opyn-tide, the Thought of Spring. Garden of Mrs. Abraham Lansing, Albany, New York. Photographed by Pirie MacDonald_ facing 154 _A Thought of Winter's Snows. Garden of Frederick J. Kingsbury, Esq., Waterbury, Connecticut_ 157 _Larkspur and Phlox. Garden of Miss Frances Clary Morse, Worcester, Massachusetts_ 162 _Sweet William and Foxglove_ 163 _Plume Poppy_ 164 _Meadow Rue_ 167 _Money-in-both-Pockets_ 171 _Box Walk in Garden of Frederick J. Kingsbury, Esq., Waterbury, Connecticut_ 173 _Lunaria in Garden of Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright, Fairfield, Connecticut. Photographed by Mabel Osgood Wright_ facing 174 _Dahlia Walk at Ravensworth, County Fairfax, Virginia. Home of Mrs. W. R. Fitzhugh Lee. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 177 _Petunias_ 180 _Virgin's Bower, in Garden of Miss Frances Clary Morse, Worcester, Massachusetts_ 184 _Matrimony Vine at Van Cortlandt Manor. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ 186 _White Chinese Wistaria, in Garden of Mortimer Howell, Esq., West Hampton Beach, Long Island_ 188 _Spiræa Van Houtteii. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ facing 190 _Old Apple Tree at Whitehall. Home of Bishop Berkeley, near Newport, Rhode Island_ 194 "_The valley stretching below Is white with blossoming Apple trees, As if touched with lightest snow._" _Photographed by T. E. M. and G. F. White_ 197 _Old Hand-power Cider Mill. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 198 _Pressing out the Cider in Old Hand Mill_ 200 _Old Cider Mill with Horse Power. Photographed by T. E. M. and G. F. White_ 203 _Straining off the Cider into Barrels_ 204 _Drying Apples. Photographed by T. E. M. and G. F. White_ facing 208 _Ancient Apple Picker, Apple Racks, Apple Parers, Apple Butter Kettle, Apple Butter Paddle, Apple Butter Stirrer, Apple Butter Crocks. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 211 _Making Apple Butter. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ facing 214 _Shakespeare Border in Garden at Hillside, Menand's, near Albany, New York. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ 216 _Long Border at Hillside, Menand's, near Albany, New York. Photographed by Gustave Lorey_ facing 218 _The Beauty of Winter Lilacs. In Garden of Mrs. Abraham Lansing, Albany, New York. Photographed by Pirie MacDonald_ 220 _Garden of Mrs. Frank Robinson, Wakefield, Rhode Island_ 222 _The Parson's Walk_ 225 _Garden of Mary Washington_ 228 _Box and Phlox. Garden of Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York_ 230 _Within the Weeping Beech. Photographed by E. C. Nichols_ facing 232 _Spring Snowflake, Garden of Miss Frances Clary Morse, Worcester, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ 234 _Star of Bethlehem, in Garden of Miss Frances Clary Morse, Worcester, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ 237 _"The Pearl" Achillæa_ 238 _Pyrethrum. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 242 _Terraced Garden of the Misses Nichols, Salem, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ 246 _Arbor in a Salem Garden_ 250 _Scilla in Garden of Miss Frances Clary Morse, Worcester, Massachusetts_ 254 _Sweet Alyssum Edging of White Border at Indian Hill, Newburyport, Massachusetts_ 256 _Bachelor's Buttons in a Salem Garden. Home of Mrs. Edward B. Peirson_ 258 _A "Sweet Garden-side" in Salem, Massachusetts, Home of John Robinson, Esq._ facing 260 _Salpiglossis in Garden at Indian Hill, Newburyport, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ 261 _The Old Campanula, Garden of Miss Frances Clary Morse, Worcester, Massachusetts_ 263 _Chinese Bellflower. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ 264 _Garden at Tudor Place, Georgetown, District of Columbia. Home of Mrs. Beverly Kennon. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ facing 266 _Light as a Loop of Larkspur, in Garden of Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Beverly, Massachusetts_ 269 _Viper's Bugloss. Photographed by Henry Troth_ 274 _The Prim Precision of Leaf and Flower of Lupine. Photographed by Henry Troth_ 276 _The Garden's Friend. Photographed by Clifton Johnson_ 281 _Edging of Striped Lilies in a Salem Garden. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ 283 _Garden Seat at Avonwood Court. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ facing 286 _Terraced Garden of the Misses Nichols, Salem, Massachusetts_ 288 _"A Running Ribbon of Perfumed Snow which the Sun is melting rapidly." At Marchant Farm, Kingston, Rhode Island. Photographed by Sarah F. Marchant_ 292 _Fountain Garden at Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York_ facing 294 _Hawthorn Arch at Holly House, Peace Dale, Rhode Island. Home of Rowland G. Hazard, Esq._ 298 _Thyme-covered Graves. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 301 "_White Umbrellas of Elder_" 305 _Lower Garden at Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York_ facing 308 "_Black-heart Amorous Poppies_" 310 _Valerian. Photographed by E. C. Nichols_ 314 _Old War Office in Garden at Salem, New Jersey_ 319 _Crown Imperial. Page from Gerarde's Herball_ facing 324 _The Children's Garden_ facing 330 _Foxgloves in a Narragansett Garden_ 333 _Hollyhocks in Garden of Kimball Homestead, Portsmouth, New Hampshire_ facing 334 _Autumn View of an Old Worcester Garden_ facing 338 _Hollyhocks at Tudor Place, Georgetown, District of Columbia. Home of Mrs. Beverly Kennon_ 339 _An Old Worcester Garden. Home of Edwin A. Fawcett, Esq._ facing 340 _Caraway_ 342 _Sun-dial of Jonathan Fairbanks, Esq., Dedham, Massachusetts_ 344 _Bronze Sun-dial on Dutch Reformed Church, West End Avenue, New York_ 346 _Sun-dial mounted on Boulder, Swiftwater, Pennsylvania_ 347 _Buckthorn Arch in Garden of Mrs. Edward B. Peirson, Salem, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ facing 348 _Sun-dial at Emery Place, Brightwood, District of Columbia. Photographed by William Van Zandt Cox_ 349 _Sun-dial at Travellers' Rest, Virginia. Home of Mrs. Bowie Gray. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 350 _Two Old Cronies; the Sun-dial and Bee skepe. Photographed by Eva E. Newell_ 354 _Portable Sun-dial from Collection of the Author_ 356 _Sun-dial in Garden of Frederick J. Kingsbury, Esq., Waterbury, Connecticut_ 358 _Sun-dial at Morristown, New Jersey. Designed by W. Gedney Beatty, Esq._ 359 "_Yes, Toby, it's Three o'clock._" _Judge Daly and his Sun-dial at Sag Harbor, Long Island. Drawn by Edward Lamson Henry, N.A._ 361 _Face of Dial at Sag Harbor, Long Island_ 362 _Sun-dial in Garden of Grace Church Rectory, New York. Photographed by J. W. Dow_ 364 _Fugio Bank-note_ 365 _Sun-dial at "Washington House," Little Brington, England_ 367 _Dial-face from Mount Vernon. Owned by William F. Havemeyer, Jr._ 368 _Sun-dial from Home of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 369 _Kenmore, the Home of Betty Washington Lewis, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 371 _Sun-dial in Garden of Charles T. Jenkins, Esq., Germantown, Pennsylvania_ 373 _Sun-dial at Ophir Farm, White Plains, New York. Country-seat of Hon. Whitelaw Reid_ 375 _Sun-dial at Hillside, Menand's, near Albany, New York_ 378 _Old Brass and Pewter Dial-faces from Collection of Author_ 379 _Beata Beatrix_ facing 380 _The Faithful Gardener_ 381 _A Garden Lyre at Waterford, Virginia_ facing 384 _A Virginia Lyre with Vines_ 386 _Old Iron Gates at Westover-on-James, Virginia. Photographed by George S. Cook_ 388 _Ironwork in Court of Colt Mansion, Bristol, Rhode Island. Photographed by J. W. Dow_ 390 _Sharpening the Old Dutch Scythe. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ facing 392 _Summer-house at Ravensworth, County Fairfax, Virginia. Home of Mrs. W. H. Fitzhugh Lee. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 392 _Beehives at Waterford, Virginia. Photographed by Henry Troth_ facing 394 _Beehives under the Trees. Photographed by Henry Troth_ 395 _Spring House at Johnson Homestead, Germantown, Pennsylvania. Photographed by Henry Troth_ facing 396 _Dovecote at Shirley-on-James, Virginia. From_ Some Colonial Mansions and Those who lived in Them. _Published by Henry T. Coates & Co., Philadelphia_ 397 _The Peacock in his Pride_ 398 _The Guardian of the Garden_ 400 _Brick Terrace Wall at Van Cortlandt Manor. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ facing 402 _Rail Fence Corner_ 403 _Topiary Work at Levens Hall_ 404 _Oval Pergola at Arlington, Virginia. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ facing 406 _French Homestead, Kingston, Rhode Island, with Old Stone Terrace Wall. Photographed by Sarah F. Marchant_ 407 _Italian Garden at Wellesley, Massachusetts. Country-seat of Hollis H. Hunnewell, Esq._ facing 408 _Marble Steps in Italian Garden at Wellesley, Massachusetts_ 410 _Topiary Work in California_ 412 _Serpentine Brick Wall at University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photographed by Elizabeth W. Trescot_ 413 _Chestnut Path in Garden at Indian Hill, Newburyport, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ facing 418 _Foxgloves in Lower Garden at Indian Hill, Newburyport, Massachusetts. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ 421 _Dame's Rocket. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ 424 _Snakeroot. Photographed by Mary F. C Paschall_ 426 _Title-page of Parkinson's_ Paradisi in Solis, _etc._ facing 428 _Yuccas, like White Marble against the Evergreens_ 430 _Fraxinella in Garden of Miss Frances Clary Morse, Worcester, Massachusetts_ facing 432 _Love-in-a-Mist. Photographed by Henry Troth_ 436 _Spiderwort in an Old Worcester Garden. Photographed by Herschel F. Davis_ facing 438 _Gardener's Garters at Van Cortlandt Manor. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ 440 _Garden Walk at The Manse, Deerfield, Massachusetts. Photographed by Clifton Johnson_ facing 442 _London Pride. Photographed by Eva E. Newell_ 445 _White Fritillaria in Garden of Miss Frances Clary Morse, Worcester, Massachusetts_ 448 _Bouncing Bet_ 451 _Overgrown Garden at Llanerck, Pennsylvania. Photographed by Henry Troth_ facing 454 _Fountain at Yaddo, Saratoga, New York. Country-seat of Spencer Trask, Esq._ 455 _Avenue of White Pines at Wellesley, Massachusetts. Country-seat of Hollis H. Hunnewell, Esq._ 456 _Violets in Silver Double Coaster_ 461 _York and Lancaster Rose at Van Cortlandt Manor. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ facing 462 _Cinnamon Roses. Photographed by Mabel Osgood Wright_ 465 _Cottage Garden with Roses. Photographed by Mary F. C. Paschall_ facing 468 _Madame Plantier Rose. Photographed by Mabel Osgood Wright_ 474 _Sun-dial and Roses at Van Cortlandt Manor. Photographed by J. Horace McFarland_ facing 476 Old Time Gardens CHAPTER I COLONIAL GARDEN-MAKING "There is not a softer trait to be found in the character of those stern men than that they should have been sensible of these flower-roots clinging among the fibres of their rugged hearts, and felt the necessity of bringing them over sea, and making them hereditary in the new land." --_American Note-book_, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. After ten wearisome weeks of travel across an unknown sea, to an equally unknown world, the group of Puritan men and women who were the founders of Boston neared their Land of Promise; and their noble leader, John Winthrop, wrote in his Journal that "we had now fair Sunshine Weather and so pleasant a sweet Aire as did much refresh us, and there came a smell off the Shore like the Smell of a Garden." A _Smell of a Garden_ was the first welcome to our ancestors from their new home; and a pleasant and perfect emblem it was of the life that awaited them. They were not to become hunters and rovers, not to be eager to explore quickly the vast wilds beyond; they were to settle down in the most domestic of lives, as tillers of the soil, as makers of gardens. What must that sweet air from the land have been to the sea-weary Puritan women on shipboard, laden to them with its promise of a garden! for I doubt not every woman bore with her across seas some little package of seeds and bulbs from her English home garden, and perhaps a tiny slip or plant of some endeared flower; watered each day, I fear, with many tears, as well as from the surprisingly scant water supply which we know was on board that ship. And there also came flying to the _Arbella_ as to the Ark, a Dove--a bird of promise--and soon the ship came to anchor. "With hearts revived in conceit new Lands and Trees they spy, Scenting the Cædars and Sweet Fern from heat's reflection dry," wrote one colonist of that arrival, in his _Good Newes from New England_. I like to think that Sweet Fern, the characteristic wild perfume of New England, was wafted out to greet them. And then all went on shore in the sunshine of that ineffable time and season,--a New England day in June,--and they "gathered store of fine strawberries," just as their Salem friends had on a June day on the preceding year gathered strawberries and "sweet Single Roses" so resembling the English Eglantine that the hearts of the women must have ached within them with fresh homesickness. And ere long all had dwelling-places, were they but humble log cabins; and pasture lands and commons were portioned out; and in a short time all had garden-plots, and thus, with sheltering roof-trees, and warm firesides, and with gardens, even in this lonely new world, they had _homes_. The first entry in the Plymouth Records is a significant one; it is the assignment of "Meresteads and Garden-Plotes," not meresteads alone, which were farm lands, but home gardens: the outlines of these can still be seen in Plymouth town. And soon all sojourners who bore news back to England of the New-Englishmen and New-Englishwomen, told of ample store of gardens. Ere a year had passed hopeful John Winthrop wrote, "My Deare Wife, wee are here in a Paradise." In four years the chronicler Wood said in his _New England's Prospect_, "There is growing here all manner of herbs for meat and medicine, and that not only in planted gardens, but in the woods, without the act and help of man." Governor Endicott had by that time a very creditable garden. And by every humble dwelling the homesick goodwife or dame, trying to create a semblance of her fair English home so far away, planted in her "garden plot" seeds and roots of homely English flowers and herbs, that quickly grew and blossomed and smiled on bleak New England's rocky shores as sturdily and happily as they had bloomed in the old gardens and by the ancient door sides in England. What good cheer they must have brought! how they must have been beloved! for these old English garden flowers are such gracious things; marvels of scent, lavish of bloom, bearing such genial faces, growing so readily and hardily, spreading so quickly, responding so gratefully to such little care: what pure refreshment they bore in their blossoms, what comfort in their seeds; they must have seemed an emblem of hope, a promise of a new and happy home. I rejoice over every one that I know was in those little colonial gardens, for each one added just so much measure of solace to what seems to me, as I think upon it, one of the loneliest, most fearsome things that gentlewomen ever had to do, all the harder because neither by poverty nor by unavoidable stress were they forced to it; they came across-seas willingly, for conscience' sake. These women were not accustomed to the thought of emigration, as are European folk to-day; they had no friends to greet them in the new land; they were to encounter wild animals and wild men; sea and country were unknown--they could scarce expect ever to return: they left everything, and took nothing of comfort but their Bibles and their flower seeds. So when I see one of the old English flowers, grown of those days, blooming now in my garden, from the unbroken chain of blossom to seed of nearly three centuries, I thank the flower for all that its forbears did to comfort my forbears, and I cherish it with added tenderness. [Illustration: Garden of the Johnson Mansion, Germantown, Pennsylvania.] We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which comes from directness, and an absence of self-consciousness. He published in 1672 a book entitled _New England's Rarities discovered_, etc., and in 1674 another volume giving an account of his two voyages hither in 1638 and 1663. He made a very careful list of vegetables which he found thriving in the new land; and since his flower list is the earliest known, I will transcribe it in full; it isn't long, but there is enough in it to make it a suggestive outline which we can fill in from what we know of the plants to-day, and form a very fair picture of those gardens. "Spearmint, Rew, will hardly grow Fetherfew prospereth exceedingly; Southernwood, is no Plant for this Country, Nor Rosemary. Nor Bayes. White-Satten groweth pretty well, so doth Lavender-Cotton. But Lavender is not for the Climate. Penny Royal Smalledge. Ground Ivey, or Ale Hoof. Gilly Flowers will continue two Years. Fennel must be taken up, and kept in a Warm Cellar all Winter Horseleek prospereth notably Holly hocks Enula Canpana, in two years time the Roots rot. Comferie, with White Flowers. Coriander, and Dill, and Annis thrive exceedingly, but Annis Seed, as also the seed of Fennel seldom come to maturity; the Seed of Annis is commonly eaten with a Fly. Clary never lasts but one Summer, the Roots rot with the Frost. Sparagus thrives exceedingly, so does Garden Sorrel, and Sweet Bryer or Eglantine Bloodwort but sorrily, but Patience and English Roses very pleasantly. Celandine, by the West Country now called Kenning Wort grows but slowly. Muschater, as well as in England Dittander or Pepperwort flourisheth notably and so doth Tansie." These lists were published fifty years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth; from them we find that the country was just as well stocked with vegetables as it was a hundred years later when other travellers made lists, but the flowers seem few; still, such as they were, they formed a goodly sight. With rows of Hollyhocks glowing against the rude stone walls and rail fences of their little yards; with clumps of Lavender Cotton and Honesty and Gillyflowers blossoming freely; with Feverfew "prospering" to sow and slip and pot and give to neighbors just as New England women have done with Feverfew every year of the centuries that have followed; with "a Rose looking in at the window"--a Sweetbrier, Eglantine, or English Rose--these colonial dames might well find "Patience growing very pleasantly" in their hearts as in their gardens. [Illustration: Garden at Grumblethorp, Germantown, Pennsylvania.] They had plenty of pot herbs for their accustomed savoring; and plenty of medicinal herbs for their wonted dosing. Shakespeare's "nose-herbs" were not lacking. Doubtless they soon added to these garden flowers many of our beautiful native blooms, rejoicing if they resembled any beloved English flowers, and quickly giving them, as we know, familiar old English plant-names. And there were other garden inhabitants, as truly English as were the cherished flowers, the old garden weeds, which quickly found a home and thrived in triumph in the new soil. Perhaps the weed seeds came over in the flower-pot that held a sheltered plant or cutting; perhaps a few were mixed with garden seeds; perhaps they were in the straw or other packing of household goods: no one knew the manner of their coming, but there they were, Motherwort, Groundsel, Chickweed, and Wild Mustard, Mullein and Nettle, Henbane and Wormwood. Many a goodwife must have gazed in despair at the persistent Plantain, "the Englishman's foot," which seems to have landed in Plymouth from the Mayflower. Josselyn made other lists of plants which he found in America, under these headings:-- "Such plants as are common with us in England. Such plants as are proper to the Country. Such plants as are proper to the Country and have no name. Such plants as have sprung up since the English planted, and kept cattle in New England." In these lists he gives a surprising number of English weeds which had thriven and rejoiced in their new home. [Illustration: Garden of the Bartram House, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.] Mr. Tuckerman calls Josselyn's list of the fishes of the new world a poor makeshift; his various lists of plants are better, but they are the lists of an herbalist, not of a botanist. He had some acquaintance with the practice of physic, of which he narrates some examples; and an interest in kitchen recipes, and included a few in his books. He said that Parkinson or another botanist might have "found in New England a thousand, at least, of plants never heard of nor seen by any Englishman before," and adds that he was himself an indifferent observer. He certainly lost an extraordinary opportunity of distinguishing himself, indeed of immortalizing himself; and it is surprising that he was so heedless, for Englishmen of that day were in general eager botanists. The study of plants was new, and was deemed of such absorbing interest and fascination that some rigid Puritans feared they might lose their immortal souls through making their new plants their idols. [Illustration: Garden of Abigail Adams.] When Josselyn wrote, but few of our American flowers were known to European botanists; Indian Corn, Pitcher Plant, Columbine, Milkweed, Everlasting, and Arbor-vitæ had been described in printed books, and the Evening Primrose. A history of Canadian and other new plants, by Dr. Cornuti, had been printed in Europe, giving thirty-seven of our plants; and all English naturalists were longing to add to the list; the ships which brought over homely seeds and plants for the gardens of the colonists carried back rare American seeds and plants for English physic gardens. In Pennsylvania, from the first years of the settlement, William Penn encouraged his Quaker followers to plant English flowers and fruit in abundance, and to try the fruits of the new world. Father Pastorius, in his Germantown settlement, assigned to each family a garden-plot of three acres, as befitted a man who left behind him at his death a manuscript poem of many thousand words on the pleasures of gardening, the description of flowers, and keeping of bees. George Fox, the founder of the Friends, or Quakers, died in 1690. He had travelled in the colonies; and in his will he left sixteen acres of land to the Quaker meeting in the city of Philadelphia. Of these sixteen acres, ten were for "a close to put Friends' horses in when they came afar to the Meeting, that they may not be Lost in the Woods," while the other six were for a site for a meeting-house and school-house, and "for a Playground for the Children of the town to Play on, and for a Garden to plant with Physical Plants, for Lads and Lasses to know Simples, and to learn to make Oils and Ointments." Few as are these words, they convey a positive picture of Fox's intent, and a pleasing picture it is. He had seen what interest had been awakened and what instruction conveyed through the "Physick-Garden" at Chelsea, England; and he promised to himself similar interest and information from the study of plants and flowers by the Quaker "lads and lasses" of the new world. Though nothing came from this bequest, there was a later fulfilment of Fox's hopes in the establishment of a successful botanic garden in Philadelphia, and, in the planting, growth, and flourishing in the province of Pennsylvania of the loveliest gardens in the new world; there floriculture reached by the time of the Revolution a very high point; and many exquisite gardens bore ample testimony to the "pride of life," as well as to the good taste and love of flowers of Philadelphia Friends. The garden at Grumblethorp, the home of Charles J. Wister, Esq., of Germantown, Pennsylvania, shown on page 7, dates to colonial days and is still flourishing and beautiful. In 1728 was established, by John Bartram, in Philadelphia, the first botanic garden in America. The ground on which it was planted, and the stone dwelling-house he built thereon in 1731, are now part of the park system of Philadelphia. A view of the garden as now in cultivation is given on page 9. Bartram travelled much in America, and through his constant correspondence and flower exchanges with distinguished botanists and plant growers in Europe, many native American plants became well known in foreign gardens, among them the Lady's Slipper and Rhododendron. He was a Quaker,--a quaint and picturesque figure,--and his example helped to establish the many fine gardens in the vicinity of Philadelphia. The example and precept of Washington also had important influence; for he was constant in his desire and his effort to secure every good and new plant, grain, shrub, and tree for his home at Mount Vernon. A beautiful tribute to his good taste and that of his wife still exists in the Mount Vernon flower garden, which in shape, Box edgings, and many details is precisely as it was in their day. A view of its well-ordered charms is shown opposite page 12. Whenever I walk in this garden I am deeply grateful to the devoted women who keep it in such perfection, as an object-lesson to us of the dignity, comeliness, and beauty of a garden of the olden times. [Illustration: Garden at Mount Vernon-on-the-Potomac. Home of George Washington.] There is little evidence that a general love and cultivation of flowers was as common in humble homes in the Southern colonies as in New England and the Middle provinces. The teeming abundance near the tropics rendered any special gardening unnecessary for poor folk; flowers grew and blossomed lavishly everywhere without any coaxing or care. On splendid estates there were splendid gardens, which have nearly all suffered by the devastations of war--in some towns they were thrice thus scourged. So great was the beauty of these Southern gardens and so vast the love they provoked in their owners, that in more than one case the life of the garden's master was merged in that of the garden. The British soldiers during the War of the Revolution wantonly destroyed the exquisite flowers at "The Grove," just outside the city of Charleston, and their owner, Mr. Gibbes, dropped dead in grief at the sight of the waste. The great wealth of the Southern planters, their constant and extravagant following of English customs and fashions, their fertile soil and favorable climate, and their many slaves, all contributed to the successful making of elaborate gardens. Even as early as 1682 South Carolina gardens were declared to be "adorned with such Flowers as to the Smell or Eye are pleasing or agreeable, as the Rose, Tulip, Lily, Carnation, &c." William Byrd wrote of the terraced gardens of Virginia homes. Charleston dames vied with each other in the beauty of their gardens, and Mrs. Logan, when seventy years old, in 1779, wrote a treatise called _The Gardener's Kalendar_. Eliza Lucas Pinckney of Charleston was devoted to practical floriculture and horticulture. Her introduction of indigo raising into South Carolina revolutionized the trade products of the state and brought to it vast wealth. Like many other women and many men of wealth and culture at that time, she kept up a constant exchange of letters, seeds, plants, and bulbs with English people of like tastes. She received from them valuable English seeds and shrubs; and in turn she sent to England what were so eagerly sought by English flower raisers, our native plants. The good will and national pride of ship captains were enlisted; even young trees of considerable size were set in hogsheads, and transported, and cared for during the long voyage. [Illustration: Gate and Hedge of Preston Garden.] The garden at Mount Vernon is probably the oldest in Virginia still in original shape. In Maryland are several fine, formal gardens which do not date, however, to colonial days; the beautiful one at Hampton, the home of the Ridgelys, in Baltimore County, is shown on pages 57, 60 and 95. In both North and South Carolina the gardens were exquisite. Many were laid out by competent landscape gardeners, and were kept in order by skilled workmen, negro slaves, who were carefully trained from childhood to special labor, such as topiary work. In Camden and Charleston the gardens vied with the finest English manor-house gardens. Remains of their beauty exist, despite devastating wars and earthquakes. Views of the Preston Garden, Columbia, South Carolina, are shown on pages 15 and 18 and facing page 54. They are now the grounds of the Presbyterian College for Women. The hedges have been much reduced within a few years; but the garden still bears a surprising resemblance to the Garden of the Generalife, Granada. The Spanish garden has fewer flowers and more fountains, yet I think it must have been the model for the Preston Garden. The climax of magnificence in Southern gardens has been for years, at Magnolia-on-the-Ashley, the ancestral home of the Draytons since 1671. It is impossible to describe the affluence of color in this garden in springtime; masses of unbroken bloom on giant Magnolias; vast Camellia Japonicas, looking, leaf and flower, thoroughly artificial, as if made of solid wax; splendid Crape Myrtles, those strange flower-trees; mammoth Rhododendrons; Azaleas of every Azalea color,--all surrounded by walls of the golden Banksia Roses, and hedges covered with Jasmine and Honeysuckle. The Azaleas are the special glory of the garden; the bushes are fifteen to twenty feet in height, and fifty or sixty feet in circumference, with rich blossoms running over and crowding down on the ground as if color had been poured over the bushes; they extend in vistas of vivid hues as far as the eye can reach. All this gay and brilliant color is overhung by a startling contrast, the most sombre and gloomy thing in nature, great Live-oaks heavily draped with gray Moss; the avenue of largest Oaks was planted two centuries ago. I give no picture of this Drayton Garden, for a photograph of these many acres of solid bloom is a meaningless thing. Even an oil painting of it is confused and disappointing. In the garden itself the excess of color is as cloying as its surfeit of scent pouring from the thousands of open flower cups; we long for green hedges, even for scanter bloom and for fainter fragrance. It is not a garden to live in, as are our box-bordered gardens of the North, our cheerful cottage borders, and our well-balanced Italian gardens, so restful to the eye; it is a garden to look at and wonder at. The Dutch settlers brought their love of flowering bulbs, and the bulbs also, to the new world. Adrian Van der Donck, a gossiping visitor to New Netherland when the little town of New Amsterdam had about a thousand inhabitants, described the fine kitchen gardens, the vegetables and fruits, and gave an interesting list of garden flowers which he found under cultivation by the Dutch vrouws. He says: "OF THE FLOWERS. The flowers in general which the Netherlanders have introduced there are the white and red roses of different kinds, the cornelian roses, and stock roses; and those of which there were none before in the country, such as eglantine, several kinds of gillyflowers, jenoffelins, different varieties of fine tulips, crown imperials, white lilies, the lily frutularia, anemones, baredames, violets, marigolds, summer sots, etc. The clove tree has also been introduced, and there are various indigenous trees that bear handsome flowers, which are unknown in the Netherlands. We also find there some flowers of native growth, as, for instance, sunflowers, red and yellow lilies, mountain lilies, morning stars, red, white, and yellow maritoffles (a very sweet flower), several species of bell flowers, etc., to which I have not given particular attention, but _amateurs_ would hold them in high estimation and make them widely known." [Illustration: Fountain Path in Preston Garden, Columbia, South Carolina.] I wish I knew what a Cornelian Rose was, and Jenoffelins, Baredames, and Summer Sots; and what the Lilies were and the Maritoffles and Bell Flowers. They all sound so cheerful and homelike--just as if they bloomed well. Perhaps the Cornelian Rose may have been striped red and white like cornelian stone, and like our York and Lancaster Rose. Tulips are on all seed and plant lists of colonial days, and they were doubtless in every home dooryard in New Netherland. Governor Peter Stuyvesant had a fine farm on the Bouwerie, and is said to have had a flower garden there and at his home, White Hall, at the Battery, for he had forty or fifty negro slaves who were kept at work on his estate. In the city of New York many fine formal gardens lingered, on what are now our most crowded streets, till within the memory of persons now living. One is described as full of "Paus bloemen of all hues, Laylocks, and tall May Roses and Snowballs intermixed with choice vegetables and herbs all bounded and hemmed in by huge rows of neatly-clipped Box-edgings." An evidence of increase in garden luxury in New York is found in the advertisement of one Theophilus Hardenbrook, in 1750, a practical surveyor and architect, who had an evening school for teaching architecture. He designed pavilions, summer-houses, and garden seats, and "Green-houses for the preservation of Herbs with winding Funnels through the walls so as to keep them warm." A picture of the green-house of James Beekman, of New York, 1764, still exists, a primitive little affair. The first glass-house in North America is believed to be one built in Boston for Andrew Faneuil, who died in 1737. Mrs. Anne Grant, writing of her life near Albany in the middle of the eighteenth century, gives a very good description of the Schuyler garden. Skulls of domestic animals on fence posts, would seem astounding had I not read of similar decorations in old Continental gardens. Vines grew over these grisly fence-capitals and birds built their nests in them, so in time the Dutch housewife's peaceful kitchen garden ceased to resemble the kraal of an African chieftain; to this day, in South Africa, natives and Dutch Boers thus set up on gate posts the skulls of cattle. Mrs. Grant writes of the Dutch in Albany:-- "The care of plants, such as needed peculiar care or skill to rear them, was the female province. Every one in town or country had a garden. Into this garden no foot of man intruded after it was dug in the Spring. I think I see yet what I have so often beheld--a respectable mistress of a family going out to her garden, on an April morning, with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and her rake over her shoulder to her garden of labours. A woman in very easy circumstances and abundantly gentle in form and manners would sow and plant and rake incessantly." We have happily a beautiful example of the old Dutch manor garden, at Van Cortlandt Manor, at Croton-on-Hudson, New York, still in the possession of the Van Cortlandt family. It is one of the few gardens in America that date really to colonial days. The manor house was built in 1681; it is one of those fine old Dutch homesteads of which we still have many existing throughout New York, in which dignity, comfort, and fitness are so happily combined. These homes are, in the words of a traveller of colonial days, "so pleasant in their building, and contrived so delightful." Above all, they are so suited to their surroundings that they seem an intrinsic part of the landscape, as they do of the old life of this Hudson River Valley. [Illustration: Door in Wall of Kitchen Garden at Van Cortlandt Manor.] I do not doubt that this Van Cortlandt garden was laid out when the house was built; much of it must be two centuries old. It has been extended, not altered; and the grass-covered bank supporting the upper garden was replaced by a brick terrace wall about sixty years ago. Its present form dates to the days when New York was a province. The upper garden is laid out in formal flower beds; the lower border is rich in old vines and shrubs, and all the beloved old-time hardy plants. There is in the manor-house an ancient portrait of the child Pierre Van Cortlandt, painted about the year 1732. He stands by a table bearing a vase filled with old garden flowers--Tulip, Convolvulus, Harebell, Rose, Peony, Narcissus, and Flowering Almond; and it is the pleasure of the present mistress of the manor, to see that the garden still holds all the great-grandfather's flowers. There is a vine-embowered old door in the wall under the piazza (see opposite page 20) which opens into the kitchen and fruit garden; a wall-door so quaint and old-timey that I always remind me of Shakespeare's lines in _Measure for Measure_:-- "He hath a garden circummured with brick, Whose western side is with a Vineyard back'd; And to that Vineyard is a planchéd gate That makes his opening with this bigger key: The other doth command a little door Which from the Vineyard to the garden leads." The long path is a beautiful feature of this garden (it is shown in the picture of the garden opposite page 24); it dates certainly to the middle of the eighteenth century. Pierre Van Cortlandt, the son of the child with the vase of flowers, and grandfather of the present generation bearing his surname, was born in 1762. He well recalled playing along this garden path when he was a child; and that one day he and his little sister Ann (Mrs. Philip Van Rensselaer) ran a race along this path and through the garden to see who could first "see the baby" and greet their sister, Mrs. Beekman, who came riding to the manor-house up the hill from Tarrytown, and through the avenue, which shows on the right-hand side of the garden-picture. This beautiful young woman was famed everywhere for her grace and loveliness, and later equally so for her intelligence and goodness, and the prominent part she bore in the War of the Revolution. She was seated on a pillion behind her husband, and she carried proudly in her arms her first baby (afterward Dr. Beekman) wrapped in a scarlet cloak. This is one of the home-pictures that the old garden holds. Would we could paint it! In this garden, near the house, is a never failing spring and well. The house was purposely built near it, in those days of sudden attacks by Indians; it has proved a fountain of perpetual youth for the old Locust tree, which shades it; a tree more ancient than house or garden, serene and beautiful in its hearty old age. Glimpses of this manor-house garden and its flowers are shown on many pages of this book, but they cannot reveal its beauty as a whole--its fine proportions, its noble background, its splendid trees, its turf, its beds of bloom. Oh! How beautiful a garden can be, when for two hundred years it has been loved and cherished, ever nurtured, ever guarded; how plainly it shows such care! Another Dutch garden is pictured opposite page 32, the garden of the Bergen Homestead, at Bay Ridge, Long Island. Let me quote part of its description, written by Mrs. Tunis Bergen:-- "Over the half-open Dutch door you look through the vines that climb about the stoop, as into a vista of the past. Beyond the garden is the great Quince orchard of hundreds of trees in pink and white glory. This orchard has a story which you must pause in the garden to hear. In the Library at Washington is preserved, in quaint manuscript, 'The Battle of Brooklyn,' a farce written and said to have been performed during the British occupation. The scene is partly laid in 'the orchard of one Bergen,' where the British hid their horses after the battle of Long Island--this is the orchard; but the blossoming Quince trees tell no tale of past carnage. At one side of the garden is a quaint little building with moss-grown roof and climbing hop-vine--the last slave kitchen left standing in New York--on the other side are rows of homely beehives. The old Locust tree overshadowing is an ancient landmark--it was standing in 1690. For some years it has worn a chain to bind its aged limbs together. All this beauty of tree and flower lived till 1890, when it was swept away by the growing city. Though now but a memory, it has the perfume of its past flowers about it." The Locust was so often a "home tree" and so fitting a one, that I have grown to associate ever with these Dutch homesteads a light-leaved Locust tree, shedding its beautiful flickering shadows on the long roof. I wonder whether there was any association or tradition that made the Locust the house-friend in old New York! The first nurseryman in the new world was stern old Governor Endicott of Salem. In 1644 he wrote to Governor Winthrop, "My children burnt mee at least 500 trees by setting the ground on fire neere them"--which was a very pretty piece of mischief for sober Puritan children. We find all thoughtful men of influence and prominence in all the colonies raising various fruits, and selling trees and plants, but they had no independent business nurseries. [Illustration: Garden at Van Cortlandt Manor.] If tradition be true, it is to Governor Endicott we owe an indelible dye on the landscape of eastern Massachusetts in midsummer. The Dyer's-weed or Woad-waxen (_Genista tinctoria_), which, in July, covers hundreds of acres in Lynn, Salem, Swampscott, and Beverly with its solid growth and brilliant yellow bloom, is said to have been brought to this country as the packing of some of the governor's household belongings. It is far more probable that he brought it here to raise it in his garden for dyeing purposes, with intent to benefit the colony, as he did other useful seeds and plants. Woadwaxen, or Broom, is a persistent thing; it needs scythe, plough, hoe, and bitter labor to eradicate it. I cannot call it a weed, for it has seized only poor rock-filled land, good for naught else; and the radiant beauty of the Salem landscape for many weeks makes us forgive its persistence, and thank Endicott for bringing it here. "The Broom, Full-flowered and visible on every steep, Along the copses runs in veins of gold." The Broom flower is the emblem of mid-summer, the hottest yellow flower I know--it seems to throw out heat. I recall the first time I saw it growing; I was told that it was "Salem Wood-wax." I had heard of "Roxbury Waxwork," the Bitter-sweet, but this was a new name, as it was a new tint of yellow, and soon I had its history, for I find Salem people rather proud both of the flower and its story. Oxeye Daisies (Whiteweed) are also by vague tradition the children of Governor Endicott's planting. I think it far more probable that they were planted and cherished by the wives of the colonists, when their beloved English Daisies were found unsuited to New England's climate and soil. We note the Woad-waxen and Whiteweed as crowding usurpers, not only because they are persistent, but because their great expanses of striking bloom will not let us forget them. Many other English plants are just as determined intruders, but their modest dress permits them to slip in comparatively unobserved. It has ever been characteristic of the British colonist to carry with him to any new home the flowers of old England and Scotland, and characteristic of these British flowers to monopolize the earth. Sweetbrier is called "the missionary-plant," by the Maoris in New Zealand, and is there regarded as a tiresome weed, spreading and holding the ground. Some homesick missionary or his more homesick wife bore it there; and her love of the home plant impressed even the savage native. We all know the story of the Scotch settlers who carried their beloved Thistles to Tasmania "to make it seem like home," and how they lived to regret it. Vancouver's Island is completely overrun with Broom and wild Roses from England. The first commercial nursery in America, in the sense of the term as we now employ it, was established about 1730 by Robert Prince, in Flushing, Long Island, a community chiefly of French Huguenot settlers, who brought to the new world many French fruits by seed and cuttings, and also a love of horticulture. For over a century and a quarter these Prince Nurseries were the leading ones in America. The sale of fruit trees was increased in 1774 (as we learn from advertisements in the _New York Mercury_ of that year), by the sale of "Carolina Magnolia flower trees, the most beautiful trees that grow in America, and 50 large Catalpa flower trees; they are nine feet high to the under part of the top and thick as one's leg," also other flowering trees and shrubs. The fine house built on the nursery grounds by William Prince suffered little during the Revolution. It was occupied by Washington and afterwards house and nursery were preserved from depredations by a guard placed by General Howe when the British took possession of Flushing. Of course, domestic nursery business waned in time of war; but an excellent demand for American shrubs and trees sprung up among the officers of the British army, to send home to gardens in England and Germany. Many an English garden still has ancient plants and trees from the Prince Nurseries. The "Linnæan Botanic Garden and Nurseries" and the "Old American Nursery" thrived once more at the close of the war, and William Prince the second entered in charge; one of his earliest ventures of importance was the introduction of Lombardy Poplars. In 1798 he advertises ten thousand trees, ten to seventeen feet in height. These became the most popular tree in America, the emblem of democracy--and a warmly hated tree as well. The eighty acres of nursery grounds were a centre of botanic and horticultural interest for the entire country; every tree, shrub, vine, and plant known to England and America was eagerly sought for; here the important botanical treasures of Lewis and Clark found a home. William Prince wrote several notable horticultural treatises; and even his trade catalogues were prized. He established the first steamboats between Flushing and New York, built roads and bridges on Long Island, and was a public-spirited, generous citizen as well as a man of science. His son, William Robert Prince, who died in 1869, was the last to keep up the nurseries, which he did as a scientific rather than a commercial establishment. He botanized the entire length of the Atlantic States with Dr. Torrey, and sought for collections of trees and wild flowers in California with the same eagerness that others there sought gold. He was a devoted promoter of the native silk industry, having vast plantations of Mulberries in many cities; for one at Norfolk, Virginia, he was offered $100,000. It is a curious fact that the interest in Mulberry culture and the practice of its cultivation was so universal in his neighborhood (about the year 1830), that cuttings of the Chinese Mulberry (_Morus multicaulis_) were used as currency in all the stores in the vicinity of Flushing, at the rate of 12-1/2 cents each. [Illustration: Garden at Prince Homestead, Flushing, Long Island.] The Prince homestead, a fine old mansion, is here shown; it is still standing, surrounded by that forlorn sight, a forgotten garden. This is of considerable extent, and evidences of its past dignity appear in the hedges and edgings of Box; one symmetrical great Box tree is fifty feet in circumference. Flowering shrubs, unkempt of shape, bloom and beautify the waste borders each spring, as do the oldest Chinese Magnolias in the United States. Gingkos, Paulownias, and weeping trees, which need no gardener's care, also flourish and are of unusual size. There are some splendid evergreens, such as Mt. Atlas Cedars; and the oldest and finest Cedar of Lebanon in the United States. It seemed sad, as I looked at the evidences of so much past beauty and present decay, that this historic house and garden should not be preserved for New York, as the house and garden of John Bartram, the Philadelphia botanist, have been for his native city. While there are few direct records of American gardens in the eighteenth century, we have many instructing side glimpses through old business letter-books. We find Sir Harry Frankland ordering Daffodils and Tulips for the garden he made for Agnes Surriage; and it is said that the first Lilacs ever seen in Hopkinton were planted by him for her. The gay young nobleman and the lovely woman are in the dust, and of all the beautiful things belonging to them there remain a splendid Portuguese fan, which stands as a memorial of that tragic crisis in their life--the great Lisbon earthquake; and the Lilacs, which still mark the site of her house and blossom each spring as a memorial of the shadowed romance of her life in New England. Let me give two pages from old letters to illustrate what I mean by side glimpses at the contents of colonial gardens. The fine Hancock mansion in Boston had a carefully-filled garden long previous to the Revolution. Such letters as the following were sent by Mr. Hancock to England to secure flowers for it:-- "My Trees and Seeds for Capt. Bennett Came Safe to Hand and I like them very well. I Return you my hearty Thanks for the Plumb Tree and Tulip Roots you were pleased to make me a Present off, which are very Acceptable to me. I have Sent my friend Mr. Wilks a mmo. to procure for me 2 or 3 Doz. Yew Trees, Some Hollys and Jessamine Vines, and if you have Any Particular Curious Things not of a high Price, will Beautifye a flower Garden Send a Sample with the Price or a Catalogue of 'em, I do not intend to spare Any Cost or Pains in making my Gardens Beautifull or Profitable. "P.S. The Tulip Roots you were Pleased to make a present off to me are all Dead as well." We find Richard Stockton writing in 1766 from England to his wife at their beautiful home "Morven," in Princeton, New Jersey:-- "I am making you a charming collection of bulbous roots, which shall be sent over as soon as the prospect of freezing on your coast is over. The first of April, I believe, will be time enough for you to put them in your sweet little flower garden, which you so fondly cultivate. Suppose I inform you that I design a ride to Twickenham the latter end of next month principally to view Mr. Pope's gardens and grotto, which I am told remain nearly as he left them; and that I shall take with me a gentleman who draws well, to lay down an exact plan of the whole." The fine line of Catalpa trees set out by Richard Stockton, along the front of his lawn, were in full flower when he rode up to his house on a memorable July day to tell his wife that he had signed the Declaration of American Independence. Since then Catalpa trees bear everywhere in that vicinity the name of Independence trees, and are believed to be ever in bloom on July 4th. [Illustration: Old Box at Prince Homestead.] In the delightful diary and letters of Eliza Southgate Bowne (_A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago_), are other side glimpses of the beautiful gardens of old Salem, among them those of the wealthy merchants of the Derby family. Terraces and arches show a formality of arrangement, for they were laid out by a Dutch gardener whose descendants still live in Salem. All had summer-houses, which were larger and more important buildings than what are to-day termed summer-houses; these latter were known in Salem and throughout Virginia as bowers. One summer-house had an arch through it with three doors on each side which opened into little apartments; one of them had a staircase by which you could ascend into a large upper room, which was the whole size of the building. This was constructed to command a fine view, and was ornamented with Chinese articles of varied interest and value; it was used for tea-drinkings. At the end of the garden, concealed by a dense Weeping Willow, was a thatched hermitage, containing the life-size figure of a man reading a prayer-book; a bed of straw and some broken furniture completed the picture. This was an English fashion, seen at one time in many old English gardens, and held to be most romantic. Apparently summer evenings were spent by the Derby household and their visitors wholly in the garden and summer-house. The diary keeper writes naïvely, "The moon shines brighter in this garden than anywhere else." [Illustration: Old Dutch Garden of Bergen Homestead.] The shrewd and capable women of the colonies who entered so freely and successfully into business ventures found the selling of flower seeds a congenial occupation, and often added it to the pursuit of other callings. I think it must have been very pleasant to buy packages of flower seed at the same time and place where you bought your best bonnet, and have all sent home in a bandbox together; each would prove a memorial of the other; and long after the glory of the bonnet had departed, and the bonnet itself was ashes, the thriving Sweet Peas and Larkspur would recall its becoming charms. I have often seen the advertisements of these seedswomen in old newspapers; unfortunately they seldom gave printed lists of their store of seeds. Here is one list printed in a Boston newspaper on March 30, 1760:-- Lavender. Palma Christi. Cerinthe or Honeywort, loved of bees. Tricolor. Indian Pink. Scarlet Cacalia. Yellow Sultans. Lemon African Marigold. Sensitive Plants. White Lupine. Love Lies Bleeding. Patagonian Cucumber. Lobelia. Catchfly. Wing-peas. Convolvulus. Strawberry Spinage. Branching Larkspur. White Chrysanthemum. Nigaella Romano. Rose Campion. Snap Dragon. Nolana prostrata. Summer Savory. Hyssop. Red Hawkweed. Red and White Lavater. Scarlet Lupine. Large blue Lupine. Snuff flower. Caterpillars. Cape Marigold. Rose Lupine. Sweet Peas. Venus' Navelwort. Yellow Chrysanthemum. Cyanus minor. Tall Holyhock. French Marigold. Carnation Poppy. Globe Amaranthus. Yellow Lupine. Indian Branching Coxcombs. Iceplants. Thyme. Sweet Marjoram. Tree Mallows. Everlasting. Greek Valerian. Tree Primrose. Canterbury Bells. Purple Stock. Sweet Scabiouse. Columbine. Pleasant-eyed Pink. Dwarf Mountain Pink. Sweet Rocket. Horn Poppy. French Honeysuckle. Bloody Wallflower. Sweet William. Honesty (to be sold in small parcels that every one may have a little). Persicaria. Polyanthos. 50 Different Sorts of mixed Tulip Roots. Ranunculus. Gladiolus. Starry Scabiouse. Curled Mallows. Painted Lady topknot peas. Colchicum. Persian Iris. Star Bethlehem. This list is certainly a pleasing one. It gives opportunity for flower borders of varied growth and rich color. There is a quality of some minds which may be termed historical imagination. It is the power of shaping from a few simple words or details of the faraway past, an ample picture, full of light and life, of which these meagre details are but a framework. Having this list of the names of these sturdy old annuals and perennials, what do you perceive besides the printed words? I see that the old mid-century garden where these seeds found a home was a cheerful place from earliest spring to autumn; that it had many bulbs, and thereafter a constant succession of warm blooms till the Coxcombs, Marigolds, Colchicums and Chrysanthemums yielded to New England's frosts. I know that the garden had beehives and that the bees were loved; for when they sallied out of their straw bee-skepes, these happy bees found their favorite blossoms planted to welcome them: Cerinthe, dropping with honey; Cacalia, a sister flower; Lupine, Larkspur, Sweet Marjoram, and Thyme--I can taste the Thyme-scented classic honey from that garden! There was variety of foliage as well as bloom, the dovelike Lavender, the glaucous Horned Poppy, the glistening Iceplants, the dusty Rose Campion. [Illustration: Old Garden at Duck Cove Farm in Narragansett.] Stately plants grew from the little seed-packets; Hollyhocks, Valerian, Canterbury Bells, Tree Primroses looked down on the low-growing herbs of the border; and there were vines of Convolvulus and Honeysuckle. It was a garden overhung by clouds of perfume from Thyme, Lavender, Sweet Peas, Pleasant-eyed Pink, and Stock. The garden's mistress looked well after her household; ample store of savory pot herbs grow among the finer blossoms. It was a garden for children to play in. I can see them; little boys with their hair tied in queues, in knee breeches and flapped coats like their stately fathers, running races down the garden path, as did the Van Cortlandt children; and demure little girls in caps and sacques and aprons, sitting in cubby houses under the Lilac bushes. I know what flowers they played with and how they played, for they were my great-grandmothers and grandfathers, and they played exactly what I did, and sang what I did when I was a child in a garden. And suddenly my picture expands, as a glow of patriotic interest thrills me in the thought that in this garden were sheltered and amused the boys of one hundred and forty years ago, who became the heroes of our American Revolution; and the girls who were Daughters of Liberty, who spun and wove and knit for their soldiers, and drank heroically their miserable Liberty tea. I fear the garden faded when bitter war scourged the land, when the women turned from their flower beds to the plough and the field, since their brothers and husbands were on the frontier. But when that winter of gloom to our country and darkness to the garden was ended, the flowers bloomed still more brightly, and to the cheerful seedlings of the old garden is now given perpetual youth and beauty; they are fated never to grow faded or neglected or sad, but to live and blossom and smile forever in the sunshine of our hearts through the magic power of a few printed words in a time-worn old news-sheet. CHAPTER II FRONT DOORYARDS "There are few of us who cannot remember a front yard garden which seemed to us a very paradise in childhood. Whether the house was a fine one and the enclosure spacious, or whether it was a small house with only a narrow bit of ground in front, the yard was kept with care, and was different from the rest of the land altogether.... People do not know what they lose when they make way with the reserve, the separateness, the sanctity, of the front yard of their grandmothers. It is like writing down family secrets for any one to read; it is like having everybody call you by your first name, or sitting in any pew in church." --_Country Byways_, SARAH ORNE JEWETT, 1881. Old New England villages and small towns and well-kept New England farms had universally a simple and pleasing form of garden called the front yard or front dooryard. A few still may be seen in conservative communities in the New England states and in New York or Pennsylvania. I saw flourishing ones this summer in Gloucester, Marblehead, and Ipswich. Even where the front yard was but a narrow strip of land before a tiny cottage, it was carefully fenced in, with a gate that was kept rigidly closed and latched. There seemed to be a law which shaped and bounded the front yard; the side fences extended from the corners of the house to the front fence on the edge of the road, and thus formed naturally the guarded parallelogram. Often the fence around the front yard was the only one on the farm; everywhere else were boundaries of great stone walls; or if there were rail fences, the front yard fence was the only painted one. I cannot doubt that the first gardens that our foremothers had, which were wholly of flowering plants, were front yards, little enclosures hard won from the forest. [Illustration: The Flowering Almond under the Window.] The word yard, not generally applied now to any enclosure of elegant cultivation, comes from the same root as the word garden. Garth is another derivative, and the word exists much disguised in orchard. In the sixteenth century yard was used in formal literature instead of garden; and later Burns writes of "Eden's bonnie yard, Where yeuthful lovers first were pair'd." This front yard was an English fashion derived from the forecourt so strongly advised by Gervayse Markham (an interesting old English writer on floriculture and husbandry), and found in front of many a yeoman's house, and many a more pretentious house as well in Markham's day. Forecourts were common in England until the middle of the eighteenth century, and may still be seen. The forecourt gave privacy to the house even when in the centre of a town. Its readoption is advised with handsome dwellings in England, where ground-space is limited,--and why not in America, too? [Illustration: Peter's Wreath.] The front yard was sacred to the best beloved, or at any rate the most honored, garden flowers of the house mistress, and was preserved by its fences from inroads of cattle, which then wandered at their will and were not housed, or even enclosed at night. The flowers were often of scant variety, but were those deemed the gentlefolk of the flower world. There was a clump of Daffodils and of the Poet's Narcissus in early spring, and stately Crown Imperial; usually, too, a few scarlet and yellow single Tulips, and Grape Hyacinths. Later came Phlox in abundance--the only native American plant,--Canterbury Bells, and ample and glowing London Pride. Of course there were great plants of white and blue Day Lilies, with their beautiful and decorative leaves, and purple and yellow Flower de Luce. A few old-fashioned shrubs always were seen. By inflexible law there must be a Lilac, which might be the aristocratic Persian Lilac. A Syringa, a flowering Currant, or Strawberry bush made sweet the front yard in spring, and sent wafts of fragrance into the house-windows. Spindling, rusty Snowberry bushes were by the gate, and Snowballs also, or our native Viburnums. Old as they seem, the Spiræas and Deutzias came to us in the nineteenth century from Japan; as did the flowering Quinces and Cherries. The pink Flowering Almond dates back to the oldest front yards (see page 39), and Peter's Wreath certainly seems an old settler and is found now in many front yards that remain. The lovely full-flowered shrub of Peter's Wreath, on page 41, which was photographed for this book, was all that remained of a once-loved front yard. The glory of the front yard was the old-fashioned early red "Piny," cultivated since the days of Pliny. I hear people speaking of it with contempt as a vulgar flower,--flaunting is the conventional derogatory adjective,--but I glory in its flaunting. The modern varieties, of every tint from white through flesh color, coral, pink, ruby color, salmon, and even yellow, to deep red, are as beautiful as Roses. Some are sweet-scented; and they have no thorns, and their foliage is ever perfect, so I am sure the Rose is jealous. I am as fond of the Peony as are the Chinese, among whom it is flower queen. It is by them regarded as an aristocratic flower; and in old New England towns fine Peony plants in an old garden are a pretty good indication of the residence of what Dr. Holmes called New England Brahmins. In Salem and Portsmouth are old "Pinys" that have a hundred blossoms at a time--a glorious sight. A Japanese name is "Flower-of-prosperity"; another name, "Plant-of-twenty-days," because its glories last during that period of time. [Illustration: Peonies in a Salem Garden.] Rhododendrons are to the modern garden what the Peony was in the old-fashioned flower border; and I am glad the modern flower cannot drive the old one out. They are equally varied in coloring, but the Peony is a much hardier plant, and I like it far better. It has no blights, no bugs, no diseases, no running out, no funguses; it doesn't have to be covered in winter, and it will bloom in the shade. No old-time or modern garden is to me fully furnished without Peonies; see how fair they are in this Salem garden. I would grow them in some corner of the garden for their splendid healthy foliage if they hadn't a blossom. The _Pæonia tenuifolia_ in particular has exquisite feathery foliage. The great Tree Peony, which came from China, grows eight feet or more in height, and is a triumph of the flower world; but it was not known to the oldest front yards. Some of the Tree Peonies have finely displayed leafage of a curious and very gratifying tint of green. Miss Jekyll, with her usual felicity, compares its blue cast with pinkish shading to the vari-colored metal alloys of the Japanese bronze workers--a striking comparison. The single Peonies of recent years are of great beauty, and will soon be esteemed here as in China. Not the least of the Peony's charms is its exceeding trimness and cleanliness. The plants always look like a well-dressed, well-shod, well-gloved girl of birth, breeding, and of equal good taste and good health; a girl who can swim, and skate, and ride, and play golf. Every inch has a well-set, neat, cared-for look which the shape and growth of the plant keeps from seeming artificial or finicky. See the white Peony on page 44; is it not a seemly, comely thing, as well as a beautiful one? No flower can be set in our garden of more distinct antiquity than the Peony; the Greeks believed it to be of divine origin. A green arbor of the fourteenth century in England is described as set around with Gillyflower, Tansy, Gromwell, and "Pyonys powdered ay betwene"--just as I like to see Peonies set to this day, "powdered" everywhere between all the other flowers of the border. [Illustration: White Peonies.] I am pleased to note of the common flowers of the New England front yard, that they are no new things; they are nearly all Elizabethan of date--many are older still. Lord Bacon in his essay on gardens names many of them, Crocus, Tulip, Hyacinth, Daffodil, Flower de Luce, double Peony, Lilac, Lily of the Valley. A favorite flower was the yellow garden Lily, the Lemon Lily, _Hemerocallis_, when it could be kept from spreading. Often its unbounded luxuriance exiled it from the front yard to the kitchen dooryard as befell the clump shown facing page 48. Its pretty old-fashioned name was Liricon-fancy, given, I am told, in England to the Lily of the Valley. I know no more satisfying sight than a good bank of these Lemon Lilies in full flower. Below Flatbush there used to be a driveway leading to an old Dutch house, set at regular intervals with great clumps of Lemon Lilies, and their full bloom made them glorious. Their power of satisfactory adaptation in our modern formal garden is happily shown facing page 76, in the lovely garden of Charles E. Mather, Esq., in Haverford, Pennsylvania. The time of fullest inflorescence of the nineteenth century front yard was when Phlox and Tiger Lilies bloomed; but the pinkish-orange colors of the latter (the oddest reds of any flower tints) blended most vilely and rampantly with the crimson-purple of the Phlox; and when London Pride joined with its glowing scarlet, the front yard fairly ached. Nevertheless, an adaptation of that front yard bloom can be most effective in a garden border, when white Phlox only is planted, and the Tiger Lily or cultivated stalks of our wild nodding Lily rise above the white trusses of bloom. These wild Lilies grow very luxuriantly in the garden, often towering above our heads and forming great candelabra bearing two score or more blooms. It is no easy task to secure their deep-rooted rhizomes in the meadow. I know a young man who won his sweetheart by the patience and assiduity with which he dug for her all one broiling morning to secure for her the coveted Lily roots, and collapsed with mild sunstroke at the finish. Her gratitude and remorse were equal factors in his favor. The Tiger Lily is usually thought upon as a truly old-fashioned flower, a veritable antique; it is a favorite of artists to place as an accessory in their colonial gardens, and of authors for their flower-beds of Revolutionary days, but it was not known either in formal garden or front yard, until after "the days when we lived under the King." The bulbs were first brought to England from Eastern Asia in 1804 by Captain Kirkpatrick of the East India Company's Service, and shared with the Japan Lily the honor of being the first Eastern Lilies introduced into European gardens. A few years ago an old gentleman, Mr. Isaac Pitman, who was then about eighty-five years of age, told me that he recalled distinctly when Tiger Lilies first appeared in our gardens, and where he first saw them growing in Boston. So instead of being an old-time flower, or even an old-comer from the Orient, it is one of the novelties of this century. How readily has it made itself at home, and even wandered wild down our roadsides! The two simple colors of Phlox of the old-time front yard, white and crimson-purple, are now augmented by tints of salmon, vermilion, and rose. I recall with special pleasure the profuse garden decoration at East Hampton, Long Island, of a pure cherry-colored Phlox, generally a doubtful color to me, but there so associated with the white blooms of various other plants, and backed by a high hedge covered solidly with blossoming Honeysuckle, that it was wonderfully successful. To other members of the Phlox family, all natives of our own continent, the old front yard owed much; the Moss Pink sometimes crowded out both Grass and its companion the Periwinkle; it is still found in our gardens, and bountifully also in our fields; either in white or pink, it is one of the satisfactions of spring, and its cheerful little blossom is of wonderful use in many waste places. An old-fashioned bloom, the low-growing _Phlox amoena_, with its queerly fuzzy leaves and bright crimson blossoms, was among the most distinctly old-fashioned flowers of the front yard. It was tolerated rather than cultivated, as was its companion, the Arabis or Rock Cress--both crowding, monopolizing creatures. I remember well how they spread over the beds and up the grass banks in my mother's garden, how sternly they were uprooted, in spite of the pretty name of the Arabis--"Snow in Summer." Sometimes the front yard path had edgings of sweet single or lightly double white or tinted Pinks, which were not deemed as choice as Box edgings. Frequently large Box plants clipped into simple and natural shapes stood at the side of the doorstep, usually in the home of the well-to-do. A great shell might be on either side of the door-sill, if there chanced to be seafaring men-folk who lived or visited under the roof-tree. Annuals were few in number; sturdy old perennial plants of many years' growth were the most honored dwellers in the front yard, true representatives of old families. The Roses were few and poor, for there was usually some great tree just without the gate, an Elm or Larch, whose shadow fell far too near and heavily for the health of Roses. Sometimes there was a prickly semidouble yellow Rose, called by us a Scotch Rose, a Sweet Brier, or a rusty-flowered white Rose, similar, though inferior, to the Madame Plantier. A new fashion of trellises appeared in the front yard about sixty years ago, and crimson Boursault Roses climbed up them as if by magic. One marked characteristic of the front yard was its lack of weeds; few sprung up, none came to seed-time; the enclosure was small, and it was a mark of good breeding to care for it well. Sometimes, however, the earth was covered closely under shrubs and plants with the cheerful little Ladies' Delights, and they blossomed in the chinks of the bricked path and under the Box edges. Ambrosia, too, grew everywhere, but these were welcome--they were not weeds. Our old New England houses were suited in color and outline to their front yards as to our landscape. Lowell has given in verse a good description of the kind of New England house that always had a front dooryard of flowers. [Illustration: Yellow Day Lilies.] "On a grass-green swell That towards the south with sweet concessions fell, It dwelt retired, and half had grown to be As aboriginal as rock or tree. It nestled close to earth, and seemed to brood O'er homely thoughts in a half-conscious mood. If paint it e'er had known, it knew no more Than yellow lichens spattered thickly o'er That soft lead gray, less dark beneath the eaves, Which the slow brush of wind and weather leaves. The ample roof sloped backward to the ground And vassal lean-tos gathered thickly round, Patched on, as sire or son had felt the need. But the great chimney was the central thought. * * * * * It rose broad-shouldered, kindly, debonair, Its warm breath whitening in the autumn air." Sarah Orne Jewett, in the plaint of _A Mournful Villager_, has drawn a beautiful and sympathetic picture of these front yards, and she deplores their passing. I mourn them as I do every fenced-in or hedged-in garden enclosure. The sanctity and reserve of these front yards of our grandmothers was somewhat emblematic of woman's life of that day: it was restricted, and narrowed to a small outlook and monotonous likeness to her neighbor's; but it was a life easily satisfied with small pleasures, and it was comely and sheltered and carefully kept, and pleasant to the home household; and these were no mean things. The front yard was never a garden of pleasure; children could not play in these precious little enclosed plots, and never could pick the flowers--front yard and flowers were both too much respected. Only formal visitors entered therein, visitors who opened the gate and closed it carefully behind them, and knocked slowly with the brass knocker, and were ushered in through the ceremonious front door and the little ill-contrived entry, to the stiff fore-room or parlor. The parson and his wife entered that portal, and sometimes a solemn would-be sweetheart, or the guests at a tea party. It can be seen that every one who had enough social dignity to have a front door and a parlor, and visitors thereto, also desired a front yard with flowers as the external token of that honored standing. It was like owning a pew in church; you could be a Christian without having a pew, but not a respected one. Sometimes when there was a "vendue" in the house, reckless folk opened the front gate, and even tied it back. I attended one where the auctioneer boldly set the articles out through the windows under the Lilac bushes and even on the precious front yard plants. A vendue and a funeral were the only gatherings in country communities when the entire neighborhood came freely to an old homestead, when all were at liberty to enter the front dooryard. At the sad time when a funeral took place in the house, the front gate was fastened widely open, and solemn men-neighbors, in Sunday garments, stood rather uncomfortably and awkwardly around the front yard as the women passed into the house of mourning and were seated within. When the sad services began, the men too entered and stood stiffly by the door. Then through the front door, down the mossy path of the front yard, and through the open front gate was borne the master, the mistress, and then their children, and children's children. All are gone from our sight, many from our memory, and often too from our ken, while the Lilacs and Peonies and Flowers de Luce still blossom and flourish with perennial youth, and still claim us as friends. At the side of the house or by the kitchen door would be seen many thrifty blooms: poles of Scarlet Runners, beds of Portulacas and Petunias, rows of Pinks, bunches of Marigolds, level expanses of Sweet Williams, banks of cheerful Nasturtiums, tangles of Morning-glories and long rows of stately Hollyhocks, which were much admired, but were seldom seen in the front yard, which was too shaded for them. Weeds grew here at the kitchen door in a rank profusion which was hard to conquer; but here the winter's Fuchsias or Geraniums stood in flower pots in the sunlight, and the tubs of Oleanders and Agapanthus Lilies. The flowers of the front yard seemed to bear a more formal, a "company" aspect; conventionality rigidly bound them. Bachelor's Buttons might grow there by accident, but Marigolds never were tolerated,--they were pot herbs. Sunflowers were not even permitted in the flower beds at the side of the house unless these stretched down to the vegetable beds. Outside the front yard would be a rioting and cheerful growth of pink Bouncing Bet, or of purple Honesty, and tall straggling plants of a certain small flowered, ragged Campanula, and a white Mallow with flannelly leaves which, doubtless, aspired to inhabit the sacred bounds of the front yard (and probably dwelt there originally), and often were gladly permitted to grow in side gardens or kitchen dooryards, but which were regarded as interloping weeds by the guardians of the front yard, and sternly exiled. Sometimes a bed of these orange-tawny Day Lilies which had once been warmly welcomed from the Orient, and now were not wanted anywhere by any one, kept company with the Bouncing Bet, and stretched cheerfully down the roadside. [Illustration: Orange Day Lilies.] When the fences disappeared with the night rambles of the cows, the front yards gradually changed character; the tender blooms vanished, but the tall shrubs and the Peonies and Flower de Luce sturdily grew and blossomed, save where that dreary destroyer of a garden crept in--the desire for a lawn. The result was then a meagre expanse of poorly kept grass, with no variety, color, or change,--neither lawn nor front yard. It is ever a pleasure to me when driving in a village street or a country road to find one of these front yards still enclosed, or even to note in front of many houses the traces of a past front yard still plainly visible in the flourishing old-fashioned plants of many years' growth. CHAPTER III VARIED GARDENS FAIR "And all without were walkes and alleys dight With divers trees enrang'd in even rankes; And here and there were pleasant arbors pight And shadie seats, and sundry flowering bankes To sit and rest the walkers wearie shankes." --_Faerie Queene_, EDMUND SPENSER. Many simple forms of gardens were common besides the enclosed front yard; and as wealth poured in on the colonies, the beautiful gardens so much thought of in England were copied here, especially by wealthy merchants, as is noted in the first chapter of this book, and by the provincial governors and their little courts; the garden of Governor Hutchinson, in Milford, Massachusetts, is stately still and little changed. [Illustration: Preston Garden.] English gardens, at the time of the settlement of America, had passed beyond the time when, as old Gervayse Markham said, "Of all the best Ornaments used in our English gardens, Knots and Mazes are the most ancient." A maze was a placing of low garden hedges of Privet, Box, or Hyssop, usually set in concentric circles which enclosed paths, that opened into each other by such artful contrivance that it was difficult to find one's way in and out through these bewildering paths. "When well formed, of a man's height, your friend may perhaps wander in gathering berries as he cannot recover himself without your help." The maze was not a thing of beauty, it was "nothing for sweetness and health," to use Lord Bacon's words; it was only a whimsical notion of gardening amusement, pleasing to a generation who liked to have hidden fountains in their gardens to sprinkle suddenly the unwary. I doubt if any mazes were ever laid out in America, though I have heard vague references to one in Virginia. Knots had been the choice adornment of the Tudor garden. They were not wholly a thing of the past when we had here our first gardens, and they have had a distinct influence on garden laying-out till our own day. An Elizabethan poet wrote:-- "My Garden sweet, enclosed with walles strong, Embanked with benches to sitt and take my rest; The knots so enknotted it cannot be expressed The arbores and alyes so pleasant and so dulce." These garden knots were not flower beds edged with Box or Rosemary, with narrow walks between the edgings, as were the parterres of our later formal gardens. They were square, ornamental beds, each of which had a design set in some close-growing, trim plant, clipped flatly across the top, and the design filled in with colored earth or sand; and with no dividing paths. Elaborate models in complicated geometrical pattern were given in gardeners' books, for setting out these knots, which were first drawn on paper and subdivided into squares; then the square of earth was similarly divided, and set out by precise rules. William Lawson, the Izaak Walton of gardeners, gave, as a result of forty-eight years of experience, some very attractive directions for large "knottys" with different "thrids" of flowers, each of one color, which made the design appear as if "made of diverse colored ribands." One of his knots, from _A New Orchard and Garden_ 1618, being a garden fashion in vogue when my forbears came to America, I have chosen as a device for the dedication of this book, thinking it, in Lawson's words, "so comely, and orderly placed, and so intermingled, that one looking thereon cannot but wonder." His knots had significant names, such as "Cinkfoyle; Flower de Luce; Trefoyle; Frette; Lozenge; Groseboowe; Diamond; Ovall; Maze." Gervayse Markham gives various knot patterns to be bordered with Box cut eighteen inches broad at the bottom and kept flat at the top--with the ever present thought for the fine English linen. He has a varied list of circular, diamond-shaped, mixed, and "single impleated knots." [Illustration: Box-edged Parterre at Hampton.] These garden knots were mildly sneered at by Lord Bacon; he said, "they be but toys, you see as good sights many times in tarts;" still I think they must have been quaint, and I should like to see a garden laid out to-day in these pretty Elizabethan knots, set in the old patterns, and with the old flowers. Nor did Parkinson and other practical gardeners look with favor on "curiously knotted gardens," though all gave designs to "satisfy the desires" of their readers. "Open knots" were preferred; these were made with borders of lead, tiles, boards, or even the shankbones of sheep, "which will become white and prettily grace out the garden,"--a fashion I saw a few years ago around flower beds in Charlton, Massachusetts. "Round whitish pebble stones" for edgings were Parkinson's own invention, and proud he was of it, simple as it seems to us. These open knots were then filled in, but "thin and sparingly," with "English Flowers"; or with "Out-Landish Flowers," which were flowers fetched from foreign parts. The parterre succeeded the knot, and has been used in gardens till the present day. Parterres were of different combinations, "well-contriv'd and ingenious." The "parterre of cut-work" was a Box-bordered formal flower garden, of which the garden at Hampton, Maryland (pages 57, 60, and 95), is a striking and perfect example; also the present garden at Mount Vernon (opposite page 12), wherein carefully designed flower beds, edged with Box, are planted with variety of flowers, and separated by paths. Sometimes, of old, fine white sand was carefully strewn on the earth under the flowers. The "parterre à l'Anglaise" had an elaborate design of vari-shaped beds edged with Box, but enclosing grass instead of flowers. In the "parterre de broderie" the Box-edged beds were filled with vari-colored earths and sands. Black earth could be made of iron filings; red earth of pounded tiles. This last-named parterre differed from a knot solely in having the paths among the beds. The _Retir'd Gard'ner_ gives patterns for ten parterres. The main walks which formed the basis of the garden design had in ancient days a singular name--forthrights; these were ever to be "spacious and fair," and neatly spread with colored sands or gravel. Parkinson says, "The fairer and larger your allies and walks be the more grace your garden should have, the lesse harm the herbes and flowers shall receive, and the better shall your weeders cleanse both the bed and the allies." "Covert-walks," or "shade-alleys," had trees meeting in an arch over them. A curious term, found in references to old American flower beds and garden designs, as well as English ones, is the "goose-foot." A "goose-foot" consisted of three flower beds or three avenues radiating rather closely together from a small semicircle; and in some places and under some conditions it is still a charming and striking design, as you stand at the heel of the design and glance down the three avenues. [Illustration: Parterre and Clipped Box at Hampton.] In all these flower beds Box was the favorite edging, but many other trim edgings have been used in parterres and borders by those who love not Box. Bricks were used, and boards; an edging of boards was not as pretty as one of flowers, but it kept the beds trimly in place; a garden thus edged is shown on page 63 which realizes this description of the pleasure-garden in the _Scots Gard'ner_: "The Bordures box'd and planted with variety of fine Flowers orderly Intermixt, Weeded, Mow'd, Rolled and Kept all Clean and Handsome." Germander and Rosemary were old favorites for edging. I have seen snowy edgings of Candy-tuft and Sweet Alyssum, setting off well the vari-colored blooms of the border. One of Sweet Alyssum is shown on page 256. Ageratum is a satisfactory edging. Thyme is of ancient use, but rather unmanageable; one garden owner has set his edgings of Moneywort, otherwise Creeping-jenny. I should be loth to use Moneywort as an edging; I would not care for its yellow flowers in that place, though I find them very kindly and cheerful on dull banks or in damp spots, under the drip of trees and eaves, or better still, growing gladly in the flower pot of the poor. I fear if Moneywort thrived enough to make a close, suitable edging, that it would thrive too well, and would swamp the borders with its underground runners. The name Moneywort is akin to its older title Herb-twopence, or Twopenny Grass. Turner (1548) says the latter name was given from the leaves all "standying together of ech syde of the stalke lyke pence." The striped leaves of one variety of Day Lily make pretty edgings. Those from a Salem garden are here shown. We often see in neglected gardens in New England, or by the roadside where no gardens now exist, a dense gray-green growth of Lavender Cotton, "the female plant of Southernwood," which was brought here by the colonists and here will ever remain. It was used as an edging, and is very pretty when it can be controlled. I know two or three old gardens where it is thus employed. Sometimes in driving along a country road you are startled by a concentration of foliage and bloom, a glimpse of a tiny farm-house, over which are clustered and heaped, and round which are gathered, close enough to be within touch from door or window, flowers in a crowded profusion ample to fill a large flower bed. Such is the mass of June bloom at Wilbur Farm in old Narragansett (page 290)--a home of flowers and bees. Often by the side of the farm-house is a little garden or flower bed containing some splendid examples of old-time flowers. The splendid "running ribbons" of Snow Pinks, on page 292, are in another Narragansett garden that is a bower of blossoms. Thrift has been a common edging since the days of the old herbalist Gerarde. "We have a bright little garden, down on a sunny slope, Bordered with sea-pinks and sweet with the songs and blossoms of hope." The garden of Secretary William H. Seward (in Auburn, New York), so beloved by him in his lifetime, is shown on page 146 and facing page 134. In this garden some beds are edged with Periwinkle, others with Polyanthus, and some with Ivy which Mr. Seward brought from Abbotsford in 1836. This garden was laid out in its present form in 1816, and the sun-dial was then set in its place. The garden has been enlarged, but not changed, the old "George II. Roses" and York and Lancaster Roses still grow and blossom, and the lovely arches of single Michigan Roses still flourish. In it are many flowers and fruits unusual in America, among them a bed of Alpine strawberries. King James I. of Scotland thus wrote of the garden which he saw from his prison window in Windsor Castle:-- "A Garden fair, and in the Corners set An Herbere greene, with Wandis long and small Railit about." These wandis were railings which were much used before Box edgings became universal. Sometimes they were painted the family colors, as at Hampton Court they were green and white, the Tudor colors. These "wandis" still are occasionally seen. In the Berkshire Hills I drove past an old garden thus trimly enclosed in little beds. The rails were painted a dull light brown, almost the color of some tree trunks; and Larkspur, Foxglove, and other tall flowers crowded up to them and hung their heads over the top rails as children hang over a fence or a gate. I thought it a neat, trim fashion, not one I would care for in my own garden, yet not to be despised in the garden of another. [Illustration: Garden of Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright, Waldstein, Fairfield, Conn.] A garden enclosed! so full of suggestion are these simple words to me, so constant is my thought that an ideal flower garden must be an enclosed garden, that I look with regret upon all beautiful flower beds that are not enclosed, not shut in a frame of green hedges, or high walls, or vine-covered fences and dividing trees. It may be selfish to hide so much beauty from general view; but until our dwelling-houses are made with uncurtained glass walls, that all the world may see everything, let those who have ample grounds enclose at least a portion for the sight of friends only. In the heart of Worcester there is a fine old mansion with ample lawns, great trees, and flowering shrubs that all may see over the garden fence as they pass by. Flowers bloom lavishly at one side of the house; and the thoughtless stroller never knows that behind the house, stretching down between the rear gardens and walls of neighboring homes, is a long enclosure of loveliness--sequestered, quiet, full of refreshment to the spirits. We think of the "Old Garden" of Margaret Deland:-- "The Garden glows And 'gainst its walls the city's heart still beats. And out from it each summer wind that blows Carries some sweetness to the tired streets!" [Illustration: Shaded Walk in Garden of Miss Harriet P. F. Burnside, Worcester, Massachusetts.] There is a shaded walk in this garden which is a thing of solace and content to all who tread its pathway; a bit is shown opposite this page, overhung with shrubs of Lilac, Syringa, Strawberry Bush, Flowering Currant, all the old treelike things, so fair-flowered and sweet-scented in spring, so heavy-leaved and cool-shadowing in midsummer: what pleasure would there be in this shaded walk if this garden were separated from the street only by stone curbing or a low rail? And there is an old sun-dial too in this enclosed garden! I fear the street imps of a crowded city would quickly destroy the old monitor were it in an open garden; and they would make sad havoc, too, of the Roses and Larkspurs (page 65) so tenderly reared by the two sisters who together loved and cared for this "garden enclosed." Great trees are at the edges of this garden, and the line of tall shrubs is carried out by the lavish vines and Roses on fences and walls. Within all this border of greenery glow the clustered gems of rare and beautiful flowers, till the whole garden seems like some rich jewel set purposely to be worn in honor over the city's heart--a clustered jewel, not one to be displayed carelessly and heedlessly. [Illustration: Roses and Larkspur in the Garden of Miss Harriet P. F. Burnside, Worcester, Massachusetts.] Salem houses and gardens are like Salem people. Salem houses present to you a serene and dignified front, gracious yet reserved, not thrusting forward their choicest treasures to the eyes of passing strangers; but behind the walls of the houses, enclosed from public view, lie cherished gardens, full of the beauty of life. Such, in their kind, are Salem folk. I know no more speaking, though silent, criticism than those old Salem gardens afford upon the modern fashion in American towns of pulling down walls and fences, removing the boundaries of lawns, and living in full view of every passer-by, in a public grassy park. It is pleasant, I suppose, for the passer-by; but homes are not made for passers-by. Old Salem gardens lie behind the house, out of sight--you have to hunt for them. They are terraced down if they stretch to the water-side; they are enclosed with hedges, and set behind high vine-covered fences, and low out-buildings; and planted around with great trees: thus they give to each family that secluded centring of family life which is the very essence and being of a home. I sat through a June afternoon in a Salem garden whose gate is within a stone's throw of a great theatre, but a few hundred feet from lines of electric cars and a busy street of trade, scarce farther from lines of active steam cars, and with a great power house for a close neighbor. Yet we were as secluded, as embowered in vines and trees, with beehives and rabbit hutches and chicken coops for happy children at the garden's end, as truly in beautiful privacy, as if in the midst of a hundred acres. Could the sense of sound be as sheltered by the enclosing walls as the sense of sight, such a garden were a city paradise. [Illustration: The Homely Back Yard.] There is scant regularity in shape in Salem gardens; there is no search for exact dimensions. Little narrow strips of flower beds run down from the main garden in any direction or at any angle where the fortunate owner can buy a few feet of land. Salem gardens do not change with the whims of fancy, either in the shape or the planting. A few new flowers find place there, such as the _Anemone Japonica_ and the Japanese shrubs; for they are akin in flower sentiment, and consort well with the old inhabitants. There are many choice flowers and fruits in these gardens. In the garden of the Manning homestead (opposite page 112) grows a flourishing Fig tree, and other rare fruits; for fifty years ago this garden was known as the Pomological Garden. It is fitting it should be the home of two Robert Mannings--both well-known names in the history of horticulture in Massachusetts. [Illustration: Covered Well at Home of Bishop Berkeley, Whitehall, Rhode Island.] The homely back yard of an old house will often possess a trim and blooming flower border cutting off the close approach of the vegetable beds (see opposite page 66). These back yards, with the covered Grape arbors, the old pumps, and bricked paths, are cheerful, wholesome places, generally of spotless cleanliness and weedless flower beds. I know one such back yard where the pump was the first one set in the town, and children were taken there from a distance to see the wondrous sight. Why are all the old appliances for raising water so pleasing? A well-sweep is of course picturesque, with its long swinging pole, and you seem to feel the refreshment and purity of the water when you see it brought up from such a distance; and an old roofed well with bucket, such as this one still in use at Bishop Berkeley's Rhode Island home is ever a homelike and companionable object. But a pump is really an awkward-looking piece of mechanism, and hasn't a vestige of beauty in its lines; yet it has something satisfying about it; it may be its domesticity, its homeliness, its simplicity. We have gained infinitely in comfort in our perfect water systems and lavish water of to-day, but we have lost the gratification of the senses which came from the sight and sound of freshly drawn or running water. Much of the delight in a fountain comes, not only from the beauty of its setting and the graceful shape of its jets, but simply from the sight of the water. Sometimes a graceful and picturesque growth of vines will beautify gate posts, a fence, or a kitchen doorway in a wonderfully artistic and pleasing fashion. On page 70 is shown the sheltered doorway of the kitchen of a fine old stone farm-house called, from its hedges of Osage Orange, "The Hedges." It stands in the village of New Hope, County Bucks, Pennsylvania. In 1718 the tract of which this farm of over two hundred acres is but a portion was deeded by the Penns to their kinsman, the direct ancestor of the present owner, John Schofield Williams, Esq. This is but one of the scores of examples I know where the same estate has been owned in one family for nearly two centuries, sometimes even for two hundred and fifty years; and in several cases where the deed from the Indian sachem to the first colonist is the only deed there has ever been, the estate having never changed ownership save by direct bequest. I have three such cases among my own kinsfolk. [Illustration: Kitchen Doorway and Porch at the Hedges.] Another form of garden and mode of planting which was in vogue in the "early thirties" is shown facing page 92. This pillared house and the stiff garden are excellent types; they are at Napanock, County Ulster, New York. Such a house and grounds indicated the possession of considerable wealth when they were built and laid out, for both were costly. The semicircular driveway swept up to the front door, dividing off Box-edged parterres like those of the day of Queen Anne. These parterres were sparsely filled, the sunnier beds being set with Spring bulbs; and there were always the yellow Day Lilies somewhere in the flower beds, and the white and blue Day Lilies, the common Funkias. Formal urns were usually found in the parterres and sometimes a great cone or ball of clipped Box. These gardens had some universal details, they always had great Snowball bushes, and Syringas, and usually white Roses, chiefly Madame Plantiers; the piazza trellises had old climbing Roses, the Queen of the Prairie or Boursault Roses. These gardens are often densely overshadowed with great evergreen trees grown from the crowded planting of seventy years ago; none are cut down, and if one dies its trunk still stands, entwined with Woodbine. I don't know that we would lay out and plant just such a garden to-day, any more than we would build exactly such a house; but I love to see both, types of the refinement of their day, and I deplore any changes. An old Southern house of allied form is shown on page 72, and its garden facing page 70,--Greenwood, in Thomasville, Georgia; but of course this garden has far more lavish and rich bloom. The decoration of this house is most interesting--a conventionalized Magnolia, and the garden is surrounded with splendid Magnolias and Crape Myrtles. The border edgings in this garden are lines of bricks set overlapping in a curious manner. They serve to keep the beds firmly in place, and the bricks are covered over with an inner edging of thrifty Violets. Curious tubs and boxes for plants are made of bricks set solidly in mortar. The garden is glorious with Roses, which seem to consort so well with Magnolias and Violets. [Illustration: Greenwood, Thomasville, Georgia.] I love a Dutch garden, "circummured" with brick. By a Dutch garden, I mean a small garden, oblong or square, sunk about three or four feet in a lawn--so that when surrounded by brick walls they seem about two feet high when viewed outside, but are five feet or more high from within the garden. There are brick or stone steps in the middle of each of the four walls by which to descend to the garden, which may be all planted with flowers, but preferably should have set borders of flowers with a grass-plot in the centre. On either side of the steps should be brick posts surmounted by Dutch pots with plants, or by balls of stone. Planted with bulbs, these gardens in their flowering time are, as old Parkinson said, a "perfect fielde of delite." We have very pretty Dutch gardens, so called, in America, but their chief claim to being Dutch is that they are set with bulbs, and have Delft or other earthen pots or boxes for formal plants or shrubs. Sunken gardens should be laid out under the supervision of an intelligent landscape architect; and even then should have a reason for being sunken other than a whim or increase in costliness. I visited last summer a beautiful estate which had a deep sunken Dutch garden with a very low wall. It lay at the right side of the house at a little distance; and beyond it, in full view of the peristyle, extended the only squalid objects in the horizon. A garden on the level, well planted, with distant edging of shrubbery, would have hidden every ugly blemish and been a thing of beauty. As it is now, there can be seen from the house nothing of the Dutch garden but a foot or two of the tops of several clipped trees, looking like very poor, stunted shrubs. I must add that this garden, with its low wall, has been a perfect man-trap. It has been evident that often, on dark nights, workmen who have sought a "short cut" across the grounds have fallen over the shallow wall, to the gardener's sorrow, and the bulbs' destruction. Once, at dawn, the unhappy gardener found an ancient horse peacefully feeding among the Hyacinths and Tulips. He said he didn't like the grass in his new pasture nor the sudden approach to it; that he was too old for such new-fangled ways. I know another estate near Philadelphia, where the sinking of a garden revealed an exquisite view of distant hills; such a garden has reason for its form. [Illustration: Roses and Violets in Garden at Greenwood, Thomasville, Georgia.] We have had few water-gardens in America till recent years; and there are some drawbacks to their presence near our homes, as I was vividly aware when I visited one in a friend's garden early in May this year. Water-hyacinths were even then in bloom, and two or three exquisite Lilies; and the Lotus leaves rose up charmingly from the surface of the tank. Less charmingly rose up also a cloud of vicious mosquitoes, who greeted the newcomer with a warm chorus of welcome. As our newspapers at that time were filled with plans for the application of kerosene to every inch of water-surface, such as I saw in these Lily tanks, accompanied by magnified drawings of dreadful malaria-bearing insects, I fled from them, preferring to resign both _Nymphæa_ and _Anopheles_. [Illustration: Water Garden at Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York.] After the introduction to English folk of that wonder of the world, the Victoria Regia, it was cultivated by enthusiastic flower lovers in America, and was for a time the height of the floral fashion. Never has the glorious Victoria Regia and scarce any other flower been described as by Colonel Higginson, a wonderful, a triumphant word picture. I was a very little child when I saw that same lovely Lily in leaf and flower that he called his neighbor; but I have never forgotten it, nor how afraid I was of it; for some one wished to lift me upon the great leaf to see whether it would hold me above the water. We had heard that the native children in South America floated on the leaves. I objected to this experiment with vehemence; but my mother noted that I was no more frightened than was the faithful gardener at the thought of the possible strain on his precious plant of the weight of a sturdy child of six or seven years. I have seen the Victoria Regia leaves of late years, but I seldom hear of its blossoming; but alas! we take less heed of the blooming of unusual plants than we used to thirty or forty years ago. Then people thronged a greenhouse to see a new Rose or Camellia Japonica; even a Night-blooming Cereus attracted scores of visitors to any house where it blossomed. And a fine Cactus of one of our neighbors always held a crowded reception when in rich bloom. It was a part of the "Flower Exchange," an interest all had for the beautiful flowers of others, a part of the old neighborly life. [Illustration: Terrace Wall at Drumthwacket, Princeton, New Jersey.] Within the past five or six years there have been laid out in America, at the country seats of men of wealth and culture, a great number of formal gardens,--Italian gardens, some of them are worthily named, as they have been shaped and planted in conformity with the best laws and rules of Italian garden-making--that special art. On this page is shown the finely proportioned terrace wall, and opposite the upper terrace and formal garden of Drumthwacket, Princeton, New Jersey, the country seat of M. Taylor Pyne, Esq. This garden affords a good example of the accord which should ever exist between the garden and its surroundings. The name, Drumthwacket--a wooded hill--is a most felicitous one; the place is part of the original grant to William Penn, and has remained in the possession of one family until late in the nineteenth century. From this beautifully wooded hill the terrace-garden overlooks the farm buildings, the linked ponds, the fertile fields and meadows; a serene pastoral view, typical of the peaceful landscape of that vicinity--yet it was once the scene of fiercest battle. For the Drumthwacket farm is the battle-ground of that important encounter of 1777 between the British and the Continental troops, known as the Battle of Princeton, the turning point of the Revolution, in which Washington was victorious. To this day, cannon ball and grape shot are dug up in the Drumthwacket fields. The Lodge built in 1696 was, at Washington's request, the shelter for the wounded British officers; and the Washington Spring in front of the Lodge furnished water to Washington. The group of trees on the left of the upper pond marks the sheltered and honored graves of the British soldiers, where have slept for one hundred and twenty-four years those killed at this memorable encounter. If anything could cement still more closely the affections of the English and American peoples, it would be the sight of the tenderly sheltered graves of British soldiers in America, such as these at Drumthwacket and other historic fields on our Eastern coast. At Concord how faithfully stand the sentinel pines over the British dead of the Battle of Concord, who thus repose, shut out from the tread of heedless feet yet ever present for the care and thought of Concord people. [Illustration: Garden at Avonwood Court, Haverford, Pennsylvania, Country-seat of Charles E. Mather, Esq.] We have older Italian gardens. Some of them are of great loveliness, among them the unique and dignified garden of Hollis H. Hunnewell, Esq., but many of the newer ones, even in their few summers, have become of surprising grace and beauty, and their exquisite promise causes a glow of delight to every garden lover. I have often tried to analyze and account for the great charm of a formal garden, to one who loves so well the unrestrained and lavished blossoming of a flower border crowded with nature-arranged and disarranged blooms. A chance sentence in the letter of a flower-loving friend, one whose refined taste is an inherent portion of her nature, runs thus:-- "I have the same love, the same sense of perfect satisfaction, in the old formal garden that I have in the sonnet in poetry, in the Greek drama as contrasted with the modern drama; something within me is ever drawn toward that which is restrained and classic." In these few words, then, is defined the charm of the formal garden--a well-ordered, a classic restraint. [Illustration: Garden at Drumthwacket, Princeton, New Jersey.] Some of the new formal gardens seem imperfect in design and inadequate in execution; worse still, they are unsuited to their surroundings; but gracious nature will give even to these many charms of color, fragrance, and shape through lavish plant growth. I have had given to me sets of beautiful photographs of these new Italian gardens, which I long to include with my pictures of older flower beds; but I cannot do so in full in a book on Old-time Gardens, though they are copied from far older gardens than our American ones. I give throughout my book occasional glimpses of detail in modern formal gardens; and two examples may be fitly illustrated and described in comparative fulness in this book, because they are not only unusual in their beauty and promise, but because they have in plan and execution some bearing on my special presentation of gardens. These two are the gardens of Avonwood Court in Haverford, Pennsylvania, the country-seat of Charles E. Mather, Esq., of Philadelphia; and of Yaddo, in Saratoga, New York, the country-seat of Spencer Trask, Esq., of New York. [Illustration: Sun-dial at Avonwood Court, Haverford, Pennsylvania.] The garden at Avonwood Court was designed and laid out in 1896 by Mr. Percy Ash. The flower planting was done by Mr. John Cope; and the garden is delightsome in proportions, contour, and aspect. Its claim to illustrative description in this book lies in the fact that it is planted chiefly with old-fashioned flowers, and its beds are laid out and bordered with thriving Box in a truly old-time mode. It affords a striking example of the beauty and satisfaction that can come from the use of Box as an edging, and old-time flowers as a filling of these beds. Among the two hundred different plants are great rows of yellow Day Lilies shown in the view facing page 76; regular plantings of Peonies; borders of Flower de Luce; banks of Lilies of the Valley; rows of white Fraxinella and Lupine, beds of fringed Poppies, sentinels of Yucca--scores of old favorites have grown and thriven in the cheery manner they ever display when they are welcome and beloved. The sun-dial in this garden is shown facing page 82; it was designed by Mr. Percy Ash, and can be regarded as a model of simple outlines, good proportions, careful placing, and symmetrical setting. By placing I mean that it is in the right site in relation to the surrounding flower beds, and to the general outlines of the garden; it is a dignified and significant garden centre. By setting I mean its being raised to proper prominence in the garden scheme, by being placed at the top of a platform formed of three circular steps of ample proportion and suitable height, that its pedestal is also of the right size and not so high but one can, when standing on the top step, read with ease the dial's response to our question, "What's the time o' the day?" The hedges and walls of Honeysuckle, Roses, and other flowering vines that surround this garden have thriven wonderfully in the five years of the garden's life, and look like settings of many years. The simple but graceful wall seat gives some idea of the symmetrical and simple garden furnishings, as well as the profusion of climbing vines that form the garden's boundaries. [Illustration: Entrance Porch and Gate to the Rose Garden at Yaddo.] This book bears on the title-page a redrawing of a charming old woodcut of the eighteenth century, a very good example of the art thought and art execution of that day, being the work of a skilful designer. It is from an old stilted treatise on orchards and gardens, and it depicts a cheerful little Love, with anxious face and painstaking care, measuring and laying out the surface of the earth in a garden. On his either side are old clipped Yews; and at his feet a spade and pots of garden flowers, among them the Fritillary so beloved of all flower lovers and herbalists of that day, a significant flower--a flower of meaning and mystery. This drawing may be taken as an old-time emblem, and a happy one, to symbolize the making of the beautiful modern Rose Garden at Yaddo; where Love, with tenderest thought, has laid out the face of the earth in an exquisite garden of Roses, for the happiness and recreation of a dearly loved wife. The noble entrance gate and porch of this Rose Garden formed a happy surprise to the garden's mistress when unveiled at the dedication of the garden. They are depicted on page 81, and there may be read the inscription which tells in a few well-chosen words the story of the inspiration of the garden; but "between the lines," to those who know the Rose Garden and its makers, the inscription speaks with even deeper meaning the story of a home whose beauty is only equalled by the garden's spirit. To all such readers the Rose Garden becomes a fitting expression of the life of those who own it and care for it. This quality of expression, of significance, may be seen in many a smaller and simpler garden, even in a tiny cottage plot; you can perceive, through the care bestowed upon it, and its responsive blossoming, a _something_ which shows the life of the garden owners; you know that they are thoughtful, kindly, beauty-loving, home-loving. [Illustration: Pergola and Terrace Walk in Rose Garden at Yaddo.] Behind the beautiful pergola of the Yaddo garden, set thickly with Crimson Rambler, a screenlike row of poplars divides the Rose Garden from a luxuriant Rock Garden, and an Old-fashioned Garden of large extent, extraordinary profusion, and many years' growth. Perhaps the latter-named garden might seem more suited to my pages, since it is more advanced in growth and apparently more akin to my subject; but I wish to write specially of the Rose Garden, because it is an unusual example of what can be accomplished without aid of architect or landscape gardener, when good taste, careful thought, attention to detail, a love of flowers, and _intent to attain perfection_ guide the garden's makers. It is happily placed in a country of most charming topography, but it must not be thought that the garden shaped itself; its beautiful proportions, contour, and shape were carefully studied out and brought to the present perfection by the same force that is felt in the garden's smallest detail, the power of Love. The Rose Garden is unusually large for a formal garden; with its vistas and walks, the connected Daffodil Dell, and the Rock Garden, it fills about ten acres. But the estate is over eight hundred acres, and the house very large in ground extent, so the garden seems well-proportioned. This Rose Garden has an unusual attraction in the personal interest of every detail, such as is found in few American gardens of great size, and indeed in few English gardens. The gardens of the Countess Warwick, at Easton Lodge, in Essex, possess the same charm, a personal meaning and significance in the statues and fountains, and even in the planting of flower borders. The illustration on page 83 depicts the general shape of the Yaddo Rose Garden, as seen from the upper terrace; but it does not show how the garden stretches down the fine marble steps, past the marble figures of Diana and Paris, and along the paths of standard Roses, past the shallow fountain which is not so large as to obscure what speaks the garden's story, the statue of Christalan, that grand creation in one of Mrs. Trask's idyls, _Under King Constantine_. This heroic figure, showing to full extent the genius of the sculptor, William Ordway Partridge, also figures the genius of the poet-creator, and is of an inexpressible and impressive nobility. With hand and arm held to heaven, Christalan shows against the background of rich evergreens as the true knight of this garden of sentiment and chivalry. [Illustration: Statue of Christalan in Rose Garden at Yaddo.] "The sunlight slanting westward through the trees Fell first upon his lifted, golden head, Making a shining helmet of his curls, And then upon the Lilies in his hand. His eyes had a defiant, fearless glow; Against the sombre background of the wood He looked scarce human." The larger and more impressive fountain at Yaddo is shown on these pages. It is one hundred feet long and seventy feet wide, and is in front of the house, to the east. Its marble figures signify the Dawn; it will be noted that on this site its beauties show against a suited and ample background, and its grand proportions are not permitted to obscure the fine statue of Christalan from the view of those seated on the terrace or walking under the shade of the pergola. [Illustration: Sun-dial in Rose Garden at Yaddo.] Especially beautiful is the sun-dial on the upper terrace, shown on page 86. The metal dial face is supported by a marble slab resting on two carved standards of classic design representing conventionalized lions, these being copies of those two splendid standards unearthed at Pompeii, which still may be seen by the side of the impluvium in the atrium or main hall of the finest Græco-Roman dwelling-place which has been restored in that wonderful city. These sun-dial standards at Yaddo were made by the permission and under the supervision of the Italian government. I can conceive nothing more fitting or more inspiring to the imagination than that, telling as they do the story of the splendor of ancient Pompeii and of the passing centuries, they should now uphold to our sight a sun-dial as if to bid us note the flight of time and the vastness of the past. [Illustration: Bronze Face of Dial in Rose Garden at Yaddo.] The entire sun-dial, with its beautiful adjuncts of carefully shaped marble seats, stands on a semicircular plaza of marble at the head of the noble flight of marble steps. The engraved metal dial face bears two exquisite verses--the gift of one poet to another--of Dr. Henry Van Dyke to the garden's mistress, Katrina Trask. These dial mottoes are unusual, and perfect examples of that genius which with a few words can shape a lasting gem of our English tongue. At the edge of the dial face is this motto: "Hours fly, Flowers die, New Days, New Ways, Pass by; Love stays." At the base of the gnomon is the second motto:-- Time is Too Slow for those who Wait, Too Swift for those who Fear, Too Long for those who Grieve, Too Short for those who Rejoice; But for those who Love, Time is Eternity. I have for years been a student of sun-dial lore, a collector of sun-dial mottoes and inscriptions, of which I have many hundreds. I know nowhere, either in English, on English or Scotch sun-dials, or in the Continental tongues, any such exquisite dial legends as these two--so slight of form, so simple in wording, so pure in diction, yet of sentiment, of thought, how full! how impressive! They stamp themselves forever on the memory as beautiful examples of what James Russell Lowell called verbal magic; that wonderful quality which comes, neither from chosen words, nor from their careful combination into sentences, but from something which is as inexplicable in its nature as it is in its charm. [Illustration: Ancient Pine in Garden at Yaddo.] To tree lovers the gardens and grounds at Yaddo have glorious charms in their splendid trees; but one can be depicted here--the grand native Pine, over eight feet in diameter, which, with other stately sentinels of its race, stands a sombrely beautiful guard over all this loveliness. CHAPTER IV BOX EDGINGS "They walked over the crackling leaves in the garden, between the lines of Box, breathing its fragrance of eternity; for this is one of the odors which carry us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past; if we ever lived on another ball of stone than this, it must be that there was Box growing on it." --_Elsie Venner_, OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 1861. To many of us, besides Dr. Holmes, the unique aroma of the Box, cleanly bitter in scent as in taste, is redolent of the eternal past; it is almost hypnotic in its effect. This strange power is not felt by all, nor is it a present sensitory influence; it is an hereditary memory, half-known by many, but fixed in its intensity in those of New England birth and descent, true children of the Puritans; to such ones the Box breathes out the very atmosphere of New England's past. I cannot see in clear outline those prim gardens of centuries ago, nor the faces of those who walked and worked therein; but I know, as I stroll to-day between our old Box-edged borders, and inhale the beloved bitterness of fragrance, and gather a stiff sprig of the beautiful glossy leaves, that in truth the garden lovers and garden workers of other days walk beside me, though unseen and unheard. About thirty years ago a bright young Yankee girl went to the island of Cuba as a governess to the family of a sugar planter. It was regarded as a somewhat perilous adventure by her home-staying folk, and their apprehensions of ill were realized in her death there five years later. This was not, however, all that happened to her. The planter's wife had died in this interval of time, and she had been married to the widower. A daughter had been born, who, after her mother's death, was reared in the Southern island, in Cuban ways, having scant and formal communication with her New England kin. When this girl was twenty years old, she came to the little Massachusetts town where her mother had been reared, and met there a group of widowed and maiden aunts, and great-aunts. After sitting for a time in her mother's room in the old home, the reserve which often exists between those of the same race who should be friends but whose lives have been widely apart, and who can never have more than a passing sight of each other, made them in semi-embarrassment and lack of resources of mutual interest walk out into the garden. As they passed down the path between high lines of Box, the girl suddenly stopped, looked in terror at the gate, and screamed out in fright, "The dog, the dog, save me, he will kill me!" _No dog was there_, but on that very spot, between those Box hedges, thirty years before, her mother had been attacked and bitten by an enraged dog, to the distress and apprehension of the aunts, who all recalled the occurrence, as they reassured the fainting and bewildered girl. She, of course, had never known aught of this till she was told it by the old Box. [Illustration: House and Garden at Napanock. County Ulster, New York.] Many other instances of the hypnotic effect of Box are known, and also of its strong influence on the mind through memory. I know of a man who travelled a thousand miles to renew acquaintance and propose marriage to an old sweetheart, whom he had not seen and scarcely thought of for years, having been induced to this act wholly through memories of her, awakened by a chance stroll in an old Box-edged garden such as those of his youth; at the gate of one of which he had often lingered, after walking home with her from singing-school. I ought to be able to add that the twain were married as a result of this sentimental memory-awakening through the old Box; but, in truth, they never came very close to matrimony. For when he saw her he remained absolutely silent on the subject of marriage; the fickle creature forgot the Box scent and the singing-school, while she openly expressed to her friends her surprise at his aged appearance, and her pity for his dulness. For the sense of sight is more powerful than that of smell, and the Box might prove a master hand at hinting, but it failed utterly in permanent influence. Those who have not loved the Box for centuries in the persons and with the partial noses of their Puritan forbears, complain of its curious scent, say, like Polly Peacham, that "they can't abear it," and declare that it brings ever the thought of old graveyards. I have never seen Box in ancient burying-grounds, they were usually too neglected to be thus planted; but it was given a limited space in the cemeteries of the middle of this century. Even those borders have now generally been dug up to give place to granite copings. The scent of Box has been aptly worded by Gabriel d'Annunzio, in his _Virgin of the Rocks_, in his description of a neglected garden. He calls it a "bitter sweet odor," and he notes its influence in making his wanderers in this garden "reconstruct some memory of their far-off childhood." The old Jesuit poet Rapin writing in the seventeenth century tells a fanciful tale that-- "Gardens of old, nor Art, nor Rules obey'd, But unadorn'd, or wild Neglect betray'd;" that Flora's hair hung undressed, neglected "in artless tresses," until in pity another nymph "around her head wreath'd a Boxen Bough" from the fields; which so improved her beauty that trim edgings were placed ever after--"where flowers disordered once at random grew." He then describes the various figures of Box, the way to plant it, its disadvantages, and the associate flowers that should be set with it, all in stilted verse. Queen Anne was a royal enemy of Box. By her order many of the famous Box hedges at Hampton Court were destroyed; by her example, many old Box-edged gardens throughout England were rooted up. There are manifold objections raised to Box besides the dislike of its distinctive odor: heavy edgings and hedges of Box "take away the heart of the ground" and flowers pine within Box-edged borders; the roots of Box on the inside of the flower knot or bed, therefore, have to be cut and pulled out in order to leave the earth free for flower roots. It is also alleged that Box harbors slugs--and I fear it does. [Illustration: Box Parterre at Hampton.] We are told that it is not well to plant Box edgings in our gardens, because Box is so frail, is so easily winter-killed, that it dies down in ugly fashion. Yet see what great trees it forms, even when untrimmed, as in the Prince Garden (page 31). It is true that Box does not always flourish in the precise shape you wish, but it has nevertheless a wonderfully tenacious hold on life. I know nothing more suggestive of persistence and of sad sentiment than the view often seen in forlorn city enclosures, as you drive past, or rush by in an electric car, of an aged bush of Box, or a few feet of old Box hedge growing in the beaten earth of a squalid back yard, surrounded by dirty tenement houses. Once a fair garden there grew; the turf and flowers and trees are vanished; but spared through accident, or because deemed so valueless, the Box still lives. Even in Washington and other Southern cities, where the negro population eagerly gather Box at Christmas-tide, you will see these forlorn relics of the garden still growing, and their bitter fragrance rises above the vile odors of the crowded slums. Box formed an important feature of the garden of Pliny's favorite villa in Tuscany, which he described in his letter to Apollinaris. How I should have loved its formal beauty! On the southern front a terrace was bordered with a Box hedge and "embellished with various figures in Box, the representation of divers animals." Beyond was a circus formed around by ranges of Box rising in walls of varied heights. The middle of this circus was ornamented with figures of Box. On one side was a hippodrome set with a plantation of Box trees backed with Plane trees; thence ran a straight walk divided by Box hedges into alleys. Thus expanses were enclosed, one of which held a beautiful meadow, another had "knots of Plane tree," another was "set with Box a thousand different forms." Some of these were letters expressing the name of the owner of all this extravagance; or the initials of various fair Roman dames, a very gallant pleasantry of young Pliny. Both Plane tree and Box tree of such ancient gardens were by tradition nourished with wine instead of water. Initials of Box may be seen to-day in English gardens, and heraldic devices. French gardens vied with English gardens in curious patterns in Box. The garden of Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV. had a stag chase, in clipped Box, with greyhounds in chase. Globes, pyramids, tubes, cylinders, cones, arches, and other shapes were cut in Box as they were in Yew. A very pretty conceit in Box was-- "Horizontal dials on the ground In living Box by cunning artists traced." Reference is frequent enough to these dials of Box to show that they were not uncommon in fine old English gardens. There were sun-dials either of Box or Thrift, in the gardens of colleges both at Oxford and Cambridge, as may be seen in Loggan's _Views_. Two modern ones are shown; one, on page 98, is in the garden of Lady Lennox, at Broughton Castle, Banbury, England. Another of exceptionally fine growth and trim perfection in the garden at Ascott, the seat of Mr. Leopold de Rothschild (opposite page 100.) These are curious rather than beautiful, but display well that quality given in the poet's term "the tonsile Box." [Illustration: Sun-dial in Box at Broughton Castle.] Writing of a similar sun-dial, Lady Warwick says:-- "Never was such a perfect timekeeper as my sun-dial, and the figures which record the hours are all cut out and trimmed in Box, and there again on its outer ring is a legend which read in whatever way you please: Les heures heureuses ne se comptent pas. They were outlined for me, those words, in baby sprigs of Box by a friend who is no more, who loved my garden and was good to it." Box hedges were much esteemed in England--so says Parkinson, to dry linen on, affording the raised expanse and even surface so much desired. It can always be noted in all domestic records of early days that the vast washing of linen and clothing was one of the great events of the year. Sometimes, in households of plentiful supply, these washings were done but once a year; in other homes, semi-annually. The drying and bleaching linen was an unceasing attraction to rascals like Autolycus, who had a "pugging tooth"--that is, a prigging tooth. These linen thieves had a special name, they were called "prygmen"; they wandered through the country on various pretexts, men and their doxies, and were the bane of English housewives. The Box hedges were also in constant use to hold the bleaching webs of homespun and woven flaxen and hempen stuff, which were often exposed for weeks in the dew and sunlight. In 1710 a reason given for the disuse and destruction of "quicksetted arbors and hedges" was that they "agreed very ill with the ladies' muslins." Box was of little value in the apothecary shop, was seldom used in medicine. Parkinson said that the leaves and dust of boxwood "boyld in lye" would make hair to be "of an Aborne or Abraham color"--that is, auburn. This was a very primitive hair dye, but it must have been a powerful one. Boxwood was a firm, beautiful wood, used to make tablets for inscriptions of note. The mottled wood near the root was called dudgeon. Holland's translation of Pliny says, "The Box tree seldome hath any grain crisped damaske-wise, and never but about the root, the which is dudgin." From its esteemed use for dagger hilts came the word dudgeon-dagger, and the terms "drawn-dudgeon" and "high-dudgeon," meaning offence or discord. I plead for the Box, not for its fragrance, for you may not be so fortunate as to have a Puritan sense of smell, nor for its weird influence, for that is intangible; but because it is the most becoming of all edgings to our garden borders of old-time flowers. The clear compact green of its shining leaves, the trim distinctness of its clipped lines, the attributes that made Pope term it the "shapely Box," make it the best of all foils for the varied tints of foliage, the many colors of bloom, and the careless grace in growth of the flowers within the border. Box edgings are pleasant, too, in winter, showing in grateful relief against the tiresome monotony of the snow expanse. And they bear sometimes a crown of lightest snow wreaths, which seem like a white blossoming in promise of the beauties of the border in the coming summer. Pick a bit of this winter Box, even with the mercury below zero. Lo! you have a breath of the hot dryness of the midsummer garden. Box grows to great size, even twenty feet in height. In Southern gardens, where it is seldom winter-killed, it is often of noble proportions. In the lovely garden of Martha Washington at Mount Vernon the Box is still preserved in the beauty and interest of its original form. [Illustration: Sun-dial in Box at Ascott.] The Box edgings and hedges of many other Southern gardens still are in good condition; those of the old Preston homestead at Columbia, South Carolina (shown on pages 15 and 18, and facing page 54), owe their preservation during the Civil War to the fact that the house was then the refuge of a sisterhood of nuns. The Ridgely estate, Hampton, in County Baltimore, Maryland, has a formal garden in which the perfection of the Box is a delight. The will of Captain Charles Ridgely, in 1787, made an appropriation of money and land for this garden. The high terrace which overlooks the garden and the shallow ones which break the southern slope and mark the boundaries of each parterre are fine examples of landscape art, and are said to be the work of Major Chase Barney, a famous military engineer. By 1829 the garden was an object of beauty and much renown. A part only of the original parterre remains, but the more modern flower borders, through the unusual perspective and contour of the garden, do not clash with the old Box-edged beds. These edgings were reset in 1870, and are always kept very closely cut. The circular domes of clipped box arise from stems at least a hundred years old. The design of the parterre is so satisfactory that I give three views of it in order to show it fully. (See pages 57, 60, and 95.) A Box-edged garden of much beauty and large extent existed for some years in the grounds connected with the County Jail in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. It was laid out by the wife of the warden, aided by the manual labor of convicted prisoners, with her earnest hope that working among flowers would have a benefiting and softening influence on these criminals. She writes rather dubiously: "They all enjoyed being out of doors with their pipes, whether among the flowers or the vegetables; and no attempt at escape was ever made by any of them while in the comparative freedom of the flower-garden." She planted and marked distinctly in this garden over seven hundred groups of annuals and hardy perennials, hoping the men would care to learn the names of the flowers, and through that knowledge, and their practise in the care of Box edgings and hedges, be able to obtain positions as under-gardeners when their terms of imprisonment expired. The garden at Tudor Place, the home of Mrs. Beverley Kennon (page 103), displays fine Box; and the garden of the poet Longfellow which is said to have been laid out after the Box-edged parterres at Versailles. Throughout this book are scattered several good examples of Box from Salem and other towns; in a sweet, old garden on Kingston Hill, Rhode Island (page 104) the flower-beds are anchor-shaped. In favorable climates Box edgings may grow in such vigor as to entirely fill the garden beds. An example of this is given on page 105, showing the garden at Tuckahoe. The beds were laid out over a large space of ground in a beautiful design, which still may be faintly seen by examining the dark expanse beside the house, which is now almost solid Box. The great hedges by the avenue are also Box; between similar ones at Upton Court in Camden, South Carolina, riders on horseback cannot be seen nor see over it. New England towns seldom show such growth of Box; but in Hingham, Massachusetts, at the home of Mrs. Robbins, author of that charming book, _The Rescue of an Old Place_, there is a Box bower, with walls of Box fifteen feet in height. These walls were originally the edgings of a flower bed on the "Old Place." Read Dr. John Brown's charming account of the Box bower of the "Queen's Maries." [Illustration: Garden at Tudor Place.] Box grows on Long Island with great vigor. At Brecknock Hall, the family residence of Mrs. Albert Delafield at Greenport, Long Island, the hedges of plain and variegated Box are unusually fine, and the paths are well laid out. Some of them are entirely covered by the closing together of the two hedges which are often six or seven feet in height. [Illustration: Anchor-shaped Flower-beds. Kingston, Rhode Island.] In spite of the constant assertion of the winter-killing of Box in the North, the oldest Box in the country is that at Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York. The estate is now owned by the tenth mistress of the manor, Miss Cornelia Horsford; the first mistress of the manor, Grissel Sylvester, who had been Grissel Gardiner, came there in 1652. It is told, and is doubtless true, that she brought there the first Box plants, to make, in what was then a far-away island, a semblance of her home garden. It is said that this Box was thriving in Madam Sylvester's garden when George Fox preached there to the Indians. The oldest Box is fifteen or eighteen feet high; not so tall, I think, as the neglected Box at Vaucluse, the old Hazard place near Newport, but far more massive and thrifty and shapely. Box needs unusual care and judgment, an instinct almost, for the removal of certain portions. It sends out tiny rootlets at the joints of the sprays, and these grow readily. The largest and oldest Box bushes at Sylvester Manor garden are a study in their strong, hearty stems, their perfect foliage, their symmetry; they show their care of centuries. [Illustration: Ancient Box at Tuckahoe.] The delightful Box-edged flower beds were laid out in their present form about seventy years ago by the grandfather of the present owner. There is a Lower Garden, a Terrace Garden, which are shown on succeeding pages, a Fountain Garden, a Rose Garden, a Water Garden; a bit of the latter is on page 75. In some portions of these gardens, especially on the upper terrace, the Box is so high, and set in such quaint and rambling figures, that it closely approaches an old English maze; and it was a pretty sight to behold a group of happy little children running in and out among these Box hedges that extended high over their heads, searching long and eagerly for the central bower where their little tea party was set. Over these old garden borders hangs literally an atmosphere of the past; the bitter perfume stimulates the imagination as we walk by the side of these splendid Box bushes, and think, as every one must, of what they have seen, of what they know; on this garden is written the history of over two centuries of beautiful domestic home life. It is well that we still have such memorials to teach us the nobility and beauty of such a life. CHAPTER V THE HERB GARDEN "To have nothing here but Sweet Herbs, and those only choice ones too, and every kind its bed by itself." --DESIDERIUS ERASMUS, 1500. In Montaigne's time it was the custom to dedicate special chapters of books to special persons. Were it so to-day, I should dedicate this chapter to the memory of a friend who has been constantly in my mind while writing it; for she formed in her beautiful garden, near our modern city, Chicago, the only perfect herb garden I know,--a garden that is the counterpart of the garden of Erasmus, made four centuries ago; for in it are "nothing but Sweet Herbs, and choice ones too, and every kind its bed by itself." A corner of it is shown on page 108. This herb garden is so well laid out that I will give directions therefrom for a bed of similar planting. It may be placed at the base of a grass bank or at the edge of a garden. Let two garden walks be laid out, one at the lower edge, perhaps, of the bank, the other parallel, ten, fifteen, twenty feet away. Let narrow paths be left at regular intervals running parallel from walk to walk, as do the rounds of a ladder from the two side bars. In the narrow oblong beds formed by these paths plant solid rows of herbs, each variety by itself, with no attempt at diversity of design. You can thus walk among them, and into them, and smell them in their concentrated strength, and you can gather them at ease. On the bank can be placed the creeping Thyme, and other low-running herbs. Medicinal shrubs should be the companions of the herbs; plant these as you will, according to their growth and habit, making them give variety of outline to the herb garden. [Illustration: Herb Garden at White Birches, Elmhurst, Illinois.] There are few persons who have a strong enough love of leaf scents, or interest in herbs, to make them willing to spend much time in working in an herb garden. The beauty and color of flowers would compensate them, but not the growth or scent of leafage. It is impossible to describe to one who does not feel by instinct "the lure of green things growing," the curious stimulation, the sense of intoxication, of delight, brought by working among such green-growing, sweet-scented things. The maker of this interesting garden felt this stimulation and delight; and at her city home on a bleak day in December we both revelled in holding and breathing in the scent of tiny sprays of Rue, Rosemary, and Balm which, still green, had been gathered from beneath fallen leaves and stalks in her country garden, as a tender and grateful attention of one herb lover to another. Thus did she prove Shakespeare's words true even on the shores of Lake Michigan:-- "Rosemary and Rue: these keep Seeming and savor all the winter long." There is ample sentiment in the homely inhabitants of the herb garden. The herb garden of the Countess of Warwick is called by her a Garden of Sentiment. Each plant is labelled with a pottery marker, swallow-shaped, bearing in ineradicable colors the flower name and its significance. Thus there is Balm for sympathy, Bay for glory, Foxglove for sincerity, Basil for hatred. A recent number of _The Garden_ deplored the dying out of herbs in old English gardens; so I think it may prove of interest to give the list of herbs and medicinal shrubs and trees which grew in this friend's herb garden in the new world across the sea. Arnica, Anise, Ambrosia, Agrimony, Aconite. Belladonna, Black Alder, Betony, Boneset or Thorough-wort, Sweet Basil, Bryony, Borage, Burnet, Butternut, Balm, _Melissa officinalis_, Balm (variegated), Bee-balm, or Oswego tea, mild, false, and true Bergamot, Burdock, Bloodroot, Black Cohosh, Barberry, Bittersweet, Butterfly-weed, Birch, Blackberry, Button-Snakeroot, Buttercup. Costmary, or Sweet Mary, Calamint, Choke-cherry, Comfrey, Coriander, Cumin, Catnip, Caraway, Chives, Castor-oil Bean, Colchicum, Cedronella, Camomile, Chicory, Cardinal-flower, Celandine, Cotton, Cranesbill, Cow-parsnip, High-bush Cranberry. Dogwood, Dutchman's-pipe, Dill, Dandelion, Dock, Dogbane. Elder, Elecampane, Slippery Elm. Sweet Fern, Fraxinella, Fennel, Flax, Fumitory, Fig, Sweet Flag, Blue Flag, Foxglove. Goldthread, Gentian, Goldenrod. Hellebore, Henbane, Hops, Horehound, Hyssop, Horseradish, Horse-chestnut, Hemlock, Small Hemlock or Fool's Parsley. American Ipecac, Indian Hemp, Poison Ivy, wild, false, and blue Indigo, wild yellow Indigo, wild white Indigo. Juniper, Joepye-weed. Lobelia, Lovage, Lavender Lemon Verbena, Lemon, Mountain Laurel, Yellow Lady's-slippers, Lily of the Valley, Liverwort, Wild Lettuce, Field Larkspur, Lungwort. Mosquito plant, Wild Mint, Motherwort, Mullein, Sweet Marjoram, Meadowsweet, Marshmallow, Mandrake, Mulberry, black and white Mustard, Mayweed, Mugwort, Marigold. Nigella. Opium Poppy, Orange, Oak. Pulsatilla, Pellitory or Pyrethrum, Red Pepper, Peppermint, Pennyroyal, False Pennyroyal, Pope-weed, Pine, Pigweed, Pumpkin, Parsley, Prince's-pine, Peony, Plantain. Rhubarb, Rue, Rosemary, Rosa gallica, Dog Rose. Sassafras, Saxifrage, Sweet Cicely, Sage (common blue), Sage (red), Summer Savory, Winter Savory, Santonin, Sweet Woodruff, Saffron, Spearmint, wild Sarsaparilla, Black Snakeroot, Squills, Senna, St.-John's-Wort, Sorrel, Spruce Fir, Self-heal, Southernwood. Thorn Apple, Tansy, Thyme, Tobacco, Tarragon. Valerian, Dogtooth Violet, Blue Violet. Witchhazel, Wormwood, Wintergreen, Willow, Walnut. Yarrow. [Illustration: Garden at White Birches. Elmhurst, Illinois.] It will be noted that some common herbs and medicinal plants are missing; there is, for instance, no Box; it will not live in that climate; and there are many other herbs which this garden held for a short time, but which succumbed under the fierce winter winds from Lake Michigan. It is interesting to compare this list with one made in rhyme three centuries ago, the garland of herbs of the nymph Lelipa in Drayton's _Muse's Elyzium_. "A chaplet then of Herbs I'll make Than which though yours be braver, Yet this of mine I'll undertake Shall not be short in savour. With Basil then I will begin, Whose scent is wondrous pleasing: This Eglantine I'll next put in The sense with sweetness seizing. Then in my Lavender I lay Muscado put among it, With here and there a leaf of Bay, Which still shall run along it. Germander, Marjoram and Thyme, Which uséd are for strewing; With Hyssop as an herb most prime Here in my wreath bestowing. Then Balm and Mint help to make up My chaplet, and for trial Costmary that so likes the Cup, And next it Pennyroyal. Then Burnet shall bear up with this, Whose leaf I greatly fancy; Some Camomile doth not amiss With Savory and some Tansy. Then here and there I'll put a sprig Of Rosemary into it, Thus not too Little nor too Big, 'Tis done if I can do it." [Illustration: Garden of Manning Homestead, Salem, Massachusetts.] Another name for the herb garden was the olitory; and the word herber, or herbar, would at first sight appear to be an herbarium, an herb garden; it was really an arbor. I have such satisfaction in herb gardens, and in the herbs themselves, and in all their uses, all their lore, that I am confirmed in my belief that I really care far less for Botany than for that old-time regard and study of plants covered by the significant name, Wort-cunning. Wort was a good old common English word, lost now in our use, save as the terminal syllable of certain plant-names; it is a pity we have given it up since its equivalent, herb, seems so variable in application, especially in that very trying expression of which we weary so of late--herbaceous border. This seems an architect's phrase rather than a florist's; you always find it on the plans of fine houses with gardens. To me it annihilates every possibility of sentiment, and it usually isn't correct, since many of the plants in these borders are woody perennials instead of annuals; any garden planting that is not "bedding-out" is wildly named "an herbaceous border." Herb gardens were no vanity and no luxury in our grandmothers' day; they were a necessity. To them every good housewife turned for nearly all that gave variety to her cooking, and to fill her domestic pharmacopoeia. The physician placed his chief reliance for supplies on herb gardens and the simples of the fields. An old author says, "Many an old wife or country woman doth often more good with a few known and common garden herbs, than our bombast physicians, with all their prodigious, sumptuous, far-fetched, rare, conjectural medicines." Doctor and goodwife both had a rival in the parson. The picture of the country parson and his wife given by old George Herbert was equally true of the New England minister and his wife:-- "In the knowledge of simples one thing would be carefully observed, which is to know what herbs may be used instead of drugs of the same nature, and to make the garden the shop; for home-bred medicines are both more easy for the parson's purse, and more familiar for all men's bodies. So when the apothecary useth either for loosing Rhubarb, or for binding Bolearmana, the parson useth damask or white Rose for the one, and Plantain, Shepherd's Purse, and Knot-grass for the other; and that with better success. As for spices, he doth not only prefer home-bred things before them, but condemns them for vanities, and so shuts them out of his family, esteeming that there is no spice comparable for herbs to Rosemary, Thyme, savory Mints, and for seeds to Fennel and Caraway. Accordingly, for salves, his wife seeks not the city, but prefers her gardens and fields before all outlandish gums." Simples were medicinal plants, so called because each of these vegetable growths was held to possess an individual virtue, to be an element, a simple substance constituting a single remedy. The noun was generally used in the plural. You must not think that sowing, gathering, drying, and saving these herbs and simples in any convenient or unstudied way was all that was necessary. Not at all; many and manifold were the rules just when to plant them, when to pick them, how to pick them, how to dry them, and even how to keep them. Gervayse Markham was very wise in herb lore, in the suited seasons of the moon, and hour of the day or night, for herb culling. In the garret of every old house, such as that of the Ward Homestead, shown on page 116, with the wreckage of house furniture, were hung bunches of herbs and simples, waiting for winter use. The still-room was wholly devoted to storing these herbs and manufacturing their products. This was the careful work of the house mistress and her daughters. It was not intrusted to servants. One book of instruction was entitled, _The Vertuouse Boke of Distyllacyon of the Waters of all Manner of Herbs_. Thomas Tusser wrote:-- "Good huswives provide, ere an sickness do come, Of sundrie good things in house to have some, Good aqua composita, vinegar tart, Rose water and treacle to comfort the heart, Good herbes in the garden for agues that burn, That over strong heat to good temper turn." [Illustration: Under the Garret Eaves of the Ward Homestead. Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.] Both still-room and simple-closet of a dame of the time of Queen Elizabeth or Queen Anne had crowded shelves. Many an herb and root, unused to-day, was deemed then of sovereign worth. From a manuscript receipt book I have taken names of ingredients, many of which are seldom, perhaps never, used now in medicine. Unripe Blackberries, Ivy berries, Eglantine berries, "Ashen Keys," Acorns, stones of Sloes, Parsley seed, Houseleeks, unripe Hazelnuts, Daisy roots, Strawberry "strings," Woodbine tops, the inner bark of Oak and of red Filberts, green "Broom Cod," White Thorn berries, Turnips, Barberry bark, Dates, Goldenrod, Gourd seed, Blue Lily roots, Parsnip seed, Asparagus roots, Peony roots. From herbs and simples were made, for internal use, liquid medicines such as wines and waters, syrups, juleps; and solids, such as conserves, confections, treacles, eclegms, tinctures. There were for external use, amulets, oils, ointments, liniments, plasters, cataplasms, salves, poultices; also sacculi, little bags of flowers, seeds, herbs, etc., and pomanders and posies. That a certain stimulus could be given to the brain by inhaling the scent of these herbs will not be doubted, I think, by the herb lover even of this century. In the _Haven of Health_, 1636, cures were promised by sleeping on herbs, smelling of them, binding the leaves on the forehead, and inhaling the vapors of their boiling or roasting. Mint was "a good Posie for Students to oft smell." Pennyroyal "quickened the brain by smelling oft." Basil cleared the wits, and so on. The use of herbs in medicine is far from being obsolete; and when we give them more stately names we swallow the same dose. Dandelion bitters is still used for diseases caused by an ill-working liver. Wintergreen, which was universally made into tea or oil for rheumatism, appears now in prescriptions for the same disease under the name of Gaultheria. Peppermint, once a sovereign cure for heartburn and "nuralogy," serves us decked with the title of Menthol. "Saffern-tea" never has lost its good standing as a cure for the "jarnders." In country communities scores of old herbs and simples are used in vast amounts; and in every village is some aged man or woman wise in gathering, distilling, and compounding these "potent and parable medicines," to use Cotton Mather's words. One of these gatherers of simples is shown opposite page 120, a quaint old figure, seen afar as we drive through country by-roads, as she bends over some dense clump of weeds in distant meadow or pasture. In our large city markets bunches of sweet herbs are still sold; and within a year I have seen men passing my city home selling great bunches of Catnip and Mint, in the spring, and dried Sage, Marjoram, and other herbs in the autumn. In one case I noted that it was the same man, unmistakably a real countryman, whom I had noted selling quail on the street, when he had about forty as fine quail as I ever saw. I never saw him sell quail, nor herbs. I think his customers are probably all foreigners--emigrants from continental Europe, chiefly Poles and Italians. The use of herbs as component parts of love philters and charms is a most ancient custom, and lingered into the nineteenth century in country communities. I knew but one case of the manufacture and administering of a love philter, and it was by a person to whom such an action would seem utterly incongruous. A very gentle, retiring girl in a New England town eighty years ago was deeply in love with the minister whose church she attended, and of which her father was the deacon. The parson was a widower, nearly of middle age, and exceedingly sombre and reserved in character--saddened, doubtless, by the loss of his two young children and his wife through that scourge of New England, consumption; but he was very handsome, and even his sadness had its charm. His house, had burned down as an additional misfortune, and he lived in lodgings with two elderly women of his congregation. Therefore church meetings and various gatherings of committees were held at the deacon's house, and the deacon's daughter saw him day after day, and grew more desperately in love. Desperate certainly she was when she dared even to think of giving a love philter to a minister. The recipe was clearly printed on the last page of an old dream book; and she carried it out in every detail. It was easy to introduce it into the mug of flip which was always brewed for the meeting, and the parson drank it down abstractedly, thinking that it seemed more bitter than usual, but showing no sign of this thought. The philter was promised to have effect in making the drinker love profoundly the first person of opposite sex whom he or she saw after drinking it; and of course the minister saw Hannah as she stood waiting for his empty tankard. The dull details of parish work were talked over in the usual dragging way for half an hour, when the minister became conscious of an intense coldness which seemed to benumb him in every limb; and he tried to walk to the fireplace. Suddenly all in the room became aware that he was very ill, and one called out, "He's got a stroke." Luckily the town doctor was also a deacon, and was therefore present; and he promptly said, "He's poisoned," and hot water from the teakettle, whites of eggs, mustard, and other domestic antidotes were administered with promptitude and effect. It is useless to detail the days of agony to the wretched girl, during which the sick man wavered between life and death, nor her devoted care of him. Soon after his recovery he solemnly proposed marriage to her, and was refused. But he never wavered in his love for her; and every year he renewed his offer and told his wishes, to be met ever with a cold refusal, until ten years had passed; when into his brain there entered a perception that her refusal had some extraordinary element in it. Then, with a warmth of determination worthy a younger man, he demanded an explanation, and received a confession of the poisonous love philter. I suppose time had softened the memory of his suffering, at any rate they were married--so the promise of the love charm came true, after all. [Illustration: A Gatherer of Simples.] Amos Bronson Alcott was another author of Concord, a sweet philosopher whom I shall ever remember with deepest gratitude as the only person who in my early youth ever imagined any literary capacity in me (and in that he was sadly mistaken, for he fancied I would be a poet). I have read very faithfully all his printed writings, trying to believe him a great man, a seer; but I cannot, in spite of my gratitude for his flattering though unfulfilled prophecy, discover in his books any profound signs of depth or novelty of thought. In his _Tablets_ are some very pleasant, if not surprisingly wise, essays on domestic subjects; one, on "Sweet Herbs," tells cheerfully of the womanly care of the herb garden, but shows that, when written--about 1850--borders of herbs were growing infrequent. One great delight of old English gardens is never afforded us in New England; we do not grow Lavender beds. I have of course seen single plants of Lavender, so easily winter-killed, but I never have seen a Lavender bed, nor do I know of one. It is a great loss. A bed or hedge of Lavender is pleasing in the same way that the dress of a Quaker lady is pleasing; it is reposeful, refined. It has a soft effect at the edge of a garden, like a blue-gray haze, and always reminds me of doves. The power of association or some inherent quality of the plant, makes Lavender always suggest freshness and cleanliness. We may linger a little with a few of these old herb favorites. One of the most balmy and beautiful of all the sweet breaths borne by leaves or blossoms is that of Basil, which, alas! I see so seldom. I have always loved it, and can never pass it without pressing its leaves in my hand; and I cannot express the satisfaction, the triumph, with which I read these light-giving lines of old Thomas Tusser, which showed me why I loved it:-- "Faire Basil desireth it may be hir lot To growe as the gilly flower trim in a pot That Ladies and Gentils whom she doth serve May help hir as needeth life to preserve." An explanation of this rhyme is given by _Tusser Redivivus_: "Most people stroak Garden Basil which leaves a grateful smell on the hand and he will have it that Stroaking from a fair lady preserves the life of the Basil." This is a striking example of floral telepathy; you know what the Basil wishes, and the Basil knows and craves your affection, and repays your caress with her perfume and growth. It is a case of mutual attraction; and I beg the "Gentle Reader" never to pass a pot or plant of Basil without "stroaking" it; that it may grow and multiply and forever retain its relations with fair women, as a type of the purest, the most clinging, and grateful love. One amusing use of Basil (as given in one of my daughter's old Herbals) was intended to check obesity:-- "TO MAKE THAT A WOMAN SHALL EAT OF NOTHING THAT IS SET UPON THE TABLE:--Take a little green Basil, and when Men bring the Dishes to the Table put it underneath them that the Woman perceive it not; so Men say that she will eat of none of that which is in the Dish whereunder the Basil lieth." I cannot understand why so sinister an association was given to a pot of Basil by Boccaccio, who makes the unhappy Isabella conceal the head of her murdered lover in a flower pot under a plant of Basil; for in Italy Basil is ever a plant of love, not of jealousy or crime. One of its common names is _Bacia, Nicola_--Kiss me, Nicholas. Peasant girls always place Basil in their hair when they go to meet their sweethearts, and an offered sprig of Basil is a love declaration. It is believed that Boccaccio obtained this tale from some tradition of ancient Greece, where Basil is a symbol of hatred and despair. The figure of poverty was there associated with a Basil plant as with rags. It had to be sown with abuse, with cursing and railing, else it would not flourish. In India its sanctity is above all other herbs. A pious Indian has at death a leaf of Basil placed in his bosom as his reward. The house surrounded by Basil is blessed, and all who cherish the plant are sure of heaven. Mithridate was a favorite medicine of our Puritan ancestors; there were various elaborate compound rules for its manufacture, in which Rue always took a part. It was simple enough in the beginning, when King Mithridates invented it as an antidote against poison: twenty leaves of Rue pounded with two Figs, two dried Walnuts and a grain of salt; which receipt may be taken _cum grano salis_. Rue also entered into the composition of the famous "Vinegar of the Four Thieves." These four rascals, at the time of the Plague in Marseilles, invented this vinegar, and, protected by its power, entered infected houses and carried away property without taking the disease. Rue had innumerable virtues. Pliny says eighty-four remedies were made of it. It was of special use in case of venomous bites, and to counteract "Head-Ach" from over indulgence in wine, especially if a little Sage were added. It promoted love in man and diminished it in woman; it was good for the ear-ache, eye-ache, stomach-ache, leg-ache, back-ache; good for an ague, good for a surfeit; indeed, it would seem wise to make Rue a daily article of food and thus insure perpetual good health. The scent of Rue seems never dying. A sprig of it was given me by a friend, and it chanced to lie for a single night on the sheets of paper upon which this chapter is written. The scent has never left them, and indeed the odor of Rue hangs literally around this whole book. Summer Savory and Sweet Marjoram are rarely employed now in American cooking. They are still found in my kitchen, and are used in scant amount as a flavoring for stuffing of fowl. Many who taste and like the result know not the old-fashioned materials used to produce that flavor, and "of the younger sort" the names even are wholly unrecognized. Sage is almost the only plant of the English kitchen garden which is ordinarily grown in America. I like its fresh grayness in the garden. In the days of our friend John Gerarde, the beloved old herbalist, there was no fixed botanical nomenclature; but he scarcely needed botanical terms, for he had a most felicitous and dextrous use of words. "Sage hath broad leaves, long, wrinkled, rough, and whitish, like in roughness to woollen cloth threadbare." What a description! it is far more vivid than the picture here shown. Sage has never lost its established place as a flavoring for the stuffing for ducks, geese, and for sausages; but its universal employment as a flavoring for Sage cheese is nearly obsolete. In my childhood home, we always had Sage cheese with other cheeses; it was believed to be an aid in digestion. I had forgotten its taste; and I must say I didn't like it when I ate it last summer, in New Hampshire. [Illustration: Our Friend, John Gerarde.] Tansy was highly esteemed in England as a medicine, a cosmetic, and a flavoring and ingredient in cooking. It was rubbed over raw meat to keep the flies away and prevent decay, for in those days of no refrigerators there had to be strong measures taken for the preservation of all perishable food. Its strong scent and taste would be deemed intolerable to us, who can scarce endure even the milder Sage in any large quantity. A good folk name for it is "Bitter Buttons." Gerarde wrote of Tansy, "In the spring time, are made with the leaves hereof newly sprung up, and with Eggs, cakes or Tansies, which be pleasant in Taste and goode for the Stomach." [Illustration: Sage.] "To Make a Tansie the Best Way," I learn from _The Accomplisht Cook_, was thus:-- "Take twenty Eggs, and take away five whites, strain them with a quart of good sweet thick Cream, and put to it a grated nutmeg, a race of ginger grated, as much cinnamon beaten fine, and a penny white loaf grated also, mix them all together with a little salt, then stamp some green wheat with some tansie herbs, strain it into the cream and eggs and stir all together; then take a clean frying-pan, and a quarter of a pound of butter, melt it, and put in the tansie, and stir it continually over the fire with a slice, ladle, or saucer, chop it, and break it as it thickens, and being well incorporated put it out of the pan into a dish, and chop it very fine; then make the frying-pan very clean, and put in some more butter, melt it, and fry it whole or in spoonfuls; being finely fried on both sides, dish it up and sprinkle it with rose-vinegar, grape-verjuyce, elder-vinegar, cowslip-vinegar, or the juyce of three or four oranges, and strow on a good store of fine sugar." To all of this we can say that it would certainly be a very good dish--without the Tansy. Another mediæval recipe was of Tansy, Feverfew, Parsley, and Violets mixed with eggs, fried in butter, and sprinkled with sugar. The Minnow-Tansie of old Izaak Walton, a "Tanzie for Lent," was made thus:-- "Being well washed with salt and cleaned, and their heads and tails cut off, and not washed after, they prove excellent for that use; that is being fried with the yolks of eggs, the flowers of cowslips and of primroses, and a little tansy, thus used they make a dainty dish." The name Tansy was given afterward to a rich fruit cake which had no Tansy in it. It was apparently a favorite dish of Pepys. A certain derivative custom obtained in some New England towns--certainly in Hartford and vicinity. Tansy was used to flavor the Fast Day pudding. One old lady recalls that it was truly a bitter food to the younger members of the family; Miss Shelton, in her entertaining book, _The Salt Box House_, tells of Tansy cakes, and says children did not dislike them. Tansy bitters were made of Tansy leaves placed in a bottle with New England rum. They were a favorite spring tonic, where all physicians and housewives prescribed "the bitter principle" in the spring time. No doubt Tansy was among the earliest plants brought over by the settlers; it was carefully cherished in the herb garden, then spread to the dooryard and then to farm lanes. As early as 1746 the traveller Kalm noted Tansy growing wild in hedges and along roads in Pennsylvania. Now it extends its sturdy growth for miles along the country road, one of the rankest of weeds. It still is used in the manufacture of proprietary medicines, and for this purpose is cut with a sickle in great armfuls and gathered in cartloads. I have always liked its scent; and its leaves, as Gerarde said, "infinitely jagged and nicked and curled"; and its cheerful little "bitter buttons" of gold. Some old flowers adapt themselves to modern conditions and look up-to-date; but to me the Tansy, wherever found, is as openly old-fashioned as a betty-lamp or a foot-stove. [Illustration: Tansy.] On July 1, 1846, an old grave was opened in the ancient "God's Acre" near the halls of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This grave was a brick vault covered with irregularly shaped flagstones about three inches thick. Over it was an ancient slab of peculiar stone, unlike any others in the cemetery save those over the graves of two presidents of the College, Rev. Dr. Chauncy and Dr. Oakes. As there were headstones near this slab inscribed with the names of the great-grandchildren of President Dunster, it was believed that this was the grave of a third President, Dr. Dunster. He died in the year 1659; but his death took place in midwinter; and when this coffin was opened, the skeleton was found entirely surrounded with common Tansy, in seed, a portion of which had been pulled up by the roots, and it was therefore believed by many who thought upon the matter that it was the coffin and grave of President Mitchell, who died in July, 1668, of "an extream fever." The skeleton was found still wrapped in a cerecloth, and in the record of the church is a memorandum of payment "for a terpauling to wrap Mr. Mitchell." The Tansy found in this coffin, placed there more than two centuries ago, still retained its shape and scent. This use of Tansy at funerals lingered long in country neighborhoods in New England, in some vicinities till fifty years ago. To many older persons the Tansy is therefore so associated with grewsome sights and sad scenes, that they turn from it wherever seen, and its scent to them is unbearable. One elderly friend writes me: "I never see the leaves of Tansy without recalling also the pale dead faces I have so often seen encircled by the dank, ugly leaves. Often as a child have I been sent to gather all the Tansy I could find, to be carried by my mother to the house of mourning; and I gathered it, loathing to touch it, but not daring to refuse, and I loathe it still." Tansy not only retains its scent for a long period, but the "golden buttons" retain their color; I have seen them in New England parlors forming part of a winter posy; this, I suppose, in neighborhoods where Tansy was little used at funerals. [Illustration: Garden of Mrs. Abraham Lansing, Albany, New York.] If an herb garden had no other reason for existence, let me commend it to the attention of those of ample grounds and kindly hearts, for a special purpose--as a garden for the blind. Our many flower-charities furnish flowers throughout the summer to our hospitals, but what sweet-scented flowers are there for those debarred from any sight of beauty? Through the past summer my daughters sent several times a week, by the generous carriage of the Long Island Express Company, boxes of wild flowers to any hospital of their choice. What could we send to the blind? The midsummer flowers of field and meadow gratified the sight, but scent was lacking. A sprig of Sweet Fern or Bayberry was the only resource. Think of the pleasure which could be given to the sightless by a posy of sweet-scented leaves, by Southernwood, Mint, Balm, or Basil, and when memory was thereby awakened in those who once had seen, what tender thoughts! If this book could influence the planting of an herb garden for the solace of those who cannot see the flowers of field and garden, then it will not have been written in vain. CHAPTER VI IN LILAC TIDE "Ere Man is aware That the Spring is here The Flowers have found it out." --_Ancient Chinese Saying._ "A flower opens, and lo! another Year," is the beautiful and suggestive legend on an old vessel found in the Catacombs. Since these words were written, how many years have begun! how many flowers have opened! and yet nature has never let us weary of spring and spring flowers. My garden knows well the time o' the year. It needs no almanac to count the months. "The untaught Spring is wise In Cowslips and Anemonies." While I sit shivering, idling, wondering when I can "start the garden"--lo, there are Snowdrops and spring starting up to greet me. Ever in earliest spring are there days when there is no green in grass, tree, or shrub; but when the garden lover is conscious that winter is gone and spring is waiting. There is in every garden, in every dooryard, as in the field and by the roadside, in some indefinable way a look of spring. One hint of spring comes even before its flowers--you can smell its coming. The snow is gone from the garden walks and some of the open beds; you walk warily down the softened path at midday, and you smell the earth as it basks in the sun, and a faint scent comes from some twigs and leaves. Box speaks of summer, not of spring; and the fragrance from that Cedar tree is equally suggestive of summer. But break off that slender branch of Calycanthus--how fresh and welcome its delightful spring scent. Carry it into the house with branches of Forsythia, and how quickly one fills its leaf buds and the other blossoms. [Illustration: Ladies' Delights.] For several years the first blossom of the new year in our garden was neither the Snowdrop nor Crocus, but the Ladies' Delight, that laughing, speaking little garden face, which is not really a spring flower, it is a stray from summer; but it is such a shrewd, intelligent little creature that it readily found out that spring was here ere man or other flowers knew it. This dear little primitive of the Pansy tribe has become wonderfully scarce save in cherished old gardens like those of Salem, where I saw this year a space thirty feet long and several feet wide, under flowering shrubs and bushes, wholly covered with the everyday, homely little blooms of Ladies' Delights. They have the party-colored petal of the existing strain of English Pansies, distinct from the French and German Pansies, and I doubt not are the descendants of the cherished garden children of the English settlers. Gerarde describes this little English Pansy or Heartsease in 1587 under the name of _Viola tricolor_:-- "The flouers in form and figure like the Violet, and for the most part of the same Bignesse, of three sundry colours, purple, yellow and white or blew, by reason of the beauty and braverie of which colours they are very pleasing to the eye, for smel they have little or none." In Breck's _Book of Flowers_, 1851, is the first printed reference I find to the flower under the name Ladies' Delight. In my childhood I never heard it called aught else; but it has a score of folk names, all testifying to an affectionate intimacy: Bird's-eye; Garden-gate; Johnny-jump-up; None-so-pretty; Kitty-come; Kit-run-about; Three-faces under-a-hood; Come-and-cuddle-me; Pink-of-my-Joan; Kiss-me; Tickle-my-fancy; Kiss-me-ere-I rise; Jump-up-and-kiss-me. To our little flower has also been given this folk name, Meet-her-in-the-entry-kiss-her-in-the-buttery, the longest plant name in the English language, rivalled only by Miss Jekyll's triumph of nomenclature for the Stonecrop, namely: Welcome-home-husband-be-he-ever-so-drunk. [Illustration: Garden House in Garden of Hon. William H. Seward, Auburn, New York.] These little Ladies' Delights have infinite variety of expression; some are laughing and roguish, some sharp and shrewd, some surprised, others worried, all are animated and vivacious, and a few saucy to a degree. They are as companionable as people--nay, more; they are as companionable as children. No wonder children love them; they recognize kindred spirits. I know a child who picked unbidden a choice Rose, and hid it under her apron. But as she passed a bed of Ladies' Delights blowing in the wind, peering, winking, mocking, she suddenly threw the Rose at them, crying out pettishly, "Here! take your old flower!" The Dandelion is to many the golden seal of spring, but it blooms the whole circle of the year in sly garden corners and in the grass. Of it might have been written the lines:-- "It smiles upon the lap of May, To sultry August spreads its charms, Lights pale October on its way, And twines December's arms." I have picked both Ladies' Delights and Dandelions every month in the year. [Illustration: Sun-dial in Garden of Hon. William H. Seward, Auburn, New York.] I suppose the common Crocus would not be deemed a very great garden ornament in midsummer, in its lowly growth; but in its spring blossoming it is--to use another's words--"most gladsome of the early flowers." A bed of Crocuses is certainly a keen pleasure, glowing in the sun, almost as grateful to the human eye as to the honey-gathering bees that come unerringly, from somewhere, to hover over the golden cups. How welcome after winter is the sound of that humming. In the garden's story, there are ever a few pictures which stand out with startling distinctness. When the year is gone you do not recall many days nor many flowers with precision; often a single flower seems of more importance than a whole garden. In the day book of 1900 I have but few pictures; the most vivid was the very first of the season. It could have been no later than April, for one or two Snowdrops still showed white in the grass, when a splendid ribbon of Chionodoxa--Glory of the Snow--opened like blue fire burning from plant to plant, the bluest thing I ever saw in any garden. It was backed with solid masses of equally vivid yellow Alyssum and chalk-white Candy-tuft, both of which had had a good start under glass in a temporary forcing bed. These three solid masses of color surrounded by bare earth and showing little green leafage made my eyes ache, but a picture was burnt in which will never leave my brain. I always have a sense of importance, of actual ownership of a plant, when I can recall its introduction--as I do of the Chionodoxa, about 1871. It is said to come up and bloom in the snow, but I have never seen it in blossom earlier than March, and never then unless the snow has vanished. It has much of the charm of its relative, the Scilla. We all have flower favorites, and some of us have flower antipathies, or at least we are indifferent to certain flowers; but I never knew any one but loved the Daffodil. Not only have poets and dramatists sung it, but it is a common favorite, as shown by its homely names in our everyday speech. I am always touched in _Endymion_ that the only flowers named as "a thing of beauty that is a joy forever" are Daffodils "with the green world they live in." In Daffodils I like the "old fat-headed sort with nutmeg and cinnamon smell and old common English names--Butter-and-eggs, Codlins-and-cream, Bacon and eggs." The newer ones are more slender in bud and bloom, more trumpet-shaped, and are commonplace of name instead of common. In Virginia the name of a variety has become applied to a family, and all Daffodils are called Butter-and-eggs by the people. On spring mornings the Tulips fairly burn with a warmth, which makes them doubly welcome after winter. Emerson--ever able to draw a picture in two lines--to show the heart of everything in a single sentence--thus paints them:-- "The gardens fire with a joyful blaze Of Tulips in the morning's rays." "Tulipase do carry so stately and delightful a form, and do abide so long in their bravery, that there is no Lady or Gentleman of any worth that is not caught with this delight,"--wrote the old herbalist Parkinson. Bravery is an ideal expression for Tulips. [Illustration: Lilacs in Midsummer in Garden of Mrs. Abraham Lansing, Albany, New York.] It is with something of a shock that we read the words of Philip Hamerton in _The Sylvan Year_, that nature is not harmonious in the spring, but is only in the way of becoming so. He calls it the time of crudities, like the adolescence of the mind. He says, "The green is good for us, and we welcome it with uncritical gladness; but when we think of painting, it may be doubted whether any season of the year is less propitious to the broad and noble harmonies which are the secrets of all grand effects in art." And he compares the season to the uncomfortable hour in a household when the early risers are walking about, not knowing what to do with themselves, while others have not yet come down to breakfast. I must confess that an undiversified country landscape in spring has upon me the effect asserted by Hamerton. I recall one early spring week in the Catskills, when I fairly complained, "Everything is so green here." I longed for rocks, water, burnt fields, bare trees, anything to break that glimmering green of new grass and new Birches. But in the spring garden there is variety of shape and color; the Peony leaf buds are red, some sprouting leaves are pink, and there are vast varieties of brown and gray and gold in leaf. Let me give the procession of spring in the garden in the words of a lover of old New England flowers, Dr. Holmes. It is a vivid word picture of the distinctive forms and colors of budding flowers and leaves. "At first the snowdrop's bells are seen, Then close against the sheltering wall The tulip's horn of dusky green, The peony's dark unfolding ball. "The golden-chaliced crocus burns; The long narcissus blades appear; The cone-beaked hyacinth returns To light her blue-flamed chandelier. "The willow's whistling lashes, wrung By the wild winds of gusty March, With sallow leaflets lightly strung, Are swaying by the tufted larch. "See the proud tulip's flaunting cup, That flames in glory for an hour,-- Behold it withering, then look up-- How meek the forest-monarchs flower! "When wake the violets, Winter dies; When sprout the elm buds, Spring is near; When lilacs blossom, Summer cries, 'Bud, little roses, Spring is here.'" The universal flower in the old-time garden was the Lilac; it was the most beloved bloom of spring, and gave a name to Spring--Lilac tide. The Lilac does not promise "spring is coming"; it is the emblem of the _presence_ of spring. Dr. Holmes says, "When Lilacs blossom, Summer cries, '_Spring is here_'" in every cheerful and lavish bloom. Lilacs shade the front yard; Lilacs grow by the kitchen doorstep; Lilacs spring up beside the barn; Lilacs shade the well; Lilacs hang over the spring house; Lilacs crowd by the fence side and down the country road. In many colonial dooryards it was the only shrub--known both to lettered and unlettered folk as Laylock, and spelt Laylock too. Walter Savage Landor, when Laylock had become antiquated, still clung to the word, and used it with a stubborn persistence such as he alone could compass, and which seems strange in the most finished classical scholar of his day. [Illustration: Lilacs at Craigie House, the Home of Longfellow.] "I shall not go to town while the Lilacs bloom," wrote Longfellow; and what Lilac lover could have left a home so Lilac-embowered as Craigie House! A view of its charms in Lilac tide is given in outline on this page; the great Lilac trees seem wondrously suited to the fine old Revolutionary mansion. [Illustration: Box-edged Garden at the Home of Longfellow.] There is in Albany, New York, a lovely garden endeared to those who know it through the memory of a presence that lighted all places associated with it with the beauty of a noble life. It is the garden of the home of Mrs. Abraham Lansing, and was planted by her father and mother, General and Mrs. Peter Gansevoort, in 1846, having been laid out with taste and an art that has borne the test of over half a century's growth. In the garden are scores of old-time favorites: Flower de Luce, Peonies, Daffodils, and snowy Phlox; but instead of bending over the flower borders, let us linger awhile in the wonderful old Lilac walk. It is a glory of tender green and shaded amethyst and grateful hum of bees, the very voice of Spring. Every sense is gratified, even that of touch, when the delicate plumes of the fragrant Lilac blossoms brush your cheek as you walk through its path; there is no spot of fairer loveliness than this Lilac walk in May. It is a wonderful study of flickering light and grateful shade in midsummer. Look at its full-leaf charms opposite page 138; was there ever anything lovelier in any garden, at any time, than the green vista of this Lilac walk in July? But for the thoughtful garden-lover it has another beauty still, the delicacy and refinement of outline when the Lilac walk is bare of foliage, as is shown on page 220 and facing page 154. The very spirit of the Lilacs seems visible, etched with a purity of touch that makes them sentient, speaking beings, instead of silent plants. See the outlines of stem and branch against the tender sky of this April noon. Do you care for color when you have such beauty of outline? Surely this Lilac walk is loveliest in April, with a sensitive etherealization beyond compare. How wonderfully these pictures have caught the look of tentative spring--spring waiting for a single day to burst into living green. There is an ancient Saxon name for springtime--Opyn-tide--thus defined by an old writer, "Whenne that flowres think on blowen"--when the flowers begin to think of budding and blowing; and so I name this picture Opyn-tide, the Thought of Spring. For many years Lilacs were planted for hedges; they were seldom satisfactory if clipped, for the broad-spreading leaves were always gray with dust, and they often had a "rust" which wholly destroyed their beauty. The finest clipped Lilac hedge I ever saw is at Indian Hill, Newburyport. It was set out about 1850, and is compact and green as Privet; the leaves are healthy, and the growth perfect down to the ground; it is an unusual example of Lilac growth--a perfect hedge. An unclipped Lilac hedge is lovely in its blooming; a beautiful one grows by the side of the old family home of Mr. Mortimer Howell at West Hampton Beach, Long Island. To this hedge in May come a-begging dusky city flower venders, who break off and carry away wagon loads of blooms. As the fare from and to New York is four dollars, and a wagon has to be hired to convey the flowers from the hedge two miles to the railroad station, there must be a high price charged for these Lilacs to afford any profit; but the Italian flower sellers appear year after year. [Illustration: Joepye-weed and Queen Anne's Lace.] Lilacs bloom not in our ancient literature; they are not named by Shakespeare, nor do I recall any earlier mention of them than in the essay of Lord Bacon on "Gardens," published about 1610, where he spelled it Lelacke. Blue-pipe tree was the ancient name of the Lilac, a reminder of the time when pipes were made of its wood; I heard it used in modern speech once. An old Narragansett coach driver called out to me, "Ye set such store on flowers, don't ye want to pick that Blue-pipe in Pender Zeke's garden?"--a deserted garden and home at Pender Zeke's Corner. This man had some of the traits of Mrs. Wright's delightful "Time-o'-Day," and he knew well my love of flowers; for he had been my charioteer to the woods where Rhododendron and Rhodora bloom, and he had revealed to me the pond where grew the pink Water Lilies. And from a chance remark of mine he had conveyed to me a wagon load of Joepye-weed and Boneset, to the dismay of my younger children, who had apprehensions of unlimited gallons of herb tea therefrom. Let me steal a few lines from my spring Lilacs to write of these two "Sisters of Healing," which were often planted in the household herb garden. From July to September in the low lying meadows of every state from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of Mexico, can be found Joepye-weed and Boneset. The dull pink clusters of soft fringy blooms of Joepye-weed stand up three to eight feet in height above the moist earth, catching our eye and the visit of every passing butterfly, and commanding attention for their fragrance, and a certain dignity of carriage notable even among the more striking hues of the brilliant Goldenrod and vivid Sunflowers. Joe Pye was an Indian medicine-man of old New England, famed among his white neighbors for his skill in curing the devastating typhoid fevers which, in those days of no drainage and ignorance of sanitation, vied with so-called "hereditary" consumption in exterminating New England families. His cure-all was a bitter tea decocted from leaves and stalks of this _Eupatorium purpureum_, and in token of his success the plant bears everywhere his name, but it is now wholly neglected by the simpler and herb-doctor. The sister plant, the _Eupatorium perfoliatum_, known as Thoroughwort, Boneset, Ague-weed, or Indian Sage, grows everywhere by its side, and is also used in fevers. It was as efficacious in "break bone fever" in the South a century ago as it is now for the grippe, for it still is used, North and South, in many a country home. Neltje Blanchan and Mrs. Dana Parsons call Thoroughwort or Boneset tea a "nauseous draught," and I thereby suspect that neither has tasted it. I have many a time, and it has a clear, clean bitter taste, no stronger than any bitter beer or ale. Every year is Boneset gathered in old Narragansett; but swamp edges and meadows that are easy of access have been depleted of the stately growth of saw-edged wrinkled leaves, and the Boneset gatherer must turn to remote brooksides and inaccessible meadows for his harvest. The flat-topped terminal cymes of leaden white blooms are not distinctive as seen from afar, and many flowers of similar appearance lure the weary simpler here and there, until at last the welcome sight of the connate perfoliate leaves, surrounding the strong stalk, distinctive of the Boneset, show that his search is rewarded. [Illustration: Boneset.] After these bitter draughts of herb tea, we will turn, as do children, to sweets, to our beloved Lilac blooms. The Lilac has ever been a flower welcomed by English-speaking folk since it first came to England by the hand of some mariner. It is said that a German traveller named Busbeck brought it from the Orient to the continent in the sixteenth century. I know not when it journeyed to the new world, but long enough ago so that it now grows cheerfully and plentifully in all our states of temperate clime and indeed far south. It even grows wild in some localities, though it never looks wild, but plainly shows its escape or exile from some garden. It is specially beloved in New England, and it seems so much more suited in spirit to New England than to Persia that it ought really to be a native plant. Its very color seems typical of New England; some parts of celestial blue, with more of warm pink, blended and softened by that shading of sombre gray ever present in New England life into a distinctive color known everywhere as lilac--a color grateful, quiet, pleasing, what Thoreau called a "tender, civil, cheerful color." Its blossoming at the time of Election Day, that all-important New England holiday, gave it another New England significance. There is no more emblematic flower to me than the Lilac; it has an association of old homes, of home-making and home interests. On the country farm, in the village garden, and in the city yard, the lilac was planted wherever the home was made, and it attached itself with deepest roots, lingering sometimes most sadly but sturdily, to show where the home once stood. [Illustration: Magnolias.] Let me tell of two Lilacs of sentiment. One of them is shown on page 149; a glorious Lilac tree which is one of a group of many full-flowered, pale-tinted ones still growing and blossoming each spring on a deserted homestead in old Narragansett. They bloom over the grave of a fine old house, and the great chimney stands sadly in their midst as a gravestone. "Hopewell," ill-suited of name, was the home of a Narragansett Robinson famed for good cheer, for refinement and luxury, and for a lovely garden, laid out with cost and care and filled with rare shrubs and flowers. Perhaps these Lilacs were a rare variety in their day, being pale of tint; now they are as wild as their companions, the Cedar hedges. [Illustration: Lilacs at Hopewell.] Gathering in the front dooryard of a fallen farm-house some splendid branches of flowering Lilac, I found a few feet of cellar wall and wooden house side standing, and the sills of two windows. These window sills, exposed for years to the bleaching and fading of rain and sun and frost, still bore the circular marks of the flower pots which, filled with houseplants, had graced the kitchen windows for many a winter under the care of a flower-loving house mistress. A few days later I learned from a woman over ninety years of age--an inmate of the "Poor House"--the story of the home thus touchingly indicated by the Lilac bushes and the stains of the flower pots. Over eighty years ago she had brought the tiny Lilac-slip to her childhood's home, then standing in a clearing in the forest. She carried it carefully in her hands as she rode behind her father on a pillion after a visit to her grandmother. She and her little brothers and sisters planted the tiny thing "of two eyes only," as she said, in the shadow of the house, in the little front yard. And these children watered it and watched it, as it rooted and grew, till the house was surrounded each spring with its vivacious blooms, its sweet fragrance. The puny slip has outlived the house and all its inmates save herself, outlived the brothers and sisters, their children and grandchildren, outlived orchard and garden and field. And it will live to tell a story to every thoughtful passer-by till a second growth of forest has arisen in pasture and garden and even in the cellar-hole, when even then the cheerful Lilac will not be wholly obliterated. A bunch of early Lilacs was ever a favorite gift to "teacher," to be placed in a broken-nosed pitcher on her desk. And Lilac petals made such lovely necklaces, thrust within each other or strung with needle and thread. And there was a love divination by Lilacs which we children solemnly observed. There will occasionally appear a tiny Lilac flower, usually a white Lilac, with five divisions of the petal instead of four--this is a Luck Lilac. This must be solemnly swallowed. If it goes down smoothly, the dabbler in magic cries out, "He loves me;" if she chokes at her floral food, she must say sadly, "He loves me not." I remember once calling out, with gratification and pride, "He loves me!" "Who is he?" said my older companions. "Oh, I didn't know he had to be somebody," I answered in surprise, to be met by derisive laughter at my satisfaction with a lover in general and not in particular. It was a matter of Lilac-luck-etiquette that the lover's name should be pronounced mentally before the petal was swallowed. [Illustration: Persian Lilacs and Peonies in Garden of the Kimball Homestead, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.] In the West Indies the Lilac is a flower of mysterious power; its perfume keeps away evil spirits, ghosts, banshees. If it grows not in the dooryard, its protecting branches are hung over the doorway. I think of this when I see it shading the door of happy homes in New England. In our old front yards we had only the common Lilacs, and occasionally a white one; and as a rarity the graceful, but sometimes rather spindling, Persian Lilacs, known since 1650 in gardens, and shown on page 151. How the old gardens would have stared at the new double Lilacs, which have luxuriant plumes of bloom twenty inches long. The "pensile Lilac" has been sung by many poets; but the spirit of the flower has been best portrayed in verse by Elizabeth Akers. I can quote but a single stanza from so many beautiful ones. "How fair it stood, with purple tassels hung, Their hue more tender than the tint of Tyre; How musical amid their fragrance rung The bee's bassoon, keynote of spring's glad choir! O languorous Lilac! still in time's despite I see thy plumy branches all alight With new-born butterflies which loved to stay And bask and banquet in the temperate ray Of springtime, ere the torrid heats should be: For these dear memories, though the world grow gray, I sing thy sweetness, lovely Lilac tree!" Another poet of the Lilac is Walt Whitman. He tells his delight in "the Lilac tall and its blossoms of mastering odor." He sings: "with the birds a warble of joy for Lilac-time." That noble, heroic dirge, the _Burial Hymn of Lincoln_, begins:-- "When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd." The poet stood under the blossoming Lilacs when he learned of the death of Lincoln, and the scent and sight of the flowers ever bore the sad association. In this poem is a vivid description of-- "The Lilac bush, tall growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom, rising delicate with the perfume strong I love. With every leaf a miracle." Thomas William Parsons could turn from his profound researches and loving translations of Dante to write with deep sympathy of the Lilac. His verses have to me an additional interest, since I believe they were written in the house built by my ancestor in 1740, and occupied still by his descendants. In its front dooryard are Lilacs still standing under the windows of Dr. Parsons' room, in which he loved so to write. Hawthorne felt a sort of "ludicrous unfitness in the idea of a time-stricken and grandfatherly Lilac bush." He was dissatisfied with aged Lilacs, though he knew not whether his heart, judgment, or rural sense put him in that condition. He felt the flower should either flourish in immortal youth or die. Apple trees could grow old and feeble without his reproach, but an aged Lilac was improper. I fancy no one ever took any care of Lilacs in an old garden. As soon water or enrich the Sumach and Elder growing by the roadside! But care for your Lilacs nowadays, and see how they respond. Make them a _garden_ flower, and you will never regret it. There be those who prefer grafted Lilacs--the stock being usually a Syringa; they prefer the single trunk, and thus get rid of the Lilac suckers. But compare a row of grafted Lilacs to a row of natural fastigate growth, as shown on page 220, and I think nature must be preferred. "Methinks I see my contemplative girl now in the garden watching the gradual approach of Spring," wrote Sterne. My contemplative girl lives in the city, how can she know that spring is here? Even on those few square feet of mother earth, dedicated to clotheslines and posts, spring sets her mark. Our Lilacs seldom bloom, but they put forth lovely fresh green leaves; and even the unrolling of the leaves of our Japanese ivies are a pleasure. Our poor little strips of back yard in city homes are apt to be too densely shaded for flower blooms, but some things will grow, even there. Some wild flowers will live, and what a delight they are in spring. We have a Jack-in-the-pulpit who comes up just as jauntily there as in the wild woods; Dog-tooth Violet and our common wild Violet also bloom. A city neighbor has Trillium which blossoms each year; our Trillium shows leaves, but no blossoms, and does not increase in spread of roots. Bloodroot, a flower so shy when gathered in the woods, and ever loving damp sites, flourishes in the dryest flower bed, grows coarser in leaf and bloom, and blossoms earlier, and holds faster its snowy petals. Corydalis in the garden seems so garden-bred that you almost forget the flower was ever wild. [Illustration: Opyn-tide, the Thought of Spring.] The approach of spring in our city parks is marked by the appearance of the Dandelion gatherers. It is always interesting to see, in May, on the closely guarded lawns and field expanses of our city parks, the hundreds of bareheaded, gayly-dressed Italian and Portuguese women and children eagerly gathering the young Dandelion plants to add to their meagre fare as a greatly-loved delicacy. They collect these "greens" in highly-colored kerchiefs, in baskets, in squares of sheeting; I have seen the women bearing off a half-bushel of plants; even their stumpy little children are impressed to increase the welcome harvest, and with a broken knife dig eagerly in the greensward. The thrifty park commissioners, in Dandelion-time, relax their rigid rules, "Keep Off the Grass," and turn the salad-loving Italians loose to improve the public lawns by freeing them from weeds. The earliest sign of spring in the fields and woods in my childhood was the appearance of the Willow catkins, and was heralded by the cry of one child to another,--"Pussy-willows are out." How eagerly did those who loved the woods and fields turn, after the storm, whiteness, and chill of a New England winter, to Pussy-willows as a promise of summer and sunshine. Some of their charm ever lingers to us as we see them in the baskets of swarthy street venders in New York. Magnolia blossoms are sold in our city streets to remind city dwellers of spring. "Every flower its own bow-kwet," is the call of the vender. Bunches of Locust blossoms follow, awkwardly tied together. Though the Magnolia is earlier, I do not find it much more splendid as a flowering tree for the garden than our northern Dogwood; and the Dogwood when in bloom seems just as tropical. It is then the glory of the landscape; and its radiant starry blossoms turn into ideal beauty even our sombre cemeteries. The Magnolia has been planted in northern gardens for over a century. Gardens on Long Island have many beautiful old specimens, doubtless furnished by the Prince Nurseries. These seem thoroughly at home; just as does the Locust brought from Virginia, a century ago, by one Captain Sands of Sands Point, to please his Virginia bride with the presence of the trees of her girlhood's home. These Locusts have spread over every rood of Long Island earth, and seem as much at home as Birch or Willow. The three Magnolia trees on Mr. Brown's lawn in Flatbush are as large as any I know in the North, and were exceptionally full of bloom this year, this photograph (shown facing page 148) being taken when they were past their prime. I saw children eagerly gathering the waxy petals which had fallen, and which show so plainly in the picture. But the flower is not common enough here for northern children to learn the varied attractions of the Magnolia. The flower lore of American children is nearly all of English derivation; but children invent as well as copy. In the South the lavish growth of the Magnolia affords multiform playthings. The beautiful broad white petals give a snowy surface for the inditing of messages or valentines, which are written with a pin, when the letters turn dark brown. The stamens of the flower--waxlike with red tips--make mock illuminating matches. The leaves shape into wonderful drinking cups, and the scarlet seeds give a glowing necklace. [Illustration: A Thought of Winter's Snows.] The glories of a spring garden are not in the rows of flowering bulbs, beautiful as they are; but in the flowering shrubs and trees. The old garden had few shrubs, but it had unsurpassed beauty in its rows of fruit trees which in their blossoming give the spring garden, as here shown, that lovely whiteness which seems a blending of the seasons--a thought of winter's snows. The perfection of Apple blossoms I have told in another chapter. Earlier to appear was the pure white, rather chilly, blooms of the Plum tree, to the Japanese "the eldest brother of an hundred flowers." They are faintly sweet-scented with the delicacy found in many spring blossoms. A good example of the short verses of the Japanese poets tells of the Plum blossom and its perfume. "In springtime, on a cloudless night, When moonbeams throw their silver pall O'er wooded landscapes, veiling all In one soft cloud of misty white, 'Twere vain almost to hope to trace The Plum trees in their lovely bloom Of argent; 'tis their sweet perfume Alone which leads me to their place." The lovely family of double white Plum blossoms which now graces our gardens is varied by tinted ones; there are sixty in all which the nineteenth century owes to Japan. The Peach tree has a flower which has given name to one of the loveliest colors in the world. The Peach has varieties with wonderful double flowers of glorious color. Cherry trees bear a more cheerful white flower than Plum trees. "The Cherry boughs above us spread The whitest shade was ever seen; And flicker, flicker came and fled Sun-spots between." I do not recall the Judas tree in my childhood. I am told there were many in Worcester; but there were none in our garden, nor in our neighborhood, and that was my world. Orchids might have hung from the trees a mile from my home, and would have been no nearer me than the tropics. I had a small world, but it was large enough, since it was bounded by garden walls. Almond trees are seldom seen in northern gardens; but the Flowering Almond flourishes as one of the purest and loveliest familiar shrubs. Silvery pink in bloom when it opens, the pink darkens till when in full flower it is deeply rosy. It was, next to the Lilac, the favorite shrub of my childhood. I used to call the exquisite little blooms "fairy roses," and there were many fairy tales relating to the Almond bush. This made the flower enhaloed with sentiment and mystery, which charmed as much as its beauty. The Flowering Almond seemed to have a special place under a window in country yards and gardens, as it is shown on page 39. A fitting spot it was, since it never grew tall enough to shade the little window panes. With Pussy-willows and Almond blossoms and Ladies' Delights, with blossoming playhouse Apple trees and sweet-scented Lilac walks, spring was certainly Paradise in our childhood. Would it were an equally happy season in mature years; but who, garden-bred, can walk in the springtime through the garden of her childhood without thought of those who cared for the garden in its youth, and shared the care of their children with the care of their flowers, but now are seen no more. "Oh, far away in some serener air, The eyes that loved them see a heavenly dawn: How can they bloom without her tender care? Why should they live when her sweet life is gone?" I have written of the gladness of spring, but I know nothing more overwhelming than the heartache of spring, the sadness of a fresh-growing spring garden. Where is the dear one who planted it and loved it, and he who helped her in the care, and the loving child who played in it and left it in the springtime? All that is good and beautiful has come again to us with the sunlight and warmth, save those whom we still love but can see no more. By that very measure of happiness poured for us in childhood in Lilac tide, is our cup of sadness now filled. CHAPTER VII OLD FLOWER FAVORITES "God does not send us strange flowers every year. When the spring winds blow o'er the pleasant places The same dear things lift up the same fair faces; The Violet is here. "It all comes back; the odor, grace, and hue Each sweet relation of its life repeated; No blank is left, no looking-for is cheated; It is the thing we knew." --ADELINE D. T. WHITNEY, 1861. Not only do I love to see the same dear things year after year, and to welcome the same odor, grace, and hue; but I love to find them in the same places. I like a garden in which plants have been growing in one spot for a long time, where they have a fixed home and surroundings. In our garden the same flowers shoulder each other comfortably and crowd each other a little, year after year. They look, my sister says, like long-established neighbors, like old family friends, not as if they had just "moved in," and didn't know each other's names and faces. Plants grow better when they are among flower friends. I suppose we have to transplant some plants, sometimes; but I would try to keep old friends together even in those removals. They would be lonely when they opened their eyes after the winter's sleep, and saw strange flower forms and unknown faces around them. [Illustration: Larkspur and Phlox.] For flowers have friendships, and antipathies as well. How Canterbury Bells and Foxgloves love to grow side by side! And Sweet Williams, with Foxgloves, as here shown. And in my sister's garden Larkspur always starts up by white Phlox--see a bit of the border on this page. Whatever may influence these docile alliances, it isn't a proper sense of fitness of color; for Tiger Lilies dearly love to grow by crimson-purple Phlox, a most inharmonious association, and you can hardly separate them. If a flower dislikes her neighbor in the garden, she moves quietly away, I don't know where or how. Sometimes she dies, but at any rate she is gone. It is so queer; I have tried every year to make Feverfew grow in this bed, and it won't do it, though it grows across the path. There is some flower here that the pompous Feverfew doesn't care to associate with. Not the Larkspur, for they are famous friends--perhaps it is the Sweet William, who is rather a plain fellow. In general flowers are very sociable with each other, but they have some preferences, and these are powerful ones. [Illustration: Sweet William and Foxglove.] It is amusing to read in no less than five recent English "garden-books," by flower-loving souls, the solemn advice that if you wish a beautiful garden effect you "must plant the great Oriental Poppy by the side of the White Lupine." "Thou say'st an undisputed thing In such a solemn way." The truth is, you have very little to do with it. That Poppy chooses to keep company with the White Lupine, and to that impulse you owe your fine garden effect. The Poppy is the slyest magician of the whole garden. He comes and goes at will. This year a few blooms, nearly all in one corner; next year a blaze of color banded across the middle of the garden like the broad sash of a court chamberlain. Then a single grand blossom quite alone in the pansy bed, while another pushes up between the tight close leaves of the box edging:--the Poppy is _queer_. [Illustration: Plume Poppy.] Some flowers have such a hatred of man they cannot breathe and live in his presence, others have an equal love of human companionship. The white Clover clings here to our pathway as does the English Daisy across seas. And in our garden Ladies' Delights and Ambrosia tell us, without words, of their love for us and longing to be by our side; just as plainly as a child silently tells us his love and dependence on us by taking our hand as we walk side by side. There is not another gesture of childhood, not an affectionate word which ever touched my heart as did that trustful holding of the hand. One of my children throughout his brief life never walked by my side without clinging closely--I think without conscious intent--with his little hand to mine. I can never forget the affection, the trust of that vanished hand. I find that my dearest flower loves are the old flowers,--not only old to me because I knew them in childhood, but old in cultivation. "Give me the good old weekday blossoms I used to see so long ago, With hearty sweetness in their bosoms, Ready and glad to bud and blow." Even were they newcomers, we should speedily care for them, they are so lovable, so winning, so endearing. If I had seen to-day for the first time a Fritillaria, a Violet, a Lilac, a Bluebell, or a Rose, I know it would be a case of love at first sight. But with intimacy they have grown dearer still. The sense of long-continued acquaintance and friendship which we feel for many garden flowers extends to a few blossoms of field and forest. It is felt to an inexplicable degree by all New Englanders for the Trailing Arbutus, our Mayflower; and it is this unformulated sentiment which makes us like to go to the same spot year after year to gather these beloved flowers. I am sensible of this friendship for Buttercups, they seem the same flowers I knew last year; and I have a distinct sympathy with Owen Meredith's poem:-- "I pluck the flowers I plucked of old About my feet--yet fresh and cold The Buttercups do bend; The selfsame Buttercups they seem, Thick in the bright-eyed green, and such As when to me their blissful gleam Was all earth's gold--how much!" We have little of the intense sentiment, the inspiration which filled flower-lovers of olden times. We admire flowers certainly as beautiful works of nature, as objects of wonder in mechanism and in the profusion of growth, and we are occasionally roused to feelings of gratitude to the Maker and Giver of such beauty; but it is not precisely the same regard that the old gardeners and "flowerists" had, which is expressed in this quotation from Gerarde of "the gallant grace of violets":-- "They admonish and stir up a man to that which is comelie and honest; for flowers through their beautie, varietie of colour and exquisite forme doe bring to a liberall and gentlemanly mind, the remembrance of honestie, comelinesse and all kinds of virtues." It was a virtue to be comely in those days; as it is indeed a virtue now; and to the pious old herbalists it seemed an impossible thing that any creation which was beautiful should not also be good. [Illustration: Meadow Rue.] All flowers cannot be loved with equal warmth; it is possible to have a wholesome liking for a flower, a wish to see it around you, which would make you plant it in your borders and treat it well, but which would not be at all akin to love. For others you have a placid tolerance; others you esteem--good, virtuous, worthy creatures, but you cannot warm toward them. Sometimes they have been sung with passion by poets (Swinburne is always glowing over very unresponsive flower souls) and they have been painted with fervor by artists--and still you do not love them. I do not love Tulips, but I welcome them very cordially in my garden. Others have loved them; the Tulip has had her head turned by attention. Some flowers we like at first sight, but they do not wear well. This is a hard truth; and I shall not shame the garden-creatures who have done their best to please by betraying them to the world, save in a single case to furnish an example. In late August the Bergamot blossoms in luxuriant heads of white and purplish pink bloom, similar in tint to the abundant Phlox. Both grow freely in the garden of Sylvester Manor. When the Bergamot has romped in your borders for two or three years, you may wish to exile it to a vegetable garden, near the blackberry vines. Is this because it is an herb instead of a purely decorative flower? You never thus thrust out Phlox. A friend confesses to me that she exiled even the splendid scarlet Bergamot after she had grown it for three years in her flower-beds; such subtle influences control our flower-loves. Beautiful and noble as are the grand contributions of the nineteenth century to us from the garden and fields of Japan and China, we seldom speak of loving them. Thus the Chinese White Wistaria is similar in shape of blossom to the Scotch Laburnum, though a far more elegant, more lavish flower; but the Laburnum is the loved one. I used to read longingly of the Laburnum in volumes of English poetry, especially in Hood's verses, beginning:-- "I remember, I remember, The house where I was born," Ella Partridge had a tall Laburnum tree at her front door; it peeped in the second-story windows. It was so cherished, that I doubt whether its blooms were ever gathered. She told us with conscious pride and rectitude that it was a "yellow Wistaria tree which came from China"; I saw no reason to doubt her words, and as I never chanced to speak to my parents about it, I ever thought of it as a yellow Wistaria tree until I went out into the world and found it was a Scotch Laburnum. Few garden owners plant now the Snowberry, _Symphoricarpus racemosus_, once seen in every front yard, and even used for hedges. It wasn't a very satisfactory shrub in its habit; the oval leaves were not a cheerful green, and were usually pallid with mildew. The flowers were insignificant, but the clusters of berries were as pure as pearls. In country homes, before the days of cheap winter flowers and omnipresent greenhouses, these snowy clusters were cherished to gather in winter to place on coffins and in hands as white and cold as the berries. Its special offence in our garden was partly on account of this funereal association, but chiefly because we were never permitted to gather its berries to string into necklaces. They were rigidly preserved on the stem as a garden decoration in winter; though they were too closely akin in color to the encircling snowdrifts to be of any value. In country homes in olden times were found several universal winter posies. On the narrow mantel shelves of farm and village parlors, both in England and America, still is seen a winter posy made of dried stalks of the seed valves of a certain flower; they are shown on the opposite page. Let us see how our old friend, Gerarde, describes this plant:-- "The stalkes are loden with many flowers like the stocke-gilliflower, of a purple colour, which, being fallen, the seede cometh foorthe conteined in a flat thinne cod, with a sharp point or pricke at one end, in fashion of the moone, and somewhat blackish. This cod is composed of three filmes or skins whereof the two outermost are of an overworne ashe colour, and the innermost, or that in the middle whereon the seed doth hang or cleave, is thin and cleere shining, like a piece of white satten newly cut from the peece." In the latter clause of this striking description is given the reason for the popular name of the flower, Satin-flower or White Satin, for the inner septum is a shining membrane resembling white satin. Another interesting name is Pricksong-flower. All who have seen sheets of music of Elizabethan days, when the notes of music were called pricks, and the whole sheet a pricksong, will readily trace the resemblance to the seeds of this plant. Gerarde says it was named "Penny-floure, Money-floure, Silver-plate, Sattin, and among our women called Honestie." The last name was commonly applied at the close of the eighteenth century. It is thus named in writings of Rev. William Hanbury, 1771, and a Boston seedsman then advertised seeds of Honestie "in small quantities, that all might have some." In 1665, Josselyn found White Satin planted and growing plentifully in New England gardens, where I am sure it formed, in garden and house, a happy reminder of their English homes to the wives of the colonists. Since that time it has spread so freely in some localities, especially in southern Connecticut, that it grows wild by the wayside. It is seldom seen now in well-kept gardens, though it should be, for it is really a lovely flower, showing from white to varied and rich light purples. I was charmed with its fresh beauty this spring in the garden of Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright; a photograph of one of her borders containing Honesty is shown opposite page 174. [Illustration: Money-in-both-pockets.] At Belvoir Castle in England, in the "Duchess's Garden," the Satin-flower can be seen in full variety of tint, and fills an important place. It is carefully cultivated by seed and division, all inferior plants being promptly destroyed, while the superior blossoms are cherished. The flower was much used in charms and spells, as was everything connected with the moon. Drayton's Clarinax sings of Lunaria:-- "Enchanting lunarie here lies In sorceries excelling." As a child this Lunaria was a favorite flower, for it afforded to us juvenile money. Indeed, it was generally known among us as Money-flower or Money-seed, or sometimes as Money-in-both-pockets. The seed valves formed our medium of exchange and trade, passing as silver dollars. Through the streets of a New England village there strolled, harmless and happy, one who was known in village parlance as a "softy," one of "God's fools," a poor addle-pated, simple-minded creature, witless--but neither homeless nor friendless; for children cared for him, and feeble-minded though he was, he managed to earn, by rush-seating chairs and weaving coarse baskets, and gathering berries, scant pennies enough to keep him alive; and he slept in a deserted barn, in a field full of rocks and Daisies and Blueberry bushes,--a barn which had been built by one but little more gifted with wits than himself. Poor Elmer never was able to understand that the money which he and the children saved so carefully each autumn from the money plants was not equal in value to the great copper cents of the village store; and when he asked gleefully for a loaf of bread or a quart of molasses, was just as apt to offer the shining seed valves in payment as he was to give the coin of the land; and it must be added that his belief received apparent confirmation in the fact that he usually got the bread whether he gave seeds or cents. [Illustration: Box Walk in Garden of Frederick J. Kingsbury, Esq. Waterbury, Connecticut.] He lost his life through his poor simple notion. In the village he was kindly treated by all, clothed, fed, and warmed; but one day there came skulking along the edge of the village what were then rare visitors, two tramps, who by ill-chance met poor Elmer as he was gathering chestnuts. And as the children lingered on their way home from school to take toll of Elmer's store of nuts, they heard him boasting gleefully of his wealth, "hundreds and hundreds of dollars all safe for winter." The children knew what his dollars were, but the tramps did not. Three days of heavy rain passed by, and Elmer did not appear at the store or any house. Then kindly neighbors went to his barn in the distant field, and found him cruelly beaten, with broken ribs and in a high fever, while scattered around him were hundreds of the seeds of his autumnal store of the money plant; these were all the silver dollars his assailants found. He was carried to the almshouse and died in a few weeks, partly from the beating, partly from exposure, but chiefly, I ever believed, from homesickness in his enforced home. His old house has fallen down, but his well still is open, and around it grows a vast expanse of Lunaria, which has spread and grown from the seeds poor Elmer saved, and every year shoots of the tender lilac blooms mingle so charmingly with the white Daisies that the sterile field is one of the show-places of the village, and people drive from afar to see it. [Illustration: Lunaria in Garden at Waldstein.] There grow in profusion in our home garden what I always called the Mullein Pink, the Rose Campion (_Lychnis coronaria_). I never heard any one speak of this plant with special affection or admiration; but as a child I loved its crimson flower more than any other flower in the garden. Perhaps I should say I loved the royal color rather than the flower. I gathered tight bunches without foliage into a glowing mass of color unequalled in richness of tint by anything in nature. I have seen only in a stained glass window flooded with high sunlight a crimson approaching that of the Mullein Pink. Gerarde calls the flower the "Gardener's Delight or Gardner's Eie." It was known in French as the Eye of God; and the Rose of Heaven. We used to rub our cheeks with the woolly leaves to give a beautiful rosy blush, and thereby I once skinned one cheek. Snapdragons were a beloved flower--companions of my childhood in our home garden, but they have been neglected a bit by nearly every one of late years. Plant a clump of the clear yellow and one of pure white Snapdragons, and see how beautiful they are in the garden, and how fresh they keep when cut. We had such a satisfying bunch of them on the dinner table to-day, in a milk-white glazed Chinese jar; yellow Snapdragons, with "borrowed leaves" of Virgin's-bower (_Adlumia_) and a haze of Gypsophila over all. A flower much admired in gardens during the early years of the nineteenth century was the Plume Poppy (_Bocconia_). It has a pretty pinkish bloom in general shape somewhat like Meadow Rue (see page 164 and page 167). A friend fancied a light feathery look over certain of her garden borders, and she planted plentifully Plume Poppy and Meadow Rue; this was in 1895. In 1896 the effect was exquisite; in 1897 the garden feathered out with far too much fulness; in 1901 all the combined forces of all the weeds of the garden could not equal these two flowers in utter usurpment and close occupation of every inch of that garden. The Plume Poppy has a strong tap-root which would be a good symbol of the root of the tree Ygdrassyl--the Tree of Life, that never dies. You can go over the borders with scythe and spade and hoe, and even with manicure-scissors, but roots of the Plume Poppy will still hide and send up vigorous growth the succeeding year. We have grown so familiar with some old doubled blossoms that we think little of their being double. One such, symmetrical of growth, beautiful of foliage, and gratifying of bloom, is the Double Buttercup. It is to me distinctly one of our most old-fashioned flowers in aspect. A hardy great clump of many years' growth is one of the ancient treasures of our garden; its golden globes are known in England as Bachelor's Buttons, and are believed by many to be the Bachelor's Buttons of Shakespeare's day. [Illustration: Dahlia Walk at Ravensworth.] Dahlias afford a striking example of the beauty of single flowers when compared to their doubled descendants. Single Dahlias are fine flowers, the yellow and scarlet ones especially so. I never thought double Dahlias really worth the trouble spent on them in our Northern gardens; so much staking and tying, and fussing, and usually an autumn storm wrenches them round and breaks the stem or a frost nips them just as they are in bloom. A Dahlia hedge or a walk such as this one at Ravensworth, Virginia, is most stately and satisfying. I like, in moderation, many of the smaller single and double Sunflowers. Under the reign of _Patience_, the Sunflower had a fleeting day of popularity, and flaunted in garden and parlor. Its place was false. It was never a garden flower in olden times, in the sense of being a flower of ornament or beauty; its place was in the kitchen garden, where it belongs. Peas have ever been favorites in English gardens since they were brought to England. We have all seen the print, if not the portrait, of Queen Elizabeth garbed in a white satin robe magnificently embroidered with open pea-pods and butterflies. A "City of London Madam" had a delightful head ornament of open pea-pods filled with peas of pearls; this was worn over a hood of gold-embroidered muslin, and with dyed red hair, must have been a most modish affair. Sweet Peas have had a unique history. They have been for a century a much-loved flower of the people both in England and America, and they were at home in cottage borders and fine gardens; were placed in vases, and carried in nosegays and posies; were loved of poets--Keats wrote an exquisite characterization of them. They had beauty of color, and a universally loved perfume--but florists have been blind to them till within a few years. A bicentenary exhibition of Sweet Peas was given in London in July, 1900; now there is formed a Sweet Pea Society. But no societies and no exhibitions ever will make them a "florist's flower"; they are of value only for cutting; their habit of growth renders them useless as a garden decoration. We all take notions in regard to flowers, just as we do in regard to people. I hear one friend say, "I love every flower that grows," but I answer with emphasis, "I don't!" I have ever disliked the Portulaca,--I hate its stems. It is my fate never to escape it. I planted it once to grow under Sweet Alyssum in the little enclosure of earth behind my city home; when I returned in the autumn, everything was covered, blanketed, overwhelmed with Portulaca. Since then it comes up even in the grass, and seems to thrive by being trampled upon. The Portulaca was not a flower of colonial days; I am glad to learn our great-grandmothers were not pestered with it; it was not described in the _Botanical Magazine_ till 1829. I do not care for the Petunia close at hand on account of its sickish odor. But in the dusky border the flowers shine like white stars (page 180), and make you almost forgive their poor colors in the daylight. I never liked the Calceolaria. Every child in our town used to have a Calceolaria in her own small garden plot, but I never wanted one. I care little for Chrysanthemums; they fill in the border in autumn, and they look pretty well growing, but I like few of the flowers close at hand. By some curious twist of a brain which, alas! is apt not to deal as it is expected and ought to, with sensations furnished to it, I have felt this distaste for Chrysanthemums since I attended a Chrysanthemum Show. Of course, I ought to love them far more, and have more eager interest in them--but I do not. Their sister, the China Aster, I care little for. The Germans call Asters "death-flowers." The Empress of Austria at the Swiss hotel where she lodged just before she was murdered, found the rooms decorated with China Asters. She said to her attendant that the flowers were in Austria termed death-flowers--and so they proved. The Aster is among the flowers prohibited in Japan for felicitous occasions, as are the Balsam, Rhododendron, and Azalea. [Illustration: Petunias.] Those who read these pages may note perhaps that I say little of Lilies. I do not care as much for them as most garden lovers do. I like all our wild Lilies, especially the yellow Nodding Lily of our fields; and the Lemon Lily of our gardens is ever a delight; but the stately Lilies which are such general favorites, Madonna Lilies, Japan Lilies, the Gold-banded Lilies, are not especially dear to me. I love climbing vines, whether of delicate leaf or beautiful flower. In a room I place all the decoration that I can on the walls, out of the way, leaving thus space to move around without fear of displacement or injury of fragile things; so in a limited garden space, grass room under our feet, with flowering vines on the surrounding walls are better than many crowded flower borders. A tiny space can quickly be made delightful with climbing plants. The common Morning-glory, called in England the Bell-bind, is frequently advertised by florists of more encouragement than judgment, as suitable to plant freely in order to cover fences and poor sandy patches of ground with speedy and abundant leafage and bloom. There is no doubt that the Morning-glory will do all this and far more than is promised. It will also spread above and below ground from the poor strip of earth to every other corner of garden and farm. This it has done till, in our Eastern states, it is now classed as a wild flower. It will never look wild, however, meet it where you will. It is as domestic and tame as a barnyard fowl, which, wandering in the wildest woodland, could never be mistaken as game. The garden at Claymont, the Virginia home of Mr. Frank R. Stockton, afforded a striking example of the spreading and strangling properties of the Morning-glory, not under encouragement, but simply under toleration. Mr. Stockton tells me that the entire expanse of his yards and garden, when he first saw them, was a solid mass of Morning-glory blooms. Every stick, every stem, every stalk, every shrub and blade of grass, every vegetable growth, whether dead or alive, had its encircling and overwhelming Morning-glory companion, set full of tiny undersized blossoms of varied tints. It was a beautiful sight at break of day,--a vast expanse of acres jewelled with Morning-glories--but it wasn't the new owner's notion of a flower garden. In my childhood flower agents used to canvass country towns from house to house. Sometimes they had a general catalogue, and sold many plants, trees, and shrubs. Oftener they had but a single plant which they were "booming." I suspect that their trade came through the sudden introduction of so many and varied flowers and shrubs from China and Japan. I am told that the first Chinese Wistarias and a certain Fringe tree were sold in this manner; and I know the white Hydrangea was, for I recall it, though I do not know that this was its first sale. I remember too that suddenly half the houses in town, on piazza or trellis, had the rich purple blooms of the _Clematis Jackmanni_; for a very persuasive agent had gone through the town the previous year. Of course people of means bought then, as now, at nurseries; but at many humble homes, whose owners would never have thought of buying from a greenhouse, he sold his plants. It gave an agreeable rivalry, when all started plants together, to see whose flourished best and had the amplest bloom. Thoreau recalled the pleasant emulation of many owners in Concord of a certain Rhododendron, sold thus sweepingly by an agent. The purple Clematis displaced an old climbing favorite, the Trumpet Honeysuckle, once seen by every door. It was so beloved of humming-birds and so beautiful, I wonder we could ever destroy it. Its downfall was hastened by its being infested by a myriad of tiny green aphides, which proceeded from it to our Roses. I recall well these little plant insects, for I was very fond of picking the tubes of the Honeysuckle for the drop of pure honey within, and I had to abandon reluctantly the sweet morsels. We have in our garden, and it is shown on the succeeding page, a vine which we carefully cherished in seedlings from year to year, and took much pride in. It came to us with the Ambrosia from the Walpole garden. It was not common in gardens in our neighborhood, and I always looked upon it as something very choice, and even rare, as it certainly was something very dainty and pretty. We called it Virgin's-bower. When I went out into the world I found that it was not rare, that it grew wild from Connecticut to the far West; that it was Climbing Fumitory, or Mountain Fringe, _Adlumia_. When Mrs. Margaret Deland asked if we had Alleghany Vine in our garden, I told her I had never seen it, when all the while it was our own dear Virgin's-bower. It doesn't seem hardy enough to be a wild thing; how could it make its way against the fierce vines and thorns of the forest when it hasn't a bit of woodiness in its stems and its leaves and flowers are so tender! I cannot think any garden perfect without it, no matter what else is there, for its delicate green Rue-like leaves lie so gracefully on stone or brick walls, or on fences, and it trails its slender tendrils so lightly over dull shrubs that are out of flower, beautifying them afresh with an alien bloom of delicate little pinkish blossoms like tiny Bleeding-hearts. [Illustration: Virgin's-bower.] Another old favorite was the Balloon-vine, sometimes called Heartseed or Heart-pea, with its seeds like fat black hearts, with three lobes which made them globose instead of flat. This, too, had pretty compound leaves, and the whole vine, like our Virgin's-bower, lay lightly on what it covered; but the Dutchman's-pipe had a leafage too heavy save to make a thick screen or arch quickly and solidly. It did well enough in gardens which had not had a long cultivated past, or made little preparation for a cherished future; but it certainly was not suited to our garden, where things were not planted for a day. These three are native vines of rich woods in our Central and Western states. The Matrimony-vine was an old favorite; one from the porch of the Van Cortlandt manor-house, over a hundred years old, is shown on the next page. Often you see a straggling, sprawling growth; but this one is as fine as any vine could be. Patient folk--as were certainly those of the old-time gardens, tried to keep the Rose Acacia as a favorite. It was hardy enough, but so hopelessly brittle in wood that it was constantly broken by the wind and snow of our Northern winters, even though it was sheltered under some stronger shrub. At the end of a lovely Salem garden, I beheld this June a long row of Rose Acacias in full bloom. I am glad I possess in my memory the exquisite harmony of their shimmering green foliage and rosy flower clusters. Miss Jekyll, ever resourceful, trains the Rose Acacia on a wall; and fastens it down by planting sturdy Crimson Ramblers by its side; her skilful example may well be followed in America and thus restore to our gardens this beautiful flower. [Illustration: Matrimony-vine at Van Cortlandt Manor.] One flower, termed old-fashioned by nearly every one, is really a recent settler of our gardens. A popular historical novel of American life at the time of the Revolution makes the hero and heroine play a very pretty love scene over a spray of the Bleeding-heart, the Dielytra, or Dicentra. Unfortunately for the truth of the novelist's picture, the Dielytra was not introduced to the gardens of English-speaking folk till 1846, when the London Horticultural Society received a single plant from the north of China. How quickly it became cheap and abundant; soon it bloomed in every cottage garden; how quickly it became beloved! The graceful racemes of pendant rosy flowers were eagerly welcomed by children; they have some inexplicable, witching charm; even young children in arms will stretch out their little hands and attempt to grasp the Dielytra, when showier blossoms are passed unheeded. Many tiny playthings can be formed of the blossoms: only deft fingers can shape the delicate lyre in the "frame." One of its folk names is "Lyre flower"; the two wings can be bent back to form a gondola. We speak of modern flowers, meaning those which have recently found their way to our gardens. Some of these clash with the older occupants, but one has promptly been given an honored place, and appears so allied to the older flowers in form and spirit that it seems to belong by their side--the _Anemone Japonica_. Its purity and beauty make it one of the delights of the autumn garden; our grandmothers would have rejoiced in it, and have divided the plants with each other till all had a row of it in the garden borders. In its red form it was first pictured in the _Botanical Magazine_, in 1847, but it has been commonly seen in our gardens for only twenty or thirty years. [Illustration: White Wistaria.] These two flowers, the _Dielytra spectabilis_ and _Anemone Japonica_, are among the valuable gifts which our gardens received through the visits to China of that adventurous collector, Robert Fortune. He went there first in 1842, and for some years constantly sent home fresh treasures. Among the best-known garden flowers of his introducing are the two named above, and _Kerria Japonica_, _Forsythia viridissima_, _Weigela rosea_, _Gardenia Fortuniana_, _Daphne Fortunei_, _Berberis Fortunei_, _Jasminum nudiflorum_, and many varieties of Prunus, Viburnum, Spiræa, Azalea, and Chrysanthemum. The fine yellow Rose known as Fortune's Yellow was acquired by him during a venturesome trip which he took, disguised as a Chinaman. The white Chinese Wistaria is regarded as the most important of his collections. It is deemed by some flower-lovers the most exquisite flower in the entire world. The Chinese variety is distinguished by the length of its racemes, sometimes three feet long. The lower part of a vine of unusual luxuriance and beauty is shown above. This special vine flowers in full richness of bloom every alternate year, and this photograph was taken during its "poor year"; for in its finest inflorescence its photograph would show simply a mass of indistinguishable whiteness. Mr. Howell has named it The Fountain, and above the pouring of white blossoms shown in this picture is an upper cascade of bloom. This Wistaria is not growing in an over-favorable locality, for winter winds are bleak on the southern shores of Long Island; but I know no rival of its beauty in far warmer and more sheltered sites. Many of the Deutzias and Spiræas which beautify our spring gardens were introduced from Japan before Fortune's day by Thunberg, the great exploiter of Japanese shrubs, who died in 1828. The Spiræa Van Houtteii (facing page 190) is perhaps the most beautiful of all. Dean Hole names the Spiræas, Deutzias, Weigelas, and Forsythias as having been brought into his ken in English gardens within his own lifetime, that is within fourscore years. In New England gardens the Forsythia is called 'Sunshine Bush'--and never was folk name better bestowed, or rather evolved. For in the eager longing for spring which comes in the bitterness of March, when we cry out with the poet, "O God, for one clear day, a Snowdrop and sweet air," in our welcome to fresh life, whether shown in starting leaf or frail blossom, the Forsythia shines out a grateful delight to the eyes and heart, concentrating for a week all the golden radiance of sunlight, which later will be shared by sister shrubs and flowers. _Forsythia suspensa_, falling in long sweeps of yellow bells, is in some favorable places a cascade of liquid light. No shrub in our gardens is more frequently ruined by gardeners than these Forsythias. It takes an artist to prune the _Forsythia suspensa_. You can steal the sunshine for your homes ere winter is gone by breaking long sprays of the Sunshine Bush and placing them in tall deep jars of water. Split up the ends of the stems that they may absorb plentiful water, and the golden plumes will soon open to fullest glory within doors. There is another yellow flowered shrub, the Corchorus, which seems as old as the Lilac, for it is ever found in old gardens; but it proves to be a Japanese shrub which we have had only a hundred years. The little, deep yellow, globular blossoms appear in early spring and sparsely throughout the whole summer. The plant isn't very adorning in its usual ragged growth, but it was universally planted. It may be seen from the shrubs of popular growth which I have named that the present glory of our shrubberies is from the Japanese and Chinese shrubs, which came to us in the nineteenth century through Thunberg, Fortune, and other bold collectors. We had no shrub-sellers of importance in the eighteenth century; the garden lover turned wholly to the seedsman and bulb-grower for garden supplies, just as we do to-day to fill our old-fashioned gardens. The new shrubs and plants from China and Japan did not clash with the old garden flowers, they seemed like kinsfolk who had long been separated and rejoiced in being reunited; they were indeed fellow-countrymen. We owed scores of our older flowers to the Orient, among them such important ones as the Lilac, Rose, Lily, Tulip, Crown Imperial. [Illustration: Spiræa Van Houtteii.] We can fancy how delighted all these Oriental shrubs and flowers were to meet after so many years of separation. What pleasant greetings all the cousins must have given each other; I am sure the Wistaria was glad to see the Lilac, and the Fortune's Yellow Rose was duly respectful to his old cousin, the thorny yellow Scotch Rose. And I seem to hear a bit of scandal passing from plant to plant! Listen! it is the Bleeding-heart gossiping with the Japanese Anemone: "Well! I never thought that Lilac girl would grow to be such a beauty. So much color! Do you suppose it can be natural? Mrs. Tulip hinted to me yesterday that the girl used fertilizers, and it certainly looks so. But she can't say much herself--I never saw such a change in any creatures as in those Tulips. You remember how commonplace their clothes were? Now such extravagance! Scores of gowns, and all made abroad, and at _her_ age! Here are you and I, my dear, both young, and we really ought to have more clothes. I haven't a thing but this pink gown to put on. It's lucky you had a white gown, for no one liked your pink one. Here comes Mrs. Rose! How those Rose children have grown! I never should have known them." CHAPTER VIII COMFORT ME WITH APPLES "What can your eye desire to see, your eares to heare, your mouth to taste, or your nose to smell, that is not to be had in an Orchard? with Abundance and Variety? What shall I say? 1000 of Delights are in an Orchard; and sooner shall I be weary than I can reckon the least part of that pleasure which one, that hath and loves an Orchard, may find therein." --_A New Orchard_, WILLIAM LAWSON, 1618. In every old-time garden, save the revered front yard, the borders stretched into the domain of the Currant and Gooseberry bushes, and into the orchard. Often a row of Crabapple trees pressed up into the garden's precincts and shaded the Sweet Peas. Orchard and garden could scarcely be separated, so closely did they grow up together. Every old garden book had long chapters on orchards, written _con amore_, with a zest sometimes lacking on other pages. How they loved in the days of Queen Elizabeth and of Queen Anne to sit in an orchard, planted, as Sir Philip Sidney said, "cunningly with trees of taste-pleasing fruits." How charming were their orchard seats, "fachoned for meditacon!" Sometimes these orchard seats were banks of the strongly scented Camomile, a favorite plant of Lord Bacon's day. Wordsworth wrote in jingling rhyme:-- "Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed Their snow-white blossoms on my head, With brightest sunshine round me spread Of spring's unclouded weather, In this sequester'd nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard seat; And flowers and birds once more to greet, My last year's friends together." The incomparable beauty of the Apple tree in full bloom has ever been sung by the poets, but even their words cannot fitly nor fully tell the delight to the senses of the close view of those exquisite pink and white domes, with their lovely opalescent tints, their ethereal fragrance; their beauty infinitely surpasses that of the vaunted Cherry plantations of Japan. In the hand the flowers show a distinct ruddiness, a promise of future red cheeks; but a long vista of trees in bloom displays no tint of pink, the flowers seem purest white. Looking last May across the orchard at Hillside, adown the valley of the Hudson with its succession of blossoming orchards, we could paraphrase the words of Longfellow's _Golden Legend_:-- "The valley stretching below Is white with blossoming Apple trees, as if touched with lightest snow." In the darkest night flowering Apple trees shine with clear radiance, and an orchard of eight hundred acres, such as may be seen in Niagara County, New York, shows a white expanse like a lake of quicksilver. This county, and its neighbor, Orleans County, form an Apple paradise--with their orchards of fifty and even a hundred thousand trees. [Illustration: Apple Trees at White Hall, the Home of Bishop Berkeley.] The largest Apple tree in New England is in Cheshire, Connecticut. Its trunk measures, one foot above all root enlargements, thirteen feet eight inches in circumference. Its age is traced back a hundred and fifty years. At White Hall, the old home of Bishop Berkeley in the island of Rhode Island, still stand the Apple trees of his day. A picture of them is shown on page 194. The sedate and comfortable motherliness of old Apple trees is felt by all Apple lovers. John Burroughs speaks of "maternal old Apple trees, regular old grandmothers, who have seen trouble." James Lane Allen, amid his apostrophes to the Hemp plant, has given us some beautiful glimpses of Apple trees and his love for them. He tells of "provident old tree mothers on the orchard slope, whose red-cheeked children are autumn Apples." It is this motherliness, this domesticity, this homeliness that makes the Apple tree so cherished, so beloved. No scene of life in the country ever seems to me homelike if it lacks an Apple orchard--this doubtless, because in my birthplace in New England they form a part of every farm scene, of every country home. Apple trees soften and humanize the wildest country scene. Even in a remote pasture, or on a mountain side, they convey a sentiment of home; and after being lost in the mazes of close-grown wood-roads Apple trees are inexpressibly welcome as giving promise of a sheltering roof-tree. Thoreau wrote of wild Apples, but to me no Apples ever look wild. They may be the veriest Crabs, growing in wild spots, unbidden, and savage and bitter in their tang, but even these seedling Pippins are domestic in aspect. On the southern shores of Long Island, where meadow, pasture, and farm are in soil and crops like New England, the frequent absence of Apple orchards makes these farm scenes unsatisfying, not homelike. No other fruit trees can take their place. An Orange tree, with its rich glossy foliage, its perfumed ivory flowers and buds, and abundant golden fruit, is an exquisite creation of nature; but an Orange grove has no ideality. All fruit trees have a beautiful inflorescence--few have sentiment. The tint of a blossoming Peach tree is perfect; but I care not for a Peach orchard. Plantations of healthy Cherry trees are lovely in flower and fruit time, whether in Japan or Massachusetts, and a Cherry tree is full of happy child memories; but their tree forms in America are often disfigured with that ugly fungous blight which is all the more disagreeable to us since we hear now of its close kinship to disease germs in the animal world. I cannot see how they avoid having Apple trees on these Long Island farms, for the Apple is fully determined to stand beside every home and in every garden in the land. It does not have to be invited; it will plant and maintain itself. Nearly all fruits and vegetables which we prize, depend on our planting and care, but the Apple is as independent as the New England farmer. In truth Apple trees would grow on these farms if they were loved or even tolerated, for I find them forced into Long Island hedge-rows as relentlessly as are forest trees. The Indians called the Plantain the "white man's foot," for it sprung up wherever he trod; the Apple tree might be called the white man's shadow. It is the Vine and Fig tree of the temperate zone, and might be chosen as the totem of the white settlers. Our love for the Apple is natural, for it was the characteristic fruit of Britain; the clergy were its chief cultivators; they grew Apples in their monastery gardens, prayed for them in special religious ceremonies, sheltered the fruit by laws, and even named the Apple when pronouncing the blessings of God upon their princes and rulers. [Illustration: "The valley stretching below Is white with blossoming Apple trees, as if touched with lightest snow."] Thoreau described an era of luxury as one in which men cultivate the Apple and the amenities of the garden. He thought it indicated relaxed nerves to read gardening books, and he regarded gardening as a civil and social function, not a love of nature. He tells of his own love for freedom and savagery--and he found what he so deemed at Walden Pond. I am told his haunts are little changed since the years when he lived there; and I had expected to find Walden Pond a scene of much wild beauty, but it was the mildest of wild woods; it seemed to me as thoroughly civilized and social as an Apple orchard. [Illustration: Old Hand-power Cider Mill.] Thoreau christened the Apple trees of his acquaintance with appropriate names in the _lingua vernacula_: the Truant's Apple, the Saunterer's Apple, December Eating, Wine of New England, the Apple of the Dell in the Wood, the Apple of the Hollow in the Pasture, the Railroad Apple, the Cellar-hole Apple, the Frozen-thawed, and many more; these he loved for their fruit; to them let me add the Playhouse Apple trees, loved solely for their ingeniously twisted branches, an Apple tree of the garden, often overhanging the flower borders. I recall their glorious whiteness in the spring, but I cannot remember that they bore any fruit save a group of serious little girls. I know there were no Apples on the Playhouse Apple trees in my garden, nor on the one in Nelly Gilbert's or Ella Partridge's garden. There is no play place for girls like an old Apple tree. The main limbs leave the trunk at exactly the right height for children to reach, and every branch and twig seems to grow and turn only to form delightful perches for children to climb among and cling to. Some Apple trees in our town had a copy of an Elizabethan garden furnishing; their branches enclosed tree platforms about twelve feet from the ground, reached by a narrow ladder or flight of steps. These were built by generous parents for their children's playhouses, but their approach of ladder was too unhazardous, their railings too safety-assuring, to prove anything but conventional and uninteresting. The natural Apple tree offered infinite variety, and a slight sense of daring to the climber. Its possibility of accident was fulfilled; untold number of broken arms and ribs--juvenile--were resultant from falls from Apple trees. [Illustration: Pressing out Cider in Old Hand Mill.] One of Thoreau's Apples was the Green Apple (_Malus viridis_, or _Cholera morbifera puerelis delectissima_). I know not for how many centuries boys (and girls too) have eaten and suffered from green apples. A description was written in 1684 which might have happened any summer since; I quote it with reminiscent delight, for I have the same love for the spirited relation that I had in my early youth when I never, for a moment, in spite of the significant names, deemed the entire book anything but a real story; the notion that _Pilgrim's Progress_ was an allegory never entered my mind. "Now there was on the other side of the wall a _Garden_. And some of the Fruit-Trees that grew in the Garden shot their Branches over the Wall, and being mellow, they that found them did gather them up and oft eat of them to their hurt. So _Christiana's_ Boys, _as Boys are apt to do_, being _pleas'd_ with the Trees did _Plash_ them and began to eat. Their Mother did also chide them for so doing, but still the Boys went on. Now _Matthew_ the Eldest Son of _Christiana_ fell sick.... There dwelt not far from thence one Mr. _Skill_ an Ancient and well approved Physician. So Christiana desired it and they sent for him and he came. And when he was entered the Room and a little observed the Boy he concluded that he was sick of the Gripes. Then he said to his Mother, _What Diet has Matthew of late fed upon_? _Diet_, said Christiana, _nothing but which is wholesome_. The Physician answered, _This Boy has been tampering with something that lies in his Maw undigested_.... Then said Samuel, _Mother, Mother, what was that which my brother did gather up and eat. You know there was an Orchard and my Brother did plash and eat. True, my child_, said Christiana, _naughty boy as he was. I did chide him and yet he would eat thereof._" The realistic treatment of Mr. Skill and Matthew's recovery thereby need not be quoted. An historic Apple much esteemed in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and often planted at the edge of the flower garden, is called the Sapson, or Early Sapson, Sapson Sweet, Sapsyvine, and in Pennsylvania, Wine-sap. The name is a corruption of the old English Apple name, Sops-o'-wine. It is a charming little red-cheeked Apple of early autumn, slightly larger than a healthy Crab-apple. The clear red of its skin perfuses in coral-colored veins and beautiful shadings to its very core. It has a condensed, spicy, aromatic flavor, not sharp like a Crab-apple, but it makes a better jelly even than the Crab-apple--jelly of a ruby color with an almost wine-like flavor, a true Sops-of-wine. This fruit is deemed so choice that I have known the sale of a farm to halt for some weeks until it could be proved that certain Apple trees in the orchard bore the esteemed Sapsyvines. Under New England and New York farm-houses was a cellar filled with bins for vegetables and apples. As the winter passed on there rose from these cellars a curious, earthy, appley smell, which always seemed most powerful in the best parlor, the room least used. How Schiller, who loved the scent of rotten apples, would have rejoiced! The cellar also contained many barrels of cider; for the beauty of the Apple trees, and the use of their fruit as food, were not the only factors which influenced the planting of the many Apple orchards of the new world; they afforded a universal drink--cider. I have written at length, in my books, _Home Life in Colonial Days_ and _Stage-Coach and Tavern Days_, the history of the vogue and manufacture of cider in the new world. The cherished Apple orchards of Endicott, Blackstone, Wolcott, and Winthrop were so speedily multiplied that by 1670 cider was plentiful and cheap everywhere. By the opening of the eighteenth century it had wholly crowded out beer and metheglin; and was the drink of old and young on all occasions. [Illustration: Old Horse-lever Cider Mill.] At first, cider was made by pounding the Apples by hand in wooden mortars; then simple mills were formed of a hollowed log and a spring board. Rude hand presses, such as are shown on pages 198 and 200, were known in 1660, and lingered to our own day. Kalm, the Swedish naturalist, saw ancient horse presses (like the one depicted on this page) in use in the Hudson River Valley in 1749. In autumn the whole country-side was scented with the sour, fruity smell from these cider mills; and the gift of a draught of sweet cider to any passer-by was as ample and free as of water from the brookside. The cider when barrelled and stored for winter was equally free to all comers, as well it might be, when many families stored a hundred barrels for winter use. [Illustration: "Straining off" the Cider.] The Washingtonian or Temperance reform which swept over this country like a purifying wind in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, found many temporizers who tried to exclude cider from the list of intoxicating drinks which converts pledged themselves to abandon. Some farmers who adopted this much-needed movement against the all-prevailing vice of drunkenness received it with fanatic zeal. It makes the heart of the Apple lover ache to read that in this spirit they cut down whole orchards of flourishing Apple trees, since they could conceive no adequate use for their apples save for cider. That any should have tried to exclude cider from the list of intoxicating beverages seems barefaced indeed to those who have tasted that most potent of all spirits--frozen cider. I once drank a small modicum of Jericho cider, as smooth as Benedictine and more persuasive, which made a raw day in April seem like sunny midsummer. I afterward learned from the ingenuous Long Island farmer whose hospitality gave me this liqueur that it had been frozen seven times. Each time he had thrust a red-hot poker into the bung-hole of the barrel, melted all the watery ice and poured it out; therefore the very essence of the cider was all that remained. It is interesting to note the folk customs of Old England which have lingered here, such as domestic love divinations. The poet Gay wrote:-- "I pare this Pippin round and round again, My shepherd's name to flourish on the plain. I fling th' unbroken paring o'er my head, Upon the grass a perfect L. is read." I have seen New England schoolgirls, scores of times, thus toss an "unbroken paring." An ancient trial of my youth was done with Apple seeds; these were named for various swains, then slightly wetted and stuck on the cheek or forehead, while we chanted:-- "Pippin! Pippin! Paradise! Tell me where my true love lies!" The seed that remained longest in place indicated the favored and favoring lover. With the neglect in this country of Saints' Days and the Puritanical frowning down of all folk customs connected with them, we lost the delightful wassailing of the Apple trees. This, like many another religious observance, was a relic of heathen sacrifice, in this case to Pomona. It was celebrated with slight variations in various parts of England; and was called an Apple howling, a wassailing, a youling, and other terms. The farmer and his workmen carried to the orchard great jugs of cider or milk pans filled with cider and roasted apples. Encircling in turn the best bearing trees, they drank from "clayen-cups," and poured part of the contents on the ground under the trees. And while they wassailed the trees they sang:-- "Here's to thee, old Apple tree! Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow, And whence thou mayst bear Apples enow! Hats full! caps full, Bushel--Bushel--sacks full, And my pockets full too." Another Devonshire rhyme ran:-- "Health to thee, good Apple tree! Well to bear pocket-fulls, hat-fulls, Peck-fulls, bushel bag-fulls." The wassailing of the trees gave place in America to a jovial autumnal gathering known as an Apple cut, an Apple paring, or an Apple bee. The cheerful kitchen of the farm-house was set out with its entire array of empty pans, pails, tubs, and baskets. Heaped-up barrels of apples stood in the centre of the room. The many skilful hands of willing neighbors emptied the barrels, and with sharp knives or an occasional Apple parer, filled the empty vessels with cleanly pared and quartered apples. When the work was finished, divinations with Apple parings and Apple seeds were tried, simple country games were played; occasionally there was a fiddler and a dance. An autumnal supper was served from the three zones of the farm-house: nuts from the attic, Apples from the pantry, and cider from the cellar. The apple-quarters intended for drying were strung on homespun linen thread and hung out of doors on clear drying days. A humble hillside home in New Hampshire thus quaintly festooned is shown in the illustration opposite page 208--a characteristic New Hampshire landscape. When thoroughly dried in sun and wind, these sliced apples were stored for the winter by being hung from rafter to rafter of various living rooms, and remained thus for months (gathering vast accumulations of dust and germs for our blissfully ignorant and unsqueamish grandparents) until the early days of spring, when Apple sauce, Apple butter, and the stores of Apple bin and Apple pit were exhausted, and they then afforded, after proper baths and soakings, the wherewithal for that domestic comestible--dried Apple pie. The Swedish parson, Dr. Acrelius, writing home to Sweden in 1758 an account of the settlement of Delaware, said:-- "Apple pie is used throughout the whole year, and when fresh Apples are no longer to be had, dried ones are used. It is the evening meal of children. House pie, in country places, is made of Apples neither peeled nor freed from their cores, and its crust is not broken if a wagon wheel goes over it." I always had an undue estimation of Apple pie in my childhood, from an accidental cause: we were requested by the conscientious teacher in our Sunday-school to "take out" each week without fail from the "Select Library" of the school a "Sabbath-school Library Book." The colorless, albeit pious, contents of the books classed under that title are well known to those of my generation; even such a child of the Puritans as I was could not read them. There were two anchors in that sea of despair,--but feeble holds would they seem to-day,--the first volumes of _Queechy_ and _The Wide, Wide World_. With the disingenuousness of childhood I satisfied the rules of the school and my own conscience by carrying home these two books, and no others, on alternate Sundays for certainly two years. The only wonder in the matter was that the transaction escaped my Mother's eye for so long a time. I read only isolated scenes; of these the favorite was the one wherein Fleda carries to the woods for the hungry visitor, who was of the English nobility, several large and toothsome sections of green Apple pie and cheese. The prominence given to that Apple pie in that book and in my two years of reading idealized it. On a glorious day last October I drove to New Canaan, the town which was the prototype of Queechy. Hungry as ever in childhood from the clear autumnal air and the long drive from Lenox, we asked for luncheon at what was reported to be a village hostelry. The exact counterpart of Miss Cynthia Gall responded rather sourly that she wasn't "boarding or baiting" that year. Humble entreaties for provender of any kind elicited from her for each of us a slice of cheese and a large and truly noble section of Apple pie, the very pie of Fleda's tale, which we ate with a bewildered sense as of a previous existence. This was intensified as we strolled to the brook under the Queechy Sugar Maples, and gathered there the great-grandchildren of Fleda's Watercresses, and heard the sound of Hugh's sawmills. [Illustration: Drying Apples.] Six hundred years ago English gentlewomen and goodwives were cooking Apples just as we cook them now--they even had Apple pie. A delightful recipe of the fourteenth century was for "Appeluns for a Lorde, in opyntide." Opyntide was springtime; this was, therefore, a spring dish fit for a lord. Apple-moy and Apple-mos, Apple Tansy, and Pommys-morle were delightful dishes and very rich food as well. The word pomatum has now no association with _pomum_, but originally pomatum was made partly of Apples. In an old "Dialog between Soarness and Chirurgi," written by one Dr. Bulleyne in the days of Queen Elizabeth, is found this question and its answer:-- "_Soarness._ How make you pomatum? "_Chirurgi._ Take the fat of a yearly kyd one pound, temper it with the water of musk-roses by the space of foure dayes, then take five apples, and dresse them, and cut them in pieces, and lard them with cloves, then boyl them altogeather in the same water of roses in one vessel of glasse set within another vessel, let it boyl on the fyre so long tyll it all be white, then wash them with the same water of muske-roses, this done kepe it in a glasse and if you will have it to smell better, then you must put in a little civet or musk, or both, or ambergrice. Gentil women doe use this to make theyr faces fayr and smooth, for it healeth cliftes in the lippes, or in any places of the hands and face." With the omission of the civet or musk I am sure this would make to-day a delightful cream; but there is one condition which the "gentil woman" of to-day could scarcely furnish--the infinite patience and leisure which accompanied and perfected all such domestic work three centuries ago. A pomander was made of "the maste of a sweet Apple tree being gathered betwixt two Lady days," mixed with various sweet-scented drugs and gums and Rose leaves, and shaped into a ball or bracelet. The successor of the pomander was the Clove Apple, or "Comfort Apple," an Apple stuck solidly with cloves. In country communities, one was given as an expression of sympathy in trouble or sorrow. Visiting a country "poorhouse" recently, we were shown a "Comfort-apple" which had been sent to one of the inmates by a friend; for even paupers have friends. "Taffaty tarts" were of paste filled with Apples sweetened and seasoned with Lemon, Rose-water, and Fennel seed. Apple-sticklin', Apple-stucklin, Apple-twelin, Apple-hoglin, are old English provincial names of Apple pie; Apple-betty is a New England term. The Apple Slump of New England homes was not the "slump-pye" of old England, which was a rich mutton pie flavored with wine and jelly, and covered with a rich confection of nuts and fruit. [Illustration: Ancient Apple Picker, Apple Racks, Apple Parers, Apple-butter Kettle, Apple-butter Paddle, Apple-butter Stirrer, Apple-butter Crocks.] In Pennsylvania, among the people known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Apple frolic was universal. Each neighbor brought his or her own Apple parer. This people make great use of Apples and cider in their food, and have many curious modes of cooking them. Dr. Heilman in his paper on "The Old Cider Mill" tells of their delicacy of "cider time" called cider soup, made of equal parts of cider and water, boiled and thickened with sweet cream and flour; when ready to serve, bits of bread or toast are placed in it. "Mole cider" is made of boiling cider thickened to a syrup with beaten eggs and milk. But of greatest importance, both for home consumption and for the market, is the staple known as Apple butter. This is made from sweet cider boiled down to about one-third its original quantity. To this is added an equal weight of sliced Apples, about a third as much of molasses, and various spices, such as cloves, ginger, mace, cinnamon or even pepper, all boiled together for twelve or fifteen hours. Often the great kettle is filled with cider in the morning, and boiled and stirred constantly all day, then the sliced Apples are added at night, and the monotonous stirring continues till morning, when the butter can be packed in jars and kegs for winter use. This Apple butter is not at all like Apple sauce; it has no granulated appearance, but is smooth and solid like cheese and dark red in color. Apple butter is stirred by a pole having upon one end a perforated blade or paddle set at right angles. Sometimes a bar was laid from rim to rim of the caldron, and worked by a crank that turned a similar paddle. A collection of ancient utensils used in making Apple butter is shown on page 211; these are from the collections of the Bucks County Historical Society. Opposite page 214 is shown an ancient open-air fireplace and an old couple making Apple butter just as they have done for over half a century. In New England what the "hired man" on the farm called "biled cider Apple sass," took the place of Apple butter. Preferably this was made in the "summer kitchen," where three kettles, usually of graduated sizes, could be set over the fire; the three kettles could be hung from a crane, or trammels. All were filled with cider, and as the liquid boiled away in the largest kettle it was filled from the second and that from the third. The fresh cider was always poured into the third kettle, thus the large kettle was never checked in its boiling. This continued till the cider was as thick as molasses. Apples (preferably Pound Sweets or Pumpkin Sweets) had been chosen with care, pared, cored, and quartered, and heated in a small kettle. These were slowly added to the thickened cider, in small quantities, in order not to check the boiling. The rule was to cook them till so softened that a rye straw could be run into them, and yet they must retain their shape. This was truly a critical time; the slightest scorched flavor would ruin the whole kettleful. A great wooden, long-handled, shovel-like ladle was used to stir the sauce fiercely until it was finished in triumph. Often a barrel of this was made by our grandmothers, and frozen solid for winter use. The farmer and "hired men" ate it clear as a relish with meats; and it was suited to appetites and digestions which had been formed by a diet of salted meats, fried breads, many pickles, and the drinking of hot cider sprinkled with pepper. Emerson well named the Apple the social fruit of New England. It ever has been and is still the grateful promoter and unfailing aid to informal social intercourse in the country-side; but the Apple tree is something far nobler even than being the sign of cheerful and cordial acquaintance; it is the beautiful rural emblem of industrious and temperate home life. Hence, let us wassail with a will:-- "Here's to thee, old Apple tree! Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow, And whence thou mayst bear Apples enow!" [Illustration: Making Apple Butter.] CHAPTER IX GARDENS OF THE POETS "The chief use of flowers is to illustrate quotations from the poets." All English poets have ever been ready to sing English flowers until jesters have laughed, and to sing garden flowers as well as wild flowers. Few have really described a garden, though the orderly distribution of flowers might be held to be akin to the restraint of rhyme and rhythm in poetry. [Illustration: Shakespeare Border at Hillside.] It has been the affectionate tribute and happy diversion of those who love both poetry and flowers to note the flowers beloved of various poets, and gather them together, either in a book or a garden. The pages of Milton cannot be forced, even by his most ardent admirers, to indicate any intimate knowledge of flowers. He certainly makes some very elegant classical allusions to flowers and fruits, and some amusingly vague ones as well. "The Flowers of Spenser," and "A Posy from Chaucer," are the titles of most readable chapters in _A Garden of Simples_, but the allusions and quotations from both authors are pleasing and interesting, rather than informing as to the real variety and description of the flowers of their day. Nearly all the older English poets, though writing glibly of woods and vales, of shepherds and swains, of buds and blossoms, scarcely allude to a flower in a natural way. Herrick was truly a flower lover, and, as the critic said, "many flowers grow to illustrate quotations from his works." The flowers named of Shakespeare have been written about in varied books, _Shakespeare's Garden_, _Shakespeare's Bouquet_, _Flowers from Stratford-on-Avon_, etc. These are easily led in fulness of detail, exactness of information, and delightful literary quality by that truly perfect book, beloved of all garden lovers, _The Plant Lore and Garden Craft of Shakespeare_, by Canon Ellacombe. Of it I never weary, and for it I am ever grateful. Shakespeare Gardens, or Shakespeare Borders, too, are laid out and set with every tree, shrub, and flower named in Shakespeare, and these are over two hundred in number. A distinguishing mark of the Shakespeare Border of Lady Warwick is the peculiar label set alongside each plant. This label is of pottery, greenish-brown in tint, shaped like a butterfly, bearing on its wings a quotation of a few words and the play reference relating to each special plant. Of course these words have been fired in and are thus permanent. Pretty as they are in themselves they must be disfiguring to the borders--as all labels are in a garden. In the garden at Hillside, near Albany, New York, grows a green and flourishing Shakespeare Border, gathered ten years ago by the mistress of the garden. I use the terms green and flourishing with exactness in this connection, for a great impression made by this border is of its thriving health, and also of the predominance of green leafage of every variety, shape, manner of growth, and oddness of tint. In this latter respect it is infinitely more beautiful than the ordinary border, varying from silvery glaucous green through greens of yellow or brownish shade to the blue-black greens of some herbs; and among these green leaves are many of sweet or pungent scent, and of medicinal qualities, such as are seldom grown to-day save in some such choice and chosen spot. There is less bloom in this Shakespeare Border than in our modern flower beds, and the flowers are not so large or brilliant as our modern favorites; but, quiet as they are, they are said to excel the blossoms of the same plants of Shakespeare's own day, which we learn from the old herbalists were smaller and less varied in color and of simpler tints than those of their descendants. At the first glance this Shakespeare Border shines chiefly in the light of the imagination, as stirred by the poet's noble words; but do not dwell on this border as a whole, as something only to be looked at; read the pages of this garden, dwell on each leafy sentence, and you are entranced with its beautiful significance. It was not gathered with so much thought, and each plant and seed set out and watched and reared like a delicate child, to become a show place; it appeals for a more intimate regard; and we find that its detail makes its charm. Such a garden as this appeals warmly to anyone who is sensitive to the imaginative element of flower beauty. Many garden makers forget that a flower bed is a group of living beings--perhaps of sentient beings--as well as a mass of beautiful color. Modern gardens tend far too much toward the display of the united effect of growing plants, to a striving for universal brilliancy, rather than attention to and love for separate flowers. There was refreshment of spirit as well as of the senses in the old-time garden of flowers, such as these planted in this Shakespeare Border, and it stirred the heart of the poet as could no modern flower gardens. [Illustration: Long Border at Hillside.] The scattering inflorescence and the tiny size of the blossoms give to this Shakespeare Border an unusual aspect of demureness and delicacy, and the plants seem to cling with affection and trust to the path of their human protector; they look simple and confiding, and seem close both to nature and to man. This homelike and modest quality is shown, I think, even in the presentation in black and white given on page 216 and opposite page 218, though it shows still more in the garden when the wide range of tint of foliage is added. A most appropriate companion of the old flowers in this Shakespeare Border is the sun-dial, which is an exact copy of the one at Abbotsford, Scotland. It bears the motto [Greek: ERCHETAI GAR NYX] meaning, "For the night cometh." It was chosen by Sir Walter Scott, for his sun-dial, as a solemn monitor to himself of the hour "when no man can work." It was copied from a motto on the dial-plate of the watch of the great Dr. Samuel Johnson; and it is curious that in both cases the word [Greek: GAR] should be introduced, for it is not in the clause in the New Testament from which the motto was taken. It is a beautiful motto and one of singular appropriateness for a sun-dial. The pedestal of this sun-dial is of simple lines, but it is dignified and pleasing, aside from the great interest of association which surrounds it. [Illustration: The Beauty of Winter Lilacs.] I had a happy sense, when walking through this garden, that, besides my congenial living companionship, I had the company of some noble Elizabethan ghosts; and I know that if Shakespeare and Jonson and Herrick were to come to Hillside, they would find the garden so familiar to them; they would greet the plants like old friends, they would note how fine grew the Rosemary this year, how sweet were the Lady's-smocks, how fair the Gillyflowers. And Gerarde and Parkinson would ponder, too, over all the herbs and simples of their own Physick Gardens, and compare notes. Above all I seemed to see, walking soberly by my side, breathing in with delight the varied scents of leaf and blossom, that lover and writer of flowers and gardens, Lord Bacon--and not in the disguise of Shakespeare either. For no stronger proofs can be found of the existence of two individualities than are in the works of each of these men, in their sentences and pages which relate to gardens and flowers. This fair garden and Shakespeare Border are loveliest in the cool of the day, in the dawn or at early eve; and those who muse may then remember another Presence in a garden in the cool of the day. And then I recall that gem of English poesy which always makes me pitiful of its author; that he could write this, and yet, in his hundreds of pages of English verse, make not another memorable line:-- "A Garden is a lovesome thing, God wot; Rose plot, Fringed pool, Ferned grot, The veriest school of Peace; And yet the fool Contends that God is not in gardens. Not in gardens! When the eve is cool! Nay, but I have a sign. 'Tis very sure God walks in mine." Shakespeare Borders grow very readily and freely in England, save in the case of the few tropical flowers and trees named in the pages of the great dramatist; but this Shakespeare Border at Hillside needs much cherishing. The plants of Heather and Broom and Gorse have to be specially coddled by transplanting under cold frames during the long winter months in frozen Albany; and thus they find vast contrast to their free, unsheltered life in Great Britain. [Illustration: Garden of Mrs. Frank Robinson, Wakefield, Rhode Island.] Persistent efforts have been made to acclimate both Heather and Gorse in America. We have seen how Broom came uninvited and spread unasked on the Massachusetts coast; but Gorse and Heather have proved shy creatures. On the beautiful island of Naushon the carefully planted Gorse may be found spread in widely scattered spots and also on the near-by mainland, but it cannot be said to have thrived markedly. The Scotch Heather, too, has been frequently planted, and watched and pushed, but it is slow to become acclimated. It is not because the winters are too cold, for it is found in considerable amount in bitter Newfoundland; perhaps it prefers to live under a crown. Modern authors have seldom given their names to gardens, not even Tennyson with his intimate and extended knowledge of garden flowers. A Mary Howitt Garden was planned, full of homely old blooms, such as she loves to name in her verse; but it would have slight significance save to its maker, since no one cares to read Mary Howitt nowadays. In that charming book, _Sylvana's Letters to an Unknown Friend_ (which I know were written to me), the author, E. V. B., says, "The very ideal of a garden, and the only one I know, is found in Shelley's _Sensitive Plant_." With quick championing of a beloved poet, I at once thought of the radiant garden of flowers in Keats's heart and poems. Then I reread the _Sensitive Plant_ in a spirit of utmost fairness and critical friendliness, and I am willing to yield the Shelley Garden to Sylvana, while I keep, for my own delight, my Keats garden of sunshine, color, and warmth. That Keats had a profound knowledge and love of flowers is shown in his letters as well as his poems. Only a few months before his death, when stricken with and fighting a fatal disease, he wrote:-- "How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon me! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields. I muse with greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy--their shapes and colors are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of my life." Near the close of his _Endymion_ he wrote:-- "Nor much it grieves To die, when summer dies on the cold sward. Why, I have been a butterfly, a lord Of flowers, garlands, love-knots, silly posies, Groves, meadows, melodies, and arbor roses; My kingdom's at its death, and just it is That I should die with it." In the summer of 1816, under the influence of a happy day at Hampstead, he wrote that lovely poem, "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill." After a description of the general scene, a special corner of beauty is thus told:-- "A bush of May flowers with the bees about them-- Ah, sure no bashful nook could be without them-- And let a lush Laburnum oversweep them, And let long grass grow round the roots to keep them Moist, cool, and green; and shade the Violets That they may bind the moss in leafy nets. A Filbert hedge with Wild-brier over trim'd, And clumps of Woodbine taking the soft wind, Upon their summer thrones...." Then come these wonderful lines, which belittle all other descriptions of Sweet Peas:-- "Here are Sweet Peas, on tiptoe for a flight, With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white, And taper fingers catching at all things To bind them all about with tiny wings." Keats states in his letters that his love of flowers was wholly for those of the "common garden sort," not for flowers of the greenhouse or difficult cultivation, nor do I find in his lines any evidence of extended familiarity with English wild flowers. He certainly does not know the flowers of woods and fields as does Matthew Arnold. [Illustration: The Parson's Walk.] The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table says: "Did you ever hear a poet who did not talk flowers? Don't you think a poem which for the sake of being original should leave them out, would be like those verses where the letter _a_ or _e_, or some other, is omitted? No; they will bloom over and over again in poems as in the summer fields, to the end of time, always old and always new." The Autocrat himself knew well a poet who never talked flowers in his poems, a poet beloved of all other poets,--Arthur Hugh Clough,--though he loved and knew all flowers. From Matthew Arnold's beautiful tribute to him, are a few of his wonderful flower lines, cut out from their fellows:-- "Through the thick Corn the scarlet Poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see Pale blue Convolvulus in tendrils creep, And air-swept Lindens yield Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers Of bloom..., * * * * * "Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the Musk Carnations break and swell. Soon shall we have gold-dusted Snapdragon, Sweet-william with his homely cottage smell, And Stocks in fragrant blow." Oh, what a master hand! Where in all English verse are fairer flower hues? And where is a more beautiful description of a midsummer evening, than Arnold's exquisite lines beginning:-- "The evening comes; the fields are still; The tinkle of the thirsty rill." Dr. Holmes was also a master in the description of garden flowers. I should know, had I never been told save from his verses, just the kind of a Cambridge garden he was reared in, and what flowers grew in it. Lowell, too, gives ample evidence of a New England childhood in a garden. The gardens of Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_ and of Thomson's poems come to our minds without great warmth of welcome from us; while Clare's lines are full of charm:-- "And where the Marjoram once, and Sage and Rue, And Balm, and Mint, with curl'd leaf Parsley grew, And double Marigolds, and silver Thyme, And Pumpkins 'neath the window climb. And where I often, when a child, for hours Tried through the pales to get the tempting flowers, As Lady's Laces, everlasting Peas, True-love-lies-bleeding, with the Hearts-at-ease And Goldenrods, and Tansy running high, That o'er the pale tops smiled on passers by." A curious old seventeenth-century poet was the Jesuit, René Rapin. The copy of his poem entitled _Gardens_ which I have seen, is the one in my daughter's collection of garden books; it was "English'd by the Ingenious Mr. Gardiner," and published in 1728. Hallam in his _Introduction to the Literature of Europe_ gives a capital estimate of this long poem of over three thousand lines. I find them pretty dull reading, with much monotony of adjectives, and very affected notions for plant names. I fancy he manufactured all his tedious plant traditions himself. [Illustration: Garden of Mary Washington.] A pleasing little book entitled _Dante's Garden_ has collected evidence, from his writings, of Dante's love of green, growing things. The title is rather strained, since he rarely names individual flowers, and only refers vaguely to their emblematic significance. I would have entitled the book _Dante's Forest_, since he chiefly refers to trees; and the Italian gardens of his days were of trees rather than flowers. There are passages in his writings which have led some of his worshippers to believe that his childhood was passed in a garden; but these references are very indeterminate. The picture of a deserted garden, with its sad sentiment has charmed the fancy of many a poet. Hood, a true flower-lover, wrote this jingle in his _Haunted House_:-- "The Marigold amidst the nettles blew, The Gourd embrac'd the Rose bush in its ramble. The Thistle and the Stock together grew, The Hollyhock and Bramble. "The Bearbine with the Lilac interlaced, The sturdy Burdock choked its tender neighbor, The spicy Pink. All tokens were effaced Of human care and labor." These lines are a great contrast to the dignified versification of The Old Garden, by Margaret Deland, a garden around which a great city has grown. "Around it is the street, a restless arm That clasps the country to the city's heart." No one could read this poem without knowing that the author is a true garden lover, and knowing as well that she spent her childhood in a garden. Another American poet, Edith Thomas, writes exquisitely of old gardens and garden flowers. "The pensile Lilacs still their favors throw. The Star of Lilies, plenteous long ago, Waits on the summer dusk, and faileth not. The legions of the grass in vain would blot The spicy Box that marks the garden row. Let but the ground some human tendance know, It long remaineth an engentled spot." Let me for a moment, through the suggestion of her last two lines, write of the impress left on nature through flower planting. "The garden long remaineth an engentled spot." You cannot for years stamp out the mark of a garden; intentional destruction may obliterate the garden borders, but neglect never. The delicate flowers die, but some sturdy things spring up happily and seem gifted with everlasting life. Fifteen years ago a friend bought an old country seat on Long Island; near the site of the new house, an old garden was ploughed deep and levelled to a lawn. Every year since then the patient gardeners pull up, on this lawn, in considerable numbers, Mallows, Campanulas, Star of Bethlehem, Bouncing-bets and innumerable Asparagus shoots, and occasionally the seedlings of other flowers which have bided their time in the dark earth. Traces of the residence of Sir Walter Raleigh in Ireland may still be seen in the growth of richly perfumed wall-flowers which he brought from the Azores. The Affane Cherry is found where he planted it, and some of his Cedars are living. The summer-house of Yew trees sheltered him when he smoked in the garden, and in this garden he planted Tobacco. Near by is the famous spot where he planted what were then called Virginian Potatoes. By that planting they acquired the name of Irish Potatoes. I have spoken of the Prince Nurseries in Flushing; the old nurserymen left a more lasting mark than their Nurseries, in the rare trees and plants now found on the roads, and in the fields and gardens for many miles around Flushing. With the Parsons family, who have been, since 1838, distributors of unusual plants, especially the splendid garden treasures from China and Japan, they have made Flushing a delightful nature-study. In the humblest dooryard, and by the wayside in outlying parts of the town, may be seen rare and beautiful old trees: a giant purple Beech is in a laborer's yard; fine Cedars, Salisburias, red-flowered Horse-chestnuts, Japanese flowering Quinces and Cherries, and even rare Japanese Maples are to be found; a few survivors of the Chinese Mulberry have a romantic interest as mementoes of a giant bubble of ruin. The largest Scotch Laburnum I ever saw, glorious in golden bloom, is behind an unkempt house. On the Parsons estate is a weeping Beech of unusual size. Its branches trail on the ground in a vast circumference of 222 feet, forming a great natural arbor. The beautiful vernal light in this tree bower may be described in Andrew Marvell's words:-- "Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade." [Illustration: Box and Phlox.] The photograph of it, shown opposite page 232, gives some scant idea of its leafy walls; it has been for years the fit trysting-place of lovers, as is shown by the initials carved on the great trunk. Great Judas trees, sadly broken yet bravely blooming; decayed hedges of several kinds of Lilacs, Syringas, Snowballs, and Yuccas of princely size and bearing still linger. Everywhere are remnants of Box hedges. One unkempt dooryard of an old Dutch farm-house was glorified with a broad double row of yellow Lily at least sixty feet in length. Everywhere is Wistaria, on porches, fences, houses, and trees; the abundant Dogwood trees are often overgrown with Wistaria. The most exquisite sight of the floral year was the largest Dogwood tree I have ever seen, radiant with starry white bloom, and hung to the tip of every white-flowered branch with the drooping amethystine racemes of Wistaria of equal luxuriance. Golden-yellow Laburnum blooms were in one case mingled with both purple and white Wistaria. These yellow, purple, and white blooms of similar shape were a curious sight, as if a single plant had been grafted. As I rode past so many glimpses of loveliness mingled with so much present squalor, I could but think of words of the old hymn:-- "Where every prospect pleases And only man is vile." Could the hedges, trees, and vines which came from the Prince and Parsons Nurseries have been cared for, northeastern Long Island, which is part of the city of Greater New York, would still be what it was named by the early explorers, "The Pearl of New Netherland." [Illustration: Within the Weeping Beech.] CHAPTER X THE CHARM OF COLOR "How strange are the freaks of memory, The lessons of life we forget. While a trifle, a trick of color, In the wonderful web is set." --JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. The quality of charm in color is most subtle; it is like the human attribute known as fascination, "whereof," says old Cotton Mather, "men have more Experience than Comprehension." Certainly some alliance of color with a form suited or wonted to it is necessary to produce a gratification of the senses. Thus in the leaves of plants every shade of green is pleasing; then why is there no charm in a green flower? The green of Mignonette bloom would scarcely be deemed beautiful were it not for our association of it with the delicious fragrance. White is the absence of color. In flowers a pure chalk-white, and a snow-white (which is bluish) is often found; but more frequently the white flower blushes a little, or is warmed with yellow, or has green veins. Where green runs into the petals of a white flower, its beauty hangs by a slender thread. If the green lines have any significance, as have the faint green checkerings of the Fritillary, which I have described elsewhere in this book, they add to its interest; but ordinarily they make the petals seem undeveloped. The Snowdrop bears the mark of one of the few tints of green which we like in white flowers; its "heart-shaped seal of green," sung by Rossetti, has been noted by many other poets. Tennyson wrote:-- "Pure as lines of green that streak the white Of the first Snowdrop's inner leaves." [Illustration: Spring Snowflake.] A cousin of the Snowdrop, is the "Spring Snowflake" or Leucojum, called also by New England country folk "High Snowdrop." It bears at the end of each snowy petal a tiny exact spot of green; and I think it must have been the flower sung by Leigh Hunt:-- "The nice-leaved lesser Lilies, Shading like detected light Their little green-tipt lamps of white." The illustration on page 234 shows the graceful growth of the flower and its exquisitely precise little green-dotted petals, but it has not caught its luminous whiteness, which seems almost of phosphorescent brightness in each little flower. The Star of Bethlehem is a plant in which the white and green of the leaf is curiously repeated in the flower. Gardeners seldom admit this flower now to their gardens, it so quickly crowds out everything else; it has become on Long Island nothing but a weed. The high-growing Star of Bethlehem is a pretty thing. A bed of it in my sister's garden is shown on page 237. It is curious that when all agree that green flowers have no beauty and scant charm, that a green flower should have been one of the best-loved flowers of my home garden. But this love does not come from any thought of the color or beauty of the flower, but from association. It was my mother's favorite, hence it is mine. It was her favorite because she loved its clear, pure, spicy fragrance. This ever present and ever welcome scent which pervades the entire garden if leaf or flower of the loved Ambrosia be crushed, is curious and characteristic, a true "ambrosiack odor," to use Ben Jonson's words. A vivid description of Ambrosia is that of Gerarde in his delightful _Herball_. "Oke of Jerusalem, or Botrys, hath sundry small stems a foote and a halfe high dividing themselves into many small branches. The leafe very much resembling the leafe of an Oke, which hath caused our English women to call it Oke of Jerusalem. The upper side of the leafe is a deepe greene and somewhat rough and hairy, but underneath it is of a darke reddish or purple colour. The seedie floures grow clustering about the branches like the yong clusters or blowings of the Vine. The roote is small and thriddy. The whole herbe is of a pleasant smell and savour, and the whole plant dieth when the seed is ripe. Oke of Jerusalem is of divers called Ambrosia." Ambrosia has been loved for many centuries by Englishwomen; it is in the first English list of names of plants, which was made in 1548 by one Dr. Turner; and in this list it is called "Ambrose." He says of it:-- "Botrys is called in englishe, Oke of Hierusalem, in duche, trauben kraute, in french pijmen. It groweth in gardines muche in England." Ambrosia has now died out "in gardines muche in England." I have had many letters from English flower lovers telling me they know it not; and I have had the pleasure of sending the seeds to several old English and Scotch gardens, where I hope it will once more grow and flourish, for I am sure it must feel at home. [Illustration: Star of Bethlehem.] The seeds of this beloved Ambrosia, which filled my mother's garden in every spot in which it could spring, and which overflowed with cheerful welcome into the gardens of our neighbors, was given her from the garden of a great-aunt in Walpole, New Hampshire. This Walpole garden was a famous gathering of old-time favorites, and it had the delightful companionship of a wild garden. On a series of terraces with shelving banks, which reached down to a stream, the boys of the family planted, seventy years ago, a myriad of wild flowers, shrubs, and trees, from the neighboring woods. By the side of the garden great Elm trees sheltered scores of beautiful gray squirrels; and behind the house and garden an orchard led to the wheat fields, which stretched down to the broad Connecticut River. All flowers thrived there, both in the Box-bordered beds and in the wild garden, perhaps because the morning mists from the river helped out the heavy buckets of water from the well during the hot summer weeks. Even in winter the wild garden was beautiful from the brilliant Bittersweet which hung from every tree. [Illustration: "The Pearl."] Here Ambrosia was plentiful, but is plentiful no longer; and Walpole garden lovers seek seeds of it from the Worcester garden. I think it dies out generally when all the weeding and garden care is done by gardeners; they assume that the little plants of such modest bearing are weeds, and pull them up, with many other precious seedlings of the old garden, in their desire to have ample expanse of naked dirt. One of the charms which was permitted to the old garden was its fulness. Nature there certainly abhorred a vacant space. The garden soil was full of resources; it had a seed for every square inch; it seemed to have a reserve store ready to crowd into any space offered by the removal or dying down of a plant at any time. Let me tell of a curious thing I found in an old book, anent our subject--green flowers. It shows that we must not accuse our modern sensation lovers, either in botany or any other science, of being the only ones to add artifice to nature. The green Carnation has been chosen to typify the decadence and monstrosity of the end of the nineteenth century; but nearly two hundred years ago a London fruit and flower grower, named Richard Bradley, wrote a treatise upon field husbandry and garden culture, and in it he tells of a green Carnation which "a certayn fryar" produced by grafting a Carnation upon a Fennel stalk. The flowers were green for several years, then nature overcame decadent art. There be those who are so enamoured of the color green and of foliage, that they care little for flowers of varied tint; even in a garden, like the old poet Marvell, they deem,-- "No white nor red was ever seen So amorous as this lovely green." Such folk could scarce find content in an American garden; for our American gardeners must confess, with Shakespeare's clown: "I am no great Nebuchadnezzar, sir, I have not much skill in grass." Our lawns are not old enough. A charming greenery of old English gardens was the bowling-green. We once had them in our colonies, as the name of a street in our greatest city now proves; and I deem them a garden fashion well-to-be-revived. The laws of color preference differ with the size of expanses. Our broad fields often have pleasing expanses of leafage other than green, and flowers that are as all-pervading as foliage. Many flowers of the field have their day, when each seems to be queen, a short day, but its rights none dispute. Snow of Daisies, yellow of Dandelions, gold of Buttercups, purple pinkness of Clover, Innocence, Blue-eyed Grass, Milkweed, none reign more absolutely in every inch of the fields than that poverty stricken creature, the Sorrel. William Morris warns us that "flowers in masses are mighty strong color," and must be used with much caution in a garden. But there need be no fear of massed color in a field, as being ever gaudy or cloying. An approach to the beauty and satisfaction of nature's plentiful field may be artificially obtained as an adjunct to the garden in a flower-close sown or set with a solid expanse of bloom of some native or widely adopted plant. I have seen a flower-close of Daisies, another of Buttercups, one of Larkspur, one of Coreopsis. A new field tint, and a splendid one, has been given to us within a few years, by the introduction of the vivid red of Italian clover. It is eagerly welcomed to our fields, so scant of scarlet. This clover was brought to America in the years 1824 _et seq._, and is described in contemporary publications in alluring sentences. I have noted the introduction of several vegetables, grains, fruits, berries, shrubs, and flowers in those years, and attribute this to the influence of the visit of Lafayette in 1824. Adored by all, his lightest word was heeded; and he was a devoted agriculturist and horticulturist, ever exchanging ideas, seeds, and plants with his American fellow-patriots and fellow-farmers. I doubt if Italian clover then became widely known; but our modern farmers now think well of it, and the flower lover revels in it. The exigencies of rhyme and rhythm force us to endure some very curious notions of color in the poets. I think no saying of poet ever gave greater check to her lovers than these lines of Emily Dickinson:-- "Nature rarer uses yellow Than another hue; Saves she all of that for sunsets, Prodigal of blue. Spending scarlet like a woman, Yellow she affords Only scantly and selectly, Like a lover's words." I read them first with a sense of misapprehension that I had not seen aright; but there the words stood out, "Nature rarer uses yellow than another hue." The writer was such a jester, such a tricky elf that I fancy she wrote them in pure "contrariness," just to see what folks would say, how they would dispute over her words. For I never can doubt that, with all her recluse life, she knew intuitively that some time her lines would be read by folks who would love them. [Illustration: Pyrethrum.] The scarcity of red wild flowers is either a cause or an effect; at any rate it is said to be connected with the small number of humming-birds, who play an important part in the fertilization of many of the red flowers. There are no humming-birds in Europe; and the Aquilegia, red and yellow here, is blue there, and is then fertilized by the assistance of the bumblebee. Without humming-birds the English successfully accomplish one glorious sweep of red in the Poppies of the field; Parkinson called them "a beautiful and gallant red"--a very happy phrase. Ruskin, that master of color and of its description, and above all master of the description of Poppies, says:-- "The Poppy is the most transparent and delicate of all the blossoms of the field. The rest, nearly all of them, depend on the texture of their surface for color. But the Poppy is painted glass; it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. Whenever it is seen, against the light or with the light, it is a flame, and warms the wind like a blown ruby." There is one quality of the Oriental Poppies which is very palpable to me. They have often been called insolent--Browning writes of the "Poppy's red affrontery"; to me the Poppy has an angry look. It is wonderfully haughty too, and its seed-pod seems like an emblem of its rank. This great green seed-pod stands one inch high in the centre of the silken scarlet robe, and has an antique crown of purple bands with filling of lilac, just like the crown in some ancient kingly portraits, when the bands of gold and gems radiating from a great jewel in the centre are filled with crimson or purple velvet. Around this splendid crowned seed-vessel are rows of stamens and purple anthers of richest hue. We must not let any scarlet flower be dropped from the garden, certainly not the Geranium, which just at present does not shine so bravely as a few years ago. The general revulsion of feeling against "bedding out" has extended to the poor plants thus misused, which is unjust. I find I have spoken somewhat despitefully of the Coleus, Lobelia, and Calceolaria, so I hasten to say that I do not include the Geranium with them. I love its clean color, in leaf and blossom; its clean fragrance; its clean beauty, its healthy growth; it is a plant I like to have near me. It has been the custom of late to sneer at crimson in the garden, especially if its vivid color gets a dash of purple and becomes what Miss Jekyll calls "malignant magenta." It is really more vulgar than malignant, and has come to be in textile products a stamp and symbol of vulgarity, through the forceful brilliancy of our modern aniline dyes. But this purple crimson, this amarant, this magenta, especially in the lighter shades, is a favorite color in nature. The garden is never weary of wearing it. See how it stands out in midsummer! It is rank in Ragged Robin, tall Phlox, and Petunias; you find it in the bed of Drummond Phlox, among the Zinnias; the Portulacas, Balsams, and China Asters prolong it. Earlier in the summer the Rhododendrons fill the garden with color that on some of the bushes is termed sultana and crimson, but it is in fact plain magenta. One of the good points of the Peony is that you never saw a magenta one. This color shows that time as well as place affects our color notions, for magenta is believed to be the honored royal purple of the ancients. Fifty years ago no one complained of magenta. It was deemed a cheerful color, and was set out boldly and complacently by the side of pink or scarlet, or wall flower colors. Now I dislike it so that really the printed word, seen often as I glance back through this page, makes the black and white look cheap. If I could turn all magenta flowers pink or purple, I should never think further about garden harmony, all other colors would adjust themselves. It has been the fortune of some communities to be the home of men in nature like Thoreau of Concord and Gilbert White of Selborne, men who live solely in love of out-door things, birds, flowers, rocks, and trees. To all these nature lovers is not given the power of writing down readily what they see and know, usually the gift of composition is denied them; but often they are just as close and accurate observers as the men whose names are known to the world by their writings. Sometimes these naturalists boldly turn to nature, their loved mother, and earn their living in the woods and fields. Sometimes they have a touch of the hermit in them, they prefer nature to man; others are genial, kindly men, albeit possessed of a certain reserve. I deem the community blest that has such a citizen, for his influence in promoting a love and study of nature is ever great. I have known one such ardent naturalist, Arba Peirce, ever since my childhood. He lives the greater part of his waking hours in the woods and fields, and these waking hours are from sunrise. From the earliest bloom of spring to the gay berry of autumn, he knows all beautiful things that grow, and where they grow, for hundreds of miles around his home. [Illustration: Terraced Garden of Misses Nichols, Salem, Massachusetts.] I speak of him in this connection because he has acquired through his woodland life a wonderful power of distinguishing flowers at great distance with absolute accuracy. Especially do his eyes have the power of detecting those rose-lilac tints which are characteristic of our rarest, our most delicate wild flowers, and which I always designate to myself as Arethusa color. He brought me this June a royal gift--a great bunch of wild fringed Orchids, another of Calopogon, and one of Arethusa. What a color study these three made! At the time their lilac-rose tints seemed to me far lovelier than any pure rose colors. In those wild princesses were found every tone of that lilac-rose from the faint blush like the clouds of a warm sunset, to a glow on the lip of the Arethusa, like the crimson glow of Mullein Pink. My friend of the meadow and wildwood had gathered that morning a glorious harvest, over two thousand stems of Pogonia, from his own hidden spot, which he has known for forty years and from whence no other hand ever gathers. For a little handful of these flower heads he easily obtains a dollar. He has acquired gradually a regular round of customers, for whom he gathers a successive harvest of wild flowers from Pussy Willows and Hepatica to winter berries. It is not easily earned money to stand in heavy rubber boots in marsh mud and water reaching nearly to the waist, but after all it is happy work. Jeered at in his early life by fools for his wood-roving tastes, he has now the pleasure and honor of supplying wild flowers to our public schools, and being the authority to whom scholars and teachers refer in vexed questions of botany. I think the various tints allied to purple are the most difficult to define and describe of any in the garden. To begin with, all these pinky-purple, these arethusa tints are nameless; perhaps orchid color is as good a name as any. Many deem purple and violet precisely the same. Lavender has much gray in its tint. Miss Jekyll deems mauve and lilac the same; to me lilac is much pinker, much more delicate. Is heliotrope a pale bluish purple? Some call it a blue faintly tinged with red. Then there are the orchid tints, which have more pink than blue. It is a curious fact that, with all these allied tints which come from the union of blue with red, the color name comes from a flower name. Violet, lavender, lilac, heliotrope, orchid, are examples; each is an exact tint. Rose and pink are color names from flowers, and flowers of much variety of colors, but the tint name is unvarying. Edward de Goncourt, of all writers on flowers and gardens, seems to have been most frankly pleased with the artificial side of the gardener's art. He viewed the garden with the eye of a colorist, setting a palette of varied greens from the deep tones of the evergreens, the Junipers and Cryptomerias through the variegated Hollies, Privets and Spindle trees; and he said that an "elegantly branched coquettishly variegated bush" seemed to him like a piece of bric-a-brac which should be hunted out and praised like some curio hidden on the shelf of a collector. A lack of color perception seems to have been prevalent of ancient days, as it is now in some Oriental countries. The Bible offers evidence of this, and it has also been observed that the fragrance of flowers is nowhere noted until we reach the Song of Solomon. It is believed that in earliest time archaic men had no sense of color; that they knew only light and darkness. Mr. Gladstone wrote a most interesting paper on the lack of color sense in Homer, whose perception of brilliant light was good, especially in the glowing reflections of metals, but who never names blue or green even in speaking of the sky, or trees, while his reds and purples are hopelessly mixed. Some German scientists have maintained that as recently as Homer's day, our ancestors were (to use Sir John Lubbock's word) blue-blind, which fills me, as it must all blue lovers, with profound pity. [Illustration: Arbor in a Salem Garden.] The influence of color has ever been felt by other senses than that of sight. In the _Cotton Manuscripts_, written six hundred years ago, the relations and effects of color on music and coat-armor were laboriously explained: and many later writers have striven to show the effect of color on the health, imagination, or fortune. I see no reason for sneering at these notions of sense-relation; I am grateful for borrowed terms of definition for these beautiful things which are so hard to define. When an artist says to me, "There is a color that sings," I know what he means; as I do when my friend says of the funeral music in _Tristan_ that "it always hurts her eyes." Musicians compose symphonies in color, and artists paint pictures in symphonies. Musicians and authors acknowledge the domination of color and color terms; a glance at a modern book catalogue will prove it. Stephen Crane and other modern extremists depend upon color to define and describe sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, ideas, vices, virtues, traits, as well as sights. Sulphur-yellow is deemed an inspiring color, and light green a clean color; every one knows the influence of bright red upon many animals and birds; it is said all barnyard fowl are affected by it. If any one can see a sunny bed of blue Larkspur in full bloom without being moved thereby, he must be color blind and sound deaf as well, for that indeed is a sight full of music and noble inspiration, a realization of Keats' beautiful thought:-- "Delicious symphonies, like airy flowers Budded, and swell'd, and full-blown, shed full showers Of light, soft unseen leaves of sound divine." CHAPTER XI THE BLUE FLOWER BORDER "Blue thou art, intensely blue! Flower! whence came thy dazzling hue? When I opened first mine eye, Upward glancing to the sky, Straightway from the firmament Was the sapphire brilliance sent." --JAMES MONTGOMERY. Questions of color relations in a garden are most opinion-making and controversy-provoking. Shall we plant by chance, or by a flower-loving instinct for sheltered and suited locations, as was done in all old-time gardens, and with most happy and most unaffected results? or shall we plant severely by colors--all yellow flowers in a border together? all red flowers side by side? all pink flowers near each other? This might be satisfactory in small gardens, but I am uncertain whether any profound gratification or full flower succession would come from such rigid planting in long flower borders. William Morris warns us that flowers in masses are "mighty strong color," and must be used with caution. A still greater cause for hesitation would be the ugly jarring of juxtaposing tints of the same color. Yellows do little injury to each other; but I cannot believe that a mixed border of red flowers would ever be satisfactory or scarcely endurable; and few persons would care for beds of all white flowers. But when I reach the Blue Border, then I can speak with decision; I know whereof I write, I know the variety and beauty of a garden bed of blue flowers. In blue you may have much difference in tint and quality without losing color effect. The Persian art workers have accomplished the combining of varying blues most wonderfully and successfully: purplish blues next to green-blues, and sapphire-blues alongside; and blues seldom clash in the flower beds. Blue is my best beloved color; I love it as the bees love it. Every blue flower is mine; and I am as pleased as with a tribute of praise to a friend to learn that scientists have proved that blue flowers represent the most highly developed lines of descent. These learned men believe that all flowers were at first yellow, being perhaps only developed stamens; then some became white, others red; while the purple and blue were the latest and highest forms. The simplest shaped flowers, open to be visited by every insect, are still yellow or white, running into red or pink. Thus the Rose family have simple open symmetrical flowers; and there are no blue Roses--the flower has never risen to the blue stage. In the Pea family the simpler flowers are yellow or red; while the highly evolved members, such as Lupines, Wistaria, Everlasting Pea, are purple or blue, varying to white. Bees are among the highest forms of insect life, and the labiate flowers are adapted to their visits; these nearly all have purple or blue petals--Thyme, Sage, Mint, Marjoram, Basil, Prunella, etc. Of course the Blue Border runs into tints of pale lilac and purple and is thereby the gainer; but I would remove from it the purple Clematis, Wistaria, and Passion-flower, all of which a friend has planted to cover the wall behind her blue flower bed. Sometimes the line between blue and purple is hard to define. Keats invented a word, _purplue_, which he used for this indeterminate color. I would not, in my Blue Border, exclude an occasional group of flowers of other colors; I love a border of all colors far too well to do that. Here, as everywhere in my garden, should be white flowers, especially tall white flowers: white Foxgloves, white Delphinium, white Lupine, white Hollyhock, white Bell-flower, nor should I object to a few spires at one end of the bed of sulphur-yellow Lupines, or yellow Hollyhocks, or a group of Paris Daisies. I have seen a great Oriental Poppy growing in wonderful beauty near a mass of pale blue Larkspur, and Shirley Poppies are a delight with blues; and any one could arrange the pompadour tints of pink and blue in a garden who could in a gown. [Illustration: Scilla.] Let me name some of the favorites of the Blue Border. The earliest but not the eldest is the pretty spicy Scilla in several varieties, and most satisfactory it is in perfection of tint, length of bloom, and great hardiness. It would be welcomed as we eagerly greet all the early spring blooms, even if it were not the perfect little blossom that is pictured on page 254, the very little Scilla that grew in my mother's garden. The early spring blooming of the beloved Grape Hyacinth gives us an overflowing bowl of "blue principle"; the whole plant is imbued and fairly exudes blue. Ruskin gave the beautiful and appropriate term "blue-flushing" to this plant and others, which at the time of their blossoming send out through their veins their blue color into the surrounding leaves and the stem; he says they "breathe out" their color, and tells of a "saturated purple" tint. [Illustration: Sweet Alyssum Edging.] Not content with the confines of the garden border, the Grape Hyacinth has "escaped the garden," and become a field flower. The "seeing eye," ever quick to feel a difference in shade or color, which often proves very slight upon close examination, viewed on Long Island a splendid sea of blue; and it seemed neither the time nor tint for the expected Violet. We found it a field of Grape Hyacinth, blue of leaf, of stem, of flower. While all flowers are in a sense perfect, some certainly do not appear so in shape, among the latter those of irregular sepals. Some flowers seem imperfect without any cause save the fancy of the one who is regarding them; thus to me the Balsam is an imperfect flower. Other flowers impress me delightfully with a sense of perfection. Such is the Grape Hyacinth, doubly grateful in this perfection in the time it comes in early spring. The Grape Hyacinth is the favorite spring flower of my garden--but no! I thought a minute ago the Scilla was! and what place has the Violet? the Flower de Luce? I cannot decide, but this I know--it is some blue flower. Ruskin says of the Grape Hyacinth, as he saw it growing in southern France, its native home, "It was as if a cluster of grapes and a hive of honey had been distilled and pressed together into one small boss of celled and beaded blue." I always think of his term "beaded blue" when I look at it. There are several varieties, from a deep blue or purple to sky-blue, and one is fringed with the most delicate feathery petals. Some varieties have a faint perfume, and country folk call the flower "Baby's Breath" therefrom. [Illustration: Bachelor's Buttons in a Salem Garden.] Purely blue, too, are some of our garden Hyacinths, especially a rather meagre single Hyacinth which looks a little chilly; and Gavin Douglas wrote in the springtime of 1500, "The Flower de Luce forth spread his heavenly blue." It always jars upon my sense of appropriateness to hear this old garden favorite called Fleur de Lis. The accepted derivation of the word is that given by Grandmaison in his _Heraldic Dictionary_. Louis VII. of France, whose name was then written Loys, first gave the name to the flower, "Fleur de Loys"; then it became Fleur de Louis, and finally, Fleur de Lis. Our flower caught its name from Louis. Tusser in his list of flowers for windows and pots gave plainly Flower de Luce; and finally Gerarde called the plant Flower de Luce, and he advised its use as a domestic remedy in a manner which is in vogue in country homes in New England to-day. He said that the root "stamped plaister-wise, doth take away the blewnesse or blacknesse of any stroke" that is, a black and blue bruise. Another use advised of him is as obsolete as the form in which it was rendered. He said it was "good in a loch or licking medicine for shortness of breath." Our apothecaries no longer make, nor do our physicians prescribe, "licking medicines." The powdered root was urged as a complexion beautifier, especially to remove morphew, and as orris-root may be found in many of our modern skin lotions. Ruskin most beautifully describes the Flower de Luce as the flower of chivalry--"with a sword for its leaf, and a Lily for its heart." These grand clumps of erect old soldiers, with leafy swords of green and splendid cuirasses and plumes of gold and bronze and blue, were planted a century ago in our grandmothers' garden, and were then Flower de Luce. A hundred years those sturdy sentinels have stood guard on either side of the garden gates--still Flower de Luce. There are the same clean-cut leaf swords, the same exquisite blossoms, far more beautiful than our tropical Orchids, though similar in shape; let us not change now their historic name, they still are Flower de Luce--the Flower de Louis. The Violet family, with its Pansies and Ladies' Delights, has honored place in our Blue Border, though the rigid color list of a prosaic practical dyer finds these Violet allies a debased purple instead of blue. Our wild Violets, the blue ones, have for me a sad lack for a Violet, that of perfume. They are not as lovely in the woodlands as their earlier coming neighbor, the shy, pure Hepatica. Bryant, calling the Hepatica Squirrelcups (a name I never heard given them elsewhere), says they form "a graceful company hiding in their bells a soft aerial blue." Of course, they vary through blue and pinky purple, but the blue is well hidden, and I never think of them save as an almost white flower. Nor are the Violets as lovely on the meadow and field slopes, as the mild Innocence, the Houstonia, called also Bluets, which is scarcely a distinctly blue expanse, but rather "a milky way of minute stars." An English botanist denies that it is blue at all. A field covered with Innocence always looks to me as if little clouds and puffs of blue-white smoke had descended and rested on the grass. [Illustration: A "Sweet Garden-side" in Salem, Massachusetts.] I well recall when the Aquilegia, under the name of California Columbine, entered my mother's garden, to which its sister, the red and yellow Columbine, had been brought from a rocky New England pasture when the garden was new. This Aquilegia came to us about the year 1870. I presume old catalogues of American florists would give details and dates of the journey of the plant from the Pacific to the Atlantic. It chanced that this first Aquilegia of my acquaintance was of a distinct light blue tint; and it grew apace and thrived and was vastly admired, and filled the border with blueness of that singular tint seen of late years in its fullest extent and most prominent position in the great masses of bloom of the blue Hydrangea, the show plant of such splendid summer homes as may be found at Newport. These blue Hydrangeas are ever to me a color blot. They accord with no other flower and no foliage. I am ever reminded of blue mould, of stale damp. I looked with inexpressible aversion on a photograph of Cecil Rhodes' garden at Cape Town--several solid acres set with this blue Hydrangea and nothing else, unbroken by tree or shrub, and scarce a path, growing as thick as a field sown with ensilage corn, and then I thought what would be the color of that mass! that crop of Hydrangeas! Yet I am told that Rhodes is a flower-lover and flower-thinker. Now this Aquilegia was of similar tint; it was blue, but it was not a pleasing blue, and additional plants of pink, lilac, and purple tints had to be added before the Aquilegia was really included in our list of well-beloveds. [Illustration: Salpiglossis.] There are other flowers for the blue border. It is pleasant to plant common Flax, if you have ample room; it is a superb blue; to many persons the blossom is unfamiliar, and is always of interest. Its lovely flowers have been much sung in English verse. The Salpiglossis, shown on the opposite page, is in its azure tint a lovely flower, though it is a kinsman of the despised Petunia. How the Campanulaceæ enriched the beauty and the blueness of the garden. We had our splendid clusters of Canterbury Bells, both blue and white. I have told elsewhere of our love for them in childhood. Equally dear to us was a hardy old Campanula whose full name I know not, perhaps it is the Pyramidalis; it is shown on page 263, the very plant my mother set out, still growing and blooming; nothing in the garden is more gladly welcomed from year to year. It partakes of the charm shared by every bell-shaped flower, a simple form, but an ever pleasing one. We had also the _Campanula persicifolia_ and _trachelium_, and one we called Bluebells of Scotland, which was not the correct name. It now has died out, and no one recalls enough of its exact detail to learn its real name. The showiest bell-flower was the _Platycodon grandiflorum_, the Chinese or Japanese Bell-flower, shown on page 264. Another name is the Balloon-flower, this on account of the characteristic buds shaped like an inflated balloon. It is a lovely blue in tint, though this photograph was taken from a white-flowered plant in the white border at Indian Hill. The Giant Bell-flower is a _fin de siècle_ blossom named _Ostrowskia_, with flowers four inches deep and six inches in diameter; it has not yet become common in our gardens, where the _Platycodon_ rules in size among its bell-shaped fellows. [Illustration: The Old Campanula.] There are several pretty low-growing blue flowers suitable for edgings, among them the tiny stars of the Swan River Daisy (_Brachycome iberidifolia_) sold as purple, but as brightly blue as Scilla. The dwarf Ageratum is also a long-blossoming soft-tinted blue flower; it made a charming edging in my sister's garden last summer; but I should never put either of them on the edge of the blue border. [Illustration: Chinese Bell-flower.] The dull blue, sparsely set flowers of the various members of the Mint family have no beauty in color, nor any noticeable elegance; the Blue Sage is the only vivid-hued one, and it is a true ornament to the border. Prunella was ever found in old gardens, now it is a wayside weed. Thoreau loved the Prunella for its blueness, its various lights, and noted that its color deepened toward night. This flower, regarded with indifference by nearly every one, and distaste by many, always to him suggested coolness and freshness by its presence. The Prunella was beloved also by Ruskin, who called it the soft warm-scented Brunelle, and told of the fine purple gleam of its hooded blossom: "the two uppermost petals joined like an old-fashioned enormous hood or bonnet; the lower petal torn deep at the edges into a kind of fringe,"--and he said it was a "Brownie flower," a little eerie and elusive in its meaning. I do not like it because it has such a disorderly, unkempt look, it always seems bedraggled. The pretty ladder-like leaf of Jacob's Ladder is most delicate and pleasing in the garden, and its blue bell-flowers are equally refined. This is truly an old-fashioned plant, but well worth universal cultivation. In answer to the question, What is the bluest flower in the garden or field? one answered Fringed Gentian; another the Forget-me-not, which has much pink in its buds and yellow in its blossoms; another Bee Larkspur; and the others _Centaurea cyanus_ or Bachelor's Buttons, a local American name for them, which is not even a standard folk name, since there are twenty-one English plants called Bachelor's Buttons. Ragged Sailor is another American name. Corn-flower, Blue-tops, Blue Bonnets, Bluebottles, Loggerheads are old English names. Queerer still is the title Break-your-spectacles. Hawdods is the oldest name of all. Fitzherbert, in his _Boke of Husbandry_, 1586, thus describes briefly the plant:-- "Hawdod hath a blewe floure, and a few lytle leaves, and hath fyve or syxe branches floured at the top." In varied shades of blue, purple, lilac, pink, and white, Bachelor's Buttons are found in every old garden, growing in a confused tangle of "lytle leaves" and vari-colored flowers, very happily and with very good effect. The illustration on page 258 shows their growth and value in the garden. In _The Promise of May_ Dora's eyes are said to be as blue as the Bluebell, Harebell, Speedwell, Bluebottle, Succory, Forget-me-not, and Violets; so we know what flowers Tennyson deemed blue. Another poet named as the bluest flower, the Monk's-hood, so wonderful of color, one of the very rarest of garden tints; graceful of growth, blooming till frost, and one of the garden's delights. In a list of garden flowers published in Boston, in 1828, it is called Cupid's Car. Southey says in _The Doctor_, of Miss Allison's garden: "The Monk's-hood of stately growth Betsey called 'Dumbledores Delight,' and was not aware that the plant, in whose helmet--rather than cowl-shaped flowers, that busy and best-natured of all insects appears to revel more than any other, is the deadly Aconite of which she read in poetry." The dumbledore was the bumblebee, and this folk name was given, as many others have been, from a close observance of plant habits; for the fertilization of the Monk's-hood is accomplished only by the aid of the bumblebee. [Illustration: Garden at Tudor Place.] Many call Chicory or Succory our bluest flower. Thoreau happily termed it "a cool blue." It is not often the fortune of a flower to be brought to notice and affection because of a poem; we expect the poem to celebrate the virtues of flowers already loved. The Succory is an example of a plant, known certainly to flower students, yet little thought of by careless observers until the beautiful poem of Margaret Deland touched all who read it. I think this a gem of modern poesy, having in full that great element of a true poem, the most essential element indeed of a short poem--the power of suggestion. Who can read it without being stirred by its tenderness and sentiment, yet how few are the words. "Oh, not in ladies' gardens, My peasant posy, Shine thy dear blue eyes; Nor only--nearer to the skies In upland pastures, dim and sweet, But by the dusty road, Where tired feet Toil to and fro, Where flaunting Sin May see thy heavenly hue, Or weary Sorrow look from thee Toward a tenderer blue." I recall perfectly every flower I saw in pasture, swamp, forest, or lane when I was a child; and I know I never saw Chicory save in old gardens. It has increased and spread wonderfully along the roadside within twenty years. By tradition it was first brought to us from England by Governor Bowdoin more than a century ago, to plant as forage. In our common Larkspur, the old-fashioned garden found its most constant and reliable blue banner, its most valuable color giver. Self-sown, this Larkspur sprung up freely every year; needing no special cherishing or nourishing, it grew apace, and bloomed with a luxuriance and length of flowering that cheerfully blued the garden for the whole summer. It was a favorite of children in their floral games, and pretty in the housewife's vases, but its chief hold on favor was in its democracy and endurance. Other flowers drew admirers and lost them; some grew very ugly in their decay; certain choice seedlings often had stunted development, garden scourges attacked tender beauties; fierce July suns dried up the whole border, all save the Larkspur, which neither withered nor decayed; and often, unaided, saved the midsummer garden from scanty unkemptness and dire disrepute. The graceful line of Dr. Holmes, "light as a loop of Larkspur," always comes to my mind as I look at a bed of Larkspur; and I am glad to show here a "loop of Larkspur," growing by the great boulder which he loved in the grounds of his country home at Beverly Farms. I liked to fancy that Dr. Holmes's expression was written by him from his memory of the little wreaths and garlands of pressed Larkspur that have been made so universally for over a century by New England children. But that careful flower observer, Mrs. Wright, notes that in a profuse growth of the Bee Larkspur, the strong flower spikes often are in complete loops before full expansion into a straight spire; some are looped thrice. Dr. Holmes was a minute observer of floral characteristics, as is shown in his poem on the _Coming of Spring_, and doubtless saw this curious growth of the Larkspur. [Illustration: "Light as a Loop of Larkspur."] Common annual Larkspurs now are planted in every one's garden, and deservedly grow in favor yearly. The season of their flowering can be prolonged, renewed in fact, by cutting away the withered flower stems. They respond well to all caretaking, to liberal fertilizing and watering, just as they dwindle miserably with neglect. There are a hundred varieties in all; among them the "Rocket-flowered" and "Ranunculus flowered" Larkspurs or Delphiniums are ever favorites. A friend burst forth in railing at being asked to admire a bed of Delphinium. "Why can't she call them the good old-time name of Larkspur, and not a stiff name cooked up by the botanists." I answered naught, but I remembered that Parkinson in his _Garden of Pleasant Flowers_ gives a chapter to Delphinium, with Lark's-heel as a second thought. "Their most usual name with us," he states, "is Delphinium." There is meaning in the name: the flower is dolphin-like in shape. Of the perennial varieties the _Delphinium brunonianum_ has lovely clear blue, musk-scented flowers; the Chinese or Branching Larkspur is of varied blue tints and tall growth, and blooms from midsummer until frost. And loveliest of all, an old garden favorite, the purely blue Bee Larkspur, with a bee in the heart of each blossom. In an ancient garden in Deerfield I saw this year a splendid group of plants of the old _Delphinium Belladonna_: it is a weak-kneed, weak-backed thing; but give it unobtrusive crutches and busks and backboards (in their garden equivalents), and its incomparable blue will reward your care. There is something singular in the blue of Larkspur. Even on a dark night you can see it showing a distinct blue in the garden like a blue lambent flame. "Larkspur lifting turquoise spires Bluer than the sorcerer's fires." Mrs. Milne-Home says her old Scotch gardener called the white Delphinium Elijah's Chariot--a resounding, stately title. Helmet-flower is another name. I think the Larkspur Border, and the Blue Border both gain if a few plants of the pure white Delphinium, especially the variety called the Emperor, bloom by the blue flowers. In our garden the common blue Larkspur loves to blossom by the side of the white Phlox. A bit of the border is shown on page 162. In another corner of the garden the pink and lilac Larkspur should be grown; for their tints, running into blue, are as varied as those of an opal. I have never seen the wild Larkspur which grows so plentifully in our middle Southern states; but I have seen expanses of our common garden Larkspur which has run wild. Nor have I seen the glorious fields of Wyoming Larkspur, so poisonous to cattle; nor the magnificent Larkspur, eight feet high, described so radiantly to us by John Muir, which blues those wonders of nature, the hanging meadow gardens of California. I am inclined to believe that Lobelia is the least pleasing blue flower that blossoms. I never see it in any place or juxtaposition that it satisfies me. When you take a single flower of it in your hand, its single little delicate bloom is really just as pretty as Blue-eyed Grass, or Innocence, or Scilla, and the whole plant regarded closely by itself isn't at all bad; but whenever and wherever you find it growing in a garden, you never want it in _that_ place, and you shift it here and there. I am convinced that the Lobelia is simply impossible; it is an alien, wrong in some subtle way in tint, in habit of growth, in time of blooming. The last time I noted it in any large garden planting, it was set around the roots of some standard Rose bushes; and the gardener had displayed some thought about it; it was only at the base of white or cream-yellow Roses; but it still was objectionable. I think I would exterminate Lobelia if I could, banish it and forget it. In the minds of many would linger a memory of certain ornate garden vases, each crowded with a Pandanus-y plant, a pink Begonia, a scarlet double Geranium, a purple Verbena or a crimson Petunia, all gracefully entwined with Nasturtiums and Lobelia--while these folks lived, the Lobelia would not be forgotten. You will have some curious experiences with your Blue Border; kindly friends, pleased with its beauty or novelty, will send to you plants and seeds to add to its variety of form "another bright blue flower." You will usually find you have added variety of tint as well, ranging into crimson and deep purple, for color blindness is far more general than is thought. The loveliest blue flowers are the wild ones of fields and meadows; therefore the poor, says Alphonse Karr, with these and the blue of the sky have the best and the most of all blueness. Yet we are constantly hearing folks speak of the lack of the color blue among wild flowers, which always surprises me; I suppose I see blue because I love blue. In pure cobalt tint it is rare; in compensation, when it does abound, it makes a permanent imprint on our vision, which never vanishes. Recalling in midwinter the expanses of color in summer waysides, I do not see them white with Daisies, or yellow with Goldenrod, but they are in my mind's vision brightly, beautifully blue. One special scene is the blue of Fringed Gentians, on a sunny October day, on a rocky hill road in Royalston, Massachusetts, where they sprung up, wide open, a solid mass of blue, from stone wall to stone wall, with scarcely a wheel rut showing among them. Even thus, growing in as lavish abundance as any weed, the Fringed Gentian still preserved in collective expanse, its delicate, its distinctly aristocratic bearing. Bryant asserts of this flower:-- "Thou waitest late, and com'st alone When woods are bare, and birds are flown." But by this roadside the woods were far from bare. Many Asters, especially the variety I call Michaelmas Daisies, Goldenrod, Butter-and-eggs, Turtle Head, and other flowers, were in ample bloom. And the same conditions of varied flower companionship existed when I saw the Fringed Gentian blooming near Bryant's own home at Cummington. [Illustration: Viper's Bugloss.] Another vast field of blue, ever living in my memory, was that of the Viper's Bugloss, which I viewed with surprise and delight from the platform of a train, returning from the Columbian Exposition; when I asked a friendly brakeman what the flower was called, he answered "Vilets," as nearly all workingmen confidently name every blue flower; and he sprang from the train while the locomotive was swallowing water, and brought to me a great armful of blueness. I am not wont to like new flowers as well as my childhood's friends, but I found this new friend, the Viper's Bugloss, a very welcome and pleasing acquaintance. Curious, too, it is, with the red anthers exserted beyond the bright blue corolla, giving the field, when the wind blew across it, a new aspect and tint, something like a red and blue changeable silk. The Viper's Bugloss seems to have the pervasive power of many another blue and purple flower, Lupine, Iris, Innocence, Grape Hyacinth, Vervain, Aster, Spiked Loosestrife; it has become in many states a tiresome weed. On the Esopus Creek (which runs into the Hudson River) and adown the Hudson, acre after acre of meadow and field by the waterside are vivid with its changeable hues, and the New York farmers' fields are overrun by the newcomer. I have seen the Viper's Bugloss often since that day on the railroad train, now that I know it, and think of it. Thoreau noted the fact that in a large sense we find only what we look for. And he defined well our powers of perception when he said that many an object will not be seen, even when it comes within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray. Last spring, having to spend a tiresome day riding the length of Long Island, I beguiled the hours by taking with me Thoreau's _Summer_ to compare his notes of blossomings with those we passed. It was June 5, and I read:-- "The Lupine is now in its glory. It is the more important because it occurs in such extensive patches, even an acre or more together.... It paints a whole hillside with its blue, making such a field, if not a meadow, as Proserpine might have wandered in. Its leaf was made to be covered with dewdrops. I am quite excited by this prospect of blue flowers in clumps, with narrow intervals; such a profusion of the heavenly, the Elysian color, as if these were the Elysian Fields. That is the value of the Lupine. The earth is blued with it.... You may have passed here a fortnight ago and the field was comparatively barren. Now you come, and these glorious redeemers appear to have flashed out here all at once. Who plants the seeds of Lupines in the barren soil? Who watereth the Lupines in the field?" [Illustration: The Precision of Leaf and Flower of Lupine.] I looked from a car window, and lo! the Long Island Railroad ran also through an Elysian Field of Lupines, nay, we sailed a swift course through a summer sea of blueness, and I seem to see it still, with its prim precision of outline and growth of both leaf and flower. The Lupine is beautiful in the garden border as it is in the landscape, whether the blossom be blue, yellow, or white. Thoreau was the slave of color, but he was the master of its description. He was as sensitive as Keats to the charm of blue, and left many records of his love, such as the paragraphs above quoted. He noted with delight the abundance of "that principle which gives the air its azure color, which makes the distant hills and meadows appear blue," the "great blue presence" of Monadnock and Wachusett with its "far blue eye." He loved Lowell's "Sweet atmosphere of hazy blue, So leisurely, so soothing, so forgiving, That sometimes makes New England fit for living." He revelled in the blue tints of water, of snow, of ice; in "the blueness and softness of a mild winter day." The constant blueness of the sky at night thrilled him with "an everlasting surprise," as did the blue shadows within the woods and the blueness of distant woods. How he would have rejoiced in Monet's paintings, how true he would have found their tones. He even idealized blueberries, "a very innocent ambrosial taste, as if made of ether itself, as they are colored with it." Thoreau was ever ready in thought of Proserpina gathering flowers. He offers to her the Lupine, the Blue-eyed Grass, and the Tufted Vetch, "blue, inclining in spots to purple"; it affected him deeply to see such an abundance of blueness in the grass. "Celestial color, I see it afar in masses on the hillside near the meadow--so much blue." I usually join with Thoreau in his flower loves; but I cannot understand his feeling toward the blue Flag; that, after noting the rich fringed recurved parasols over its anthers, and its exquisite petals, that he could say it is "a little too showy and gaudy, like some women's bonnets." I note that whenever he compares flowers to women it is in no flattering humor to either; which is, perhaps, what we expect from a man who chose to be a bachelor and a hermit. His love of obscure and small flowers might explain his sentiment toward the radiant and dominant blue Flag. The most valued flower of my childhood, outside the garden, was a little sister of the Iris--the Blue-eyed Grass. To find it blooming was a triumph, for it was not very profuse of growth near my home; to gather it a delight; why, I know not, since the tiny blooms promptly closed and withered as soon as we held them in our warm little hands. Colonel Higginson writes wittily of the Blue-eyed Grass, "It has such an annoying way of shutting up its azure orbs the moment you gather it; and you reach home with a bare stiff blade which deserves no better name than _Sisyrinchium anceps_." The only time I ever played truant was to run off one June morning to find "the starlike gleam amid the grass and dew"; to pick Blue-eyed Grass in a field to which I was conducted by another naughty girl. I was simple enough to come home at mid-day with my hands full of the stiff blades and tightly closed blooms; and at my mother's inquiry as to my acquisition of these treasures, I promptly burst into tears. I was then told, in impressive phraseology adapted to my youthful comprehension, and with the flowers as eloquent proof, that all stolen pleasures were ever like my coveted flowers, withered and unsightly as soon as gathered--which my mother believed was true. The blossoms of this little Iris seem to lie on the surface of the grass like a froth of blueness; they gaze up at the sky with a sort of intimacy as if they were a part of it. Thoreau called it an "air of easy sympathy." The slightest clouding or grayness of atmosphere makes them turn away and close. The naming of Proserpina leads me to say this: that to grow in love and knowledge of flowers, and above all of blue flowers, you must read Ruskin's _Proserpina_. It is a book of botany, of studies of plants, but begemmed with beautiful sentences and thoughts and expressions, with lessons of pleasantness which you can never forget, of pictures which you never cease to see, such sentences and pictures as this:-- "Rome. My father's Birthday. I found the loveliest blue Asphodel I ever saw in my life in the fields beyond Monte Mario--a spire two feet high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in the Elysian Fields, some day!" Oh, the power of written words! when by these few lines I can carry forever in my inner vision this spire of starry blueness. To that writer, now in the Elysian Fields, an honest teacher if ever one lived, I send my thanks for this beautiful vision of blueness. CHAPTER XII PLANT NAMES "The fascination of plant names is founded on two instincts,--love of Nature and curiosity about Language." --_English Plant Names_, REV. JOHN EARLE, 1880. Verbal magic is the subtle mysterious power of certain words. This power may come from association with the senses; thus I have distinct sense of stimulation in the word scarlet, and pleasure in the words lucid and liquid. The word garden is a never ceasing delight; it seems to me Oriental; perhaps I have a transmitted sense from my grandmother Eve of the Garden of Eden. I like the words, a Garden of Olives, a Garden of Herbs, the Garden of the Gods, a Garden enclosed, Philosophers of the Garden, the Garden of the Lord. As I have written on gardens, and thought on gardens, and walked in gardens, "the very music of the name has gone into my being." How beautiful are Cardinal Newman's words:-- "By a garden is meant mystically a place of spiritual repose, stillness, peace, refreshment, delight." There was, in Gerarde's day, no fixed botanical nomenclature of any of the parts or attributes of a plant. Without using botanical terms, try to describe a plant so as to give an exact notion of it to a person who has never seen it, then try to find common words to describe hundreds of plants; you will then admire the vocabulary of the old herbalist, his "fresh English words," for you will find that it needs the most dextrous use of words to convey accurately the figure of a flower. That felicity and facility Gerarde had; "a bleak white color"--how clearly you see it! The Water Lily had "great round leaves like a buckler." The Cat-tail Flags "flower and bear their mace or torch in July and August." One plant had "deeply gashed leaves." The Marigold had "fat thick crumpled leaves set upon a gross and spongious stalke." Here is the Wake-robin, "a long hood in proportion like the ear of a hare, in middle of which hood cometh forth a pestle or clapper of a dark murry or pale purple color." The leaves of the Corn-marigold are "much hackt and cut into divers sections and placed confusedly." Another plant had leaves of "an overworne green," and Pansy leaves were "a bleak green." The leaves of Tansy are also vividly described as "infinitely jagged and nicked and curled with all like unto a plume of feathers." [Illustration: The Garden's Friend.] The classification and naming of flowers was much thought and written upon from Gerarde's day, until the great work of Linnæus was finished. Some very original schemes were devised. _The Curious and Profitable Gardner_, printed in 1730, suggested this plan: That all plants should be named to indicate their color, and that the initials of their names should be the initials of their respective colors; thus if a plant were named William the Conqueror it would indicate that the name was of a white flower with crimson lines or shades. "Virtuous Oreada would indicate a violet and orange flower; Charming Phyllis or Curious Plotinus a crimson and purple blossom." S. was to indicate Black or Sable, and what letter was Scarlet to have? The "curious ingenious Gentleman" who published this plan urged also the giving of "pompous names" as more dignified; and he made the assertion that French and Flemish "Flowerists" had adopted his system. [Illustration: Edging of Striped Lilies in a Salem Garden.] These were all forerunners of Ruskin, with his poetical notions of plant nomenclature, such as this; that feminine forms of names ending in _a_ (as Prunella, Campanula, Salvia, Kalmia) and _is_ (Iris, Amarylis) should be given only to plants "that are pretty and good"; and that real names, Lucia, Clarissa, etc., be also given. Masculine names in _us_ should be given to plants of masculine qualities,--strength, force, stubbornness; neuter endings in _um_, given to plants indicative of evil or death. I have a fancy anent many old-time flower names that they are also the names of persons. I think of them as persons bearing various traits and characteristics. On the other hand, many old English Christian names seem so suited for flowers, that they might as well stand for flowers as for persons. Here are a few of these quaint old names, Collet, Colin, Emmot, Issot, Doucet, Dobinet, Cicely, Audrey, Amice, Hilary, Bryde, Morrice, Tyffany, Amery, Nowell, Ellice, Digory, Avery, Audley, Jacomin, Gillian, Petronille, Gresel, Joyce, Lettice, Cibell, Avice, Cesselot, Parnell, Renelsha. Do they not "smell sweet to the ear"? The names of flowers are often given as Christian names. Children have been christened by the names Dahlia, Clover, Hyacinth, Asphodel, Verbena, Mignonette, Pansy, Heartsease, Daisy, Zinnia, Fraxinella, Poppy, Daffodil, Hawthorn. What power have the old English names of garden flowers, to unlock old memories, as have the flowers themselves! Dr. Earle writes, "The fascination of plant names is founded on two instincts; love of Nature, and curiosity about Language." To these I should add an equally strong instinct in many persons--their sensitiveness to associations. I am never more filled with a sense of the delight of old English plant-names than when I read the liquid verse of Spenser:-- "Bring hether the pincke and purple Cullembine ... with Gellifloures, Bring hether Coronations and Sops-in-wine Worne of paramours. Sow me the ground with Daffadowndillies And Cowslips and Kingcups and loved Lilies, The pretty Pawnce The Chevisaunce Shall match with the fayre Flour Delice." Why, the names are a pleasure, though you know not what the Sops-in-wine or the Chevisaunce were. Gilliflowers were in the verses of every poet. One of scant fame, named Plat, thus sings:-- "Here spring the goodly Gelofors, Some white, some red in showe; Here pretie Pinks with jagged leaves On rugged rootes do growe; The Johns so sweete in showe and smell, Distinct by colours twaine, About the borders of their beds In seemlie sight remaine." If there ever existed any difference between Sweet-johns and Sweet-williams, it is forgotten now. They have not shared a revival of popularity with other old-time favorites. They were one of the "garland flowers" of Gerarde's day, and were "esteemed for beauty, to deck up the bosoms of the beautiful, and for garlands and crowns of pleasure." In the gardens of Hampton Court in the days of King Henry VIII., were Sweet-williams, for the plants had been bought by the bushel. Sweet-williams are little sung by the poets, and I never knew any one to call the Sweet-william her favorite flower, save one person. Old residents of Worcester will recall the tiny cottage that stood on the corner of Chestnut and Pleasant streets, since the remote years when the latter-named street was a post-road. It was occupied during my childhood by friends of my mother--a century-old mother, and her ancient unmarried daughter. Behind the house stretched one of the most cheerful gardens I have ever seen; ever, in my memory, bathed in glowing sunlight and color. Of its glories I recall specially the long spires of vivid Bee Larkspur, the varied Poppies of wonderful growth, and the rioting Sweet-williams. The latter flowers had some sentimental association to the older lady, who always asserted with emphasis to all visitors that they were her favorite flower. They overran the entire garden, crowding the grass plot where the washed garments were hung out to dry, even growing in the chinks of the stone steps and between the flat stone flagging of the little back yard, where stood the old well with its moss-covered bucket. They spread under the high board fence and appeared outside on Chestnut Street; and they extended under the dense Lilac bushes and Cedars and down the steep grass bank and narrow steps to Pleasant Street. The seed was carefully gathered, especially of one glowing crimson beauty, the color of the Mullein Pink, and a gift of it was highly esteemed by other garden owners. Old herbals say the Sweet-williams are "worthy the Respect of the Greatest Ladies who are Lovers of Flowers." They certainly had the respect and love of these two old ladies, who were truly Lovers of Flowers. [Illustration: Garden Seat at Avonwood Court.] I recall an objection made to Sweet-williams, by some one years ago, that they were of no use or value save in the garden; that they could never be combined in bouquets, nor did they arrange well in vases. It is a place of honor, some of us believe, to be a garden flower as well as a vase flower. This garden was the only one I knew when a child which contained plants of Love-lies-bleeding--it had even then been deemed old-fashioned and out of date. And it also held a few Sunflowers, which had not then had a revival of attention, and seemed as obsolete as the Love-lies-bleeding. The last-named flower I always disliked, a shapeless, gawky creature, described in florists' catalogues and like publications as "an effective plant easily attaining to a splendid form bearing many plume-tufts of rich lustrous crimson." It is the "immortal amarant" chosen by Milton to crown the celestial beings in _Paradise Lost_. Poor angels! they have had many trying vagaries of attire assigned to them. I can contribute to plant lore one fantastic notion in regard to Love-lies-bleeding--though I can find no one who can confirm this memory of my childhood. I recall distinctly expressions of surprise and regret that these two old people in Worcester should retain the Love-lies-bleeding in their garden, because "the house would surely be struck with lightning." Perhaps this fancy contributed to the exile of the flower from gardens. [Illustration: Terraced Garden of the Misses Nichols, Salem, Massachusetts.] There be those who write, and I suppose they believe, that a love of Nature and perception of her beauties and a knowledge of flowers, are the dower of those who are country born and bred; by which is meant reared upon a farm. I have not found this true. Farm children have little love for Nature and are surprisingly ignorant about wild flowers, save a very few varieties. The child who is garden bred has a happier start in life, a greater love and knowledge of Nature. It is a principle of Froebel that one must limit a child's view in order to coördinate his perceptions. That is precisely what is done in a child's regard of Nature by his life in a garden; his view is limited and he learns to know garden flowers and birds and insects thoroughly, when the vast and bewildering variety of field and forest would have remained unappreciated by him. It is a distressing condition of the education of farmers, that they know so little about the country. The man knows about his crops and his wife about the flowers, herbs, and vegetables of her garden; but no countrymen know the names of wild flowers--and few countrywomen, save of medicinal herbs. I asked one farmer the name of a brilliant autumnal flower whose intense purple was then unfamiliar to me--the Devil's-bit. He answered, "Them's Woilets." Violet is the only word in which the initial V is ever changed to W by native New Englanders. Every pink or crimson flower is a Pink. Spring blossoms are "Mayflowers." A frequent answer is, "Those ain't flowers, they're weeds." They are more knowing as to trees, though shaky about the evergreen trees, having little idea of varieties and inclined to call many Spruce. They know little about the reasons for names of localities, or of any historical traditions save those of the Revolution. One exclaims in despair, "No one in the country knows anything about the country." This is no recent indifference and ignorance; Susan Cooper wrote in her _Rural Hours_ in 1848:-- "When we first made acquaintance with the flowers of the neighborhood we asked grown persons--learned perhaps in many matters--the common names of plants they must have seen all their lives, and we found they were no wiser than the children or ourselves. It is really surprising how little country people know on such subjects. Farmers and their wives can tell you nothing on these matters. The men are at fault even among the trees on their own farms, if they are at all out of the common way; and as for smaller native plants, they know less about them than Buck or Brindle, their own oxen." [Illustration: Kitchen Dooryard at Wilbour Farm, Kingston, Rhode Island.] In that delightful book, _The Rescue of an Old Place_, the author has a chapter on the love of flowers in America. It was written anent the everpresent statements seen in metropolitan print that Americans do not love flowers because they are used among the rich and fashionable in large cities for extravagant display rather than for enjoyment; and that we accept botanical names for our indigenous plants instead of calling them by homely ones such as familiar flowers are known by in older lands. Two more foolish claims could scarcely be made. In the first place, the doings of fashionable folk in large cities are fortunately far from being a national index or habit. Secondly, in ancient lands the people named the flowers long before there were botanists, here the botanists found the flowers and named them for the people. Moreover, country folk in New England and even in the far West call flowers by pretty folk-names, if they call them at all, just as in Old England. The fussing over the use of the scientific Latin names for plants apparently will never cease; many of these Latin names are very pleasant, have become so from constant usage, and scarcely seem Latin; thus Clematis, Tiarella, Rhodora, Arethusa, Campanula, Potentilla, Hepatica. When I know the folk-names of flowers I always speak thus of them--and _to them_; but I am grateful too for the scientific classification and naming, as a means of accurate distinction. For any flower student quickly learns that the same English folk-name is given in different localities to very different plants. For instance, the name Whiteweed is applied to ten different plants; there are in England ten or twelve Cuckoo-flowers, and twenty-one Bachelor's Buttons. Such names as Mayflower, Wild Pink, Wild Lily, Eyebright, Toad-flax, Ragged Robin, None-so-pretty, Lady's-fingers, Four-o'clocks, Redweed, Buttercups, Butterflower, Cat's-tail, Rocket, Blue-Caps, Creeping-jenny, Bird's-eye, Bluebells, apply to half a dozen plants. The old folk-names are not definite, but they are delightful; they tell of mythology and medicine, of superstitions and traditions; they show trains of relationship, and associations; in fact, they appeal more to the philologist and antiquarian than to the botanist. Among all the languages which contribute to the variety and picturesqueness of English plant names, Dr. Prior deems Maple the only one surviving from the Celtic language. Gromwell and Wormwood may possibly be added. [Illustration: "A running ribbon of perfumed snow which the sun is melting rapidly."] There are some Anglo-Saxon words; among them Hawthorn and Groundsel. French, Dutch, and Danish names are many, Arabic and Persian are more. Many plant names are dedicatory; they embody the names of the saints and a few the names of the Deity. Our Lady's Flowers are many and interesting; my daughter wrote a series of articles for the _New York Evening Post_ on Our Lady's Flowers, and the list swelled to a surprising number. The devil and witches have their shares of flowers, as have the fairies. I have always regretted deeply that our botanists neglected an opportunity of great enrichment in plant nomenclature when they ignored the Indian names of our native plants, shrubs, and trees. The first names given these plants were not always planned by botanists; they were more often invented in loving memory of English plants, or sometimes from a fancied resemblance to those plants. They did give the wonderfully descriptive name of Moccasin-flower to that creature of the wild-woods; and a far more appropriate title it is than Lady's-slipper, but it is not as well known. I have never found the Lady's-slipper as beautiful a flower as do nearly all my friends, as did my father and mother, and I was pleased at Ruskin's sharp comment that such a slipper was only fit for very gouty old toes. Pappoose-root utilizes another Indian word. Very few Indian plant names were adopted by the white men, fewer still have been adopted by the scientists. The _Catalpa speciosa_ (Catalpa); the _Zea mays_ (Maize); and _Yucca filamentosa_ (Yucca), are the only ones I know. Chinkapin, Cohosh, Hackmatack, Kinnikinnik, Tamarack, Persimmon, Tupelo, Squash, Puccoon, Pipsissewa, Musquash, Pecan, the Scuppernong and Catawba grapes, are our only well-known Indian plant names that survive. Of these Maize, the distinctive product of the United States, will ever link us with the vanishing Indian. It will be noticed that only Puccoon, Cohosh, Pipsissewa, Hackmatack, and Yucca are names of flowering plants; of these Yucca is the only one generally known. I am glad our stately native trees, Tupelo, Hickory, Catalpa, bear Indian names. A curious example of persistence, when so much else has perished, is found in the word "Kiskatomas," the shellbark nut. This Algonquin word was heard everywhere in the state of New York sixty years ago, and is not yet obsolete in families of Dutch descent who still care for the nut itself. We could very well have preserved many Indian names, among them Hiawatha's "Beauty of the springtime, The Miskodeed in blossom," I think Miskodeed a better name than Claytonia or Spring Beauty. The Onondaga Indians had a suggestive name for the Marsh Marigold, "It-opens-the-swamps," which seems to show you the yellow stars "shining in swamps and hollows gray." The name Cowslip has been transferred to it in some localities in New England, which is not strange when we find that the flower has fifty-six English folk-names; among them are Drunkards, Crazy Bet, Meadow-bright, Publicans and Sinners, Soldiers' Buttons, Gowans, Kingcups, and Buttercups. Our Italian street venders call them Buttercups. In erudite Boston, in sight of Boston Common, the beautiful Fringed Gentian is not only called, but labelled, French Gentian. To hear a lovely bunch of the Arethusa called Swamp Pink is not so strange. The Sabbatia grows in its greatest profusion in the vicinity of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and is called locally, "The Rose of Plymouth." It is sold during its season of bloom in the streets of that town and is used to dress the churches. Its name was given to honor an early botanist, Tiberatus Sabbatia, but in Plymouth there is an almost universal belief that it was named because the Pilgrims of 1620 first saw the flower on the Sabbath day. It thus is regarded as a religious emblem, and strong objection is made to mingling other flowers with it in church decoration. This legend was invented about thirty years ago by a man whose name is still remembered as well as his work. [Illustration: Fountain Garden at Sylvester Manor.] CHAPTER XIII TUSSY-MUSSIES "There be some flowers make a delicious Tussie-Mussie or Nosegay both for Sight and Smell." --JOHN PARKINSON, _A Garden of all Sorts of Pleasant Flowers_, 1629. No following can be more productive of a study and love of word derivations and allied word meanings than gardening. An interest in flowers and in our English tongue go hand in hand. The old mediæval word at the head of this chapter has a full explanation by Nares as "A nosegay, a tuzzie-muzzie, a sweet posie." The old English form, _tussy-mose_ was allied with _tosty_, a bouquet, _tuss_ and _tusk_, a wisp, as of hay, _tussock_, and _tutty_, a nosegay. Thomas Campion wrote:-- "Joan can call by name her cows, And deck her windows with green boughs; She can wreathes and tuttyes make, And trim with plums a bridal cake." Tussy-mussy was not a colloquial word; it was found in serious, even in religious, text. A tussy-mussy was the most beloved of nosegays, and was often made of flowers mingled with sweet-scented leaves. My favorite tussy-mussy, if made of flowers, would be of Wood Violet, Cabbage Rose, and Clove Pink. These are all beautiful flowers, but many of our most delightful fragrances do not come from flowers of gay dress; even these three are not showy flowers; flowers of bold color and growth are not apt to be sweet-scented; and all flower perfumes of great distinction, all that are unique, are from blossoms of modest color and bearing. The Calycanthus, called Virginia Allspice, Sweet Shrub, or Strawberry bush, has what I term a perfume of distinction, and its flowers are neither fine in shape, color, nor quality. I have often tried to define to myself the scent of the Calycanthus blooms; they have an aromatic fragrance somewhat like the ripest Pineapples of the tropics, but still richer; how I love to carry them in my hand, crushed and warm, occasionally holding them tight over my mouth and nose to fill myself with their perfume. The leaves have a similar, but somewhat varied and sharper, scent, and the woody stems another; the latter I like to nibble. This flower has an element of mystery in it--that indescribable quality felt by children, and remembered by prosaic grown folk. Perhaps its curious dark reddish brown tint may have added part of the queerness, since the "Mourning Bride," similar in color, has a like mysterious association. I cannot explain these qualities to any one not a garden-bred child; and as given in the chapter entitled The Mystery of Flowers, they will appear to many, fanciful and unreal--but I have a fraternity who will understand, and who will know that it was this same undefinable quality that made a branch of Strawberry bush, or a handful of its stemless blooms, a gift significant of interest and intimacy; we would not willingly give Calycanthus blossoms to a child we did not like, or to a stranger. [Illustration: Hawthorn Arch at Holly House, Peace Dale, Rhode Island. Home of Rowland G. Hazard, Esq.] A rare perfume floats from the modest yellow Flowering Currant. I do not see this sweet and sightly shrub in many modern gardens, and it is our loss. The crowding bees are goodly and cheerful, and the flowers are pleasant, but the perfume is of the sort you can truly say you love it; its aroma is like some of the liqueurs of the old monks. The greatest pleasure in flower perfumes comes to us through the first flowers of spring. How we breathe in their sweetness! Our native wild flowers give us the most delicate odors. The Mayflower is, I believe, the only wild flower for which all country folk of New England have a sincere affection; it is not only a beautiful, an enchanting flower, but it is so fresh, so balmy of bloom. It has the delicacy of texture and form characteristic of many of our native spring blooms, Hepatica, Anemone, Spring Beauty, Polygala. The Arethusa was one of the special favorites of my father and mother, who delighted in its exquisite fragrance. Hawthorne said of it: "One of the delicatest, gracefullest, and in every manner sweetest of the whole race of flowers. For a fortnight past I have found it in the swampy meadows, growing up to its chin in heaps of wet moss. Its hue is a delicate pink, of various depths of shade, and somewhat in the form of a Grecian helmet." It pleases me to fancy that Hawthorne was like the Arethusa, that it was a fit symbol of the nature of our greatest New England genius. Perfect in grace and beauty, full of sentiment, classic and elegant of shape, it has a shrinking heart; the sepals and petals rise over it and shield it, and the whole flower is shy and retiring, hiding in marshes and quaking bogs. It is one of our flowers which we ever regard singly, as an individual, a rare and fine spirit; we never think of it as growing in an expanse or even in groups. This lovely flower has, as Landor said of the flower of the vine, "a scent so delicate that it requires a sigh to inhale it." The faintest flower scents are the best. You find yourself longing for just a little more, and you bury your face in the flowers and try to draw out a stronger breath of balm. Apple blossoms, certain Violets, and Pansies have this pale perfume. In the front yard of my childhood's home grew a Larch, an exquisitely graceful tree, one now little planted in Northern climates. I recall with special delight the faint fragrance of its early shoots. The next tree was a splendid pink Hawthorn. What a day of mourning it was when it had to be cut down, for trees had been planted so closely that many must be sacrificed as years went on and all grew in stature. There are some smells that are strangely pleasing to the country lover which are neither from fragrant flower nor leaf; one is the scent of the upturned earth, most heartily appreciated in early spring. The smell of a ploughed field is perhaps the best of all earthy scents, though what Bliss Carman calls "the racy smell of the forest loam" is always good. Another is the burning of weeds of garden rakings, "The spicy smoke Of withered weeds that burn where gardens be." A garden "weed-smother" always makes me think of my home garden, and my father, who used to stand by this burning weed-heap, raking in the withered leaves. Many such scents are pleasing chiefly through the power of association. [Illustration: Thyme-covered Graves.] The sense of smell in its psychological relations is most subtle:-- "The subtle power in perfume found, Nor priest nor sibyl vainly learned; On Grecian shrine or Aztec mound No censer idly burned. "And Nature holds in wood and field Her thousand sunlit censers still; To spells of flower and shrub we yield Against or with our will." Dr. Holmes notes that memory, imagination, sentiment, are most readily touched through the sense of smell. He tells of the associations borne to him by the scent of Marigold, of Life-everlasting, of an herb closet. Notwithstanding all these tributes to sweet scents and to the sense of smell, it is not deemed, save in poetry, wholly meet to dwell much on smells, even pleasant ones. To all who here sniff a little disdainfully at a whole chapter given to flower scents, let me repeat the Oriental proverb:-- "To raise Flowers is a Common Thing, God alone gives them Fragrance." Balmier far, and more stimulating and satisfying than the perfumes of most blossoms, is the scent of aromatic or balsamic leaves, of herbs, of green growing things. Sweetbrier, says Thoreau, is thus "thrice crowned: in fragrant leaf, tinted flower, and glossy fruit." Every spring we long, as Whittier wrote-- "To come to Bayberry scented slopes, And fragrant Fern and Groundmat vine, Breathe airs blown o'er holt and copse, Sweet with black Birch and Pine." All these scents of holt and copse are dear to New Englanders. I have tried to explain the reason for the charm to me of growing Thyme. It is not its beautiful perfume, its clear vivid green, its tiny fresh flowers, or the element of historic interest. Alphonse Karr gives another reason, a sentiment of gratitude. He says:-- "Thyme takes upon itself to embellish the parts of the earth which other plants disdain. If there is an arid, stony, dry soil, burnt up by the sun, it is there Thyme spreads its charming green beds, perfumed, close, thick, elastic, scattered over with little balls of blossom, pink in color, and of a delightful freshness." Thyme was, in older days, spelt Thime and Time. This made the poet call it "pun-provoking Thyme." I have an ancient recipe from an old herbal for "Water of Time to ease the Passions of the Heart." This remedy is efficacious to-day, whether you spell it time or thyme. There are shown on page 301 some lonely graves in the old Moravian burying-ground in Bethlehem, overgrown with the pleasant perfumed Thyme. And as we stand by their side we think with a half smile--a tender one--of the never-failing pun of the old herbalists. Spenser called Thyme "bee-alluring," "honey-laden." It was the symbol of sweetness; and the Thyme that grew on the sunny slopes of Mt. Hymettus gave to the bees the sweetest and most famed of all honey. The plant furnished physic as well as perfume and puns and honey. Pliny named eighteen sovereign remedies made from Thyme. These cured everything from the "bite of poysonful spidars" to "the Apoplex." There were so many recipes in the English _Compleat Chirurgeon_, and similar medical books, that you would fancy venomous spiders were as thick as gnats in England. These spider cure-alls are however simply a proof that the recipes were taken from dose-books of Pliny and various Roman physicians, with whom spider bites were more common and more painful than in England. _The Haven of Health_, written in 1366, with a special view to the curing of "Students," says that Wild Thyme has a great power to drive away heaviness of mind, "to purge melancholly and splenetick humours." And the author recommends to "sup the leaves with eggs." The leaves were used everywhere "to be put in puddings and such like meates, so that in divers places Thime was called Pudding-grass." Pudding in early days was the stuffing of meat and poultry, while concoctions of eggs, milk, flour, sugar, etc., like our modern puddings, were called whitpot. Many traditions hang around Thyme. It was used widely in incantations and charms. It was even one of the herbs through whose magic power you could see fairies. Here is a "Choice Proven Secret made Known" from the Ashmolean Mss. How to see Fayries "Rx. A pint of Sallet-Oyle and put it into a vial-glasse but first wash it with Rose-water and Marygolde-water the Flowers to be gathered toward the East. Wash it until teh Oyle come white. Then put it in the glasse, _ut supra_: Then put thereto the budds of Holyhocke, the flowers of Marygolde, the flowers or toppers of Wild Thyme, the budds of young Hazle: and the time must be gathered neare the side of a Hill where Fayries used to be: and take the grasse off a Fayrie throne. Then all these put into the Oyle into the Glasse, and sette it to dissolve three dayes in the Sunne and then keep for thy use _ut supra_." [Illustration: "White Umbrellas of Elder."] "I know a bank whereon the Wild Thyme blows"--it is not in old England, but on Long Island; the dense clusters of tiny aromatic flowers form a thick cushioned carpet under our feet. Lord Bacon says in his essay on Gardens:-- "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." Here we have an alley of Thyme, set by nature, for us to tread upon and enjoy, though Thyme always seems to me so classic a plant, that it is far too fine to walk upon; one ought rather to sleep and dream upon it. Great bushes of Elder, another flower of witchcraft, grow and blossom near my Thyme bank. Old Thomas Browne, as long ago as 1685 called the Elder bloom "white umbrellas"--which has puzzled me much, since we are told to assign the use and knowledge of umbrellas in England to a much later date; perhaps he really wrote umbellas. Now it is a well-known fact--sworn to in scores of old herbals, that any one who stands on Wild Thyme, by the side of an Elder bush, on Midsummer Eve, will "see great experiences"; his eyes will be opened, his wits quickened, his vision clarified; and some have even seen fairies, pixies--Shakespeare's elves--sporting over the Thyme at their feet. I shall not tell whom I saw walking on my Wild Thyme bank last Midsummer Eve. I did not need the Elder bush to open my eyes. I watched the twain strolling back and forth in the half-light, and I heard snatches of talk as they walked toward me, and I lost the responses as they turned from me. At last, in a louder voice:-- HE. "What is this jolly smell all around here? Just like a mint-julep! Some kind of a flower?" SHE. "It's Thyme, Wild Thyme; it has run into the edge of the lawn from the field, and is just ruining the grass." HE (_stooping to pick it_). "Why, so it is. I thought it came from that big white flower over there by the hedge." SHE. "No, that is Elder." HE (_after a pause_). "I had to learn a lot of old Arnold's poetry at school once, or in college, and there was some just like to-night:-- "'The evening comes--the fields are still, The tinkle of the thirsty rill, Unheard all day, ascends again. Deserted is the half-mown plain, And from the Thyme upon the height, And from the Elder-blossom white, And pale Dog Roses in the hedge, And from the Mint-plant in the sedge, In puffs of balm the night air blows The perfume which the day foregoes-- And on the pure horizon far See pulsing with the first-born star The liquid light above the hill. The evening comes--the fields are still.'" Then came the silence and half-stiffness which is ever apt to follow any long quotation, especially any rare recitation of verse by those who are notoriously indifferent to the charms of rhyme and rhythm, and are of another sex than the listener. It seems to indicate an unusual condition of emotion, to be a sort of barometer of sentiment, and the warning of threatening weather was not unheeded by her; hence her response was somewhat nervous in utterance, and instinctively perverse and contradictory. SHE. "That line, 'The liquid light above the hill,' is very lovely, but I can't see that it's any of it at all like to-night." HE (_stoutly and resentfully_). "Oh, no! not at all! There's the field, all still, and here's Thyme, and Elder, and there are wild Roses!--and see! the moon is coming up--so there's your liquid light." SHE. "Well! Yes, perhaps it is; at any rate it is a lovely night. You've read _Lavengro_? No? Certainly you must have heard of it. The gipsy in it says: 'Life is sweet, brother. There's day and night, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there is likewise a wind on the heath.'" HE (_dubiously_). "That's rather queer poetry, if it is poetry--and you must know I do not like to hear you call me brother." Whereupon I discreetly betrayed my near presence on the piazza, to prove that the field, though still, was not deserted. And soon the twain said they would walk to the club house to view the golf prizes; and they left the Wild Thyme and Elder blossoms white, and turned their backs on the moon, and fell to golf and other eminently unromantic topics, far safer for Midsummer Eve than poesy and other sweet things. [Illustration: Lower Garden at Sylvester Manor.] CHAPTER XIV JOAN SILVER-PIN "Being of many variable colours, and of great beautie, although of evill smell, our gentlewomen doe call them Jone Silver-pin." --JOHN GERARDE, _Herball_, 1596. Garden Poppies were the Joan Silver-pin of Gerarde, stigmatized also by Parkinson as "Jone Silver-pinne, _subauditur_; faire without and foule within." In Elizabeth's day Poppies met universal distrust and aversion, as being the source of the dreaded opium. Spenser called the flower "dead-sleeping" Poppy; Morris "the black heart, amorous Poppy"--which might refer to the black spots in the flower's heart. Clare, in his _Shepherd's Calendar_ also asperses them:-- "Corn-poppies, that in crimson dwell, Called Head-aches from their sickly smell." Forby adds this testimony: "Any one by smelling of it for a very short time may convince himself of the propriety of the name." Some fancied that the dazzle of color caused headaches--that vivid scarlet, so fine a word as well as color that it is annoying to hear the poets change it to crimson. [Illustration: "Black Heart, Amorous Poppies."] This regard of and aversion to the Poppy lingered among elderly folks till our own day; and I well recall the horror of a visitor of antique years in our mother's garden during our childhood, when we were found cheerfully eating Poppy seeds. She viewed us with openly expressed apprehension that we would fall into a stupor; and quite terrified us and our relatives, in spite of our assertions that we "always ate them," which indeed we always did and do to this day; and very pleasant of taste they are, and of absolutely no effect, and not at all of evil smell to our present fancy, either in blossom or seed, though distinctly medicinal in odor. Returned missionaries were frequent and honored visitors in our town and our house in those days; and one of these good men reassured us and reinstated in favor our uncanny feast by telling us that in the East, Poppy seeds were eaten everywhere, and were frequently baked with wheaten flour into cakes. A dislike of the scent of Field Poppies is often found among English folk. The author of _A World in a Garden_ speaks in disgust of "the pungent and sickly odor of the flaring Poppies--they positively nauseate me"; but then he disliked their color too. There is something very fine about a Poppy, in the extraordinary combination of boldness of color and great size with its slender delicacy of stem, the grace of the set of the beautiful buds, the fine turn of the flower as it opens, and the wonderful airiness of poise of so heavy a flower. The silkiness of tissue of the petals, and their semi-transparency in some colors, and the delicate fringes of some varieties, are great charms. "Each crumpled crêpe-like leaf is soft as silk; Long, long ago the children saw them there, Scarlet and rose, with fringes white as milk, And called them 'shawls for fairies' dainty wear'; They were not finer, those laid safe away In that low attic, neath the brown, warm eaves." And when the flowers have shed, oh, so lightly! their silken petals, there is still another beauty, a seed vessel of such classic shape that it wears a crown. I have always rejoiced in the tributes paid to the Poppy by Ruskin and Mrs. Thaxter. She deemed them the most satisfactory flower among the annuals "for wondrous variety, certain picturesque qualities, for color and form, and a subtle air of mystery." There is a line of Poppy colors which is most entrancing; the gray, smoke color, lavender, mauve, and lilac Poppies, edged often and freaked with tints of red, are rarely beautiful things. There are fine white Poppies, some fringed, some single, some double--the Bride is the appropriate name of the fairest. And the pinks of Poppies, that wonderful red-pink, and a shell-pink that is almost salmon, and the sunset pinks of our modern Shirley Poppies, with quality like finest silken gauze! The story of the Shirley Poppies is one of magic, that a flower-loving clergyman who in 1882 sowed the seed of one specially beautiful Poppy which had no black in it, and then sowed those of its fine successors, produced thus a variety which has supplied the world with beauty. Rev. Mr. Wilks, their raiser, gives these simply worded rules anent his Shirley Poppies:-- "1, They are single; 2, always have a white base; 3, with yellow or white stamens, anthers, or pollen; 4, and never have the smallest particle of black about them." The thought of these successful and beautiful Poppies is very stimulating to flower raisers of moderate means, with no profound knowledge of flowers; it shows what can be done by enthusiasm and application and patience. It gives something of the same comfort found in Keats's fine lines to the singing thrush:-- "Oh! fret not after knowledge. I have none, _and yet the evening listens_." Notwithstanding all this distinction and beauty, these fine things of the garden were dubbed Joan Silver-pin. I wonder who Joan Silver-pin was! I have searched faithfully for her, but have not been able to get on the right scent. Was she of real life, or fiction? I have looked through the lists of characters of contemporary plays, and read a few old jest books and some short tales of that desperately colorless sort, wherein you read page after page of the printed words with as little absorption of signification as if they were Choctaw. But never have I seen Joan Silver-pin's name; it was a bit of Elizabethan slang, I suspect,--a cant term once well known by every one, now existing solely through this chance reference of the old herbalists. [Illustration: Valerian.] No garden can aspire to be named An Old-fashioned Garden unless it contains that beautiful plant the Garden Valerian, known throughout New England to-day as Garden Heliotrope; as Setwall it grew in every old garden, as it was in every pharmacopoeia. It was termed "drink-quickening Setuale" by Spenser, from the universal use of its flowers to flavor various enticing drinks. Its lovely blossoms are pinkish in bud and open to pure white; its curiously penetrating vanilla-like fragrance is disliked by many who are not cats. I find it rather pleasing of scent when growing in the garden, and not at all like the extremely nasty-smelling medicine which is made from it, and which has been used for centuries for "histerrick fits," and is still constantly prescribed to-day for that unsympathized-with malady. Dr. Holmes calls it, "Valerian, calmer of hysteric squirms." It is a stately plant when in tall flower in June; my sister had great clumps of bloom like the ones shown above, but alas! the cats caught them before the photographer did. The cats did not have to watch the wind and sun and rain, to pick out plates and pack plate-holders, and gather ray-fillers and cloth and lens, and adjust the tripod, and fix the camera and focus, and think, and focus, and think, and then wait--till the wind ceased blowing. So when they found it, they broke down every slender stalk and rolled in it till the ground was tamped down as hard as if one of our lazy road-menders had been at it. Valerian has in England as an appropriate folk name, "Cats'-fancy." The pretty little annual, Nemophila, makes also a favorite rolling-place for our cat; while all who love cats have given them Catnip and seen the singular intoxication it brings. The sight of a cat in this strange ecstasy over a bunch of Catnip always gives me a half-sense of fear; she becomes such a truly wild creature, such a miniature tiger. In _The Art of Gardening_, by J. W., Gent., 1683, the author says of Marigolds: "There are divers sorts besides the common as the African Marigold, a Fair bigge Yellow Flower, but of a very Naughty Smell." I cannot refrain, ere I tell more of the Marigold's naughtiness, to copy a note written in this book by a Massachusetts bride whose new husband owned and studied the book two hundred years ago; for it gives a little glimpse of old-time life. In her exact little handwriting are these words:-- "Planted in Potts, 1720: An Almond Stone, an English Wallnut, Cittron Seeds, Pistachica nutts, Red Damsons, Leamon seeds, Oring seeds and Daits." Poor Anne! she died before she had time to become any one's grandmother. I hope her successor in matrimony, our forbear, cherished her little seedlings and rejoiced in the Lemon and Almond trees, though Anne herself was so speedily forgotten. She is, however, avenged by Time; for she is remembered better than the wife who took her place, through her simple flower-loving words. I am surprised at this aspersion on the Marigold as to its smell, for all the traditions of this flower show it to have been a great favorite in kitchen gardens; and I have found that elderly folk are very apt to like its scent. My father loved the flower and the fragrance, and liked to have a bowl of Marigolds stand beside him on his library table. It was constantly carried to church as a "Sabbath-day posy," and its petals used as flavoring in soups and stews. Charles Lamb said it poisoned them. Canon Ellacombe writes that it has been banished in England to the gardens of cottages and old farm-houses; it had a waning popularity in America, but was never wholly despised. How Edward Fitzgerald loved the African Marigold! "Its grand color is so comfortable to us Spanish-like Paddies," he writes to Fanny Kemble in letters punctuated with little references to his garden flowers: letters so cheerful, too, with capitals; "I love the old way of Capitals for Names," he says--and so do I; letters bearing two surprises, namely, the infrequent references to Omar Khayyam; and the fact that Nasturtiums, not Roses, were his favorite flower. The question of the agreeableness of a flower scent is a matter of public opinion as well as personal choice. Environment and education influence us. In olden times every one liked certain scents deemed odious to-day. Parkinson's praise of Sweet Sultans was, "They are of so exceeding sweet a scent as it surpasses the best civet that is." Have you ever smelt civet? You will need no words to tell you that the civet is a little cousin of the skunk. Cowper could not talk with civet in the room; most of us could not even breathe. The old herbalists call Privet sweet-scented. I don't know that it is strange to find a generation who loved civet and musk thinking Privet pleasant-scented. Nearly all our modern botanists have copied the words of their predecessors; but I scarcely know what to say or to think when I find so exact an observer as John Burroughs calling Privet "faintly sweet-scented." I find it rankly ill-scented. The men of Elizabethan days were much more learned in perfumes and fonder of them than are most folk to-day. Authors and poets dwelt frankly upon them without seeming at all vulgar. Of course herbalists, from their choice of subject, were free to write of them at length, and they did so with evident delight. Nowadays the French realists are the only writers who boldly reckon with the sense of smell. It isn't deemed exactly respectable to dwell too much on smells, even pleasant ones; so this chapter certainly must be brief. I suppose nine-tenths of all who love flower scents would give Violets as their favorite fragrance; yet how quickly, in the hothouse Violets, can the scent become nauseous. I recall one formal luncheon whereat the many tables were mightily massed with violets; and though all looked as fresh as daybreak to the sight, some must have been gathered for a day or more, and the stale odor throughout the room was unbearable. But it is scarcely fair to decry a flower because of its scent in decay. Shakespeare wrote:-- "Lilies festered smell far worse than weeds." Many of our Compositæ are vile after standing in water in vases; Ox-eye Daisies, Rudbeckia, Zinnia, Sunflower, and even the wholesome Marigold. Delicate as is the scent of the Pansy, the smell of a bed of ancient Pansy plants is bad beyond words. The scent of the flowers of fruit-bearing trees is usually delightful; but I cannot like the scent of Pear blossoms. I dislike much the rank smell of common yellow Daffodils and of many of that family. I can scarcely tolerate them even when freshly picked, upon a dinner table. Some of the Jonquils are as sickening within doors as the Tuberose, though in both cases it is only because the scent is confined that it is cloying. In the open air, at a slight distance, they smell as well as many Lilies, and the Poet's Narcissus is deemed by many delightful. [Illustration: Old "War Office."] I have ever found the scent of Lilacs somewhat imperfect, not well rounded, not wholly satisfying; but one of my friends can never find in a bunch of our spring Lilacs any odor save that of illuminating gas. I do wish he had not told me this! Now when I stand beside my Lilac bush I feel like looking around anxiously to see where the gas is escaping. Linnæus thought the perfume of Mignonette the purest ambrosia. Another thinks that Mignonette has a doggy smell, as have several flowers; this is not wholly to their disparagement. Our cocker spaniel is sweeter than some flowers, but he is not a Mignonette. There be those who love most of all the scent of Heliotrope, which is to me a close, almost musty scent. I have even known of one or two who disliked the scent of Roses, and the Rose itself has been abhorred. Marie de' Medici would not even look at a painting or carving of a Rose. The Chevalier de Guise had a loathing for Roses. Lady Heneage, one of the maids of honor to Queen Elizabeth, was made very ill by the presence or scent of Roses. This illness was not akin to "Rose cold," which is the baneful companion of so many Americans, and which can conquer its victims in the most sudden and complete manner. Even my affection for Roses, and my intense love of their fragrance, shown in its most ineffable sweetness in the old pink Cabbage Rose, will not cause me to be silent as to the scent of some of the Rose sisters. Some of the Tea Roses, so lovely of texture, so delicate of hue, are sickening; one has a suggestion of ether which is most offensive. "A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet," but not if its name (and its being) was the Persian Yellow. This beautiful double Rose of rich yellow was introduced to our gardens about 1830. It is infrequent now, though I find it in florists' lists; and I suspect I know why. Of late years I have not seen it, but I have a remembrance of its uprootal from our garden. Mrs. Wright confirms my memory by calling it "a horrible thing--the Skunk Cabbage of the garden." It smells as if foul insects were hidden within it, a disgusting smell. I wonder whether poor Marie de' Medici hadn't had a whiff of it. A Persian Rose! it cannot be possible that Omar Khayyam ever smelt it, or any of the Rose singers of Persia, else their praises would have turned to loathing as they fled from its presence. There are two or three yellow Roses which are not pleasing, but are not abhorrent as is the Persian Yellow. One evening last May I walked down the garden path, then by the shadowy fence-side toward the barn. I was not wandering in the garden for sweet moonlight, for there was none; nor for love of flowers, nor in admiration of any of nature's works, for it was very cold; we even spoke of frost, as we ever do apprehensively on a chilly night in spring. The kitten was lost. She was in the shrubbery at the garden end, for I could hear her plaintive yowling; and I thus traced her. I gathered her up, purring and clawing, when I heard by my side a cross rustling of leaves and another complaining voice. It was the Crown-imperial, unmindful or unwitting of my presence, and muttering peevishly: "Here I am, out of fashion, and therefore out of the world! torn away from the honored border by the front door path, and even set away from the broad garden beds, and thrust with sunflowers and other plants of no social position whatever down here behind the barn, where, she dares to say, we 'can all smell to heaven together.' "What airs, forsooth! these twentieth century children put on! Smell to heaven, indeed! I wish her grandfather could have heard her! He didn't make such a fuss about smells when I was young, nor did any one else; no one's nose was so over-nice. Every spring when I came up, glorious in my dress of scarlet and green, and hung with my jewels of pearls, they were all glad to see me and to smell me, too; and well they might be, for there was a rotten-appley, old-potatoey smell in the cellar which pervaded the whole house when doors were closed. And when the frost came up from the ground the old sink drain at the kitchen door rendered up to the spring sunshine all the combined vapors of all the dish-water of all the winter. The barn and hen-house and cow-house reeked in the sunlight, but the pigpen easily conquered them all. There was an ancient cesspool far too near the kitchen door, underground and not to be seen, but present, nevertheless. A hogshead of rain-water stood at the cellar door, and one at the end of the barn--to water the flowers with--they fancied rotten rain-water made flowers grow! A foul dye-tub was ever reeking in every kitchen chimney corner, a culminating horror in stenches; and vessels of ancient soap grease festered in the outer shed, the grease collected through the winter and waiting for the spring soap-making. The vapor of sour milk, ever present, was of little moment--when there was so much else so much worse. There wasn't a bath-tub in the grandfather's house, nor in any other house in town, nor any too much bathing in winter, either, I am sure, in icy well-water in icier sleeping rooms. The windows were carefully closed all winter long, but the open fireplaces managed to save the life of the inmates, though the walls and rafters were hung with millions of germs which every one knows are all the wickeder when they don't smell, because you take no care, fancying they are not there. But the grandfather knew naught of germs--and was happy. The trees shaded the house so that the roof was always damp. Oh, how those germs grew and multiplied in the grateful shade of those lovely trees, and how mould and rust rejoiced. Well might people turn from all these sights and scents to me. The grandfather and his wife, when they were young, as when they were in middle age, and when they were old, walked every early spring day at set of sun, slowly down the front path, looking at every flower, every bud; pulling a tiny weed, gathering a choice flower, breaking a withered sprig; and they ever lingered long and happily by my side. And he always said, 'Wife! isn't this Crown-imperial a glorious plant? so stately, so perfect in form, such an expression of life, and such a personification of spring!' 'Yes, father,' she would answer quickly, 'but don't pick it.' Why, I should have resented even that word had she referred to my perfume. She meant that the garden border could not spare me. The children never could pick me, even the naughtiest ones did not dare to; but they could pull all the little upstart Ladies' Delights and Violets they wished. And yet, with all this family homage which should make me a family totem, here I am, stuck down by the barn--I, who sprung from the blood of a king, the great Gustavus Adolphus--and was sung by a poet two centuries ago in the famous _Garland of Julia_. The old Jesuit poet Rapin said of me, 'No flower aspires in pomp and state so high.' "Read this page from that master-herbalist, John Gerarde, telling of the rare beauties within my golden cup. "A very intelligent and respectable old gentleman named Parkinson, who knew far more about flowers than flighty folk do nowadays, loved me well and wrote of me, 'The Crown-imperial, for its stately beautifulnesse deserveth the first place in this our garden of delight to be here entreated of before all other Lilies.' He had good sense. It was not I who was stigmatized by him as Joan Silver-pin. He spoke very plainly and very sensibly of my perfume; there was no nonsense in his notions, he told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: 'The whole plant and every part thereof, as well as rootes as leaves and floures doe smell somewhat strong, as it were the savour of a foxe, so that if any doe but near it, he can but smell it, yet is not unwholesome.' "How different all is to-day in literature, as well as in flower culture. Now there are low, coarse attempts at wit that fairly wilt a sensitive nature like mine. There is one miserable Man who comes to this garden, and who _thinks_ he is a Poet; I will not repeat his wretched rhymes. But only yesterday, when he stood looking superciliously down upon us, he said sneeringly, 'Yes, spring is here, balmy spring; we know her presence without seeing her face or hearing her voice; for the Skunk Cabbage is unfurled in the swamps, and the Crown-imperial is blooming in the garden.' Think of his presuming to set me alongside that low Skunk Cabbage--me with my 'stately beautifulness.' [Illustration: Crown Imperial. A Page from Gerarde's _Herball_.] "Little do people nowadays know about scents anyway, when their botanists and naturalists write that the Privet bloom is 'pleasingly fragrant,' and one dame set last summer a dish of Privet on her dining table before many guests. Privet! with its ancient and fishlike smell! And another tells of the fragrant delight of flowering Buckwheat--may the breezes blow such fragrance far from me! But why dwell on perfumes; flowers were made to look at, not to smell; sprays of Sweet Balm or Basil leaves outsweeten every flower, and make no pretence or thought of beauty; render to each its own virtues, and try not to engross the charm of another. "I was indeed the queen of the garden, and here I am exiled behind the barn. Life is not worth living. I won't come up again. She will walk through the garden next May and say, 'How dull and shabby the garden looks this year! the spring is backward, everything has run to leaves, nothing is in bloom, we must buy more fertilizer, we must get a new gardener, we must get more plants and slips and seeds and bulbs, it is fearfully discouraging, I never saw anything so gone off!' then perhaps she will remember, and regret the friend of her grandparents, the Crown-imperial--whom she thrust from her Garden of Delight." CHAPTER XV CHILDHOOD IN A GARDEN "I see the garden thicket's shade Where all the summer long we played, And gardens set and houses made, Our early work and late." --MARY HOWITT. How we thank God for the noble traits of our ancestors; and our hearts fill with gratitude for the tenderness, the patience, the loving kindness of our parents; I have an infinite deal for which to be sincerely grateful; but for nothing am I now more happy than that there were given to me a flower-loving father and mother. To that flower-loving father and mother I offer in tenderest memory equal gratitude for a childhood spent in a garden. Winter as well as summer gave us many happy garden hours. Sometimes a sudden thaw of heavy snow and an equally quick frost formed a miniature pond for sheltered skating at the lower end of the garden. A frozen crust of snow (which our winters nowadays so seldom afford) gave other joys. And the delights of making a snow man, or a snow fort, even of rolling great globes of snow, were infinite and varied. More subtle was the charm of shaping certain _things_ from dried twigs and evergreen sprigs, and pouring water over them to freeze into a beautiful resemblance of the original form. These might be the ornate initials or name of a dear girl friend, or a tiny tower or pagoda. I once had a real winter garden in miniature set in twigs of cedar and spruce, and frozen into a fairy garden. In summertime the old-fashioned garden was a paradise for a child; the long warm days saw the fresh telling of child to child, by that curiously subtle system of transmission which exists everywhere among happy children, of quaint flower customs known to centuries of English-speaking children, and also some newer customs developed by the fitness of local flowers for such games and plays. The Countess Potocka says the intense enjoyment of nature is a sixth sense. We are not born with this good gift, nor do we often acquire it in later life; it comes through our rearing. The fulness of delight in a garden is the bequest of a childhood spent in a garden. No study or possession of flowers in mature years can afford gratification equal to that conferred by childish associations with them; by the sudden recollection of flower lore, the memory of child friendships, the recalling of games or toys made of flowers: you cannot explain it; it seems a concentration, an extract of all the sunshine and all the beauty of those happy summers of our lives when the whole day and every day was spent among flowers. The sober teachings of science in later years can never make up the loss to children debarred of this inheritance, who have grown up knowing not when "the summer comes with bee and flower." [Illustration: Milkweed Seed.] A garden childhood gives more sources of delight to the senses in after life than come from beautiful color and fine fragrance. Have you pleasure in the contact of a flower? Do you like its touch as well as its perfume? Do you love to feel a Lilac spray brush your cheek in the cool of the evening? Do you like to bury your face in a bunch of Roses? How frail and papery is the Larkspur! And how silky is the Poppy! A Locust bloom is a fringe of sweetness; and how very doubtful is the touch of the Lily--an unpleasant thick sleekness. The Clove Carnation is the best of all. It feels just as it smells. These and scores more give me pleasure through their touch, the result of constant handling of flowers when I was a child. There were harmful flowers in the old garden--among them the Monk's-hood; we never touched it, except warily. Doubtless we were warned, but we knew it by instinct and did not need to be told. I always used to see in modest homes great tubs each with a flourishing Oleander tree. I have set out scores of little slips of Oleander, just as I planted Orange seeds. I seldom see Oleanders now; I wonder whether the plant has been banished on account of its poisonous properties. I heard of but one fatal case of Oleander poisoning--and that was doubtful. A little child, the sister of one of my playmates, died suddenly in great distress. Several months after her death the mother was told that the leaves of the Oleander were poisonous, when she recalled that the child had eaten them on the day of her death. Oleander blossoms were lovely in shape and color. Edward Fitzgerald writes to Fanny Kemble: "Don't you love the Oleander? So clean in its Leaves and Stem, as so beautiful in its Flower; loving to stand in water which it drinks up fast. I have written all my best Mss. with a Pen that has been held with its nib in water for more than a fortnight--Charles Keene's recipe for keeping Pens in condition--Oleander-like." This, written in 1882, must, even at that recent date, refer to quill pens. The lines of Mary Howitt's, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, ring to me so true; there is in them no mock sentiment, it is the real thing,--"the garden thicket's shade," little "cubby houses" under the close-growing stems of Lilac and Syringa, with an old thick shawl outspread on the damp earth for a carpet. Oh, how hot and scant the air was in the green light of those close "garden-thickets," those "Lilac ambushes," which were really not half so pleasant as the cooler seats on the grass under the trees, but which we clung to with a warmth equal to their temperature. [Illustration: The Children's Garden.] Let us peer into these garden thickets at these happy little girls, fantastic in their garden dress. Their hair is hung thick with Dandelion curls, made from pale green opal-tinted stems that have grown long under the shrubbery and Box borders. Around their necks are childish wampum, strings of Dandelion beads or Daisy chains. More delicate wreaths for the neck or hair were made from the blossoms of the Four-o'clock or the petals of Phlox or Lilacs, threaded with pretty alternation of color. Fuchsias were hung at the ears for eardrops, green leaves were pinned with leaf stems into little caps and bonnets and aprons, Foxgloves made dainty children's gloves. Truly the garden-bred child went in gay attire. That exquisite thing, the seed of Milkweed (shown on page 328), furnished abundant playthings. The plant was sternly exterminated in our garden, but sallies into a neighboring field provided supplies for fairy cradles with tiny pillows of silvery silk. One of the early impulses of infancy is to put everything in the mouth; this impulse makes the creeping days of some children a period of constant watchfulness and terror to their apprehensive guardians. When the children are older and can walk in the garden or edge of the woods, a fresh anxiety arises; for a certain savagery in their make-up makes them regard every growing thing, not as an object to look at or even to play with, but to eat. It is a relief to the mother when the child grows beyond the savage, and falls under the dominion of tradition and folk-lore, communicated to him by other children by that subtle power of enlightenment common to children, which seems more like instinct than instruction. The child still eats, but he makes distinctions, and seldom touches harmful leaves or seeds or berries. He has an astonishing range: roots, twigs, leaves, bark, tendrils, fruit, berries, flowers, buds, seeds, all alike serve for food. Young shoots of Sweetbrier and Blackberry are nibbled as well as the branches of young Birch. Grape tendrils, too, have an acid zest, as do Sorrel leaves. Wild Rose hips and the drupes of dwarf Cornel are chewed. The leaf buds of Spruce and Linden are also tasted. I hear that some children in some places eat the young fronds of Cinnamon Fern, but I never saw it done. Seeds of Pumpkins and Sunflowers were edible, as well as Hollyhock cheeses. There was one Slippery Elm tree which we know in our town, and we took ample toll of it. Cherry gum and Plum gum are chewed, as well as the gum of Spruce trees. There was a boy who used sometimes to intrude on our girl's paradise, since he was the son of a neighbor, and he said he ate raw Turnips, and something he called Pig-nuts--I wonder what they were. Those childish customs linger long in our minds, or rather in our subconsciousness. I never walk through an old garden without wishing to nibble and browse on the leaves and stems which I ate as a child, without sucking a drop of honey from certain flowers. I do it not with intent, but I waken to realization with the petal of Trumpet Honeysuckle in my hand and its drop of ambrosia on my lips. [Illustration: Foxgloves in a Narragansett Garden.] Children care far less for scent and perfection in a flower than they do for color, and, above all, for desirability and adaptability of form, this desirability being afforded by the fitness of the flower for the traditional games and plays. The favorite flowers of my childhood were three noble creatures, Hollyhocks, Canterbury Bells, and Foxgloves, all three were scentless. I cannot think of a child's summer in a garden without these three old favorites of history and folk-lore. Of course we enjoyed the earlier flower blooms and played happily with them ere our dearest treasures came to us; but never had we full variety, zest, and satisfaction till this trio were in midsummer bloom. There was a little gawky, crudely-shaped wooden doll of German manufacture sold in Worcester which I never saw elsewhere; they were kept for sale by old Waxler, the German basket maker, a most respected citizen, whose name I now learn was not Waxler but Weichsler. These dolls came in three sizes, the five-cent size was a midsummer favorite, because on its featureless head the blossoms of the Canterbury Bells fitted like a high azure cap. I can see rows of these wooden creatures sitting, thus crowned, stiffly around the trunk of the old Seckel Pear tree at a doll's tea-party. By the constant trampling of our childish feet the earth at the end of the garden path was hard and smooth under the shadow of the Lilac trees near our garden fence; and this hard path, remote from wanderers in the garden, made a splendid plateau to use for flower balls. Once we fitted it up as a palace; circular walls of Balsam flowers set closely together shaped the ball-room. The dancers were blue and white Canterbury Bells. Quadrilles were placed of little twigs, or strong flower stalks set firmly upright in the hard trodden earth, and on each of these a flower bell was hung so that the pretty reflexion of the scalloped edges of the corolla just touched the ground as the hooped petticoats swayed lightly in the wind. [Illustration: Hollyhocks in Garden of Kimball Homestead, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.] We used to catch bumblebees in the Canterbury Bells, and hear them buzz and bump and tear their way out to liberty. We held the edges of the flower tightly pinched together, and were never stung. Besides its adaptability as a toy for children, the Canterbury Bell was beloved for its beauty in the garden. An appropriate folk name for it is Fair-in-sight. Healthy clumps grow tall and stately, towering up as high as childish heads; and the firm stalks are hung so closely in bloom. Nowadays people plant expanses of Canterbury Bells; one at the beautiful garden at White Birches, Elmhurst, Illinois, is shown on page 111. I do not like this as well as the planting in our home garden when they are set in a mixed border, as shown opposite page 416. Our tastes in the flower world are largely influenced by what we were wonted to in childhood, not only in the selection of flowers, but in their placing in our gardens. The Canterbury Bell has historical interest through its being named for the bells borne by pilgrims to the shrine at Canterbury. I have been delighted to see plants of these sturdy garden favorites offered for sale of late years in New York streets in springtime, by street venders, who now show a tendency to throw aside Callas, Lilies, Tuberoses, and flowers of such ilk, and substitute shrubs and seedlings of hardy growth and satisfactory flowering. But it filled me with regret, to hear the pretty historic name--Canterbury Bells--changed in so short a residence in the city, by these Italian and German tongues to Gingerbread Bells--a sad debasement. Native New Englanders have seldom forgotten or altered an old flower name, and very rarely transferred it to another plant, even in two centuries of everyday usage. But I am glad to know that the flower will bloom in the flower pot or soap box in the dingy window of the city poor, or in the square foot of earth of the city squatter, even if it be called Gingerbread Bells. I think we may safely affirm that the Hollyhock is the most popular, and most widely known, of all old-fashioned flowers. It is loved for its beauty, its associations, its adaptiveness. It is such a decorative flower, and looks of so much distinction in so many places. It is invaluable to the landscape gardener and to the architect; and might be named the wallflower, since it looks so well growing by every wall. I like it there, or by a fence-side, or in a corner, better than in the middle of flower beds. How many garden pictures have Hollyhocks? Sir Joshua Reynolds even used them as accessories of his portraits. They usually grow so well and bloom so freely. I have seen them in Connecticut growing wild--garden strays, standing up by ruined stone walls in a pasture with as much grace of grouping, as good form, as if they had been planted by our most skilful gardeners or architects. Many illustrations of them are given in this book; I need scarcely refer to them; opposite page 334 is shown a part of the four hundred stalks of rich bloom in a Portsmouth garden. There is a pretty semidouble Hollyhock with a single row of broad outer petals and a smaller double rosette for the centre; but the single flowers are far more effective. I like well the old single crimson flower, but the yellow ones are, I believe, the loveliest; a row of the yellow and white ones against an old brick wall is perfection. I can never repay to the Hollyhock the debt of gratitude I owe for the happy hours it furnished to me in my childhood. Its reflexed petals could be tied into such lovely silken-garbed dolls; its "cheeses" were one of the staple food supplies of our dolls' larder. I am sure in my childhood I would have warmly chosen the Hollyhock as my favorite flower. The sixty-two folk names of the Foxglove give ample proof of its closeness to humanity; it is a familiar flower, a home flower. Of these many names I never heard but two in New England, and those but once; an old Irish gardener called the flowers Fairy Thimbles, and an English servant, Pops--this from the well-known habit of popping the petals on the palm of the hand. We used to build little columns of these Foxgloves by thrusting one within another, alternating purple and white; and we wore them for gloves, and placed them as foolscaps on the heads of tiny dolls. The beauty of the Foxglove in the garden is unquestioned; the spires of white bloom are, as Cotton Mather said of a pious and painful Puritan preacher, "a shining and white light in a golden candlestick improved for the sweet felicity of Mankind and to the honour of our Maker." Opposite page 340 is a glimpse of a Box-edged garden in Worcester, whose blossoming has been a delight to me every summer of my entire life. In my childhood this home was that of flower-loving neighbors who had an established and constant system of exchange with my mother and other neighbors of flowers, plants, seeds, slips, and bulbs. The garden was serene with an atmosphere of worthy old age; you wondered how any man so old could so constantly plant, weed, prune, and hoe until you saw how he loved his flowers, and how his wife loved them. The Roses, Peonies, and Flower de Luce in this garden are sixty years old, and the Box also; the shrubs are almost trees. Nothing seems to be transplanted, yet all flourish; I suppose some plants must be pulled up, sometimes, else the garden would be a thicket. The varying grading of city streets has left this garden in a little valley sheltered from winds and open to the sun's rays. Here bloom Crocuses, Snowdrops, Grape Hyacinths, and sometimes Tulips, before any neighbor has a blossom and scarce a leaf. On a Sunday noon in April there are always flower lovers hanging over the low fences, and gazing at the welcome early blooms. Here if ever, "Winter, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring." A close cloud of Box-scent hangs over this garden, even in midwinter; sometimes the Box edgings grow until no one can walk between; then drastic measures have to be taken, and the rows look ragged for a time. [Illustration: An Autumn Path in a Worcester Garden.] I think much of my love of Box comes from happy associations with this garden. I used to like to go there with my mother when she went on what the Japanese would call "garden-viewing" visits, for at the lower end of the garden was a small orchard of the finest playhouse Apple trees I ever climbed (and I have had much experience), and some large trees bearing little globular early Pears; and there were rows of bushes of golden "Honeyblob" Gooseberries. The Apple trees are there still, but the Gooseberry bushes are gone. I looked for them this summer eagerly, but in vain; I presume the berries would have been sour had I found them. [Illustration: Hollyhocks at Tudor Place.] In many old New England gardens the close juxtaposition and even intermingling of vegetables and fruits with the flowers gave a sense of homely simplicity and usefulness which did not detract from the garden's interest, and added much to the child's pleasure. At the lower end of the long flower border in our garden, grew "Mourning Brides," white, pale lavender, and purple brown in tint. They opened under the shadow of a row of Gooseberry bushes. I seldom see Gooseberry bushes nowadays in any gardens, whether on farms or in nurseries; they seem to be an antiquated fruit. I have in my memory many other customs of childhood in the garden; some of them I have told in my book _Child Life in Colonial Days_, and there are scores more which I have not recounted, but most of them were peculiar to my own fanciful childhood, and I will not recount them here. One of the most exquisite of Mrs. Browning's poems is _The Lost Bower_; it is endeared to me because it expresses so fully a childish bereavement of my own, for I have a lost garden. Somewhere, in my childhood, I saw this beautiful garden, filled with radiant blossoms, rich with fruit and berries, set with beehives, rabbit hutches, and a dove cote, and enclosed about with hedges; and through it ran a purling brook--a thing I ever longed for in my home garden. All one happy summer afternoon I played in it, and gathered from its beds and borders at will--and I have never seen it since. When I was still a child I used to ask to return to it, but no one seemed to understand; and when I was grown I asked where it was, describing it in every detail, and the only answer was that it was a dream, I had never seen and played in such a garden. This lost garden has become to me an emblem, as was the lost bower to Mrs. Browning, of the losses of life; but I did not lose all; while memory lasts I shall ever possess the happiness of my childhood passed in our home garden. [Illustration: An Old Worcester Garden.] CHAPTER XVI MEETIN' SEED AND SABBATH DAY POSIES "I touched a thought, I know Has tantalized me many times. Help me to hold it! First it left The yellowing Fennel run to seed." --ROBERT BROWNING. My "thought" is the association of certain flowers with Sunday; the fact that special flowers and leaves and seeds, Fennel, Dill, and Southernwood, were held to be fitting and meet to carry to the Sunday service. "Help me to hold it"--to record those simple customs of the country-side ere they are forgotten. In the herb garden grew three free-growing plants, all three called indifferently in country tongue, "meetin' seed." They were Fennel, Dill, and Caraway, and similar in growth and seed. Caraway is shown on page 342. Their name was given because, in summer days of years gone by, nearly every woman and child carried to "meeting" on Sundays, bunches of the ripe seeds of one or all of these three plants, to nibble throughout the long prayers and sermon. It is fancied that these herbs were anti-soporific, but I find no record of such power. On the contrary, Galen says Dill "procureth sleep, wherefore garlands of Dill are worn at feasts." A far more probable reason for its presence at church was the quality assigned to it by Pliny and other herbalists down to Gerarde, that of staying the "yeox or hicket or hicquet," otherwise the hiccough. If we can judge by the manifold remedies offered to allay this affliction, it was certainly very prevalent in ancient times. Cotton Mather wrote a bulky medical treatise entitled _The Angel of Bethesda_. It was never printed; the manuscript is owned by the American Antiquarian Society. The character of this medico-religious book may be judged by this opening sentence of his chapter on the hiccough:-- "The Hiccough or the Hicox rather, for it's a Teutonic word that signifies to sob, appears a Lively Emblem of the battle between the Flesh and the Spirit in the Life of Piety. The Conflict in the Pious Mind gives all the Trouble and same uneasiness as Hickox. Death puts an end to the Conflict." [Illustration: Caraway.] Parson Mather gives Tansy and Caraway as remedies for the hiccough, but far better still--spiders, prepared in various odious ways; I prefer Dill. Peter Parley said that "a sprig of Fennel was the theological smelling-bottle of the tender sex, and not unfrequently of the men, who from long sitting in the sanctuary, after a week of labor in the field, found themselves tempted to sleep, would sometimes borrow a sprig of Fennel, to exorcise the fiend that threatened their spiritual welfare." Old-fashioned folk kept up a constant nibbling in church, not only of these three seeds, but of bits of Cinnamon or Lovage root, or, more commonly still, the roots of Sweet Flag. Many children went to brooksides and the banks of ponds to gather these roots. This pleasure was denied to us, but we had a Flag root purveyor, our milkman's daughter. This milkman, who lived on a lonely farm, used often to take with him on his daily rounds his little daughter. She sat with him on the front seat of his queer cart in summer and his queerer pung in winter, an odd little figure, with a face of gypsylike beauty which could scarcely be seen in the depths of the Shaker sunbonnet or pumpkin hood. If my mother chanced to see her, she gave the child an orange, or a few figs, or some little cakes, or almonds and raisins; in return the child would throw out to us violently roots of Sweet Flag, Wild Ginger, Snakeroot, Sassafras, and Apples or Pears, which she carried in a deep detached pocket at her side. She never spoke, and the milkman confided to my mother that he "took her around because she was so wild," by which he meant timid. We were firmly convinced that the child could not walk nor speak, and had no ears; and we were much surprised when she walked down the aisle of our church one Sunday as actively as any child could, displaying very natural ears. Her father had bought a home in the town that she might go to school. He was rewarded by her development into one of those scholars of phenomenal brilliancy, such as are occasionally produced from New England farmers' families. She also became a beauty of most unusual type. At her father's death she "went West." I have always expected to read of her as of marked life in some way, but I never have. Of course her family name may have been changed by marriage; but her Christian name, Appoline, was so unusual I could certainly trace her. If my wild and beautiful little milk girl reads these lines, I hope she will forgive me, for she certainly was queer. [Illustration: Sun-dial of Jonathan Fairbanks.] When her residence was in town, Appoline did not cease her gifts of country treasures. She brought on spring Sundays a very delightful addition to our Sabbath day nibblings and browsings, the most delicious mouthful of all the treasures of New England woods, what we called Pippins, the first tender leaves of the aromatic Checkerberry. In the autumn the spicy berries of the same plant filled many a paper cornucopia which was secretly conveyed to us. It was also a universal custom among the elder folk to carry a Sunday posy; the stems were discreetly enwrapped with the folded handkerchief which also concealed the sprig of Fennel. Dean Hole tells us that a sprig of Southernwood was always seen in the Sunday smocks of English farm folk. Mary Howitt, in her poem, _The Poor Man's Garden_, has this verse:-- "And here on Sabbath mornings The goodman comes to get His Sunday nosegay--Moss Rose bud, White Pink, and Mignonette." This shows to me that the church posy was just as common in England as in America; in domestic and social customs we can never disassociate ourselves from England; our ways, our deeds, are all English. Thoreau noted with pleasure when, at the last of June, the young men of Concord "walked slowly and soberly to church, in their best clothes, each with a Pond Lily in his hand or bosom, with as long a stem as he could get." And he adds thereto almost the only decorous and conventional picture he gives of himself, that he used in early life to go thus to church, smelling a Pond Lily, "its odor contrasting with and atoning for that of the sermon." He associated this universal bearing of the Lily with a very natural act, that of the first spring swim and bath, and pictured with delight the quiet Sabbath stillness and the pure opening flowers. He said the flower had become typical to him equally of a Sunday morning swim and of church-going. He adds that the young women carried on this floral Sunday, as a companion flower, their first Rose. [Illustration: Bronze Sun-dial on Dutch Reformed Church. West End Avenue, New York.] This Sabbath bearing of the early Water Lilies may have been a local custom; a few miles from Walden Pond and Concord an old kinsman of mine throughout his long life (which closed twenty years ago) carried Water Lilies on summer Sundays to church; and starting with neighborly intent a short time before the usual hour of church service, he placed a single beautiful Lily in the pew of each of his old friends. All knew who was the flower bearer, and gentle smiles and nods of thanks would radiate across the old church to him. These lilies were gathered for him freshly each Sabbath morning by the young men of his family, who, as Thoreau tells, all took their morning bath in the pond throughout the summer. [Illustration: Sun-dial on Boulder, Swiftwater, Pennsylvania.] There were conventions in these Sunday posies. I never heard of carrying sprays of Lemon Verbena or Rose Geranium, or any of the strong-scented herbs of the Mint family; but throughout eastern Massachusetts, especially in Concord and Wayland, a favorite posy was a spray of the refreshing, soft-textured leaves from what country folk called the Tongue plant--which was none other than Costmary, also called Beaver tongue, and Patagonian mint. As there has been recently much interest and discussion anent this Tongue plant, I here give its botanical name _Chrysanthemum balsamita_, var. _tanacetoides_. A far more popular Sunday posy than any blossom was a sprig of Southernwood, known also everywhere as Lad's-love, and occasionally as Old Man and Kiss-me-quick-and-go. It was also termed Meeting plant from this universal Sunday use. A restless little child was once handed during the church services in summer a bunch of Caraway seeds, and a goodly sprig of Southernwood. The little girl's mother listened earnestly to the long sermon, and was horrified at its close to find that her child had eaten the entire bunch of Caraway, stems and seeds, and all the bitter Southernwood. She was hurried out of church to the village doctor's, and spent a very unhappy hour or two as the result of her Nebuchadnezzar-like gorging. Like many New Englanders, I dearly love the scent of Southernwood:-- "I'll give to him Who gathers me, more sweetness than he knows Without me--more than any Lily could, I, that am flowerless, being Southernwood." Southernwood bears a balmier breath than is ever borne by many blossoms, for it is sweet with the fragrance of memory. The scent that has been loved for centuries, the leaves that have been pressed to the hearts of fair maids, as they questioned of love, are indeed endeared. [Illustration: Buckthorn Arch in an Old Salem Garden.] Southernwood was a plant of vast powers. It was named in the fourteenth century as potent to cure talking in sleep, and other "vanityes of the heade." An old Salem sea captain had this recipe for baldness: "Take a quantitye of Suthernwoode and put it upon kindled coale to burn and being made into a powder mix it with oyl of radiches, and anoynt a bald head and you shall see great experiences." The lying old _Dispensatory_ of Culpepper gave a rule to mix the ashes of Southernwood with "Old Sallet Oyl" which "helpeth those that are hair-fallen and bald." [Illustration: Sun-dial at Emery Place, Brightwood, District of Columbia.] Far pleasanter were the uses of the plant as a love charm. Pliny did not disdain to counsel putting Southernwood under the pillow to make one dream of a lover. A sprig of Southernwood in an unmarried girl's shoe would bring to her the sight of her husband-to-be before night. Sixty years ago two young country folk of New England were married. The twain built them a house and established their home. Since a sprig of Southernwood had played a romantic part in their courtship, each planted a bush at the side of the broad doorstone; and the husband, William, often thrust a bit of this Lad's-love from the flourishing bushes in the buttonhole of his woollen shirt, for he fancied the fresh scent of the leaves. [Illustration: Sun-dial at Traveller's Rest.] The twain had no children, and perhaps therefrom grew and increased in Hetty a fairly passionate love of exact order and neatness in her home--a trait which is not so common in New England housewives as many fancy, and which does not always find equal growth and encouragement in New England husbands. William chafed under the frequent and bitter reproofs for the muddy shoes, dusty garments, hanging straws and seeds which he brought into his wife's orderly paradise, and the jarring culminated one night over such a trifle, a green sprig of Lad's-love which he had dropped and trodden into the freshly washed floor of the kitchen, where it left a green stain on the spotless boards. The quarrel flamed high, and was followed by an ominous calm which was not broken at breakfast. It would be impossible to express in words Hetty's emotions when she crossed her threshold to set her shining milk tins in the morning sunlight, and saw on one side of the doorstone a yawning hole where had grown for ten years William's bunch of Lad's-love. He had driven to the next village to sell some grain, so she could search unseen for the vanished emblem of domestic felicity, and soon she found it, in the ditch by the public road, already withered in the hot sun. When her husband went at nightfall to feed and water his cattle, he found the other bush of Lad's-love, which had been planted with such affectionate sentiment, trodden in the mire of the pigpen, under the feet of the swine. They lived together for thirty years after this crowning indignity. The grass grew green over the empty holes by the doorside, but he never forgave her, and they never spoke to each other save in direst necessity, and then in fewest words. Yet they were not wicked folk. She cared for his father and mother in the last years of their life with a devotion that was fairly pathetic when it was seen that the old man was untidy to a degree, and absolutely oblivious of all her orderly ways and wishes. At their death he sent for and "homed," as the expression ran, a brother of hers who was almost blind, and paid the expenses of her nephew through college--but he died unforgiving; the sight of that beloved Southernwood--in the pigpen--forever killed his affection. CHAPTER XVII SUN-DIALS "'Tis an old dial, dark with many a stain, In summer crowned with drifting orchard bloom, Tricked in the autumn with the yellow rain, And white in winter like a marble tomb. "And round about its gray, time-eaten brow Lean letters speak--a worn and shattered row:-- 'I am a Shade; A Shadowe too arte thou; I mark the Time; saye, Gossip, dost thou soe?'" --AUSTIN DOBSON. A century or more ago, in the heart of nearly all English gardens, and in the gardens of our American colonies as well, there might be seen a pedestal of varying material, shape, and pretension, surmounted by the most interesting furnishing in "dead-works" of the garden, a sun-dial. In public squares, on the walls of public buildings, on bridges, and by the side of the way, other and simpler dials were found. On the walls of country houses and churches vertical sun-dials were displayed; every English town held them by scores. In Scotland, and to some extent in England, these sun-dials still are found; in fine old gardens the most richly carved dials are standing; but in America they have become so rare that many people have never seen one. In many of the formal gardens planned by our skilled architects, sun-dials are now springing afresh like mushroom growth of a single night, and some are objects of the greatest beauty and interest. [Illustration: Two Old Cronies, the Sun-dial and Bee Skepe.] If the claims of antiquity and historical association have aught to charm us, every sun-dial must be assured of our interest. The most primitive mode of knowing of the midday hour was by a "noon mark," a groove cut or line drawn on door or window sill which indicated the meridian hour through a shadow thrown on this noon mark. A good guess as to the hours near noon could be made by noting the distance of the shadow from the noon mark. I chanced to be near an old noon mark this summer as the sun warned that noon approached; I noted that the marking shadow crossed the line at twenty minutes before noon by our watches--which, I suppose, was near enough to satisfy our "early to rise" ancestors. Meridian lines were often traced with exactness on the floors of churches in Continental Europe. An advance step in accuracy and elegance was made when a simple metal sun-dial was affixed to the window sill instead of cutting the rude noon mark. Soon the sun-dial was set on a simple pedestal near the kitchen window, so that the active worker within might glance at the dial face without ceasing in her task. Such a sun-dial is shown on page 354, as it stands under the "buttery" window cosily hobnobbing with its old crony of many years, the bee skepe. One could wish to be a bee, and live in that snug home under the Syringa bush. Portable sun-dials succeeded fixed dials; they have been known as long as the Christian era; shepherds' dials were the "Kalendars" or "Cylindres" about which treatises were written as early as the thirteenth century. They were small cylinders of wood or ivory, having at the top a kind of stopper with a hinged gnomon; they are still used in the Pyrenees. Pretty little "ring-dials" of brass, gold, or silver, are constructed on the same principle. The exquisitely wrought portable dial shown on this page is a very fine piece of workmanship, and must have been costly. It is dated 1764, and is eleven inches in diameter. It is a perfect example of the advanced type of dial made in Italy, which had a simpler form as early certainly as A.D. 300. The compass was added in the thirteenth century. The compass-needle is missing on this dial, its only blemish. The Italians excelled in dial-making; among their interesting forms were the cross-shaped dials evidently a reliquary. [Illustration: Portable Sun-dial.] Portable dials were used instead of watches. There is at the Washington headquarters at Morristown a delicately wrought oval silver case, with compass and sun-dial, which was carried by one of the French officers who came here with Lafayette; George Washington owned and carried one. The colonists came here from a land set with dials, whether they sailed from Holland or England. Charles I had a vast fancy for dials, and had them placed everywhere; the finest and most curious was the splendid master dial placed in his private gardens at Whitehall; this had five dials set in the upper part, four in the four corners, and a great horizontal concave dial; among these were scattered equinoctial dials, vertical dials, declining dials, polar dials, plane dials, cylindrical dials, triangular dials; each was inscribed with explanatory verses in Latin. Equally beautiful and intricate were the dials of Charles II, the most marvellous being the vast pyramid dial bearing 271 different dial faces. Those who wish to learn of English sun-dials should read Mrs. Gatty's _Book of Sun-dials_, a massive and fascinating volume. No such extended record could be made of American sun-dials; but it pleases me that I know of over two hundred sun-dials in America, chiefly old ones; that I have photographs of many of them; that I have copies of many hundred dial mottoes, and also a very fair collection of the old dial faces, of various metals and sizes. I know of no public collection of sun-dials in America save that in the Smithsonian Institution, and that is not a large one. Several of our Historical Societies own single sun-dials. In the Essex Institute is the sun-dial of Governor Endicott; another, shown on page 344, was once the property of my far-away grandfather, Jonathan Fairbanks; it is in the Dedham Historical Society. [Illustration: Sun-dial in Garden of Frederick J. Kingsbury, Esq.] All forms of sun-dials are interesting. A simple but accurate one was set on Robins Island by the late Samuel Bowne Duryea, Esq., of Brooklyn. Taking the flagpole of the club house as a stylus, he laid the lines and figures of the dial-face with small dark stones on a ground of light-hued stones, all set firmly in the earth at the base of the pole. Thus was formed, with the simplest materials, by one who ever strove to give pleasure and stimulate knowledge in all around him, an object which not only told the time o' the day, but afforded gratification, elicited investigation, and awakened sentiment in all who beheld it. A similar use of a vertical pole as a primitive gnomon for a sun-dial seems to have been common to many uncivilized peoples. In upper Egypt the natives set up a palm rod in open ground, and arrange a circle of stones or pegs around it, calling it an _alka_, and thus mark the hours. The ploughman leaves his buffalo standing in the furrow while he learns the progress of time from this simple dial--and we recall the words of Job, "As a servant earnestly desireth a shadow." [Illustration: Sun-dial at Morristown, New Jersey.] The Labrador Indians, when on the hunt or the march, set an upright stick or spear in the snow, and draw the line of the shadow thus cast. They then stalk on their way; and the women, heavily laden with provisions, shelter, and fuel, come slowly along two or three hours later, note the distance between the present shadow and the line drawn by their lords, and know at once whether they must gather up the stick or spear and hurry along, or can rest for a short time on their weary march. This is a primitive but exact chronometer. There are serious objections to quoting from Charles Lamb: you are never willing to end the transcription--you long to add just one phrase, one clause more. Then, too, the purity of the pearl which you choose seems to render duller than their wont the leaden sentences with which you enclose it as a setting. Still, who could write of sun-dials without choosing to transcribe these words of Lamb's? "What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead or brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere banished? If its business use be suspended by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labors, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of temperance and good hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. The 'shepherd carved it out quaintly in the sun,' and turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones." [Illustration: Yes, Toby! It's Three O'clock.] Sun-dial mottoes still can be gathered by hundreds; and they are one record of a force in the development of our literate people. For it was long after we had printing ere we had any general class of folk, who, if they could read, read anything save the Bible. To many the knowledge of reading came from the deciphering of what has been happily termed the Literature of the Bookless. This literature was placed that he who ran might read; and its opening chapters were in the form of inscriptions and legends and mottoes which were placed, not only on buildings and walls, and pillars and bridges, but on household furniture and table utensils. The inscribing of mottoes on sun-dials appears to have sprung up with dial-making; and where could a strict moral lesson, a suggestive or inspiring thought, be better placed? Even the most heedless or indifferent passer-by, or the unwilling reader could not fail to see the instructive words when he cast his glance to learn the time. The mottoes were frequently in Latin, a few in Greek or Hebrew; but the old English mottoes seem the most appealing. ABUSE ME NOT I DO NO ILL I STAND TO SERVE THEE WITH GOOD WILL AS CAREFUL THEN BE SURE THOU BE TO SERVE THY GOD AS I SERVE THEE. A CLOCK THE TIME MAY WRONGLY TELL I NEVER IF THE SUN SHINE WELL. AS A SHADOW SUCH IS LIFE. I COUNT NONE BUT SUNNY HOURS. BE THE DAY WEARY, BE THE DAY LONG SOON IT SHALL RING TO EVEN SONG. Scriptural verses have ever been favorites, especially passages from the Psalms: "Man is like a thing of nought, his time passeth away like a shadow." "My time is in Thy hand." "Put not off from day to day." "Oh, remember how short my time is." Some of the Latin mottoes are very beautiful. [Illustration: Face of Dial at Sag Harbor, Long Island.] Poets have written special verses for sun-dials. These noble lines are by Walter Savage Landor:-- IN HIS OWN IMAGE THE CREATOR MADE, HIS OWN PURE SUNBEAM QUICKENED THEE, O MAN! THOU BREATHING DIAL! SINCE THE DAY BEGAN THE PRESENT HOUR WAS EVER MARKED WITH SHADE. The motto, _Horas non numero nisi serenas_, in various forms and languages, has ever been a favorite. From an old album I have received this poem written by Professor S. F. B. Morse; there is a note with it in Professor Morse's handwriting, saying he saw the motto on a sun-dial at Worms:-- TO A. G. E. _Horas non numero nisi serenas._ The sun when it shines in a clear cloudless sky Marks the time on my disk in figures of light; If clouds gather o'er me, unheeded they fly, I note not the hours except they be bright. So when I review all the scenes that have past Between me and thee, be they dark, be they light, I forget what was dark, the light I hold fast; I note not the hours except they be bright. SAMUEL F. B. MORSE, Washington, March, 1845. The sun-dial seems too classic an object, and too serious a teacher, to bear a jesting motto. This sober pun was often seen:-- LIFE'S BUT A SHADOWE MAN'S BUT DUST THIS DYALL SAYES DY ALL WE MUST. [Illustration: Sun-dial in Garden of Grace Church Rectory, New York.] The sun-dial does not lure to "idle dalliance." Nine-tenths of the sun-dial mottoes tersely warn you not to linger, to haste away, that time is fleeting, and your hours are numbered, and therefore to "be about your business." In a single moment and at a single glance the sun-dial has said its lesson, has told its absolute message, and there is no reason for you to gaze at it longer. Its very position, too, in the unshaded rays of the sun, does not invite you to long companionship, as do the shady lengths of a pergola, or a green orchard seat. Still, I would ever have a garden seat near a sun-dial, especially when it is a work of art to be studied, and with mottoes to be remembered. For even in hurrying America the sun-dial seems--like a guide-post--a half-human thing, for which we can feel an almost personal interest. [Illustration: Fugio Bank-note.] The figure of a sun-dial played an interesting part in the early history of the United States. In the first set of notes issued for currency by the American Congress was one for the value of one third of a dollar. One side has the chain of links bearing the names of the thirteen states, enclosing a sunburst bearing the words, _American Congress, We are One_. The reverse side is shown on this page. It bears a print of a sun-dial, with the motto, _Fugio, Mind Your Business_. The so-called "Franklin cent" has a similar design of a sun-dial with the same motto, and there was a beautiful "Fugio dollar" cast in silver, bronze, and pewter. Though this design and motto were evidently Franklin's taste, the motto in its use on a sun-dial was not original with Franklin, nor with any one else in the Congress, for it had been seen on dials on many English churches and houses. In the form, "Begone about Your Business," it was on a house in the Inner Temple; this is the tradition of the origin of this motto. The dialler sent for a motto to place under the dial, as he had been instructed by the Benchers; when the man arrived at the Library, he found but one surly old gentleman poring over a musty book. To him he said, "Please, sir, the gentlemen told me to call this hour for a motto for the sun-dial." "Begone about your business," was the testy answer. So the man painted the words under the dial; and the chance words seemed so appropriate to the Benchers that they were never removed. It is told of Dean Cotton of Bangor that he had a cross old gardener who always warded off unwelcome visitors to the deanery by saying to every one who approached, "Go about your business!" After the gardener's death the dean had this motto engraved around the sun-dial in the garden, "Goa bou tyo urb us in ess, 1838." Thus the gardener's growl became his epitaph. Another form was, "Be about Your Business," and it is a suggestive fact that it was on a dial on the General Post-office in London in 1756. Franklin's interest in and knowledge of postal matters, his long residence in London, and service under the crown as American postmaster general, must have familiarized him with this dial, and I am convinced it furnished to him the notion for the design on the first bank-note and coins of the new nation. An interesting bit of history allied to America is given to us in the finding of a sun-dial which gives to American students of heraldic antiquities another dated shield of the Washington "stars and stripes." [Illustration: Sun-dial at "Washington House," Little Brington, England.] In Little Brington, Northamptonshire, stands a house known as "The Washington House," which gave shelter to the Washingtons of Sulgrave after the fall of their fortunes. Within a stone's throw of the house has recently been found a sun-dial having the Washington arms (argent) two bars, and in chief three mullets (gules) carved upon it, with the date 1617. The existence of this stone has been known for forty years; but it has never been closely examined and noted till recently. It is a circular slab of sandstone three inches thick and sixteen inches in diameter. The gnomon is lacking. The lines, figures, and shield are incised, and the letters R. W. can be dimly seen. These were probably the initials of Robert Washington, great uncle of the two emigrants to Virginia. [Illustration: Dial-face from Mount Vernon.] Through the kindness of Mr. A. L. Y. Morley, a faithful antiquary of Great Barrington, I have the pleasure of giving, on page 367, a representation of this interesting dial. It is shown leaning against the "pump-stand" in the yard of the "Washington House"; and the pump seems as ancient as the dial. [Illustration: Sun-dial of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia.] In this book are three other sun-dials associated with George Washington. At Mount Vernon there stands at the front of the entrance door a modern sun-dial. The fine old metal dial-face, about ten inches in diameter, which in Washington's day was placed on the same site, is now the property of Mr. William F. Havemeyer, Jr., of New York. It was given to him by Mr. Custis; a picture of it is shown on page 368. This dial-face is a splendid relic; one closely associated with Washington's everyday life, and full of suggestion and sentiment to every thoughtful beholder. The sun-dial which stood in the old Fredericksburg garden of Mary Washington, the mother of George Washington, still stands in Fredericksburg, in the grounds of Mr. Doswell. A photograph of it is reproduced on page 369. The fourth historic dial is on page 371. It is the one at Kenmore, the home built by Fielding Lewis for his bride, Betty Washington, the sister of George Washington, on ground adjoining her mother's home. A part of the garden which connected these two Washington homes is shown on page 228. These three American sun-dials afford an interesting proof of the universal presence of sun-dials in Virginian homes of wealth, and they also show the kind of dial-face which was generally used. Another ancient dial (page 350) at Travellers' Rest, a near-by Virginian country seat, is similar in shape to these three, and differs but little in mounting. In Pennsylvania and Virginia sun-dials have lingered in use in front of court-houses, on churches, and in a few old garden dials. In New England I scarcely know an old garden dial still standing in its original place on its original pedestal. Four old ones of brass or pewter are shown in the illustration on page 379. These once stood in New England gardens or on the window sills of old houses; one was taken from a sunny window ledge to give to me. Perhaps the attention paid the doings of the American Philosophical Society, and the number of scientists living near Philadelphia, may account for the many sun-dials set up in the vicinity of the town. Godfrey, the maker of Godfrey's Quadrant, was one of those scientific investigators, and must have been a famous "dialler." [Illustration: Kenmore, the Home of Betty Washington Lewis.] On page 373 is shown an ancient sun-dial in the garden of Charles F. Jenkins, Esq., in Germantown, Pennsylvania. This sun-dial originally belonged to Nathan Spencer, who lived in Germantown prior to and during the Revolutionary War. Hepzibah Spencer, his daughter, married, and took the sun-dial to Byberry. Her daughter carried the sun-dial to Gwynedd when her name was changed to Jenkins; and their grandson, the present owner, rescued it from the chicken house with the gnomon missing, which was afterward found. Its inscription, "Time waits for No Man," is an old punning device on the word gnomon. At one time dialling was taught by many a country schoolmaster, and excellent and accurate sun-dials were made and set up by country workmen, usually masons of slight education. In Scotland the making of sun-dials has never died out. In America many pewter sun-dials were cast in moulds of steatite or other material. A few dial-makers still remain; one in lower New York makes very interesting-looking sun-dials of brass, which, properly discolored and stained, find a ready sale in uptown shops. I doubt if these are ever made for any special geographical point, but there is in a small Pennsylvania town an old Quaker who makes carefully calculated and accurate sun-dials, computed by logarithms for special places. I should like to see him "sit like a shepherd carving out dials, quaintly point by point." I have a very pretty circular brass dial of his making, about eight inches in diameter. He writes me that "the dial sent thee is a good students' dial, fit to set outside the window for a young man to use and study by in college," which would indicate to me that my Quaker dialler knows another type of collegian from those of my acquaintance, who would find the time set by a sun-dial rather slow. [Illustration: Sun-dial in Garden of Charles F. Jenkins, Esq., Germantown, Pennsylvania.] There have been those who truly loved sun-dials. Sir William Temple ordered that after his death his heart should be buried under the sun-dial in his garden--where his heart had been in life. 'Tis not unusual to see a sun-dial over the gate to a burial ground, and a noble emblem it is in that place; one at Mount Auburn Cemetery, near Boston, bears a pleasing motto written originally by John G. Whittier for his friend, Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, and inscribed on a beautiful silver sun-dial now owned by Dr. Vincent Y. Bowditch of Boston, Massachusetts. A facsimile of this dial was also placed before the Manor House on the island of Naushon by Mr. John M. Forbes in memory of Dr. Bowditch. The lines run thus:-- WITH WARNING HAND I MARK TIME'S RAPID FLIGHT FROM LIFE'S GLAD MORNING TO ITS SOLEMN NIGHT. YET, THROUGH THE DEAR GOD'S LOVE I ALSO SHOW THERE'S LIGHT ABOVE ME, BY THE SHADE BELOW. A sun-dial is to me, in many places, a far more inspiring memorial than a monument or tablet. Let me give as an example the fine sun-dial, designed by W. Gedney Beatty, Esq., and shown on page 359, which was erected on the grounds of the Memorial Hospital at Morristown, New Jersey, by the Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, to mark the spot where Washington partook of the Communion. What dignified and appropriate church appointments sun-dials are. A simple and impressive bronze vertical dial on the wall of the Dutch Reformed Church on West End Avenue, New York, is shown on page 346. The sun-dial standing before the rectory of Grace Church on Broadway, New York, is on page 364. [Illustration: Sun-dial at Ophir Farm, White Plains, New York, Country-seat of Hon. Whitelaw Reid.] There is ever much question as to a suitable pedestal for garden sun-dials: it must not stand so high that the dial-face cannot be looked down upon by grown persons; it must not be so light as to seem rickety, nor so heavy as to be clumsy. A very good rule is to err on the side of simplicity in sun-dials for ordinary gardens. What I regard as a very satisfactory pedestal and mounting in every particular may be seen in the illustration facing page 80, showing the sun-dial in the garden of Charles E. Mather, Esq., at Avonwood Court, Haverford, Pennsylvania. Sometimes the pillars of old balustrades, old fence posts, and even parts of old tombs and monuments, have been used as pedestals for sun-dials. How pleasantly Sylvana in her _Letters to an Unknown Friend_, tells us and shows to us her cheerful sun-dial mounted on the four corners of an old tombstone with this fine motto cut into the upper step, _Lux et umbra vicissim sed semper amor_. I mean to search the stone-cutters' waste heap this summer and see whether I cannot rob the grave to mark the hours of my life. Charles Dickens had at Gadshill a sun-dial set on one of the pillars of the balustrade of Old Rochester Bridge. From Italy and Greece marble pillars have been sent from ancient ruins to be set up as dial pedestals. If possible, the pedestal as well as the dial-face of a handsome sun-dial should have some significance through association, suggestion, or history. At Ophir Farm, White Plains, New York, the country-seat of Hon. Whitelaw Reid, may be seen a sun-dial full of exquisite significance. It is shown on page 375. The signs of the Zodiac in finely designed bronze are set on the symmetrical marble pedestal, and seem wonderfully harmonious and appropriate. This sun-dial is a literal exemplification of the words of Emerson:-- "A calendar Exact to days, exact to hours, Counted on the spacious dial Yon broidered Zodiac girds." The dial-face is upheld by a carefully modelled tortoise in bronze, which is an equally suggestive emblem, connected with the tradition, folk-lore, and religious beliefs of both primitive and cultured peoples; it is specially full of meaning in this place. The whole sun-dial shows much thought and æsthetic perception in the designer and owner, and cannot fail to prove gratifying to all observers having either sensibility or judgment. Occasionally a very unusual and beautiful sun-dial standard may be seen, like the one in the Rose garden at Yaddo, Saratoga, New York, a copy of rarely beautiful Pompeian carvings. A representation of this is shown on page 86. Copies of simpler antique carvings make excellent sun-dial pedestals; a safe rule to follow is to have a reproduction made of some well-proportioned English or Scotch pedestal. The latter are well suited to small gardens. I have drawings of several Scotch sun-dials and pedestals which would be charming in American gardens. In the gardens at Hillside, by the side of the Shakespeare Border is a sun-dial (page 378) which is an exact reproduction of the one in the garden at Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott. This pedestal is suited to its surroundings, is well proportioned; and has historic interest. It forms an excellent example of Charles Lamb's "garden-altar." [Illustration: Sun-dial at Hillside, Menand's, near Albany, New York.] On a lawn or in any suitable spot the dial-face can be mounted on a boulder; one is here shown. I prefer a pedestal. For gardens of limited size, much simplicity of design is more pleasing and more fitting than any elaborate carving. In an Italian garden, or in any formal garden whose work in stone or marble is costly and artistic, the sun-dial pedestal should be the climax in richness of carving of all the garden furnishing. I like the pedestal set on a little platform, so two or three steps may be taken up to it from the garden level; but after all, no rules can be given for the dial's setting. It may be planted with vines, or stand unornamented; it may be set low, and be looked down upon, or it may be raised high up on a side wall; but wherever it is, it must not be for a single minute in shadow; no trees or overhanging shrubs should be near it; it is a child of the sun, and lives only in the sun's full rays. [Illustration: Old Brass and Pewter Dial-faces.] In the lovely old garden at the home of Frederick J. Kingsbury, Esq., at Waterbury, Conn., is a sun-dial bearing the motto, "_Horas non numero nisi serenas_," and the dates 1739-1751,--the dates of the building of the old and new houses on land that has been in the immediate family since 1739. Around this dial is a crescent-shaped bed of Zinnias, and very satisfactory do they prove. This garden has fine Box edgings; one is shown on page 173, a Box walk, set in 1851 with ancient Box brought from the garden of Mr. Kingsbury's great-great-grandfather. The gnomon of a sun-dial is usually a simple plate of metal in the general shape of a right-angled triangle, cut often in some pierced design, and occasionally inscribed with a motto, name, or date. Sometimes the dial-maker placed on the gnomon various Masonic symbols--the compass, square, and triangle, or the coat of arms of the dial owner. One old English dial fitting we have never copied in America. It was the taste of the days of the Stuart kings, days of constant jesting and amusement and practical jokes. Concealed water jets were placed which wet the clothing of the unwary one who lingered to consult the dial-face. The significance of the sun-dial, as well as its classicism, was sure to be felt by artists. In the paintings of Holbein, of Albert Dürer, dials may be seen, not idly painted, but with symbolic meaning. The mystic import of a sun-dial is shown in full effect in that perfect picture, _Beata Beatrix_, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I have chosen to show here (facing page 380) the _Beata Beatrix_ owned by Charles L. Hutchinson, Esq., of Chicago, as being less photographed and known than the one of the British Gallery, from which it varies slightly and also because it has the beautiful predella. In this picture, in the words of its poet-painter:-- "Love's Hour stands. Its eyes invisible Watch till the dial's thin brown shade Be born--yea, till the journeying line be laid Upon the point." [Illustration: Beata Beatrix.] Andrew Marvell wrote two centuries ago of the floral sun-dials which were the height of the gardening mode of his day:-- "How well the skilful gardener drew Of flowers and herbs this dial new. When from above the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run; And as it works the industrious bee Computes its time as well as we! How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!" These were sometimes set of diverse flowers, sometimes of Mallows. Two of growing Box are described and displayed in the chapter on Box edgings. [Illustration: The Faithful Gardener.] Linnæus made a list of forty-six flowers which constituted what he termed the Horologe or Watch of Flora, and he gave what he called their exact hours of rising and setting. He divided them into three classes: Meteoric, Tropical, and Equinoctial flowers. Among those which he named are:-- =========================================================== | OPENING HOUR. | CLOSING HOUR. ----------------------------------------------------------- Dandelion | 5-6 A.M. | 8-9 P.M. Mouse-ear Hawkweed | 8 A.M. | 2 P.M. Sow Thistle | 5 A.M. | 11-12 P.M. Yellow Goat-beard | 3-5 A.M. | 9-10 (?) White Water Lily | 7 A.M. | 7 P.M. Day Lily | 5 A.M. | 7-8 P.M. Convolvulus | 5-6 A.M. | Mallow | 9-10 A.M. | Pimpernel | 7-8 A.M. | Portulaca | 9-10 A.M. | Pink (_Dianthus prolifer_) | 8 A.M. | 1 P.M. Succory | 4-5 A.M. | Calendula | 7 A.M. | 3-4 P.M. =========================================================== Of course these hours would vary in this country. And I must say very frankly that I think we should always be behind time if we trusted to Flora's Horologe. This floral clock of Linnæus was calculated for Upsala, Sweden; De Candolle gave another for Paris, and one has been arranged for our Eastern states. CHAPTER XVIII GARDEN FURNISHINGS "Furnished with whatever may make the place agreeable, melancholy, and country-like." --_Forest Trees_, JOHN EVELYN, 1670. Quaint old books of garden designers show us that much more was contained in a garden two centuries ago, than now; it had many more adjuncts, more furnishings; a very full list of them has been given by Batty Langley in his _New Principles of Gardening_, etc., 1728. Some seem amusing--as haystacks and woodpiles, which he terms "rural enrichments." Of water adornments there were to be purling streams, basins, canals, fountains, cascades, cold baths. There were to be aviaries, hare warrens, pheasant grounds, partridge grounds, dove-cotes, beehives, deer paddocks, sheep walks, cow pastures, and "manazeries" (menageries?); physic gardens, orchards, bowling-greens, hop gardens, orangeries, melon grounds, vineyards, parterres, fruit yards, nurseries, sun-dials, obelisks, statues, cabinets, etc., decorated the garden walks. There were to be land gradings of mounts, winding valleys, dales, terraces, slopes, borders, open plains, labyrinths, wildernesses, "serpentine meanders," "rude-coppices," precipices, amphitheatres. His "serpentine meanders" had large opening spaces at proper distances, in one of which might be placed a small fruit garden, a "cone of evergreens," or a "Paradice-Stocks,"--about which latter mysterious garden adornment I think we must be content to remain in ignorance, since he certainly has given us ample variety to choose from without it. Other "landscapists" placed in their gardens old ruins, misshapen rocks, and even dead trees, in order to look "natural." In 1608 Henry Ballard brought out _The Gardener's Labyrinth_--a pretty good book, shut away from the most of us by being printed in black letter. He says:-- "The framing of sundry herbs delectable, with waies and allies artfully devised is an upright herbar." Herbars, or arbors, were of two kinds: an upright arbor, which was merely a covered lean-to attached to a fence or wall; and a winding or "arch-arbor" standing alone. He names "archherbs," which are simply climbing vines to set "winding in arch-manner on withie poles." "Walker and sitters there-under" are thereby comfortably protected from the heat of the sun. These upright arbors were in high favor; Ballard says they offered "fragrant savours, delectable sights, and sharpening of the memory." [Illustration: A Garden Lyre at Waterford, Virginia.] Tree arbors were in use in Elizabethan times, platforms built in the branches of large trees. Parkinson called one that would hold fifty men, "the goodliest spectacle that ever his eyes beheld." A distinction was made between arbors and bowers. The arbor might be round or square, and was domed over the top; while the long arched way was a bower. In our Southern states that special use of the word bower is still universal, especially in the term Rose bowers. A quaint and universal furnishing of old Southern gardens were the trellises known as garden lyres. Two are shown in this chapter, from Waterford, Virginia; one bearing little foliage and another embowered in vines, in order to show what a really good vine support they were. Garden lyres and Rose bowers are rotting on the ground in old Virginia gardens, and I fear they will never be replaced. The word pergola was seldom heard here a century ago, save as used by the few who had travelled in Italy; but pergolas were to be found in many an old American garden. An ancient oval pergola still stands at Arlington, that beautiful spot which was once the home of the Virginia Lees, and is now the home of the honored dead of our Civil War. This old pergola has remained unharmed through fierce conflict, and is wreathed each spring with the verdure of vines of many kinds. It is twenty feet wide between the pillars, and forms an oval one hundred feet long and seventy wide, and when in full greenery is a lovely thing. It was called--indeed it is still termed in the South--a "green gallery," a word and thing of mediæval days. [Illustration: A Virginia Lyre with Vines.] There are many pretty trellises and vine supports and arbors which can be made of light poles and rails, but I do not like to hear the pretentious name, pergola, applied to them. A pergola must not be a mean, light-built affair. It should be of good proportions and substantial materials. It need not be made with brick or marble pillars; natural tree trunks of good size serve as well. It should look as if it had been built with care and stability, and that the vines had been planted and trained by skilled gardeners. A pergola may have a dilapidated Present and be endurable; but it should show evidences of a substantial Past. Little sisters of the pergola are the _charmilles_, or bosquets, arches of growing trees, whose interlaced boughs have no supports of wood as have the pergolas. When these arches are carefully trained and pruned, and the ground underneath is laid with turf or gravel, they form a delightful shady walk. Charming covered ways can be easily made by polling and training Plum or Willow trees. Arches are far too rare in American gardens. The few we have are generally old ones. In Mrs. Pierson's garden in Salem the splendid arch of Buckthorn is a hundred and twenty five years old. Similar ones are at Indian Hill. Cedar was an old choice for hedges and arches. It easily winter-kills at the base, and that is ample reason for its rejection and disuse. The many garden seats of the old English garden were perhaps its chief feature in distinction from American garden furnishings to-day. In a letter written from Kenilworth in 1575 the writer told of garden seats where he sat in the heat of summer, "feeling the pleasant whisking wynde." I have walked through many a large modern garden in the summer heat, and longed in vain for a shaded seat from which to regard for a few moments the garden treasures and feel the whisking wind, and would gladly have made use of the temporary presence of a wheelbarrow. [Illustration: Old Iron Gate at Westover-on-James.] Seats of marble and stone are in many of our modern formal gardens; a pretty one is in the garden at Avonwood Court. Grottoes, arbors, and summer-houses were all of importance in those days, when in our latitude and climate men had not thought to build piazzas surrounding the house and shadowing all the ground floor rooms. We are beginning to think anew of the value of sunlight in the parlors and dining rooms of our summer homes, which for the past thirty or forty years have been so darkened by our wide piazzas. Now we have fewer piazzas and more peristyles, and soon we shall have summer-houses and garden houses also. There are preserved in the South, in spite of war and earthquake, a number of fine examples of old wrought-iron garden gates. King William of England introduced these artistic gates into England, and they were the height of garden fashion. Among them were the beautiful gates still at Hampton Court, and those of Bulwich, Northamptonshire. They were called _clair-voyees_ on account of the uninterrupted view they permitted to those without and within the walls. These were often painted blue; but in America they were more sober of tint, though portions were gilded. One of the old gates at Westover-on-James is here shown, and on page 390 the rich wrought-iron work in the courtyard at the home of Colonel Colt in Bristol, Rhode Island. This is as fine as the house, and that is a splendid example of the best work of the first years of the nineteenth century. Fountains were seen usually in handsome gardens in the South; simple water jets falling in a handsome basin of marble or stone. Statuary of marble or lead was never common in old American gardens, though pretentious gardens had examples. To-day, in our carefully thought-out gardens, the garden statuary is a thing of beauty and often of meaning, as the figure shown on page 84. Usually our statues are of marble, sometimes a Japanese bronze is seen. [Illustration: Iron-work in Court of Colt Mansion, Bristol, Rhode Island.] In the old black letter _Gardener's Labyrinth_, a very full description is given of old modes of watering a garden. There was a primitive and very limited system of irrigation, the water being raised by "well-swipes"; there were very handy puncheons, or tubs on wheels, which could be trundled down the garden walk. There was also a formidable "Great Squirt of Tin," which was said to take "mighty strength" to handle, and which looked like a small cannon; with it was an ingenious bent tube of tin by which the water could be thrown in "great droppes" like a fountain. The author says of ordinary means of garden watering:-- "The common Watring Pot with us hath a narrow Neck, a Big Belly, Somewhat large Bottome, and full of little holes with a proper hole forced in the head to take in the water; which filled full and the Thumbe laid on the hole to keep in the aire may in such wise be carried in handsome Manner." Garden tools have changed but little since Tudor days; spade and rake were like ours to-day, so were dibble and mattock. Even grafting and pruning tools, shown in books of husbandry, were surprisingly like our own. Scythes were much heavier and clumsier. An old fellow is here shown sharpening in the ancient manner a scythe about three hundred years old. The art of grafting, known since early days, formed an important part of the gardener's craft. Large share of ancient garden treatises is devoted to minute instructions therein. To this day in New England towns a good grafter is a local autocrat. [Illustration: Summer-house at Ravensworth.] Beehives were once found in every garden; bee-skepes they were called when made of straw. Picturesque and homely were the old straw beehives, and still are they used in England; the old one shown in the chapter on sun-dials can scarcely be mated in America. They served as a conventional emblem of industry. They were made of welts or ropes of twisted straw, as were the heavy winnowing skepes once used for winnowing grain. In Maine, in a few out-of-the-way communities, ancient men still winnow grain with these skepes. I saw a man last autumn, a giant in stature, standing in a dull light on the crown of a hill winnowing wheat in one of these great skepes with an indescribably free and noble gesture. He was a classic, a relic of Homer's age, no longer a farmer, but a husbandman. Bees and honey were of much value in ancient days. Honey was the chief ingredient in many wholesome and pleasing drinks--mead, metheglin, bragget (or braket), morat, erboule--all very delightful in their ingredients, redolent of meadows and hedge-rows; thus Cowslip mead was made of Cowslip "pips," honey, Lemon juice, and "a handful of Sweetbrier." "Athol porridge," demure of name, was as potent as pleasing--potent as good honey, good cream, and good whiskey could make it. [Illustration: Sharpening the Old Dutch Scythe.] Rows of typical Southern beehives are shown in the two succeeding illustrations. From their home by the side of a White Rose and under an old Sweet Apple tree these Waterford bees did not wish to swarm out in a hurry to find a new home. These beehives are not very ancient in shape, but when I see a row of them set thus under the trees, or in a hive-shelter, they seem to tell of olden days. The very bees flying in and out seem steady-going, respectable old fellows. Such hives have a cosy look, with rows of Hollyhocks behind them, and hundreds of spires of Larkspur for these old bees to bury their heads in. [Illustration: Beehives at Waterford, Virginia.] The sadly picturesque old superstition of "telling the bees" of a death in a family and hanging a bit of black cloth on the hives as a mourning-weed still is observed in some country communities. Whittier's poem on the subject is wonderfully "countrified" in atmosphere, using the word chore-girl, so seldom heard even in familiar speech to-day and never found in verse elsewhere than in this rustic poem. I saw one summer in Narragansett, on Stony Lane, not far from the old Six-Principle Church, a row of beehives hung with strips of black cloth; the house mistress was dead--the friend of bird and beast and bee--who had reared the guardian of the garden told of on page 396 _et seq._ [Illustration: Beehives under the Trees.] A pretty and appropriate garden furnishing was the dove-cote. The possession of a dove-cote in England, and the rearing of pigeons, was free only to lords of the manor and noblemen. When the colonists came to America, many of them had never been permitted to keep pigeons. In Scotland persistent attempts at pigeon-raising by folks of humble station might be punished with death. The settlers must have revelled in the freedom of the new land, as well as in the plenty of pigeons, both wild and domestic. In old England the dove-cote was often built close to the kitchen door, that squab and pigeon might be near the hand of the cook. Dove-cotes in America were often simple boxes or houses raised on stout posts. Occasionally might be seen a fine brick dove-cote like the one still standing at Shirley-on-the-James, in Virginia, which is shaped without and within like several famous old dove-cotes in England, among them the one at Athelhampton Hall, Dorchester, England. The English dove-cote has within a revolving ladder hung from a central post while the Virginian squab catcher uses an ordinary ladder. The shelves for the birds to rest upon and the square recesses for the nests made by the ingenious placing of the bricks are alike in both cotes. [Illustration: Spring House at Johnson Homestead, Germantown, Pennsylvania.] A beautiful and fitting tenant of old formal gardens was the peacock, "with his aungelis federys bryghte." On large English estates peacocks were universally kept. A fine peacock, with full-spread tail, makes many a gay flower bed pale before his panoply of iridescence and color. The peahen is a demurely pretty creature. Peacocks are not altogether grateful to garden owners; on the old Narragansett farm whose garden is shown on page 35, they were always kept, and it was one of the prides and pleasures of formal hospitality to offer a roasted peacock to visitors. But, save when roasted, the vain creatures would not keep silence, and when they squawked the glory of their plumage was forgotten. They had an odious habit, too, of wandering off to distant groves on the farm, usually selecting the nights of bitterest cold, and roosting in some very high tree, in some very inaccessible spot. They could not be left in this ill-considered sleeping-place, else they would all freeze to death; and words fail to tell the labor in lowering twilight and temperature of discovering their retreat, the dislodging, capturing, and imprisoning them. [Illustration: Dove-cote at Shirley-on-James.] In Narragansett there is a charming old farm garden, which I often visit to note and admire its old-time blossoms. This garden has a guardian, who haunts the garden walks as did the terrace peacock of old England; no watch-dog ever was so faithful, and none half so acute. When I visit the garden I always ask "Where is Job?" I am answered that he is in the field with the cattle. Sometimes this is true, but at other times Job has left the field and is attending to his assumed duties. As he is not encouraged, he has learned great slyness and dissimulation. Immovable, and in silence, Job is concealed behind a Syringa hedge or in a Lilac ambush, and as you stroll peacefully and unwittingly down the paths, sniffing the honeyed sweetness of the dense edging of Sweet Alyssum, all is as balmy as the blossoms. But stoop for an instant, to gather some leaves of Sweet Basil or Sweet Brier, or to collect a dozen seed-pods of that specially delicate Sweet Pea, and lo! the enemy is upon you, like a fierce whirlwind. He looks mild and demure enough in his kitchen yard retreat, whereto, upon piercing outcry for help, the farmer and his two sons have haled him, and where the camera has caught him. But far from meek is his aspect when you are dodging him around the great Tree Peony, or flying frantically before him down the side path to the garden gate. This fierce wild beast was once that mildest of creatures--a pet lamb; the constant companion of the farm-wife, as she weeded and watered her loved garden. Her husband says, "He seems to think folks are stealing her flowers, if they stop to look." The wife and mother of these three great men has gone from her garden forever; but a tenderness for all that she loved makes them not only care for her flowers, but keeps this rampant guardian of the garden at the kitchen door, just as she kept him when he was a little lamb. I knew this New England farmer's wife, a noble woman, of infinite tenderness, strength, and endurance; a lover of trees and flowers and all living things, and I marvel not that they keep her memory green. [Illustration: The Peacock in His Pride.] CHAPTER XIX GARDEN BOUNDARIES "A garden fair ... with Wandis long and small Railèd about, and so with treès set Was all the place; and Hawthorne hedges knet, That lyf was none walking there forbye That might within scarce any wight espy." --_Kings Qubair_, KING JAMES I OF SCOTLAND. One who reads what I have written in these pages of a garden enclosed, will scarcely doubt that to me every garden must have boundaries, definite and high. Three old farm boundaries were of necessity garden boundaries in early days--our stone walls, rail fences, and hedge-rows. The first two seem typically American; the third is an English hedge fashion. Throughout New England the great boulders were blasted to clear the rocky fields; and these, with the smaller loose stones, were gathered into vast stone walls. We still see these walls around fields and as the boundaries of kitchen gardens and farm flower gardens, and delightful walls they are, resourceful of beauty to the inventive gardener. I know one lovely garden in old Narragansett, on a farm which is now the country-seat of folk of great wealth, where the old stone walls are the pride of the place; and the carefully kept garden seems set in a beautiful frame of soft gray stones and flowering vines. These walls would be more beautiful still if our climate would let us have the wall gardens of old England, but everything here becomes too dry in summer for wall gardens to flourish. [Illustration: The Guardian of the Garden.] Rhode Island farmers for two centuries have cleared and sheltered the scanty soil of their state by blasting the ledges, and gathering the great stones of ledge and field into splendid stone walls. Their beauty is a gift to the farmer's descendants in reward for his hours of bitter and wearying toil. One of these fine stone walls, six feet in height, has stood secure and unbroken through a century of upheavals of winter frosts--which it was too broad and firmly built to heed. It stretches from the Post Road in old Narragansett, through field and meadow, and by the side of the oak grove, to the very edge of the bay. To the waterside one afternoon in June there strolled, a few years ago, a beautiful young girl and a somewhat conscious but determined young man. They seated themselves on the stone wall under the flickering shadow of a great Locust tree, then in full bloom. The air was sweet with the honeyed fragrance of the lovely pendent clusters of bloom, and bird and bee and butterfly hovered around,--it was paradise. The beauty and fitness of the scene so stimulated the young man's fancy to thoughts and words of love that he soon burst forth to his companion in an impassioned avowal of his desire to make her his wife. He had often pictured to himself that some time he would say to her these words, and he had seen also in his hopes the looks of tender affection with which she would reply. What was his amazement to behold that, instead of blushes and tender glances, his words of love were met by an apparently frenzied stare of horror and disgust, that seemed to pierce through him, as his beloved one sprung at one bound from her seat by his side on the high stone wall, and ran away at full speed, screaming out, "Oh, kill him! kill him!" Now that was certainly more than disconcerting to the warmest of lovers, and with a half-formed dread that the suddenness of his proposal of love had turned her brain, he ran after her, albeit somewhat coolly, and soon learned the reason for her extraordinary behavior. Emulous of the tempting serpent of old, a great black snake, Mr. _Bascanion constrictor_, had said complaisantly to himself: "Now here are a fair young Adam and Eve who have entered uninvited my Garden of Eden, and the man fancies it is not good for him to be alone, but I will have a word to say about that. I will come to her with honied words." So he thrust himself up between the stones of the wall, and advanced persuasively upon them, behind the man's back. But a Yankee Eve of the year 1890 A.D. is not that simple creature, the Eve of the year ---- B.C.; and even the Father of Evil would have to be great of guile to succeed in his wiles with her. A farm servant was promptly despatched to watch for the ill-mannered and intrusive snake who--as is the fashion of a snake--had grown to be as big as a boa-constrictor after he vanished; and at the end of the week once more the heel of man had bruised the serpent's head, and the third party in this love episode lay dead in his six feet of ugliness, a silent witness to the truth of the story. Throughout Narragansett, Locust trees have a fashion of fringing the stone walls with close young growth, and shading them with occasional taller trees. [Illustration: Terrace Wall at Van Cortlandt Manor.] These form an ideal garden boundary. The stone walls also gather a beautiful growth of Clematis, Brier, wild Peas, and Grapes; but they form a clinging-place for that devil's brood, Poison Ivy, which is so persistent in growth and so difficult to exterminate. The old worm fence was distinctly American; it had a zigzag series of chestnut rails, with stakes of twisted cedar saplings which were sometimes "chunked" by moss-covered boulders just peeping from the earth. This worm fence secured to the nature lover and to wild life a strip of land eight or ten feet wide, whereon plant, bird, beast, reptile, and insect flourished and reproduced. It has been, within a few years, a gardening fashion to preserve these old "Virginia" fences on country places of considerable elegance. Planted with Clematis, Honeysuckle, Trumpet vine, Wistaria, and the free-growing new Japanese Roses, they are wonderfully effective. [Illustration: Rail Fence Corner.] On Long Island, east of Riverhead, where there are few stones to form stone walls, are curious and picturesque hedge-rows, which are a most interesting and characteristic feature of the landscape, and they are beautiful also, as I have seen them once or twice, at the end of an old garden. These hedge-rows were thus formed: when a field was cleared, a row of young saplings of varied growth, chiefly Oak, Elder, and Ash, was left to form the hedge. These young trees were cut and bent over parallel to the ground, and sometimes interlaced together with dry branches and vines. Each year these trees were lopped, and new sprouts and branches permitted to grow only in the line of the hedge. Soon a tangle of briers and wild vines overgrew and netted them all into a close, impenetrable, luxuriant mass. They were, to use Wordsworth's phrase, "scarcely hedge-rows, but lines of sportive woods run wild." In this close green wall birds build their nests, and in their shelter burrow wild hares, and there open Violets and other firstlings of the spring. The twisted tree trunks in these old hedges are sometimes three or four feet in diameter one way, and but a foot or more the other; they were a shiftless field-border, as they took up so much land, but they were sheep-proof. The custom of making a dividing line by a row of bent and polled trees still remains, even where the close, tangled hedge-row has disappeared with the flocks of sheep. [Illustration: Topiary Work at Levens Hall.] These hedge-rows were an English fashion seen in Hertfordshire and Suffolk. On commons and reclaimed land they took the place of the quickset hedges seen around richer farm lands. The bending and interlacing was called plashing; the polling, shrouding. English farmers and gardeners paid infinite attention to their hedges, both as a protection to their fields and as a means of firewood. There is something very pleasant in the thought that these English gentlemen who settled eastern Long Island, the Gardiners, Sylvesters, Coxes, and others, retained on their farm lands in the new world the customs of their English homes, pleasanter still to know that their descendants for centuries kept up these homely farm fashions. The old hedge-rows on Long Island are an historical record, a landmark--long may they linger. On some of the finest estates on the island they have been carefully preserved, to form the lower boundary of a garden, where, laid out with a shaded, grassy walk dividing it from the flower beds, they form the loveliest of garden limits. Planted skilfully with great Art to look like great Nature, with edging of Elder and Wild Rose, with native vines and an occasional congenial garden ally, they are truly unique. [Illustration: Oval Pergola at Arlington.] Yew was used for the most famous English hedges; and as neither Yew nor Holly thrive here--though both will grow--I fancy that is why we have ever had in comparison so few hedges, and have really no very ancient ones, though in old letters and account books we read of the planting of hedges on fine estates. George Washington tried it, so did Adams, and Jefferson, and Quincy. Osage Orange, Barberry, and Privet were in nurserymen's lists, but it has not been till within twenty or thirty years that Privet has become so popular. In Southern gardens, Cypress made close, good garden hedges; and Cedar hedges fifty or sixty years old are seen. Lilac hedges were unsatisfactory, save in isolated cases, as the one at Indian Hill. The Japan Quinces, and other of the Japanese shrubs, were tried in hedges in the mid-century, with doubtful success as hedges, though they form lovely rows of flowering shrubs. Snowballs and Snowberries, Flowering Currant, Altheas, and Locust, all have been used for hedge-planting, so we certainly have tried faithfully enough to have hedges in America. Locust hedges are most graceful, they cannot be clipped closely. I saw one lovely creation of Locust, set with an occasional Rose Acacia--and the Locust thus supported the brittle Acacia. If it were successful, it would be, when in bloom, a dream of beauty. Hemlock hedges are ever fine, as are hemlock trees everywhere, but will not bear too close clipping. Other evergreens, among them the varied Spruces, have been set in hedges, but have not proved satisfactory enough to be much used. [Illustration: French Homestead with old Stone Terrace, Kingston, Rhode Island.] Buckthorn was a century ago much used for hedges and arches. When Josiah Quincy, President of Harvard College, was in Congress in 1809, he obtained from an English gardener, in Georgetown, Buckthorn plants for hedges in his Massachusetts home, which hedges were an object of great beauty for many years. The traveller Kalm found Privet hedges in Pennsylvania in 1760. In Scotland Privet is called Primprint. Primet and Primprivet were other old names. Box was called Primpe. These were all derivative of prim, meaning precise. Our Privet hedges, new as they are, are of great beauty and satisfaction, and soon will rival the English Yew hedges. I have never yet seen the garden in which there was not some boundary or line which could be filled to advantage by a hedge. In garden great or garden small, the hedge should ever have a place. Often a featureless garden, blooming well, yet somehow unattractive, has been completely transformed by the planting of hedges. They seem, too, to give such an orderly aspect to the garden. In level countries hedges are specially valuable. I cannot understand why some denounce clipped hedges and trees as against nature. A clipped hedge is just as natural as the cut grass of a lawn, and is closely akin to it. Others think hedges "too set"; to me their finality is their charm. Hedges need to be well kept to be pleasing. Chaucer in his day in praising a "hegge" said that:-- "Every branche and leaf must grow by mesure Pleine as a bord, of an height by and by." In England, hedge-clipping has ever been a gardening art. [Illustration: Italian Garden at Wellesley, Massachusetts.] In the old English garden the topiarist was an important functionary. Besides his clipping shears he had to have what old-time cooks called _judgment_ or _faculty_. In English gardens many specimens of topiary work still exist, maintained usually as relics of the past rather than as a modern notion of the beautiful. The old gardens at Levens Hall, page 404, contain some of the most remarkable examples. In a few old gardens in America, especially in Southern towns, traces of the topiary work of early years can be seen; these overgrown, uncertain shapes have a curious influence, and the sentiment awakened is beautifully described by Gabriele d' Annunzio:-- "We walked among evergreens, among ancient Box trees, Laurels, Myrtles, whose wild old age had forgotten its early discipline. In a few places here and there was some trace of the symmetrical shapes carved once upon a time by the gardener's shears, and with a melancholy not unlike his who searches on old tombstones for the effigies of the forgotten dead, I noted carefully among the silent plants those traces of humanity not altogether obliterated." The height of topiary art in America is reached in the lovely garden, often called the Italian garden, of Hollis H. Hunnewell, Esq., at Wellesley, Massachusetts. Vernon Lee tells in her charming essay on "Italian Gardens" of the beauty of gardens without flowers, and this garden of Mr. Hunnewell is an admirable example. Though the effect of the black and white of the pictured representations shown on these pages is perhaps somewhat sombre, there is nothing sad or sombre in the garden itself. The clear gleam of marble pavilions and balustrades, the formal rows of flower jars with their hundreds of Century plants, and the lovely light on the lovely lake, serve as a delightful contrast to the clear, clean lusty green of the clipped trees. This garden is a beautiful example of the art of the topiarist, not in its grotesque forms, but in the shapes liked by Lord Bacon, pyramids, columns, and "hedges in welts," carefully studied to be both stately and graceful. I first saw this garden thirty years ago; it was interesting then in its well thought-out plan, and in the perfection of every inch of its slow growth; but how much more beautiful now, when the garden's promise is fulfilled. [Illustration: Steps in Italian Garden at Wellesley, Massachusetts.] The editor of _Country Life_ says that the most notable attempt at modern topiary work in England is at Ascott, the seat of Mr. Leopold de Rothschild, but the examples there have not attained a growth at all approaching those at Wellesley. Mr. Hunnewell writes thus of his garden:-- "It was after a visit to Elvaston nearly fifty years ago that I conceived the idea of making a collection of trees for topiary work in imitation of what I had witnessed at that celebrated estate. As suitable trees for that purpose could not be obtained at the nurseries in this country, and as the English Yew is not reliable in our New England climate, I was obliged to make the best selection possible from such trees as had proved hardy here--the Pines, Spruces, Hemlocks, Junipers, Arbor-vitæ, Cedars, and Japanese Retinosporas. The trees were all very small, and for the first twenty years their growth was shortened twice annually, causing them to take a close and compact habit, comparing favorably in that respect with the Yew. Many of them are now more than forty feet in height and sixty feet in circumference, the Hemlocks especially proving highly successful." This beautiful example of art in nature is ever open to visitors, and the number of such visitors is very large. It is, however, but one of the many beauties of the great estate, with its fine garden of Roses, its pavilion of splendid Rhododendrons and Azaleas, its uncommon and very successful rock garden, and its magnificent plantation of rare trees. There are also many rows of fine hedges and arches in various portions of the grounds, hedges of clipped Cedar and Hemlock, many of them twenty feet high, which compare well in condition, symmetry, and extent with the finest English hedges on the finest English estates. [Illustration: Topiary Work in California.] Through the great number of formal gardens laid out within a few years in America, the topiary art has had a certain revival. In California, with the lavish foliage, it may be seen in considerable perfection, though of scant beauty, as here shown. [Illustration: Serpentine Brick Wall at University of Virginia, Charlottesville.] Happy is the garden surrounded by a brick wall or with terrace wall of brick. How well every color looks by the side of old brick; even scarlet, bright pink, and rose-pink flowers, which seem impossible, do very well when held to the wall by clear green leaves. Flowering vines are perfect when trained on old soft-red brick enclosing walls; white-flowered vines are specially lovely thereon, Clematis, white Roses, and the rarely beautiful white Wistaria. How lovely is my Virgin's-bower when growing on brick; how Hollyhocks stand up beside it. Brick posts, too, are good in a fence, and, better still, in a pergola. A portion of the fine terrace wall at Van Cortlandt Manor is shown facing page 286. This wall was put in about fifty years ago; ere that there had been a grass bank, which is ever a trial in a garden; for it is hard to mow the grass on such a bank, and it never looks neat; it should be planted with some vine. A very curious garden wall is the serpentine brick wall still standing at the University of Virginia, at Charlottesville. It is about seven feet high, and closes in the garden and green of the row of houses occupied by members of the faculty; originally it may have extended around the entire college grounds. I present a view from the street in order to show its contour distinctly; within the garden its outlines are obscured by vines and flowers. The first thought in the mind of the observer is that its reason for curving is that it could be built much more lightly, and hence more cheaply, than a straight wall; then it seems a possible idealization in brick of the old Virginia rail fence. But I do not look to domestic patterns and influences for its production; it is to me a good example of the old-time domination of French ideas which was so marked and so disquieting in America. In France, after the peace of 1762, the Marquis de Geradin was revolutionizing gardening. His own garden at Ermenonville and his description of it exercised important influence in England and America, as in France. Jefferson was the planner and architect of the University of Virginia; and it is stated that he built this serpentine wall. Whether he did or not, it is another example of French influences in architecture in the United States. This French school, above everything else, replaced straight lines with carefully curving and winding lines. CHAPTER XX A MOONLIGHT GARDEN "How sweetly smells the Honeysuckle In the hush'd night, as if the world were one Of utter peace and love and gentleness." --WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR Gardens fanciful of name, a Saint's Garden, a Friendship Garden, have been planted and cherished. I plant a garden like none other; not an everyday garden, nor indeed a garden of any day, but a garden for "brave moonshine," a garden of twilight opening and midnight bloom, a garden of nocturnal blossoms, a garden of white blossoms, and the sweetest garden in the world. It is a garden of my dreams, but I know where it lies, and it now is smiling back at this very harvest moon. The old house of Hon. Ben. Perley Poore--Indian Hill--at Newburyport, Massachusetts, has been for many years one of the loveliest of New England's homes. During his lifetime it had extraordinary charms, for on the noble hillside, where grew scattered in sunny fields and pastures every variety of native tree that would winter New England's snow and ice, there were vast herds of snow-white cows, and flocks of white sheep, and the splendid oxen were white. White pigeons circled in the air around ample dove-cotes, and the farmyard poultry were all white; an enthusiastic chronicler recounts also white peacocks on the wall, but these are also denied. On every side were old terraced walls covered with Roses and flowering vines, banked with shrubs, and standing in beds of old-time flowers running over with bloom; but behind the house, stretching up the lovely hillside, was The Garden, and when we entered it, lo! it was a White Garden with edgings of pure and seemly white Candytuft from the forcing beds, and flowers of Spring Snowflake and Star of Bethlehem and Jonquils; and there were white-flowered shrubs of spring, the earliest Spiræas and Deutzias; the doubled-flowered Cherries and Almonds and old favorites, such as Peter's Wreath, all white and wonderfully expressive of a simplicity, a purity, a closeness to nature. I saw this lovely farmstead and radiant White Garden first in glowing sunlight, but far rarer must have been its charm in moonlight; though the white beasts (as English hinds call cattle) were sleeping in careful shelter; and the white dog, assured of their safety, was silent; and the white fowl were in coop and cote; and "Only the white sheep were sometimes seen To cross the strips of moon-blanch'd green." But the White Garden, ah! then the garden truly lived; it was like lightest snow wreaths bathed in silvery moonshine, with every radiant flower adoring the moon with wide-open eyes, and pouring forth incense at her altar. And it was peopled with shadowy forms shaped of pearly mists and dews; and white night moths bore messages for them from flower to flower--this garden then was the garden of my dreams. Thoreau complained to himself that he had not put duskiness enough into his words in his description of his evening walks. He longed to have the peculiar and classic severity of his sentences, the color of his style, tell his readers that his scene was laid at night without saying so in exact words. I, too, have not written as I wished, by moonlight; I can tell of moonlight in the garden, but I desire more; I want you to see and feel this moonlight garden, as did Emily Dickinson her garden by moonlight:-- "And still within the summer's night A something so transporting bright I clap my hands to see." But perhaps I can no more gather it into words than I can bottle up the moonlight itself. This lovely garden, varied in shape, and extending in many and diverse directions and corners, bears as its crown a magnificent double flower border over seven hundred feet long; with a broad straight path trimly edged with Box adown through its centre, and with a flower border twelve feet wide on either side. This was laid out and planted in 1833 by the parents of Major Poore, after extended travel in England, and doubtless under the influences of the beautiful English flower gardens they had seen. Its length was originally broken halfway up the hill and crowned at the top of the hill by some formal parterres of careful design, but these now are removed. There are graceful arches across the path, one of Honeysuckle on the crown of the hill, from which you look out perhaps into Paradise--for Indian Hill in June is a very close neighbor to Paradise; it is difficult to define the boundaries between the two, and to me it would be hard to choose between them. Standing in this arch on this fair hill, you can look down the long flower borders of color and perfume to the old house, lying in the heart of the trees and vines and flowers. To your left is the hill-sweep, bearing the splendid grove, an arboretum of great native trees, planted by Major Poore, and for which he received the prize awarded by his native state to the finest plantation of trees within its bounds. Turn from the house and garden, and look through this frame of vines formed by the arch upon this scene,--the loveliest to me of any on earth,--a fair New England summer landscape. Fields of rich corn and grain, broken at times with the gray granite boulders which show what centuries of grand and sturdy toil were given to make these fertile fields; ample orchards full of promise of fruit; placid lakes and mill-dams and narrow silvery rivers, with low-lying red brick mills embowered in trees; dark forests of sombre Pine and Cedar and Oak; narrow lanes and broad highways shaded with the livelier green of Elm and Maple and Birch; gray farm-houses with vast barns; little towns of thrifty white houses clustered around slender church-spires which, set thickly over this sunny land, point everywhere to heaven, and tell, as if speaking, the story of New England's past, of her foundation on love of God, just as the fields and orchards and highways speak of thrift and honesty and hard labor; and the houses, such as this of Indian Hill, of kindly neighborliness and substantial comfort; and as this old garden speaks of a love of the beautiful, a refinement, an æsthetic and tender side of New England character which _we_ know, but into which--as Mr. Underwood says in _Quabbin_, that fine study of New England life--"strangers and Kiplings cannot enter." Seven hundred feet of double flower border, fourteen hundred feet of flower bed, twelve feet wide! "It do swallow no end of plants," says the gardener. [Illustration: Chestnut Path in Garden at Indian Hill.] In spite of the banishing dictum of many artists in regard to white flowers in a garden, the presence of ample variety of white flowers is to me the greatest factor in producing harmony and beauty both by night and day. White seems to be as important a foil in some cases as green. It may sometimes be given to the garden in other ways than through flower blossoms, by white marble statues, vases, pedestals, seats. We all like the approval of our own thoughts by men of genius; with my love of white flowers I had infinite gratification in these words of Walter Savage Landor's, written from Florence in regard to a friend's garden:-- "I like white flowers better than any others; they resemble fair women. Lily, Tuberose, Orange, and the truly English Syringa are my heart's delight. I do not mean to say that they supplant the Rose and Violet in my affections, for these are our first loves, before we grew _too fond of considering_; and too fond of displaying our acquaintance with others of sounding titles." In Japan, where flowers have rank, white flowers are the aristocrats. I deem them the aristocrats in the gardens of the Occident also. Having been informed of Tennyson's dislike of white flowers, I have amused myself by trying to discover in his poems evidence of such aversion. I think one possibly might note an indifference to white blossoms; but strong color sense, his love of ample and rich color, would naturally make him name white infrequently. A pretty line in _Walking to the Mail_ tells of a girl with "a skin as clean and white as Privet when it flowers"; and there were White Lilies and Roses and milk-white Acacias in Maud's garden. In _The Last Tournament_ the street-ways are depicted as hung with white samite, and "children sat in white," and the dames and damsels were all "white-robed in honor of the stainless child." A "swarthy one" cried out at last:-- "The snowdrop only, flowering thro' the year, Would make the world as blank as wintertide. Come!--let us gladden their sad eyes With all the kindlier colors of the field. So dame and damsel glitter'd at the feast Variously gay.... So dame and damsel cast the simple white, And glowing in all colors, the live grass, Rose-campion, King-cup, Bluebell, Poppy, glanced About the revels." [Illustration: Foxgloves in Lower Garden at Indian Hill.] In the garden borders is a commonplace little plant, gray of foliage, with small, drooping, closed flowers of an indifferently dull tint, you would almost wonder at its presence among its gay garden fellows. Let us glance at it in the twilight, for it seems like the twilight, a soft, shaded gray; but the flowers have already lifted their heads and opened their petals, and they now seem like the twilight clouds of palest pink and lilac. It is the Night-scented Stock, and lavishly through the still night it pours forth its ineffable fragrance. A single plant, thirty feet from an open window, will waft its perfume into the room. This white Stock was a favorite flower of Marie Antoinette, under its French name the Julienne. "Night Violets," is its appropriate German name. Hesperis! the name shows its habit. Dame's Rocket is our title for this cheerful old favorite of May, which shines in such snowy beauty at night, and throws forth such a compelling fragrance. It is rarely found in our gardens, but I have seen it growing wild by the roadside in secluded spots; not in ample sheets of growth like Bouncing Bet, which we at first glance thought it was; it is a shyer stray, blossoming earlier than comely Betsey. The old-fashioned single, or slightly double, country Pink, known as Snow Pink or Star Pink, was often used as an edging for small borders, and its bluish green, almost gray, foliage was quaint in effect and beautiful in the moonlight. When seen at night, the reason for the folk-name is evident. Last summer, on a heavily clouded night in June, in a cottage garden at West Hampton, borders of this Snow Pink shone out of the darkness with a phosphorescent light, like hoar-frost, on every grassy leaf; while the hundreds of pale pink blossoms seemed softly shining stars. It was a curious effect, almost wintry, even in midsummer. The scent was wafted down the garden path, and along the country road, like a concentrated essence, rather than a fleeting breath of flowers. One of these cottage borders is shown on page 292, and I have named it from these lines from _The Garden that I Love_:-- "A running ribbon of perfumed snow Which the sun is melting rapidly." At sundown the beautiful white Day Lily opens and gives forth all night an overwhelming sweetness; I have never seen night moths visiting it, though I know they must, since a few seed capsules always form. In the border stand-- "Clumps of sunny Phlox That shine at dusk, and grow more deeply sweet." These, with white Petunias, are almost unbearably cloying in their heavy odor. It is a curious fact that some of these night-scented flowers are positively offensive in the daytime; try your _Nicotiana affinis_ next midday--it outpours honeyed sweetness at night, but you will be glad it withholds its perfume by day. The plants of Nicotiana were first introduced to England for their beauty, sweet scent, and medicinal qualities, not to furnish smoke. Parkinson in 1629 writes of Tobacco, "With us it is cherished for medicinal qualities as for the beauty of its flowers," and Gerarde, in 1633, after telling of the beauty, etc., says that the dried leaves are "taken in a pipe, set on fire, the smoke suckt into the stomach, and thrust forth at the noshtrils." Snake-root, sometimes called Black Cohosh (_Cimicifuga racemosa_), is one of the most stately wild flowers, and a noble addition to the garden. A picture of a single plant gives little impression of its dignity of habit, its wonderfully decorative growth; but the succession of pure white spires, standing up several feet high at the edge of a swampy field, or in a garden, partake of that compelling charm which comes from tall trees of slender growth, from repetition and association, such as pine trees, rows of bayonets, the gathered masts of a harbor, from stalks of corn in a field, from rows of Foxglove--from all "serried ranks." I must not conceal the fact of its horrible odor, which might exile it from a small garden. [Illustration: Dame's Rocket.] Among my beloved white flowers, a favorite among those who are all favorites, is the white Columbine. Some are double, but the common single white Columbines picture far better the derivation of their name; they are like white doves, they seem almost an emblematic flower. William Morris says:-- "Be very shy of double flowers; choose the old Columbine where the clustering doves are unmistakable and distinct, not the double one, where they run into mere tatters. Don't be swindled out of that wonder of beauty, a single Snowdrop; there is no gain and plenty of loss in the double one." There are some extremists, such as Dr. Forbes Watson, who condemn all double flowers. One thing in the favor of double blooms is that their perfume is increased with their petals. Double Violets, Roses, and Pinks seem as natural now as single flowers of their kinds. I confess a distinct aversion to the thought of a double Lilac. I have never seen one, though the Ranoncule, said to be very fine, costs but forty cents a plant, and hence must be much grown. [Illustration: Snake-root.] There is a curious influence of flower-color which I can only explain by giving an example. We think of Iris, Gladiolus, Lupine, and even Foxglove and Poppy as flowers of a warm and vivid color; so where we see them a pure white, they have a distinct and compelling effect on us, pleasing, but a little eerie; not a surprise, for we have always known the white varieties, yet not exactly what we are wonted to. This has nothing of the grotesque, as is produced by the albino element in the animal world; it is simply a trifle mysterious. White Pansies and White Violets possess this quality to a marked degree. I always look and look again at growing White Violets. A friend says: "Do you think they will speak to you?" for I turn to them with such an expectancy of something. The "everlasting" white Pea is a most satisfactory plant by day or night. Hedges covered with it are a pure delight. Do not fear to plant it with liberal hand. Be very liberal, too, in your garden of white Foxgloves. Even if the garden be small, there is room for many graceful spires of the lovely bells to shine out everywhere, piercing up through green foliage and colored blooms of other plants. They are not only beautiful, but they are flowers of sentiment and association, endeared to childhood, visited of bees, among the best beloved of old-time favorites. They consort well with nearly every other flower, and certainly with every other color, and they seem to clarify many a crudely or dingily tinted flower; they are as admirable foils as they are principals in the garden scheme. In England, where they readily grow wild, they are often planted at the edge of a wood, or to form vistas in a copse. I doubt whether they would thrive here thus planted, but they are admirable when set in occasional groups to show in pure whiteness against a hedge. I say in occasional groups, for the Foxglove should never be planted in exact rows. The White Iris, the Iris of the Florentine Orris-root, is one of the noblest plants of the whole world; its pure petals are truly hyaline like snow-ice, like translucent white glass; and the indescribably beautiful drooping lines of the flowers are such a contrast with the defiant erectness of the fresh green leaves. Small wonder that it was a sacred flower of the Greeks. It was called by the French _la flambe blanche_, a beautiful poetic title--the White Torch of the Garden. A flower of mystery, of wonderment to children, was the Evening Primrose; I knew the garden variety only with intimacy. Possibly the wild flower had similar charms and was equally weird in the gloaming, but it grew by country roadsides, and I was never outside our garden limits after nightfall, so I know not its evening habits. We had in our garden a variety known as the California Evening Primrose--a giant flower as tall as our heads. My mother saw its pale yellow stars shining in the early evening in a cottage garden on Cape Ann, and was there given, out of the darkness, by a fellow flower lover, the seeds which have afforded to us every year since so much sentiment and pleasure. The most exquisite description of the Evening Primrose is given by Margaret Deland in her _Old Garden_:-- "There the primrose stands, that as the night Begins to gather, and the dews to fall, Flings wide to circling moths her twisted buds, That shine like yellow moons with pale cold glow, And all the air her heavy fragrance floods, And gives largess to any winds that blow. Here in warm darkness of a night in June, ... children came To watch the primrose blow. Silently they stood Hand clasped in hand, in breathless hush around, And saw her slyly doff her soft green hood And blossom--with a silken burst of sound." [Illustration: The Title-page of Parkinson's _Paradisi in Solis_, etc.] The wild Primrose opens slowly, hesitatingly, it trembles open, but the garden Primrose flares open. The Evening Primrose is usually classed with sweet-scented flowers, but that exact observer, E. V. B., tells of its "repulsive smell. At night if the stem be shaken, or if the flower-cup trembles at the touch of a moth as it alights, out pours the dreadful odor." I do not know that any other garden flower opens with a distinct sound. Owen Meredith's poem, _The Aloe_, tells that the Aloe opened with such a loud explosive report that the rooks shrieked and folks ran out of the house to learn whence came the sound. The tall columns of the Yucca or Adam's Needle stood like shafts of marble against the hedge trees of the Indian Hill garden. Their beautiful blooms are a miniature of those of the great Century Plant. In the daytime the Yucca's blossoms hang in scentless, greenish white bells, but at night these bells lift up their heads and expand with great stars of light and odor--a glorious plant. Around their spire of luminous bells circle pale night moths, lured by the rich fragrance. Even by moonlight we can see the little white detached fibres at the edge of the leaves, which we are told the Mexican women used as thread to sew with. And we children used to pull off the strong fibres and put them in a needle and sew with them too. When I see those Yuccas in bloom I fully believe that they are the grandest flowers of our gardens; but happily, I have a short garden memory, so I mourn not the Yucca when I see the _Anemone japonica_ or any other noble white garden child. [Illustration: Yucca, like White Marble against the Evergreens.] Here at the end of the garden walk is an arbor dark with the shadow of great leaves, such as Gerarde calls "leaves round and big like to a buckler." But out of that shadowed background of leaf on leaf shine hundreds of pure, pale stars of sweetness and light,--a true flower of the night in fragrance, beauty, and name,--the Moon-vine. It is a flower of sentiment, full of suggestion. Did you ever see a ghost in a garden? I do so wish I could. If I had the placing of ghosts, I would not make them mope round in stuffy old bedrooms and garrets; but would place one here in this arbor in my Moonlight Garden. But if I did, I have no doubt she would take up a hoe or a watering-pot, and proceed to do some very unghostlike deed--perhaps, grub up weeds. Longfellow had a ghost in his garden (page 142). He must have mourned when he found it was only a clothes-line and a long night-gown. It was the favorite tale of a Swedish old lady who lived to be ninety-six years old, of a discovery of her youth, in the year 1762, of strange flashes of light which sparkled out of the flowers of the Nasturtium one sultry night. I suppose the average young woman of the average education of the day and her country might not have heeded or told of this, but she was the daughter of Linnæus, the great botanist, and had not the everyday education. Then great Goethe saw and wrote of similar flashes of light around Oriental Poppies; and soon other folk saw them also--naturalists and everyday folk. Usually yellow flowers were found to display this light--Marigolds, orange Lilies, and Sunflowers. Then the daughter of Linnæus reported another curious discovery; she certainly turned her nocturnal rambles in her garden to good account. She averred she had set fire to a certain gas which formed and hung around the Fraxinella, and that the ignition did not injure the plant. This assertion was met with open scoffing and disbelief, which has never wholly ceased; yet the popular name of Gas Plant indicates a widespread confidence in this quality of the Fraxinella and it is easily proved true. Another New England name for the Fraxinella, given me from the owner of the herb-garden at Elmhurst, is "Spitfire Plant," because the seed-pods sizzle so when a lighted match is applied to them. The Fraxinella is a sturdy, hardy flower. There are some aged plants in old New England gardens; I know one which has outlived the man who planted it, his son, grandson, and great-grandson. The Fraxinella bears a tall stem with Larkspur-like flowers of white or a curious dark pink, and shining Ash-like leaves, whence its name, the little Ash. It is one of the finest plants of the old-fashioned garden; fine in bloom, fine in habit of growth, and it even has decorative seed vessels. It is as ready of scent as anything in the garden; if you but brush against leaf, stem, flower, or seed, as you walk down the garden path, it gives forth a penetrating perfume, that you think at first is like Lemon, then like Anise, then like Lavender; until you finally decide it is like nothing save Fraxinella. As with the blossoms of the Calycanthus shrub, you can never mistake the perfume, when once you know it, for anything else. It is a scent of distinction. Through this individuality it is, therefore, full of associations, and correspondingly beloved. [Illustration: Fraxinella.] CHAPTER XXI FLOWERS OF MYSTERY "Let thy upsoaring vision range at large This garden through: for so by ray divine Kindled, thy ken a magic flight shall mount." --CARY'S Translation of Dante. Bogies and fairies, a sense of eeriness, came to every garden-bred child of any imagination in connection with certain flowers. These flowers seemed to be regarded thus through no special rule or reason. With some there may have been slight associations with fairy lore, or medicinal usage, or a hint of meretriciousness. Sometimes the child hardly formulated his thought of the flower, yet the dread or dislike or curiosity existed. My own notions were absolutely baseless, and usually absurd. I doubt if we communicated these fancies to each other save in a few cases, as of the Monk's-hood, when we had been warned that the flower was poisonous. I have read with much interest Dr. Forbes Watson's account of plants that filled his childish mind with mysterious awe and wonder; among them were the Spurge, Henbane, Rue, Dogtooth Violet, Nigella, and pink Marsh Mallow. The latter has ever been to me one of the most cheerful of blossoms. I did not know it in my earliest childhood, and never saw it in gardens till recent years. It is too close a cousin of the Hollyhock ever to seem to me aught but a happy flower. Henbane and Rue I did not know, but I share his feeling toward the others, though I could not carry it to the extent of fancying these the plants which a young man gathered, distilled, and gave to his betrothed as a poison. There has ever been much uncanny suggestion in the Cypress Spurge. I never should have picked it had I found it in trim gardens; but I saw it only in forlorn and neglected spots. Perhaps its sombre tinge may come now from association, since it is often seen in country graveyards; and I heard a country woman once call it "Graveyard Ground Pine." But this association was not what influenced my childhood, for I never went then to graveyards. In driving along our New England roads I am ever reminded of Parkinson's dictum that "Spurge once planted will hardly be got rid out again." For by every decaying old house, in every deserted garden, and by the roadside where houses may have been, grows and spreads this Cypress Spurge. I know a large orchard in Narragansett from which grass has wholly vanished; it has been crowded out by the ugly little plant, which has even invaded the adjoining woods. I wonder why every one in colonial days planted it, for it is said to be poisonous in its contact to some folks, and virulently poisonous to eat--though I am sure no one ever wanted to eat it. The colonists even brought it over from England, when we had here such lovely native plants. It seldom flowers. Old New England names for it are Love-in-a-huddle and Seven Sisters; not over significant, but of interest, as folk-names always are. I join with Dr. Forbes Watson in finding the Nigella uncanny. It has a half-spidery look, that seems ungracious in a flower. Its names are curious: Love-in-a-mist, Love-in-a-puzzle, Love-in-a-tangle, Puzzle-love, Devil-in-a-bush, Katherine-flowers--another of the many allusions to St. Katherine and her wheel; and the persistent styles do resemble the spokes of a wheel. A name given it in a cottage garden in Wayland was Blue Spider-flower, which seems more suited than that of Spiderwort for the Tradescantia. Spiderwort, like all "three-cornered" flowers, is a flower of mystery; and so little cared for to-day that it is almost extinct in our gardens, save where it persists in out-of-the-way spots. A splendid clump of it is here shown, which grows still in the Worcester garden I so loved in my childhood. In this plant the old imagined tracings of spider's legs in the leaves can scarce be seen. With the fanciful notion of "like curing like" ever found in old medical recipes, Gerarde says, vaguely, the leaves are good for "the Bite of that Great Spider," a creature also of mystery. Perhaps if the clear blue flowers kept open throughout the day, the Spiderwort would be more tolerated, for this picture certainly has a Japanesque appearance, and what we must acknowledge was far more characteristic of old-time flowers than of many new ones, a wonderful individuality; there was no sameness of outline. I could draw the outline of a dozen blossoms of our modern gardens, and you could not in a careless glance distinguish one from the other: Cosmos, _Anemone japonica_, single Dahlias, and Sunflowers, Gaillardia, Gazanias, all such simple Rose forms. [Illustration: Love-in-a-mist.] There was a quaint and mysterious annual in ancient gardens, called Shell flower, or Molucca Balm, which is not found now even on seedsmen's special lists of old-fashioned plants. The flower was white, pink-tipped, and set in a cup-shaped calyx an inch long, which was bigger than the flower itself. The plant stood two or three feet high, and the sweet-scented flowers were in whorls of five or six on a stem. It is a good example of my assertion that the old flowers had queerer shapes than modern ones, and were made of queer materials; the calyx of this Shell flower is of such singular quality and fibre. The Dog-tooth Violet always had to me a sickly look, but its leaves give it its special offensiveness; all spotted leaves, or flower petals which showed the slightest resemblance to the markings of a snake or lizard, always filled me with dislike. Among them I included Lungwort (Pulmonaria), a flower which seems suddenly to have disappeared from many gardens, even old-fashioned ones, just as it has disappeared from medicine. Not a gardener could be found in our public parks in New York who had ever seen it, or knew it, though there is in Prospect Park a well-filled and noteworthy "Old-fashioned Garden." Let me add, in passing, that nothing in the entire park system--greenhouses, water gardens, Italian gardens--affords such delight to the public as this old-fashioned garden. The changing blue and pink flowers of the Lungwort, somewhat characteristic of its family, are curious also. This plant was also known by the singular name of Joseph-and-Mary; the pink flowers being the emblem of Joseph; the blue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Lady's-tears was an allied name, from a legend that the Virgin Mary's tears fell on the leaves, causing the white spots to grow in them, and that one of her blue eyes became red from excessive weeping. It was held to be unlucky even to destroy the plant. Soldier-and-his-wife also had reference to the red and blue tints of the flower. A cousin of the Lungwort, our native _Mertensia virginica_, has in the young plant an equally singular leafage; every ordinary process of leaf progress is reversed: the young shoots are not a tender green, but are almost black, and change gradually in leaf, stem, and flower calyx to an odd light green in which the dark color lingers in veins and spots until the plant is in its full flower of tender blue, lilac, and pink. "Blue and pink ladies" we used to call the blossoms when we hung them on pins for a fairy dance. The Alstroemeria is another spotted flower of the old borders, curious in its funnel-shaped blooms, edged and lined with tiny brown and green spots. It is more grotesque than beautiful, but was beloved in a day that deemed the Tiger Lily the most beautiful of all lilies. [Illustration: Spiderwort.] The aversion I feel for spotted leaves does not extend to striped ones, though I care little for variegated or striped foliage in a garden. I like the striped white and green leaves of one variety of our garden Iris, and of our common Sweet Flag (Calamus), which are decorative to a most satisfactory degree. The firm ribbon leaves of the striped Sweet Flag never turn brown in the driest summer, and grow very tall; a tub of it kept well watered is a thing of surprising beauty, and the plants are very handsome in the rock garden. I wonder what the bees seek in the leaves! they throng its green and white blades in May, finding something, I am sure, besides the delightful scent; though I do not note that they pierce the veins of the plant for the sap, as I have known them to do along the large veins of certain palm leaves. I have seen bees often act as though they were sniffing a flower with appreciation, not gathering honey. The only endeared striped leaf was that of the Striped Grass--Gardener's Garters we called it. Clumps of it growing at Van Cortlandt Manor are here shown. We children used to run to the great plants of Striped Grass at the end of the garden as to a toy ribbon shop. The long blades of Grass looked like some antique gauze ribbons. They were very modish for dolls' wear, very useful to shape pin-a-sights, those very useful things, and very pretty to tie up posies. Under favorable circumstances this garden child might become a garden pest, a spreading weed. I never saw a more curious garden stray than an entire dooryard and farm garden--certainly two acres in extent, covered with Striped Grass, save where a few persistent Tiger Lilies pierced through the striped leaves. Even among the deserted hearthstones and tumble-down chimneys the striped leaves ran up among the roofless walls. Let me state here that the suggestion of mystery in a flower did not always make me dislike it; sometimes it added a charm. The Periwinkle--Ground Myrtle we used to call it--was one of the most mysterious and elusive flowers I knew, and other children thus regarded it; but I had a deep affection for its lovely blue stars and clean, glossy leaves, a special love, since it was the first flower I saw blooming out of doors after a severe illness, and it seemed to welcome me back to life. [Illustration: Gardener's Garters, at Van Cortlandt Manor.] The name is from the French Pervenche, which suffers sadly by being changed into the clumsy Periwinkle. Everywhere it is a flower of mystery; it is the "Violette des Sorciers" of the French. Sadder is its Tuscan name, "Flower of death," for it is used there as garlands at the burial of children; and is often planted on graves, just as it is here. A far happier folk-name was Joy-of-the-ground, and to my mind better suited to the cheerful, healthy little plant. An ancient medical manuscript gives this description of the Periwinkle, which for directness and lucidity can scarcely be excelled:-- "Parwyke is an erbe grene of colour, In tyme of May he bereth blue flour. Ye lef is thicke, schinede and styf, As is ye grene jwy lefe. Vnder brod and uerhand round, Men call it ye joy of grownde." On the list of the Boston seedsman (given on page 33 _et seq._) is Venus'-navelwort. I lingered this summer by an ancient front yard in Marblehead, and in the shade of the low-lying gray-shingled house I saw a refined plant with which I was wholly unacquainted, lying like a little dun cloud on the border, a pleasing plant with cinereous foliage, in color like the silvery gray of the house, shaded with a bluer tint and bearing a dainty milk-white bloom. This modest flower had that power of catching the attention in spite of the high and striking colors of its neighbors, such as a simple gown of gray and white, if of graceful cut and shape, will have among gay-colored silk attire--the charm of Quaker garb, even though its shape be ugly. You know how ready is the owner of such a garden to talk of her favorites, and soon I was told that this plant was "Navy-work." I accepted this name in this old maritime town as possibly a local folk-name, yet I was puzzled by a haunting memory of having heard some similar title. A later search in a botany revealed the original, Venus'-navelwort. I deem it right to state in this connection that any such corruption of the old name of a flower is very unusual in Massachusetts, where the English tongue is spoken by all of Massachusetts descent in much purity of pronunciation. There is no doubt that all the flowers of the old garden were far more suggestive, more full of meaning, than those given to us by modern florists. This does not come wholly from association, as many fancy, but from an inherent quality of the flower itself. I never saw Honeywort (Cerinthe) till five years ago, and then it was not in an old-fashioned garden; but the moment I beheld the graceful, drooping flowers in the flower bed, the yellow and purple-toothed corolla caught my eye, as it caught my fancy; it seemed to mean something. I was not surprised to learn that it was an ancient favorite of colonial days. The leaves of Honeywort are often lightly spotted, which may be one of its elements of mystery. Honeywort is seldom seen even in our oldest gardens; but it is a beautiful flower and a most hardy annual, and deserves to be reintroduced. [Illustration: Garden Walk at The Manse, Deerfield, Massachusetts.] A great favorite in the old garden was the splendid scarlet Lychnis, to which in New England is given the name of London Pride. There are two old varieties: one has four petals with squared ends, and is called, from the shape of the expanded flower, the Maltese Cross; the other, called Scarlet Lightning, is shown on a succeeding page; it has five deeply-nicked petals. It is a flower of midsummer eve and magic power, and I think it must have some connection with the Crusaders, being called by Gerarde Floure of Jerusalem, and Flower of Candy. The five-petalled form is rarely seen; in one old family I know it is so cherished, and deemed so magic a home-maker, that every bride who has gone from that home for over a hundred years has borne away a plant of that London Pride; it has really become a Family Pride. Another plant of mysterious suggestion was the common Plantain. This was not an unaided instinct of my childhood, but came to me through an explanation of the lines in the chapter, "The White Man's Foot," in _Hiawatha_:-- "Whereso'er they tread, beneath them Springs a flower unknown among us; Springs the White Man's Foot in blossom." After my father showed me the Plantain as the "White Man's Foot," I ever regarded it with a sense of its unusual power; and I used often to wonder, when I found it growing in the grass, who had stepped there. I have permanently associated with the Plantain or Waybred a curious and distasteful trick of my memory. We recall our American humorist's lament over the haunting lines from the car-conductor's orders, which filled his brain and ears from the moment he read them, wholly by chance, and which he tried vainly to forget. A similar obsession filled me when I read the spirited apostrophe to the Plantain or Waybred, in Cockayne's translation of Ælfric's _Lacunga_, a book of leech-craft of the eleventh century:-- "And thou Waybroad, Mother of worts, Over thee carts creaked, Over thee Queens rode, Over thee brides bridalled, Over thee bulls breathed, All these thou withstoodst, Venom and vile things, And all the loathly things, That through the land rove." I could not thrust them out of my mind; worse still, I kept manufacturing for the poem scores of lines of similar metre. I never shall forget the Plantain, it won't let me forget it. [Illustration: London Pride.] The Orpine was a flower linked with tradition and mystery in England, there were scores of fanciful notions connected with it. It has grown to be a spreading weed in some parts of New England, but it has lost both its mystery and its flowers. The only bed of flowering Orpine I ever saw in America was in the millyard of Miller Rose at Kettle Hole--and a really lovely expanse of bloom it was, broken only by old worn millstones which formed the doorsteps. He told with pride that his grandmother planted it, and "it was the flowering variety that no one else had in Rhode Island, not even in greenhouses in Newport." Miller Rose ground corn meal and flour with ancient millstones, and infinitely better were his grindings than "store meal." He could tell you, with prolonged detail, of the new-fangled roller he bought and used one week, and not a decent Johnny-cake could be made from the meal, and it shamed him. So he threw away all the meal he hadn't sold; and then the new machinery was pulled out and the millstones replaced, "to await the Lord's coming," he added, being a Second Adventist--or by his own title a "Christadelphian and an Old Bachelor." He was a famous preacher, having a pulpit built of heavy stones, in the woods near his mill. A little trying it was to hear the outpourings of his long sermons on summer afternoons, while you waited for him to come down from his pulpit and his prophesyings to give you your bag of meal. A tithing of time he gave each day to the Lord, two hours and a half of preaching--and doubtless far more than a tithe of his income to the poor. In sentimental association with his name, he had a few straggling Roses around his millyard--all old-time varieties; and, with Orpine and Sweetbrier, he could gather a very pretty posy for all who came to Kettle Hole. We constantly read of Fritillaries in the river fields sung of Matthew Arnold. In a charming book of English country life, _Idlehurst_, I read how closely the flower is still associated with Oxford life, recalling ever the Iffley and Kensington meadows to all Oxford men. The author tells that "quite unlikely sorts of men used to pick bunches of the flowers, and we would come up the towpath with our spoils." Fritillaries grew in my mother's garden; I cannot now recall another garden in America where I have ever seen them in bloom. They certainly are not common. On a succeeding page are shown the blossoms of the white Fritillary my mother planted and loved. Can you not believe that we love them still? They have spread but little, neither have they dwindled nor died. Each year they seem to us the very same blossoms she loved. Our cyclopædias of gardening tell us that the Fritillaries spread freely; but E. V. B. writes of them in her exquisite English: "Slow in growth as the Fritillaries are, they are ever sure. When they once take root, there they stay forever, with a constancy unknown in our human world. They may be trusted, however late their coming. In the fresh vigor of its youth was there ever seen any other flower planned so exquisitely, fashioned so slenderly! The pink symmetry of Kalmia perhaps comes nearest this perfection, with the delicately curved and rounded angles of its bloom." In no garden, no matter how modern, could the Fritillaries ever look to me aught but antique and classic. They are as essentially of the past, even to the careless eye, as an antique lamp or brazier. Quaint, too, is the fabric of their coats, like some old silken stuff of paduasoy or sarsenet. All are checkered, as their name indicates. Even the white flowers bear little birthmarks of checkered lines. They were among the famous dancers in my mother's garden, and I can tell you that a country dance of Fritillaries in plaided kirtles and green caps is a lively sight. Another name for this queer little flower is Guinea-hen Flower. Gerarde, with his felicity of description, says:-- "One square is of a greenish-yellow colour, the other purple, keeping the same order as well on the back side of the flower as on the inside; although they are blackish in one square, and of a violet colour in another: in so much that every leafe (of the flower) seemeth to be the feather of a Ginnie hen, whereof it took its name." A strong personal trait of the Fritillaries (for I may so speak of flowers I love) is their air of mystery. They mean something I cannot fathom; they look it, but cannot tell it. Fritillaries were a flower of significance even in Elizabethan days. They were made into little buttonhole posies, and, as Parkinson says, "worn abroad by curious lovers of these delights." In California grow wild a dozen varieties; the best known of these is recurved, but it does not droop, and is to all outward glance an Anemone, and has lost in that new world much the mystery of the old herbalist's "Checker Lily," save the checkers; these always are visible. [Illustration: White Fritillaria.] The Cyclamen and Dodecatheon lay their ears back like a vicious horse. Both have an eerie aspect, as if turned upside down, as has also the Nightshade. I knew a little child, a flower lover from babyhood, who feared to touch the Cyclamen, and even cried if any attempt was made to have her touch the flower. When older, she said that she had feared the flower would sting her. I have often a sense of mysterious meaning in a vine, it seems so plainly to reach out to attract your attention. I recall once being seated on the doorstep of a deserted farm-house, musing a little over the sad thought of this lost home, when suddenly some one tapped me on the cheek--I suppose I ought to say some thing, though it seemed a human touch. It was a spray of Matrimony vine, twenty feet long or more, that had reached around a corner, and helped by a breeze, had appealed to me for sympathy and companionship. I answered by following it around the corner. It had been trained up to a little shelf-like ledge or roof, over what had been a pantry window, and hung in long lines of heavy shade. It said to me: "Here once lived a flower-loving woman and a man who cared for her comfort and pleasure. She planted me when she, and the man, and the house were young, and he made the window shelter, and trained me over it, to make cool and green the window where she worked. I was the symbol of their happy married love. See! there they lie, under the gray stone beneath those cedars. Their children all are far away, but every year I grow fresh and green, though I find it lonely here now." To me, the Matrimony vine is ever a plant of interest, and it may be very beautiful, if cared for. On page 186 is shown the lovely growth on the porch at Van Cortlandt Manor. With a sentiment of wonder and inquiry, not unmixed with mystery, do we regard many flowers, which are described in our botanies as Garden Escapes. This Matrimony vine is one of the many creeping, climbing things that have wandered away from houses. Honeysuckles and Trumpet-vines are far travellers. I saw once in a remote and wild spot a great boulder surrounded with bushes and all were covered with the old Coral or Trumpet Honeysuckle; it had such a familiar air, and yet seemed to have gained a certain knowingness by its travels. This element of mystery does not extend to the flowers which I am told once were in trim gardens, but which I have never seen there, such as Ox-eye Daisies, Scotch Thistles, Chamomile, Tansy, Bergamot, Yarrow, and all of the Mint family; they are to me truly wild. But when I find flowers still cherished in our gardens, growing also in some wild spot, I regard them with wonder. A great expanse of Coreopsis, a field of Grape Hyacinth or Star of Bethlehem, roadsides of Coronilla or Moneywort, rows of red Day Lily and Tiger Lily, patches of Sunflowers or Jerusalem Artichokes, all are matters of thought; we long to trace their wanderings, to have them tell whence and how they came. Bouncing Bet is too cheerful and rollicking a wanderer to awaken sentiment. How gladly has she been welcomed to our fields and roadsides. I could not willingly spare her in our country drives, even to become again a cherished garden dweller. She rivals the Succory in beautifying arid dust heaps and barren railroad cuts, with her tender opalescent pink tints. How wholesome and hearty her growth, how pleasant her fragrance. We can never see her too often, nor ever stigmatize her, as have been so many of our garden escapes, as "Now a dreaded weed." [Illustration: Bouncing Bet.] One of the weirdest of all flowers to me is the Butter-and-eggs, the Toad-flax, which was once a garden child, but has run away from gardens to wander in every field in the land. I haven't the slightest reason for this regard of Butter-and-eggs, and I believe it is peculiar to myself, just as is Dr. Forbes Watson's regard of the Marshmallow to him. I have no uncanny or sad associations with it, and I never heard anything "queer" about it. Thirty years ago, in a locality I knew well in central Massachusetts, Butter-and-eggs was far from common; I even remember the first time I saw it and was told its quaint name; now it grows there and everywhere; it is a persistent weed. John Burroughs calls it "the hateful Toad-flax," and old Manasseh Cutler, in a curious mixture of compliment and slur, "a common, handsome, tedious weed." It travels above ground and below ground, and in some soils will run out the grass. It knows how to allure the bumblebee, however, and has honey in its heart. I think it a lovely flower, though it is queer; and it is a delight to the scientific botanist, in the delicate perfection of its methods and means of fertilization. The greatest beauty of this flower is in late autumn, when it springs up densely in shaven fields. I have seen, during the last week in October, fields entirely filled with its exquisite sulphur-yellow tint, one of the most delicate colors in nature; a yellow that is luminous at night, and is rivalled only by the pale yellow translucent leaves of the Moosewood in late autumn, which make such a strange pallid light in old forests in the North--a light which dominates over every other autumn tint, though the trees which bear them are so spindling and low, and little noted save in early spring in their rare pinkness, and in this their autumn etherealization. And the Moosewood shares the mystery of the Butter-and-eggs as well as its color. I should be afraid to drive or walk alone in a wood road, when the Moosewood leaves were turning yellow in autumn. I shall never forget them in Dublin, New Hampshire, driving through what our delightful Yankee charioteer and guide called "only a cat-road." This was to me a new use of the word cat as a prænomen, though I knew, as did Dr. Holmes and Hosea Biglow, and every good New Englander, that "cat-sticks" were poor spindling sticks, either growing or in a load of cut wood. I heard a country parson say as he regarded ruefully a gift of a sled load of firewood, "The deacon's load is all cat-sticks." Of course a cat-stick was also the stick used in the game of ball called tip-cat. Myself when young did much practise another loved ball game, "one old cat," a local favorite, perhaps a local name. "Cat-ice," too, is a good old New England word and thing; it is the thin layer of brittle ice formed over puddles, from under which the water has afterward receded. If there lives a New Englander too old or too hurried to rejoice in stepping upon and crackling the first "cat-ice" on a late autumn morning, then he is a man; for no New England girl, a century old, could be thus indifferent. It is akin to rustling through the deep-lying autumn leaves, which affords a pleasure so absurdly disproportioned and inexplicable that it is almost mysterious. Some of us gouty ones, alas! have had to give up the "cat-slides" which were also such a delight; the little stretches of glare ice to which we ran a few steps and slid rapidly over with the impetus. But I must not let my New England folk-words lure me away from my subject, even on a tempting "cat-slide." [Illustration: Overgrown Garden at Llanerck, Pennsylvania.] Though garden flowers run everywhere that they will, they are not easily forced to become wild flowers. We hear much of the pleasure of sowing garden seeds along the roadside, and children are urged to make beautiful wild gardens to be the delight of passers-by. Alphonse Karr wrote most charmingly of such sowings, and he pictured the delight and surprise of country folk in the future when they found the choice blooms, and the confusion of learned botanists in years to come. The delight and surprise and confusion would have been if any of his seeds sprouted and lived! A few years ago a kindly member of our United States Congress sent to me from the vast seed stores of our national Agricultural Department, thousands of packages of seeds of common garden flowers to be given to the poor children in public kindergartens and primary schools in our great city. The seeds were given to hundreds of eager flower lovers, but starch boxes and old tubs and flower pots formed the limited gardens of those Irish and Italian children, and the Government had sent to me such "hats full, sacks full, bushel-bags full," that I was left with an embarrassment of riches. I sent them to Narragansett and amused myself thereafter by sowing several pecks of garden seeds along the country roadsides; never, to my knowledge, did one seed live and produce a plant. I watched eagerly for certain plantings of Poppies, Candytuft, Morning-glories, and even the indomitable Portulaca; not one appeared. I don't know why I should think I could improve on nature; for I drove through that road yesterday and it was radiant with Wild Rose bloom, white Elder, and Meadow Beauty; a combination that Thoreau thought and that I think could not be excelled in a cultivated garden. Above all, these are the right things in the right place, which my garden plants would not have been. I am sure that if they had lived and crowded out these exquisite wild flowers I should have been sorry enough. [Illustration: Fountain at Yaddo.] The hardy Colchicum or Autumnal Crocus is seldom seen in our gardens; nor do I care for its increase, even when planted in the grass. It bears to me none of the delight which accompanies the spring Crocus, but seems to be out of keeping with the autumnal season. Rising bare of leaves, it has but a seminatural aspect, as if it had been stuck rootless in the ground like the leafless, stemless blooms of a child's posy bed. Its English name--Naked Boys--seems suited to it. The Colchicum is associated in my mind with the Indian Pipe and similar growths; it is curious, but it isn't pleasing. As the Indian Pipe could not be lured within garden walls, I will not write of it here, save to say that no one could ever see it growing in its shadowy home in the woods without yielding to its air of mystery. It is the weirdest flower that grows, so palpably ghastly that we feel almost a cheerful satisfaction in the perfection of its performance and our own responsive thrill, just as we do in a good ghost story. [Illustration: Avenue of White Pines at Wellesley, Mass., the Country-seat of Hollis H. Hunnewell, Esq.] Many wild flowers which we have transplanted to our gardens are full of magic and charm. In some, such as Thyme and Elder, these elements come from English tradition. In other flowers the quality of mystery is inherent. In childhood I absolutely abhorred Bloodroot; it seemed to me a fearsome thing when first I picked it. I remember well my dismay, it was so pure, so sleek, so innocent of face, yet bleeding at a touch, like a murdered man in the Blood Ordeal. The Trillium, Wake-robin, is a wonderful flower. I have seen it growing in a luxuriance almost beyond belief in lonely Canadian forests on the Laurentian Mountains. At this mining settlement, so remote that it was unvisited even by the omnipresent and faithful Canadian priest, was a wealth of plant growth which seemed fairly tropical. The starry flowers of the Trillium hung on long peduncles, and the two-inch diameter of the ordinary blossom was doubled. The Painted Trillium bore rich flowers of pink and wine color, and stood four or five feet from the ground. I think no one had ever gathered their blooms, for there were no women in this mining camp save a few French-Indian servants and one Irish cook, and no educated white woman had ever been within fifty, perhaps a hundred, miles of the place. Every variety of bloom seemed of exaggerated growth, but the Trillium exceeded all. An element of mystery surrounds this plant, a quality which appertains to all "three-cornered" flowers; perhaps there may be some significance in the three-sided form. I felt this influence in the extreme when in the presence of this Canadian Trillium, so much so that I was depressed by it when wandering alone even in the edge of the forest; and when by light o' the moon I peered in on this forest garden, it was like the vision of a troop of trembling white ghosts, stimulating to the fancy. It was but a part of the whole influence of that place, which was full of eerie mystery. For after the countless eons of time during which "the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the earth," the waters at last were gathered together and dry land appeared. And that dry land which came up slowly out of the face of the waters was this Laurentian range. And when at God's command "on the third day" the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielded seed--lo, among the things which were good and beautiful there shone forth upon the earth the first starry flowers of the white Trillium. CHAPTER XXII ROSES OF YESTERDAY "Each morn a thousand Roses brings, you say; Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?" --_Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, translated by EDWARD FITZGERALD, 1858. The answer can be given the Persian poet that the Rose of Yesterday leaves again in the heart. The subtle fragrance of a Rose can readily conjure in our minds a dream of summers past, and happy summers to come. Many a flower lover since Chaucer has felt as did the poet:-- "The savour of the Roses swote Me smote right to the herte rote." The old-time Roses possess most fully this hidden power. Sweetest of all was the old Cabbage Rose--called by some the Provence Rose--for its perfume "to be chronicled and chronicled, and cut and chronicled, and all-to-be-praised." Its odor is perfection; it is the standard by which I compare all other fragrances. It is not too strong nor too cloying, as are some Rose scents; it is the idealization of that distinctive sweetness of the Rose family which other Roses have to some degree. The color of the Cabbage Rose is very warm and pleasing, a clear, happy pink, and the flower has a wholesome, open look; but it is not a beautiful Rose by florists' standards,--few of the old Roses are,--and it is rather awkward in growth. The Cabbage Rose is said to have been a favorite in ancient Rome. I wish it had a prettier name; it is certainly worthy one. The Hundred-leaved Rose was akin to the Cabbage Rose, and shared its delicious fragrance. In its rather irregular shape it resembled the present Duke of Sussex Rose. One of the rarest of old-time Roses in our gardens to-day is the red and white mottled York and Lancaster. It is as old as the sixteenth century. Shakespeare writes in the _Sonnets_:-- "The Roses fearfully in thorns did stand One blushing shame, another white despair. A third, nor red, nor white, had stol'n of both." They are what Chaucer loved, "sweitie roses red, brode, and open also." Roses of a broad, flat expanse when in full bloom; they have a cheerier, heartier, more gracious look than many of the new Roses that never open far from bud, that seem so pinched and narrow. What ineffable fragrance do they pour out from every wide-open flower, a fragrance that is the very spirit of the Oriental Attar of Roses; all the sensuous sweetness of the attar is gone, and only that which is purest and best remains. I believe, in thinking of it, that it equals the perfume of the Cabbage Rose, which, ere now, I have always placed first. This York and Lancaster Rose is the _Rosa mundi_,--the rose of the world. A fine plant is growing in Hawthorne's old home in Salem. [Illustration: Violets in Silver Double Coaster.] Opposite page 462 is an unusual depiction of the century-old York and Lancaster Rose still growing and flourishing in the old garden at Van Cortlandt Manor. It is from one of the few photographs which I have ever seen which make you forgive their lack of color. The vigor, the grace, the richness of this wonderful Rose certainly are fully shown, though but in black and white. I have called this Rose bush a century old; it is doubtless much older, but it does not seem old; it is gifted with everlasting youth. We know how the Persians gather before a single plant in flower; they spread their rugs, and pray before it; and sit and meditate before it; sip sherbet, play the lute and guitar in the moonlight; bring their friends and stand as in a vision, then talk in praises of it, and then all serenade it with an ode from Hafiz and depart. So would I gather my friends around this lovely old Rose, and share its beauty just as my friends at the manor-house share it with me; and as the Persians, we would praise it in sunlight and by moonlight, and sing its beauty in verses. This York and Lancaster Rose was known to Parkinson in his day; it is his _Rosa versicolor_. I wonder why so few modern gardens contain this treasure. I know it does not rise to all the standards of the modern Rose growers; but it possesses something better--it has a living spirit; it speaks of history, romance, sentiment; it awakens inspiration and thought, it has an ever living interest, a significance. I wonder whether a hundred years from now any one will stand before some Crimson Rambler, which will then be ancient, and feel as I do before this York and Lancaster goddess. [Illustration: York and Lancaster Rose.] The fragrance of the sweetest Roses--the Damask, the Cabbage, the York and Lancaster--is beyond any other flower-scent, it is irresistible, enthralling; you cannot leave it. You can push aside a Syringa, a Honeysuckle, even a Mignonette, but there is a magic something which binds you irrevocably to the Rose. I have never doubted that the Rose has some compelling quality shared not by other flowers. I know not whether it comes from centuries of establishment as a race-symbol, or from some inherent witchery of the plant, but it certainly exists. The variety of Roses known to old American gardens, as to English gardens, was few. The English Eglantine was quickly established here in gardens and spread to roadsides. The small, ragged, cheerful little Cinnamon Rose, now chiefly seen as a garden stray, is undoubtedly old. This Rose diffuses its faint "sinamon smelle" when the petals are dried. Nearly all of the Roses vaguely thought to be one or two hundred years old date only, within our ken, to the earlier years of the nineteenth century. The Seven Sisters Rose, imagined by the owner of many a Southern garden to belong to colonial days, is one of the family _Rosa multiflora_, introduced from Japan to England by Thunberg. Its catalogue name is Greville. I think the Seven Sisters dates back to 1822. The clusters of little double blooms of the Seven Sisters are not among our beautiful Roses, but are planted by the house mistress of every Southern home from power of association, because they were loved by her grandmothers, if not by more distant forbears. The crimson Boursaults are no older. They came from the Swiss Alps and therefore are hardy, but they are fussy things, needing much pruning and pulling out. I recall that they had much longer prickles than the other roses in our garden. The beloved little Banksia Rose came from China in 1807. The Madame Plantier is a hybrid China Rose of much popularity. We have had it about seventy or eighty years. In the lovely garden of Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright, author of _Flowers and Trees in their Haunts_, I saw, this spring, a giant Madame Plantier which had over five thousand buds, and which could scarcely be equalled in beauty by any modern Roses. Its photograph gives scant idea of its size. What gratitude we have in spring to the Sweetbrier! How early in the year, from sprouting branch and curling leaf, it begins to give forth its pure odor! Gracious and lavish plant, beloved in scent by every one, you have no rival in the spring garden with its pale perfumes. The Sweetbrier and Shakespeare's Musk Rose (_Rosa moschata_) are said to be the only Roses that at evening pour forth their perfume; the others are what Bacon called "fast of their odor." The June Rose, called by many the Hedgehog Rose, was, I think, the first Rose of summer. A sturdy plant, about three feet in height; set thick with briers, it well deserved its folk name. The flowers opened into a saucer of richest carmine, as fragrant as an American Beauty, and the little circles of crimson resembling the _Rosa rugosa_ were seen in every front dooryard. [Illustration: Cinnamon Roses.] In the Walpole garden from whence came to us our beloved Ambrosia, was an ample Box-edged flower bed which my mother and the great-aunt called The Rosery. One cousin, now living, recalls with distinctness its charms in 1830; for it was beautiful, though the vast riches of the Rose-world of China and Japan had not reached it. There grew in it, he remembers, Yellow Scotch Roses, Sweetbrier (or Eglantine), Cinnamon Roses, White Scotch Roses, Damask Roses, Blush Roses, Dog Roses (the Canker-bloom of Shakespeare), Black Roses, Burgundy Roses, and Moss Roses. The last-named sensitive creatures, so difficult to rear with satisfaction in such a climate, found in this Rosery by the river-side some exact fitness of soil or surroundings, or perhaps of fostering care, which in spite of the dampness and the constant tendency of all Moss Roses to mildew, made them blossom in unrivalled perfection. I remember their successors, deplored as much inferior to the Roses of 1830, and they were the finest Moss Roses I ever saw blooming in a garden. An amusing saying of some of the village passers-by (with smaller gardens and education) showed the universal acknowledgment of the perfection of these Roses. These people thought the name was Morse Roses and always thus termed them, fancying they were named for the family for whom the flowers bloomed in such beauty and number. Among the other Roses named by my cousin I recall the White Scotch Rose, sometimes called also the Burnet-leaved Rose. It was very fragrant, and was often chosen for a Sunday posy. There were both single and double varieties. The Blush Rose (_Rosa alba_), known also as Maiden's blush, was much esteemed for its exquisite color; it could be distinguished readily by the glaucous hue of the foliage, which always looked like the leaves of artificial roses. It was easily blighted; and indeed we must acknowledge that few of the old Roses were as certain as their sturdy descendants. The Damask Rose was the only one ever used in careful families and by careful housekeepers for making rose-water. There was a Velvet Rose, darker than the Damask and low-growing, evidently the same Rose. Both showed plentiful yellow stamens in the centres, and had exquisite rich dark leaves. The old Black Rose of The Rosery was so suffused with color-principle, so "color-flushing," that even the wood had black and dark red streaks. Its petals were purple-black. The Burgundy Rose was of the Cabbage Rose family; its flowers were very small, scarce an inch in diameter. There were two varieties: the one my cousin called Little Burgundy had clear dark red blossoms; the other, white with pink centres. Both were low-growing, small bushes with small leaves. They are practically vanished Roses--wholly out of cultivation. We had other tiny roses; one was a lovely little Rose creature called a Fairy Rose. I haven't seen one for years. As I recall them, the Rose plants were never a foot in height, and had dainty little flower rosettes from a quarter to half an inch in diameter set in thick clusters. But the recalled dimensions of youth vary so when seen actually in the cold light of to-day that perhaps I am wrong in my description. This was also called a Pony Rose. This Fairy Rose was not the Polyantha which also has forty or fifty little roses in a cluster. The single Polyantha Rose looks much like its cousin, the Blackberry blossom. Another small Rose was the Garland Rose. This was deemed extremely elegant, and rightfully so. It has great corymbs of tiny white blossoms with tight little buff buds squeezing out among the open Roses. Another old favorite was the Rose of Four Seasons--known also by its French name, _Rose de Quartre Saisons_--which had occasional blooms throughout the summer. It may have been the foundation of our Hybrid Perpetual Roses. The Bourbon Roses were vastly modish; their round smooth petals and oval leaves easily distinguish them from other varieties. Among the several hundred things I have fully planned out to do, to solace my old age after I have become a "centurion," is a series of water-color drawings of all these old-time Roses, for so many of them are already scarce. The Michigan Rose which covered the arches in Mr. Seward's garden, has clusters of deep pink, single, odorless flowers, that fade out nearly white after they open. It is our only native Rose that has passed into cultivation. From it come many fine double-flowered Roses, among them the beautiful Baltimore Belle and Queen of the Prairies, which were named about 1836 by a Baltimore florist called Feast. All its vigorous and hardy descendants are scentless save the Gem of the Prairies. It is one of the ironies of plant-nomenclature when we have so few plant names saved to us from the picturesque and often musical speech of the American Indians, that the lovely Cherokee Rose, Indian of name, is a Chinese Rose. It ought to be a native, for everywhere throughout our Southern states its pure white flowers and glossy evergreen leaves love to grow till they form dense thickets. People who own fine gardens are nowadays unwilling to plant the old "Summer Roses" which bloom cheerfully in their own Rose-month and then have no more blossoming till the next year; they want a Remontant Rose, which will bloom a second time in the autumn, or a Perpetual Rose, which will give flowers from June till cut off by the frost. But these latter-named Roses are not only of fine gardens but of fine gardeners; and folk who wish the old simple flower garden which needs no highly-skilled care, still are happy in the old Summer Roses I have named. [Illustration: Cottage Garden with Roses.] A Rose hedge is the most beautiful of all garden walls and the most ancient. Professor Koch says that long before men customarily surrounded their gardens with walls, that they had Rose hedges. He tells us that each of the four great peoples of Asia owned its own beloved Rose, carried in all wanderings, until at last the four became common to all races of men. Indo-Germanic stock chose the hundred-leaved red Rose, _Rosa gallica_ (the best Rose for conserves). _Rosa damascena_, which blooms twice a year, and the Musk Rose were cherished by the Semitic people; these were preferred for attar of Roses and Rose water. The yellow Rose, _Rosa lutea_, or Persian Rose, was the flower of the Turkish Mongolian people. Eastern Asia is the fatherland of the Indian and Tea Roses. The Rose has now become as universal as sunlight. Even in Iceland and Lapland grows the lovely _Rosa nitida_. We say these Roses are common to all peoples, but we have never in America been able to grow yellow Roses in ample bloom in our gardens. Many that thrive in English gardens are unknown here. The only yellow garden Rose common in old gardens was known simply as the "old yellow Rose," or Scotch Rose, but it came from the far East. In a few localities the yellow Eglantine was seen. The picturesque old custom of paying a Rose for rent was known here. In Manheim, Pennsylvania, stands the Zion Lutheran Church, which was gathered together by Baron William Stiegel, who was the first glass and iron manufacturer of note in this country. He came to America in 1750, with a fortune which would be equal to-day to a million dollars, and founded and built and named Manheim. He was a man of deep spiritual and religious belief, and of profound sentiment, and when in 1771 he gave the land to the church, this clause was in the indenture:-- "Yielding and paying therefor unto the said Henry William Stiegel, his heirs or assigns, at the said town of Manheim, in the Month of June Yearly, forever hereafter, the rent of _One Red Rose_, if the same shall be lawfully demanded." Nothing more touching can be imagined than the fulfilment each year of this beautiful and symbolic ceremony of payment. The little town is rich in Roses, and these are gathered freely for the church service, when One Red Rose is still paid to the heirs of the sainted old baron, who died in 1778, broken in health and fortunes, even having languished in jail some time for debt. A new church was erected on the site of the old one in 1892, and in a beautiful memorial window the decoration of the Red Rose commemorates the sentiment of its benefactor. The Rose Tavern, in the neighboring town of Bethlehem, stands on land granted for the site of a tavern by William Penn, for the yearly rental of One Red Rose. In England the payment of a Rose as rent was often known. The Bishop of Ely leased Ely house in 1576 to Sir Christopher Hatton, Queen Elizabeth's handsome Lord Chancellor, for a Red Rose to be paid on Midsummer Day, ten loads of hay and ten pounds per annum, and he and his Episcopal successors reserved the right of walking in the gardens and gathering twenty bushels of Roses yearly. In France there was a feudal right to demand a payment of Roses for the making of Rose water. Two of our great historians, George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, were great rose-growers and rose-lovers. I never saw Mr. Parkman's Rose Garden, but I remember Mr. Bancroft's well; the Tea Roses were especially beautiful. Mr. Bancroft's Rose Garden in its earliest days had no rivals in America. The making of potpourri was common in my childhood. While the petals of the Cabbage Rose were preferred, all were used. Recipes for making potpourri exist in great number; I have seen several in manuscript in old recipe books, one dated 1690. The old ones are much simpler than the modern ones, and have no strong spices such as cinnamon and clove, and no bergamot or mints or strongly scented essences or leaves. The best rules gave ambergris as one of the ingredients; this is not really a perfume, but gives the potpourri its staying power. There is something very pleasant in opening an old China jar to find it filled with potpourri, even if the scent has wholly faded. It tells a story of a day when people had time for such things. I read in a letter a century and a half old of a happy group of people riding out to the house of the provincial governor of New York; all gathered Rose leaves in the governor's garden, and the governor's wife started the distilling of these Rose leaves, in her new still, into Rose water, while all drank syllabubs and junkets--a pretty Watteau-ish scene. The hips of wild Roses are a harvest--one unused in America in modern days, but in olden times they were stewed with sugar and spices, as were other fruits. Sauce Saracen, or Sarzyn, was made of Rose hips and Almonds pounded together, cooked in wine and sweetened. I believe they are still cooked by some folks in England, but I never heard of their use in America save by one person, an elderly Irish woman on a farm in Narragansett. Plentiful are the references and rules in old cookbooks for cooking Rose hips. Parkinson says: "Hippes are made into a conserve, also a paste like licoris. Cooks and their Mistresses know how to prepare from them many fine dishes for the Table." Gerarde writes characteristically of the Sweetbrier, "The fruit when it is ripe maketh most pleasant meats and banqueting dishes, as tarts and such-like; the making whereof I commit to the cunning cooke, and teeth to eat them in the rich man's mouth." Children have ever nibbled Rose hips:-- "I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws-- Hard fare, but such as boyish appetite Disdains not." The Rose bush furnished another comestible for the children's larder, the red succulent shoots of common garden and wild Roses. These were known by the dainty name of "brier candy," a name appropriate and characteristic, as the folk-names devised by children frequently are. [Illustration: Madame Plantier Rose.] On the post-road in southern New Hampshire stands an old house, which according to its license was once "improved" as a tavern, and was famous for its ghost and its Roses. The tavern was owned by a family of two brothers and two sisters, all unmarried, as was rather a habit in the Mason family; though when any of the tribe did marry, a vast throng of children quickly sprung up to propagate the name and sturdy qualities of the race. The men were giants, and both men and women were hard-working folk of vast endurance and great thrift, and, like all of that ilk in New England, they prospered and grew well-to-do; great barns and out-buildings, all well filled, stretched down along the roadside below the house. Joseph Mason could lay more feet of stone wall in a day, could plough more land, chop down more trees, pull more stumps, than any other man in New Hampshire. His sisters could bake and brew, make soap, weed the garden, spin and weave, unceasingly and untiringly. Their garden was a source of purest pleasure to them, as well as of hard work; its borders were so stocked with medicinal herbs that it could supply a township; and its old-time flowers furnished seeds and slips and bulbs to every other garden within a day's driving distance; but its glory was a garden side to gladden the heart of Omar Khayyam, where two or three acres of ground were grown over heavily with old-fashioned Roses. These were only the common Cinnamon Rose, the beloved Cabbage Rose, and a pale pink, spicily scented, large-petalled, scarcely double Rose, known to them as the Apothecaries' Rose. Farmer-neighbors wondered at this waste of the Masons' good land in this unprofitable Rose crop, but it had a certain use. There came every June to this Rose garden all the children of the vicinity, bearing milk-pails, homespun bags, birch baskets, to gather Rose petals. They nearly all had Roses at their homes, but not the Mason Roses. These Rose leaves were carried carefully to each home, and were packed in stone jars with alternate layers of brown or scant maple sugar. Soon all conglomerated into a gummy, brown, close-grained, not over alluring substance to the vision, which was known among the children by the unromantic name of "Rose tobacco." This cloying confection was in high repute. It was chipped off and eaten in tiny bits, and much treasured--as a love token, or reward of good behavior. The Mason house was a tavern. It was not one of the regular stopping-places on the turnpike road, being rather too near the town to gather any travel of teamsters or coaches; but passers-by who knew the house and the Masons loved to stop there. Everything in the well-kept, well-filled house and barns contributed to the comfort of guests, and it was known that the Masons cared more for the company of the traveller than for his pay. There was a shadow on this house. The youngest of the family, Hannah, had been jilted in her youth, "shabbed" as said the country folks. After several years of "constant company-keeping" with the son of a neighbor, during which time many a linen sheet and tablecloth, many a fine blanket, had been spun and woven, and laid aside with the tacit understanding that it was part of her wedding outfit, the man had fallen suddenly and violently in love with a girl who came from a neighboring town to sing a single Sunday in the church choir. He had driven to her home the following week, carried her off to a parson in a third town, married her, and brought her to his home in a triumph of enthusiasm and romance, which quickly fled before the open dislike and reprehension of his upright neighbors, who abhorred his fickleness, and before the years of ill health and ill temper of the hard-worked, faded wife. Many children were born to them; two lived, sickly little souls, who, unconscious of the blemish on their parents' past, came with the other children every June, and gathered Rose leaves under Hannah Mason's window. Hannah Mason was called crazy. After her desertion she never entered any door save that of her own home, never went to a neighbor's house either in time of joy or sorrow; queerer still, never went to church. All her life, her thoughts, her vast strength, went into hard work. No labor was too heavy or too formidable for her. She would hetchel flax for weeks, spin unceasingly, and weave on a hand loom, most wearing of women's work, without thought of rest. No single household could supply work for such an untiring machine, especially when all labored industriously--so work was brought to her from the neighbors. Not a wedding outfit for miles around was complete without one of Hannah Mason's fine tablecloths. Every corpse was buried in one of her linen shrouds. Sailmakers and boat-owners in Portsmouth sent up to her for strong duck for their sails. Lads went up to Dartmouth College in suits of her homespun. Many a teamster on the road slept under Hannah Mason's heavy gray woollen blankets, and his wagon tilts were covered with her canvas. Her bank account grew rapidly--she became rich as fast as her old lover became poor. But all this cast a shadow on the house. Sojourners would waken and hear throughout the night some steady sound, a scratching of the cards, a whirring of the spinning-wheel, the thump-thump of the loom. Some said she never slept, and could well grow rich when she worked all night. [Illustration: Sun-dial and Roses at Van Cortlandt Manor.] At last the woman who had stolen her lover--the poor, sickly wife--died. The widower, burdened hopelessly with debts, of course put up in her memory a fine headstone extolling her virtues. One wakeful night, with a sentiment often found in such natures, he went to the graveyard to view his proud but unpaid-for possession. The grass deadened his footsteps, and not till he reached the grave did there rise up from the ground a tall, ghostly figure dressed all in undyed gray wool of her own weaving. It was Hannah Mason. "Hannah," whimpered the widower, trying to take her hand,--with equal thought of her long bank account and his unpaid-for headstone,--"I never really loved any one but you." She broke away from him with an indescribable gesture of contempt and dignity, and went home. She died suddenly four days later of pneumonia, either from the shock or the damp midnight chill of the graveyard. As months passed on travellers still came to the tavern, and the story began to be whispered from one to another that the house was haunted by the ghost of Hannah Mason. Strange sounds were heard at night from the garret where she had always worked; most plainly of all could be heard the whirring of her great wool wheel. When this rumor reached the brothers' ears, they determined to investigate the story and end it forever. That night their vigil began, and soon the sound of the wheel was heard. They entered the garret, and to their surprise found the wheel spinning round. Then Joseph Mason went to the garret and seated himself for closer and more determined watch. He sat in the dark till the wheel began to revolve, then struck a sudden light and found the ghost. A great rat had run out on the spoke of the wheel and when he reached the broad rim had started a treadmill of his own--which made the ghostly sound as it whirred around. Soon this rat grew so tame that he would come out on the spinning-wheel in the daytime, and several others were seen to run around in the wheel as if it were a pleasant recreation. The old brick house still stands with its great grove of Sugar Maples, but it is silent, for the Masons all sleep in the graveyard behind the church high up on the hillside; no travellers stop within the doors, the ghost rats are dead, the spinning-wheel is gone, but the garden still blossoms with eternal youth. Though children no longer gather rose leaves for Rose tobacco, the "Roses of Yesterday" bloom every year; and each June morn, "a thousand blossoms with the day awake," and fling their spicy fragrance on the air. Index Abbotsford, Ivy from, 62; sun-dial from, 219, 377. Achillæa, 238. Aconite, 266. Acrelius, Dr., quoted, 208. Adam's Needle. _See_ Yucca. Adlumia, 183. Agapanthus, 52. Ageratum, as edging, 60, 264. Ague-weed, 146. Akers, Elizabeth, quoted, 152. Alcott, A. B., cited, 120. Alka, 359. Alleghany Vine. _See_ Adlumia. Allen, James Lane, quoted, 195. Almond, flowering, 39, 41, 159. Aloe, 429. Alpine Strawberries, 62. Alstroemeria, 438. Alyssum, sweet, 59-60, 179; yellow, 137. Ambrosia, 48, 235 _et seq._ _Anemone japonica_, 67, 187. Annunzio, G. d', quoted, 94. Apple betty, 211. Apple butter, 212-213. Apple frolic, 211 _et seq._ Apple hoglin, 211. Apple-luns, 209. Apple mose, 209. Apple moy, 209. Apple paring, 207. Apple pie, 208. Apple sauce, 213. Apple slump, 211. Apple stucklin, 211. Apple tansy, 209. Aquilegia, 260. Arabis, 47. Arbors, 384. Arbutus, trailing, 166, 291, 299. Arches, 384, 387, 418. Arch-herbs, 384. Arethusa, 247 _et seq._, 295, 299 _et seq._ Arlington, pergola at, 385. Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 225, 226. Ascott, sun-dial at, 98. Asters, 179, 180. Athol porridge, 393. Azalea, 16. Baby's Breath, 257. Bachelor's Buttons, 52, 176, 265, 291. Back-yard, flowers in, 154. Bacon-and-eggs, 138. Bacon, Lord, cited, 44-45, 55, 56, 144. Balloon Flower. _See_ _Platycodon grandiflorum_. Balloon Vine, 183-184. Balsams, 257. Baltimore Belle Rose, 468. Bancroft, George, Rose Garden of, 471. Banksia Rose, 463. Bare-dames, 17. Barney, Major, landscape art of, 101. Bartram, John, 12. Basil, sweet, 121 _et seq._ Battle of Princeton, 78. Batty Langley, cited, 383. Bayberry, 302. Beata Beatrix, 380. Beaver-tongue, 347-348. Beech, weeping, 231. Bee-hives, 354, 391 _et seq._ Beekman, James, greenhouse of, 19. Bee Larkspur, 265, 268. Bell-bind, 181, 182. Bell Flower, Chinese or Japanese. _See_ _Platycodon grandiflorum_. Belvoir Castle, Lunaria at, 171-172. Bergamot, 166. Bergen Homestead, garden of, 23. Berkeley, Bishop, Apple trees of, 194-195. Bitter Buttons. _See_ Tansy. Bitter-sweet, 25, 238. Black Cohosh, 423-424. Black Roses, 466. Bleeding-heart. _See_ Dielytra. Blind, herb-garden for, 131. Bloodroot, 154, 457. Bluebottles, 265. Blue-eyed Grass, 278-279. Blue-pipe tree, 144. Blue Roses, 253. Blue Sage, 264. Blue Spider-flower, 435. Bluetops, 265. Bluets, 260. Blue-weed. _See_ Viper's Bugloss. Blush Roses, 466. Bocconia. _See_ Plume Poppy. Boneset, 145 _et seq._ Bosquets, 387. Botrys. _See_ Ambrosia. Boulder, sun-dial mounted on, 377. Bouncing Bet, 52, 450. Bourbon Roses, 467. Boursault Roses, 48, 463. Bowers, 385. Bowling greens, 240. Bowne, Eliza Southgate, diary of, 31. Box. _See_ Chapter IV.; also 29, 47, 48, 54, 59, 71, 80, 112, 338. Break-your-spectacles, 265. Brecknock Hall, Box at, 103-104. Bricks for edging, 59, 71; for walls, 71-72, 412 _et seq._ Brier candy, 473. British soldiers, graves of, 77 _et seq._ Broom. _See_ Woad-waxen. Broughton Castle, Box sun-dial at, 97, 98. Brown, Dr. John, cited, 103. Browne, Sir Thomas, quoted, 306. Brunelle. _See_ Prunella. Buck-thorn, 387, 407. Bulbs, 157. Burgundy Roses, 465, 466, 467. Burnet, 305. Burnet-leaved Rose, 466. Burroughs, J., quoted, 195, 451-452. Burying-grounds, Box in, 94; Dogwood in, 155; Thyme in, 303; Spurge in, 434. Butter-and-eggs. _See_ Toad-flax. Buttercups, 166, 291, 294. Cabbage Rose, 297, 320, 459, 460, 471. Calceolarias, 179. Calopogon, 247. Calycanthus, 297. Cambridge University, sun-dial at, 97. Camden, South Carolina, gardens at, 15. Camellia Japonica, 16. Camomile, 192. Campanula, 52, 262. Candy-tuft, as edging, 59. Canker-bloom, 465. Canterbury Bells, 34, 162, 262, 333 _et seq._ Caraway, 341, 342. Carnation, green, 239. Catalpas, 26, 31, 293. Cat-ice, 453. Catnip, 315. Cat road, 452. Cat's-fancy, 315. Cat-slides, 453. Cat-sticks, 453. Cedar hedges, 387. Cedar of Lebanon, 29. Centaurea Cyanus. _See_ Bachelor's Buttons. Cerinthe. _See_ Honeywort. Charles I. sun-dials of, 357. Charles II. sun-dials of, 357. Charlottesville, Virginia, wall at, 414. Charmilles, 387. Chaucer, Geoffrey, quoted, flowers of, 215. Checkerberry, 345. Checker lily. _See_ Fritillaria. Chenopodium Botrys. _See_ Ambrosia. Cherokee Rose, 468. Cherry blossoms, 158, 193, 197. Cheshire, Connecticut, Apple tree in, 194. Chicory, 266 _et seq._ Chinese Bell Flower. _See_ _Platycodon grandiflorum_. Chionodoxa, 137. Chore-girl, 393. Christalan, statue of, 84, 85. Chrysanthemums, 179. Cider, manufacture of, 202 _et seq._ Cider soup, 212. Cinnamon Fern, 332. Cinnamon Roses, 463, 465. Civet, 317. Clair-voyées, 389. Clare, John, quoted, 227, 309. Claymont, Virginia, garden at, 181, 182. Claytonia, 294. Clematis, Jackmanni, 182. Clove apple, 210. Clover, 165. Clover, Italian, 241. Codlins and Cream, 138. Cohosh. _See_ Snakeroot. Colchicum, 455. Columbia, South Carolina, gardens at, 15. Columbine, 260, 424-425. Comfort Apple, 210. Concord, Massachusetts, British dead at, 78; Sunday observance in, 345 _et seq._ Cooper, Susan, quoted, 289. Corchorus, 190. Cornel, 332. Cornelian Rose, 17. Cornuti, Dr., list of plants, 10. Corydalis, 154. Costmary, 347-348. Covert walks, 59. Cowslips, 294. Cowslip mead, 393. Crab Apple trees, 192. Craigie House, 141. Crape Myrtle, 16, 71. Creeping Jenny, 60. Crocus, 136. Crown Imperial, 40; _loquitur_, 322 _et seq._ Culpepper, N., cited, 349. Cupid's Car, 266. Currant, flowering, 298. Cyanus, 33. Cyclamens, 448. Cylindres, 355. Cypress, 406. Daffodil Dell, 84. Daffodils, 137 _et seq._; 318. Dahlias, 176 _et seq._ Daisies, 165. Damask Roses, 462, 465, 466. Dames' Rocket, 422. Dandelion, 117, 135, 154-155, 330. Dante's Garden, 228. Deland, Margaret, quoted, 64, 229, 267, 429. Delphinum. _See_ Larkspur. Derby family, gardens of, 30-31. Deutzias, 189. Devil-in-a-bush, 435. Devil's-bit, 289. Dialling, taught, 372. Dicentra. _See_ Dielytra. Dickens, Charles, sun-dial of, 376. Dickinson, Emily, quoted, 341, 417. Dielytra, 185 _et seq._ Dill, 5, 341-343. Dodocatheon, 448. Dog Roses, 465. Dogtooth Violet, 434, 437. Dogwood, 155. Double Buttercups, 176. Double flowers, 425. Douglas, Gavin, quoted, 257. Dovecotes in England, 394; at Shirley-on-James, 394 _et seq._ Draytons, garden of, 16. Drumthwacket, garden at, 76 _et seq._ Drying Apples, 207. Dudgeon, 99-100. Dutch gardens, 19, 20 _et seq._, 71 _et seq._ Dutchman's Pipe, 184. Dumbledore's Delight, 266. Dyer's Weed. _See_ Woad-waxen. Egyptians, sun-dials of, 359. Elder, 304. Election Day, lilacs bloom on, 148. Elijah's Chariot, 271. Ely Place, rental of, 471. Emerson, R. W., quoted, 138, 376. Endicott, Governor, garden of, 3; nursery of, 24; bequest of Woad-waxen, 24, 25; sun-dial of, 358. Erasmus quoted, 109. Evening Primrose, 10, 428, 429. Everlasting Pea, 427. Fairbanks, Jonathan, sun-dial of, 344, 358. Fairies, charm to see, 304. Fair-in-sight, 334. Fairy Roses, 467. Fairy Thimbles, 337. Faneuil, Andrew, glass house of, 19. Fennel, 5, 341 _et seq._ Fitchburg, Massachusetts, garden at jail, 101, 102. Fitzgerald, Edward, quoted, 316, 330. Flag, sweet, striped, 438; blue, 278. Flagroot, 343 _et seq._ Flax, 262. Flower closes, 240. Flower de Luce, 257 _et seq._ Flowering Currant, 64. Flower-of-death, 441. Flower-of-prosperity, 42. Flower toys, 156. Flushing, Long Island, nurseries at, 26; _et seq._, 156, 230 _et seq._ Fore court, 40. Forget-me-not, 265. Formal garden, 78 _et seq._ Forsythia, 133, 189, 190. Forth rights, 58. Fortune, Robert, 187 _et seq._ Fountains, 69, 85-86, 380, 389. Fox, George, bequest of, 11; at Sylvester Manor, 105. Foxgloves, 162, 427. Frankland, Sir Henry, 29. Franklin cent, 365. Fraxinella, 432. Fringed Gentian, 265, 273, 294. Fritillaria, 81, 165, 446 _et seq._ Fuchsias, 52, 331. Fugio bank note, 364, 365. Fumitory, Climbing, 183. Funerals, in front yard, 51; Tansy at, 128 _et seq._ Funkias, 70. Gardener's Garters, 438. Garden Heliotrope, 313. Garden of Sentiment, 110. Garden Pink. _See_ Pinks. Garden, Significance of name, 280. Garden-viewing, 338. Gardiner, Grissel, 104. Garland of Julia, 323. Garland Roses, 467. Garrets with herbs, 115. Garth, 39. Gas-plant. _See_ Fraxinella. Gate of Yaddo, 81, 82; at Westover-on-James, 388, 389; at Bristol, Rhode Island, 389. Gatherer of simples, 118. Gaultheria, 118. Gem of the Prairies Rose, 468. Genista tinctoria. _See_ Woad-waxen. Geraniums, 244. Germander, 59. Germantown, Pennsylvania, gardens at, 11, 12; sun-dial at, 371 _et seq._ Ghosts in gardens, 431. Gilly flowers, 5. Ginger, Wild, 343. _Girls' Life Eighty Years Ago_, 31. Glory-of-the-snow, 137. Gnomon of sun-dial, 379 _et seq._ Goethe, cited, 431. Goncourt, Edmond de, quoted, 248, 249. Gooseberries, 338, 339 _et seq._ Goosefoot, 59. Gorse, 221, 222. Grace Church Rectory, sun-dial of, 364, 374. Grafting, 391. Grape Hyacinth, 255 _et seq._ Graveyard Ground-pine, 434. Green apples, 200 _et seq._ Green, color, 138, 233 _et seq._ Green galleries, 385. Greenhouse, of James Beekman, 19; of T. Hardenbrook, 19. Ground Myrtle, 439. Groundsel, 292. Guinea-hen flower, 447. Gypsophila, 175. Hair-dye, of Box, 99. Hampton Court, Box at, 94. Hampton, garden at, 14, 58, 60, 95, 101. Hancock garden, 30. Hawdods, 265. Hawthorn, 292, 300. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, quoted, 153, 299. Headaches, 309. Heart pea, 184. Heather, 221, 222. Hedgehog Roses, 464. Hedgerows, 399 _et seq._, 403 _et seq._ Hedges, of Box, 99; of Lilac, 143-144, 406; of Privet, 406, 408; of Locust, 406. Heliotrope, scent of, 319. Hermerocallis. _See_ Lemon Lily. Hemlock hedges, 406. Henbane, 434. Hepatica, 259. Herbaceous border, 113 _et seq._ Herber, 113, 384. Herbert, George, quoted, 114. Herb twopence, 61. Hermits, 245. Herrick, flowers of, 216. Hesperis, 421-422. Hiccough, 342. Higginson, T. W., quoted, 74. Hips of Roses, 472. Holly, 406. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, quoted, 91, 139-140, 226, 268, 301, 313. Hollyhocks, 5, 6, 33, 52, 332 _et seq._, 336. Honesty. _See_ Lunaria. Honeyblob gooseberries, 338. Honey, from Thyme, 303; in drinks, 393. Honeysuckle, 182, 332, 450. Honeywort, 33, 442. Hood, quoted, 228-229. Hopewell, Lilacs at, 148. Houstonia, 260. Howitt Garden, 223. Howitt, Mary, quoted, 326, 330, 345. Humming-birds, 243. Hundred-leaved Rose, 460, 469. Hutchinson, Governor, garden of, 54. Hyacinths, 257. Hydrangea, 182; blue, 260; at Capetown, 261. Hyssop, 54. Iberis. _See_ Candy-tuft. Independence Trees. _See_ Catalpa. Indian Hill, 144, 415 _et seq._ Indian Pipe, 455. Indian plant names, 293 _et seq._ Innocence. _See_ Houstonia. Iris, 427. _See_ also Flower de Luce. Italian gardens, 75 _et seq._ Jack-in-the-pulpit, 154. Jacob's Ladder, 265. James I., quoted, 62. Japan, flowers from, 40, 67, 157, 158, 406. Jenoffelins, 17. Jewett, S. O., quoted, 38, 49. Joepye-weed, 145 _et seq._ Johnson, Dr. Samuel, dial motto of, 219. Jonquils, 318. Joseph and Mary, 437, 438. Josselyn, John, quoted, 4 _et seq._, 8. Joy-of-the-ground, 441. Judas tree, 158. June Roses, 464. Kalendars, 355. Kalm, cited, 128, 203, 408. Karr, Alphonse, quoted, 272, 302, 453, 454. Katherine flowers, 435. Keats, cited, 223 _et seq._ Kiskatomas nut, 294. Kiss-me-at-the-garden-gate, 135. Kitchen door, 69. Knots, described, 54 _et seq._ Labels, 217. Labrador Indians, sun-dials of, 359. Laburnum, 168, 169, 231. Ladies' Delights, 48, 133 _et seq._ Lad's Love. _See_ Southernwood. Lady's Slipper, 293. Lafayette, influence of, 241; dial of, 357. Lamb, Charles quoted, 360. Landor, Walter Savage, quoted, 140, 362-363, 415, 420. Larch, 300. Larkspur, 33, 162, 267 _et seq._ Latin names, 291. Lavender, 5, 33, 121. Lavender Cotton, 5, 61. Lawns, 53, 240. Lawson, William, quoted, 56. Lebanon, Cedar of, 29. Lemon Lily, 45, 80. Lennox, Lady, Box sun-dial of, 97-98. Leucojum, 234-235. Lilacs, at Hopkinton, 29, also 140-153, 318 _et seq._, 406. Lilies, 180. Linen, drying of, 99; bleaching of, 99. Linnæus, classification of, 282; horologe of, 381-382; discovery of daughter of, 431 _et seq._ Liricon-fancy, 45. Little Burgundy Rose, 467. Live-forever. _See_ Orpine. Live Oaks, 16. Lobelia, 33, 271-272. Loch, 259. Locust, as house friend, 22-23; blossoms sold, 155; on Long Island, 156; in Narragansett, 401 _et seq._; in a hedge, 406-407. Loggerheads, 265. Lombardy Poplars, 27. London Pride, 45, 443. Longfellow, quoted, 141; garden of, 102, 431. Lotus, 74. Lovage-root, 343. Love divination, with Lilacs, 150; with Apples, 205 _et seq._; with Southernwood, 349. Love-in-a-huddle, 435. Love-in-a-mist, 435. Love lies bleeding, 287. Love philtres, 118 _et seq._ Lowell, J. R., quoted, 48-49, 89, 227, 277. Luck-lilac, 150. Lunaria, 5, 33, 170 _et seq._ Lungwort, 437-438. Lupines, 33, 163, 253, 275 _et seq._ Lychnis. _See_ Mullein Pink; also London Pride. Lyre flower. _See_ Dielytra. Lyres, 385, 386. Madame Plantier Rose, 71, 463, 464. Magnolia-on-the-Ashley, gardens at, 16. Magnolias, 26, 71, 155-156. Maiden's Blush Roses, 466. Maize, 293-294. Maltese Cross, 443. Manheim, Rose for rent in, 470. Maple, only Celtic plant name, 292. Marigolds, 33, 52, 315 _et seq._ Maritoffles, 17. Markham, Gervayse, cited, 40, 54, 115. Marsh Mallow, 434. Marsh Marigold, 294. Marvell, Andrew, quoted, 231, 239, 381. Mather, Cotton, quoted, 337, 342. Matrimony Vine, 185, 449-450. Mayflower, 166, 291, 299. Maze, described, 54-55; in America, 55; at Sylvester Manor, 106. Meadow Rue, 175-176. Meet-her-in-the-entry, Kiss-her-in-the-buttery, 135. Meeting-plant, 348. Meet-me-at-the-garden-gate, 135. Meredith, Owen, quoted, 166. Meresteads, 3. Meridian lines, 355. Mertensia, 438. Michigan Roses, 62, 468. Mignonette, scent of, 319. Milkweed silk, 328, 331. Mills, for cider-making, 203. Minnow-tansy, 127. Mint family, 117-264. Miskodeed, 294. Missionary plant, 25. Mitchell, Dr., disinterment of, 129 _et seq._ Mithridate, 123. Moccasin flower, 293. Mole cider, 212. Molucca Balm, 436-437. Money-in-both-pockets, 170 _et seq._ Moneywort, 60-61. Monkshood, 266, 329, 433. Moon vine, 430-431. Moosewood, 452 _et seq._ Morning-glory, 181-182. Morristown, sun-dial at, 359, 374. Morris, William, quoted, 240, 425. Morse, S. B. F., lines on sun-dial motto, 363. Mosquitoes, 74. Moss Roses, 345, 465, 466. Mottoes on sun-dials, 88, 360, _et seq._ Mountain Fringe. _See_ Adlumia. Mount Atlas Cedar, 29. Mount Auburn Cemetery, sun-dial at, 373. Mount Vernon, garden at, 11-12; sun-dial at, 369. Mourning Bride, 297, 339 _et seq._ Mulberries, 27. Mullein Pink, 174. Musk Roses, 464, 469. Names, old English, 284 _et seq._ Naked Boys, 455. Napanock, garden at, 69-70. Naushon, Gorse on, 222; sun-dial at, 374. Nemophila, 315. New Amsterdam, flowers of, 17-18. _New England's Prospect_, 3. New England's Rarities, 5. Nicotiana, 423. Nigella, 33, 434, 435. Night-scented Stock, 421-422. Nightshade, 448. Night Violets, 422. Noon-marks, 355. None-so-pretty, 135. Oak of Jerusalem. _See_ Ambrosia. Obesity, cure for, 122. Old Man. _See_ Southernwood. Oleanders, 52, 329-330. Olitory, 113. Open knots, 57-58. Ophir Farm, sun-dial at, 376 _et seq._ Opyn-tide, meaning of, 143. Orange Lily, 50. Orchard seats, 192. Orpine, 444-445. Orris-root, 259. Osage Orange, 69, 406. Ostrowskia, 262. "Out-Landish Flowers," 58. Oxeye Daisies, introduction to America, 25. Oxford, sun-dial at, 97. Pansies, 134, 318. Pappoose-root, 293. Parkman, Francis, Rose Garden of, 471. Parley, Peter, quoted, 343. Parsons, T. W., on Lilacs, 153. Parterre, 58 _et seq._ Pastorius, Father, 11. Patagonian Mint, 347-348. Patience, 6. Paulownias, 29. Peach blossoms, 158. Peacocks, 395 _et seq._ Pear blossoms, scent of, 318. Pedestals for sun-dials, 374 _et seq._ Pennsylvania, sun-dials in, 370 _et seq._ Penn, William, encouraged gardens, 11. Peony, 42 _et seq._ Peppermint, as medicine, 118. Pergolas, 82-83, 385 _et seq._ Peristyle, 389. Periwinkle, 62, 439 _et seq._ Perpetual Roses, 468. Persians, colors of, 253; plant names of, 292; flower love of, 462. Persian Lilac, 152. Persian Yellow Rose, 320, 469. Peter's Wreath, 41-42. Petunias, 179, 423. Phlox, 40, 45, 162, 423. Piazzas, 388-389. Pig-nuts, 332. _Pilgrim's Progress_, quotations from, 201. Pinckney, E. L., floriculture by, 14. Pine at Yaddo, 90. Pink-of-my-Joan, 135. Pinks, as edgings, 34, 47, 61, 292, 422-423. Pippins, 345. Plane trees in Pliny's garden, 97. Plantain, 197, 443-444. Plant-of-twenty-days, 42. _Platycodon grandiflorum_, 262. Playhouse Apple tree, 199. Pliny, quoted, 342, 349; gardens of, 96-97. Plum blossoms, 157-158. Plume Poppy, 175 _et seq._ Plymouth, Massachusetts, early gardens at, 3. Poet's Narcissus, 318. Pogonia, 247. Poison Ivy, 403. Polling, of trees, 387. Polyantha Rose, 467. Polyanthus, as edging, 62. Pomander, 212. Pomatum, 209-210. Pompeii, standards at, 87 _et seq._ Pond Lily, 345. Pony Roses, 467. Poppies, 163-164, 243-244, 309 _et seq._, 431. Pops, 337. Portable dials, 356-357. Portulaca, 178-179. Potatoes, planted by Raleigh, 230. Potocka, Countess, quoted, 327. Pot-pourri, 471. Preston Garden, 15-16, 18, 24, 101. Prick-song plant. _See_ Lunaria. Primprint. _See_ Privet. Prince Nurseries, 26 _et seq._, 230. Privet, 54, 317, 406, 408. Provence Roses, 459. Prunella, 264-265. Prygmen, 99. Pudding, 304. Pulmonaria, 437-438. Pumps, old, 67-68. Pussy Willows, 155, 247. Puzzle-love, 435. Pyrethrum, 242. _Quabbin_, 419. Queen Anne, hatred of Box, 94. Queen's Maries, bower of, 103. Queen of the Prairies Rose, 468. Quincy, Josiah, 407. Ragged Robin, 291. Ragged Sailors, 265. Rail fences, 399 _et seq._ Railings, 62. Raleigh, Sir Walter, garden of, 230. Rapin, René, quoted, 94, 323; on gardens, 227. Red, influence of, 251. Remontant Roses, 468. Rent, of a Rose, 469 _et seq._ _Rescue of an Old Place_, cited, 103, 290. Rhodes, Cecil, garden of, 261. Rhododendrons, 42, 182, 244, 245. Ridgely Garden, 57, 60, 95, 101. Ring dials, 356. Rock Cress. _See_ Arabis. Rocket. _See_ Dames' Rocket. Rose Acacia, 185, 406. Rose Campion, 33, 174, 175. Rose Garden, at Yaddo, 81 _et seq._ Rosemary, 5, 55, 59, 110. Rose of Four Seasons, 467. Rose of Plymouth, 295. Rose Tavern, 470. Rose tobacco, 475. Rose-water, 472. Rossetti, D. G., picture by, 380; quoted, 380. Roxbury Waxwork. _See_ Bittersweet. Rue, 5, 110, 123 _et seq_, 434. Ruskin, John, quoted, 243, 283, 255, 279, 309. Sabbatia, 295. Saffron-tea, 118. Sage, 125 _et seq._ Sag Harbor, sun-dial at, 362. Salpiglossis, 262. Salt Box House, 128. Sand, in parterres, 56, 58. Santolina. _See_ Lavender Cotton. Sapson Apples, 201-202. Sassafras, 343. Satin-flower, 170 _et seq._ Sauce Saracen, 472. Scarlet Lightning, 443. Scilla, 255. Scotch Roses, 48, 464, 469. Scott, Sir Walter, sun-dial of, 219, 377. Scythes, 391. Seeds, sale of, 32 _et seq._ Serpentine Walls, 414. Setwall. _See_ Valerian. Seven Sisters, 435. Seven Sisters Rose, 463. Shade alleys, 59. Shaded Walks, 64. Shakespeare Border, 217 _et seq._ Sheep bones, as edgings, 57-58. Shelley, Garden, 223. Shell flower, 436-437. Shirley Poppies, 255, 312. Simples, 115. Skepes, 354, 391 _et seq._ Slugs, in Box, 95. Smithsonian Institution, sun-dials in, 357-358. Snakeroot, 423-424. Snapdragons, 33, 175. Snowballs, 71. Snowberry, 169. Snowdrops, 234. Snow in Summer, 47. Snow Pink. _See_ Pinks. Soldier and his Wife, 438. Sops-o'-wine. _See_ Sapson. Sorrel, 6, 240, 332. South Carolina, gardens of, 14. Southernwood, 5, 341, 348 _et seq._ Southey, Robert, quoted, 266. Spenser, Edmund, quoted, 54; flowers of, 215, 284. Spider-flower. _See_ Love-in-a-mist. Spiders in medicine, 303, 343. Spiderwort, 435-436. Spiræas, 189. Spitfire Plant. _See_ Fraxinella. Spring Beauty, 294. Spring Snowflake, 234, 235. Spruce gum, 332. Spurge, Cypress, 434 _et seq._ Squirrel Cups, 260. Squirt, for water, 390. Star of Bethlehem, 34, 235. Star Pink. _See_ Pink. Statues in garden, 85, 389. Stockton, Richard, letter of, 30-31. Stones, for edging, 58. Stonecrop, 135. Stone walls, 399 _et seq._ Strawberry Bush. _See_ Calycanthus. Striped Grass, 438-439. Striped Lily, 61. Stuyvesant, Peter, garden of, 18-19. Succory. _See_ Chicory. Summer-houses, 392. Summer Roses, 468. Summer savory, 124. Summer-sots, 17. Sun-dials of Box, 62, 80, 87, 88, 97 _et seq._ Sun-flowers, 178, 287. Sunken gardens, 72-73. Sunshine Bush, 189. Swan River Daisy, 263, 264. Sweet Alyssum. _See_ Alyssum. Sweet Brier, 6, 25, 48, 302, 464, 465. Sweet Fern, 2. Sweet Flag, 343. Sweet Johns, 285. Sweet Marjoram, 124. Sweet Peas, 33, 178, 224. Sweet Rocket, 34. Sweet Shrub. _See_ Calycanthus. Sweet Williams, 34, 162, 285 _et seq._ Sylvester Manor, gardens at, 104 _et seq._ Syringas, 71. Tansy, 6, 126 _et seq._ Tansy bitters, 128. Tansy cakes, 128. Tasmania, Thistles in, 26. Tea Roses, 320, 469. Telling the bees, 393. Temperance Reform, 204. Tennyson, on blue, 266; on white, 420-421. Thaxter, Celia, cited, 311. Thistles, in Tasmania, 26. Thomas, Edith, quoted, 229. Thoreau, H. D., quoted, 148, 197, 198, 199, 275, 276, 345, 346, 417. Thoroughwort, 145 _et seq._ Thrift, sun-dials in, 97; as edging, 61-62. Thyme, 34, 60, 302 _et seq._ Tiger Lilies, 45, 162. Toad-flax, 450 _et seq._ Tobacco. _See_ Nicotiana. Tongue-plant, 347-348. Topiary work in England, 408; at Wellesley, 409 _et seq._; in California, 412. Tradescantia. _See_ Spiderwort. Trailing Arbutus, 299. Traveller's Rest, sun-dial at, 350, 370. Tree arbors, 199, 384-385. Tree Peony. _See_ Peony. Trillium, 154, 457, 458. Trumpet vine, 449-450. Tuckahoe, Box at, 102, 105. Tudor gardens, 55. Tudor Place, garden at, 103. Tulips, 18, 138, 168. Turner, cited, 61, 236. Tusser, Thomas, quoted, 115. Twopenny Grass, 61. Valerian, 34, 313 _et seq._ Van Cortlandt Manor, garden at, 20 _et seq._ Van Cortlandt, Pierre, 21. Vancouver's Island, 26. Van der Donck, Adrian, quoted, 17-18. Velvet Roses, 466. Vendue, 50-51. Venus' Navelwort, 33, 441-442. Versailles, Box at, 97. Victoria Regia, 74-75. Vinca. _See_ Periwinkle. Viola tricolor, 134. Violets, edgings of, 71; in backyard, 154; gallant grace of, 166; scent of, 259, 317-318. Viper's Bugloss, 273-274. Virginia Allspice. _See_ Calycanthus. Virginia, sun-dials in, 369-370; Rose-bowers in, 385; lyres in, 385. Virgin's Bower. _See_ Adlumia. Wake Robin. _See_ Trillium. Walden Pond, 198, 345. Walpole, New Hampshire, garden in, 237 _et seq._, 464 _et seq._ Walton, Izaak, 127. Wandis, 62. Warwick, Lady, sun-dial of, 98; gardens of, 84, 85, 110; Shakespeare Border of, 217. Washings, semi-annual, 99. Washington, Betty, sun-dial of, 370. Washington Family, in England, 367; sun-dial of, 367 _et seq._ Washington, George, sun-dials of, 357, 368. Washington, Martha, garden of, 12-13. Washington, Mary, sun-dial of, 369; garden of, 370. Wassailing, 206. Waterbury, Connecticut, sun-dial at, 379. Waterford, Virginia, bee-hives at, 393. Water gardens, 73-74. Watering-pot, 391. Watson, Forbes, cited, 425, 433. Waybred, 443-444. Weed-smother, 300. Weeds of old garden, 8, 48, 52. Wellesley, gardens at, 409 _et seq._ Well-sweeps, 68, 390. White animals on farm; 416 _et seq._ White Garden, 415 _et seq._ Whitehall, home of Bishop Berkeley, 194, 195. White Man's Foot, 443-444. White Satin, 170 _et seq._ White, value in garden, 157, 255, 419. Whiteweed, 291. _See_ Oxeye Daisy. Whitman, Walt, quoted, 152-153. Whittier, J. G., sun-dial motto by, 373-374. Wild gardens, 237 _et seq._, 453-454. Wine-sap. _See_ Sapson. Winter, in a garden, 327 _et seq._ Winter posy, 131. Winthrop, John, quoted, 1, 3. Wistaria, 166, 182, 188 _et seq._, 232. Woad-waxen, 24, 25. Wordsworth, W., quoted, 193. Wort, 113. Wort-cunning, 113. Yaddo, garden at, 81 _et seq._ Yew, 406. York and Lancaster Rose, 62, 460 _et seq._ Yucca, 293, 429-430. Zodiac, signs of, on sun-dial, 376. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: A prescription symbol on page 304 is represented in this text as "Rx". Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected without comment. One example of an obvious error is on page 126 where the word "perservation" was changed to "preservation" in the phrase: "... preservation of all perishable food...." With the exception of obvious errors, inconsistencies in the author's spelling and use of punctuation and hyphenation are left unchanged, as in the original text. One error which has been retained in this version is on Page 415, where the attribution line for the poem reads "Walter Savage Landor" while the correct author of the poem is Alfred Lord Tennyson. Illustrations have been moved to the nearest, most appropriate paragraph break.