AN AUTUMN GARDEN
The cottage gardens are ceremonious and bright with phlox and sunflower
and hollyhock; the orchards are yellow with apple, and of all sunburnt
hues with plum; in the descending lane you wade in a world of
ragwort, knapweed and Canterbury-bell, with your head in the world of
honeysuckle; and, parting the hazel branches to seek their branching
clusters, you see now and then in the valley a farmhouse on whose walls
and roofs the hues of fruit and flower all meet harmoniously. They
meet as the colours of many pictures meet in some ancient palette,
or as Plato and Catullus and Sidney and Shelley meet in some grey
schoolmaster.
In every Autumn the farmhouse, with its old tiles and new and its
glowing bricks (suppressing easily a few of a putrid blue scattered
here and there), seems, in spite of its age, to be a great new flower.
It is the royal flower of autumn. It expresses at once all that fruit
and flower upon the hill have been expressing laboriously and word by
word.
Perfect gay youth and sage antiquity are mingled in the aspect of the
house; just as, in an autumn dawn, the gradual veiled golden pomp of
serene victory speaks, to one mood, of the happy and mellow antiquity
of the world, but, to another mood, speaks of the sublime, insurgent
youth which all nights nourish and equip and send forth over the land.
In winter it is old; it has apparently been long fortifying itself
against the foreign cold of the landscape, snowy white or windy grey.
In spring it is old; the green garlands it as in tender mockery. In
summer it is old; it is impatient of the bragging rose on its walls and
the multiplication of leaf and flower. But in September it is at home,
as if after an exile; it remembers only pleasant things--the autumns
of two centuries, their harvest, their fruit, their blossom, their
hedgerow vintages of bryony and cornel and thorn, their ruddy moons.
Gathered about it are the farm buildings of the same colour, stacks of
dark hay, sharp-breasted ricks of corn, maternal, warm oast-houses and
orchard and garden, all of the same family.
In the misty days, when no gleam falls from the warm sky on grass or
water or fruit, you would say that the sun had stalled his horses for
a season within the farmhouse walls; so much they glow; so glorious
are they. I have seen the radiant cart-horses coming with grave nods
through the farmyard at dawn as if they were to be yoked to the chariot
of the sun; the red-haired carter was at least a Phaeton, a son of
Apollo if not Apollo himself.
The garden borders are discreetly furnished, so that they are now
as clouds in the neighbourhood of the sun, doing it honour by their
liveries. They are populous with sun-flowers, hollyhocks (tall,
solemn halberds at evening, guarding the outmost edge and held up
mysteriously), red-hot pokers rising out of a lake of rose of Sharon
and nasturtium, into which run promontories and peninsulas of
snap-dragon, rocket, Shirley poppy, carnation and phlox of every hue
that white and red confederate can invent; here and there fuchsia trees
in rivers of autumn crocus, great poppies and evening primrose, and at
their feet, like long, coloured shadows stretching away, red flax and
pansies and the recurved stone-crop which the tortoise-shell butterfly
loves. These bodies of colour change year by year--in one autumn the
pansies made a long, curled purple dragon among all the rest; but
always the taller flowers look as if stopped short in the mazes of a
dance which is soon to be resumed. Between these two borders are two
little lawns divided by a path, whereon the fanciful might see a little
beam of the house’s influence in the peacock butterfly that returns
continually to one stone, settling there as the wanton light cast on
ceiling and wall by a raised glass settles when the glass is put down.
It is not a rich or choice garden, though a fitting one. Yet an earlier
head of the farmer’s family--a student of allegorical prints and
emblems, the designer of at least one, in which his own garden had
notoriously served as a model for the Eden--was so much enamoured of
the flowers and the house that he came, towards the end of his life,
to think himself over-worldly in his esteem of them, but failed to
overcome it, and, a little before his death, in the free wanderings of
his mind, announced that he saw Paradise, and that it was even as his
garden was, “nasturtiums and all, Jacob” (which was a thrust at the
said son, a disliker of those flowers)--except that the vainglorious
new carnations were not there.
Travelling beyond the garden, the house declares its lordship over
four limes that stand before it, in the home field, at just such a
distance that the flying blackbird, frightened from the garden, will
stop there instead of going to the hedge beyond. As far as to these
trees the house sends out its light and virtue. Approaching them from
the hills, the eye of the wayfarer first salutes the out-buildings,
the ricks and the elms; it turns to the house and gratefully pauses
there; and last it glides to the limes and is at rest, delighted by
that one lyric effort, yet with a slight gravity--even a sigh--at the
accomplishment of its sweet toil. Then it is to be seen how noble
is the order of the four trees. They are not in circle, square or
line; they make no figure, except that they are in a sharp curve,
straightening out as it nears you, so that they have a power as of
the first ships of a fleet, coming into sight round a promontory and
suggesting majestic numbers. At nightfall the swallows twitter among
the topmost branches, sweetly, trippingly, one at a time, or in pairs
and companies, for a little while. Suddenly lamps are lit within the
house.