THE SUNKEN GARDEN
Extending directly west from the porch for 150 feet is an open pergola,
of simple construction, but fast gaining beauty from the rapid growth of
climbers which Polly and Johnson have planted. It is floored with brick
for the protection of dainty feet, and near the western end cluster
rustic benches, chairs, tables, and such things as women and gardeners
love. Facing the west 50 feet of this pergola is Polly's sunken flower
garden, which is her special pride. It extends south 100 feet, and is
built in the side of the hill so that its eastern wall just shows a
coping above the close-cropped lawn. Of course the western wall is much
higher, as the lawn slopes sharply; but it was filled in so as to make
this wall-enclosed garden quite level. The walls which rise above the
flower beds 4½ feet, are beginning to look decorated, thanks to creeping
vines and other things which a cunning gardener and Polly know. Flowers
of all sorts--annuals, biennials (triennials, perhaps), and
perennials--cover the beds, which are laid out in strange, irregular
fashion, far indeed from my rectangular style. These beds please the
eye of the mistress, and of her friends, too, if they are candid in
their remarks, which I doubt.
While excavating the garden we found a granite boulder shaped somewhat
like an egg and nearly five feet long. It was a big thing, and not very
shapely; but it came from the soil, and Polly wanted it for the base of
her sun-dial. We placed it, big end down, in the mathematical centre of
the garden (I insisted on that), and sunk it into the ground to make it
solid; then a stone mason fashioned a flat space on the top to
accommodate an old brass dial that Polly had found in Boston. The dial
is not half bad. From the heavy, octagonal brass base rises a slender
quill to cast its shadow on the figured circle, while around this circle
old English characters ask, "Am I not wise, who note only bright hours?"
A plat of sod surrounds the dial, and Polly goes to it at least once a
day to set her watch by the shadow of the quill, though I have told her
a hundred times that it is seventeen minutes off standard time. I am
convinced that this estimable lady wilfully ignores conventional time
and marks her cycles by such divisions as "catalogue time," "seed-buying
time," "planting time," "sprouting time," "spraying time," "flowering
time," "seed-gathering time," "mulching time," and "dreary time," until
the catalogues come again. I know it seemed no time at all until she had
let me in to the tune of $687 for the pergola, walls, and garden. She
bought the sun-dial with her own money, I am thankful to say, and it
doesn't enter into this account. I think it must have cost a pretty
penny, for she had a hat "made over" that spring.
Polly has planted the lawn with a lot of shade trees and shrubs, and has
added some clumps of fruit trees. Few trees have been planted near the
house; the four fine oaks, from which we take our name, stand without
rivals and give ample shade. The great black oak near the east end of
the porch is a tower of strength and beauty, which is "seen and known of
all men," while the three white oaks farther to the west form a clump
which casts a grateful shade when the sun begins to decline. The seven
acres of forest to the east is left severely alone, save where the
carriage drive winds through it, and Polly watches so closely that the
foot of the Philistine rarely crushes her wild flowers. Its sacredness
recalls the schoolgirl's definition of a virgin forest: "One in which
the hand of man has never dared to put his foot into it." Polly wanders
in this grove for hours; but then she knows where and how things grow,
and her footsteps are followed by flowers. If by chance she brushes one
down, it rises at once, shakes off the dust, and says, "I ought to have
known better than to wander so far from home."
She keeps a wise eye on the vegetable garden, too, and has stores of
knowledge as to seed-time and harvest and the correct succession of
garden crops. She and Johnson planned a greenhouse, which Nelson built,
for flowers and green stuff through the winter, she said; but I think it
is chiefly a place where she can play in the dirt when the weather is
bad. Anyhow, that glass house cost the farm $442, and the interest and
taxes are going on yet. I as well as Polly had to do some building that
autumn. Three more chicken-houses were built, making five in all. Each
consists in ten compartments twenty feet wide, of which each is intended
to house forty hens. When these houses were completed, I had room for
forty pens of forty each, which was my limit for laying hens. In
addition was one house of ten pens for half-grown chickens and fattening
fowls. It would take the hatch of another year to fill my pens, but one
must provide for the future. These three houses cost, in round numbers,
$2100,--five times as much as Polly's glass house,--but I was not going
to play in them.
I also built a cow-house on the same plan as the first one, but about
half the size. This was for the dry cows and the heifers. It cost $2230,
and gave me stable room enough for the waiting stock, so that I could
count on forty milch cows all the time, when my herd was once balanced.
Forty cows giving milk, six hundred swine of all ages, putting on fat or
doing whatever other duty came to hand, fifteen or sixteen hundred hens
laying eggs when not otherwise engaged, three thousand apple trees
striving with all their might to get large enough to bear fruit,--these
made up my ideal of a factory farm; and it looked as if one year more
would see it complete.
No rain fell in October, and my brook became such a little brook that I
dared to correct its ways. We spent a week with teams, ploughs, and
scrapers, cutting the fringe and frills away from it, and reducing it to
severe simplicity. It is strange, but true, that this reversion to
simplicity robbed it of its shy ways and rustic beauty, and left it
boldly staring with open eyes and gaping with wide-stretched mouth at
the men who turned from it. We put in about two thousand feet of tile
drainage on both sides of what Polly called "that ditch," and this
completed the improvements on the low lands. The land, indeed, was not
too low to bear good crops, but it was lightened by under drainage and
yielded more each after year.
The tiles cost me five cents per foot, or $100 for the whole. The work
was done by my own men.