and rush them out to sea, know how to overcome the inertia of the great
hulks. They tug spitefully, but the ship has to move, and you see the
white sails already beginning to fall down from the yards, for the work
where the blue water begins. It may be a grotesque association, but have
you never seen a small woman, with a wonderful concentration of energy,
tug her great lazy hulk of a husband out into the broad field of earnest
endeavor in much the same way? Once there, his inertia overcome, the
feminine tow-line cast off, he did brave and honest work, making the
race quite abreast of average men. But the woman, who tugged him from
his lazy anchorage out into a good offing, did as much for that man as
he ever did for himself. Nothing more fortunate can happen to a great
many men than that they be towed out to sea early. And in not a few
instances, nothing more unfortunate could happen than that they should
ever return. This last remark would have been softened a little, had it
not been repeated with emphasis by a tender-hearted woman.
Just after a winter rain, there are occasionally realistic views of the
great city in the foreground, which are so ugly that one never forgets
them. The hills are brought nigh; all the houses seem to rise out of
the desert, and along the water front the spars of shipping look like a
forest which has been blasted by some devouring flame. It is certain
that these forests will never sprout again; and there is such a dead
look that, were it not for the little tugs going back and forth, one
might imagine that all men had hastened away, and left the city to
silence and the desert. But after nightfall the thousand lamps glorify
the city; the blackened forest along the water front has faded out; and
a mild sort of charity steals over one, suggesting that, after all, it
is a goodly city set upon a hill, and that its peculiar beauty is not
alone in appearing to the best advantage by gaslight. The background of
hills is more angular and jerky than ever before, because all the
softening effect has been taken out of the atmosphere. There is no
distance, no dreamy haze to spread like a gossamer veil over these hard
outlines. Nature is wonderfully honest and self-revealing. Evidently
these hills were never finished. They lack all the rounded beauty, all
the gentle curves and slopes, and all the fine touches of a perfected
work. They look as if, when in a plastic state, they had been set by
the jerk of an earthquake. Who knows but another jerk might take these
kinks out and tone down all these stiff angles, and otherwise put on the
finishing touches? If it must be done in this way, let the softening
undulations be as gentle as possible. It is very inconvenient to get up
in the morning and find that the chimney-top is either on the garden
walk, or that it has been turned three-quarters round, in the very
wantonness and devilment of Nature.
Some day there will be a closer recognized relation between landscape
gardening and landscape painting. If the work is done badly in either
department, it will make little difference whether an acre of canvas is
hung upon the wall, or whether lines have been badly drawn and colors
crudely laid on to an acre of earth. The style of trimming trees so that
they are a libel on Nature, and the geometrical diagrams worked up in a
garden, can hardly be referred to any very high standard of art. But if
my neighbor is delighted with trees representing spindles, ramrods,
paint brushes, cylinders, cones, and what not, I would no more quarrel
with him than with the man who is under the pleasing delusion that he is
an artist, because, in a more remote way, he has been traducing Nature
with certain grotesque figures laid on to canvas.
A hedge will bear cutting into line, because it is to be treated as
nothing more than the frame of the landscape to be worked up. The former
may be as stiff and artificial in its way, as a gilt or mahogany frame,
and do no violence to good taste; if it hides an ugly fence, a point has
been gained. One cannot expect much diversity of surface on a single
acre. A large lawn will give the effect of greater flatness. If you find
the hired gardener, bred in some noted school in Europe, setting out
trees in straight lines, exhort him to penitence at once. If he remain
obdurate, cut the trees down with your little hatchet and pitch them
over the fence, but keep your temper as sweet as a June morning. He will
see by that time that you have ideas to be respected. Grouping the
trees, on the lawn and elsewhere, neutralizes, in part, the effect of a
flat surface; it is better than the poor apology of a little hillock,
which suggests an ant's nest, or that a coyote may be burrowing in that
vicinity. Something may be done in the way of massing colors with
annuals to produce good effects. But ribbon gardening, according to the
patterns laid down by florists, has no nearer relation to art in
landscape gardening than crochet work has to landscape painting. It is a
fantastic trick, which may very well please rural clowns, but is in some
sort an offense to good taste.
Neither is it necessary that all the trees and shrubs which a florist
has for sale should be admitted to the private garden. More than
one-half of them have no merit; they neither set off the grounds, nor
have any peculiarity worth a moment's attention. They figure in the
florist's list under very attractive names, but if taken home they will
probably prove but scrubby little bushes, fit only to be dedicated to
the rubbish-heap and the annual bon-fire in the Spring. A plant or a
shrub which gives no pleasure either in its form or the color of its
flower, and has no suggestive associations, may do well enough for a
botanical garden. Many of us may like occasionally to look at a
hippopotamus or an elephant in the menagerie, or at the zoological
gardens, but we don't want these specimens brought home to our private
grounds. Some of the _sequoia gigantea_ family do very well in the
forest. Once in a lifetime we can afford to make a journey to look at
them. But why undertake to bring home one of these vegetable elephants
as a specimen, when we know that it will require a thousand years for
its growth, and that most of us will come a little short of that measure
of time? Some trees may be planted for posterity, and others may be
safely left to take their chances. If any one wishes to contemplate upon
his grounds a shrub of the future dimensions of one of the Calaveras
group, let him plant it at once. Most of the vegetable monsters went out
with the ichthyosaurus, and as for the few that remain, they will yet be
an affront to the pigmies who are swarming on the earth.
"Why did we plant cherry trees along the rear fence?" To make friends
with the birds and the children. You can get more songs from the birds,
and more of song and glee from the children, on a small investment in
cherry trees than in any other way. Those last year's birds' nests tell
the story. The robin, thrush, oriole and linnet will come early and stay
late. Groups of children will come in the front way, and will never be
so happy as when invited to go down the rear garden walk, unless in the
supremest moments when they step from your shoulders into the trees,
and never come back until they have closed their fingers on the last
cherry. The man who is not satisfied to divide all his cherries with the
birds and the children is a curmudgeon; notably so is he who plants
cherry trees in front of his lot, and gets into a white heat of rage
because boys of average Sunday school antecedents could not resist the
temptation to borrow the fruit. Besides, the eclectic judgment of
children, the sparrow, the yellow-jacket and the honey-bee will always
tell you where the best nectarines and plums may be found.
It is well to reserve a nook for little experiments in horticulture or
floriculture which one wishes to make. A great many theories may be
brought home and decently buried, or be made to sprout in such a corner.
The larger the spaces, the more one will be tempted to use the spade at
odd hours; and none of us has yet found out all the remedial qualities
of dry earth freshly turned over day after day. A hard day's work,
taxing brain more than hands, brings on a degree of nervous
irritability. There is a dry electrical atmosphere; the attrition of
trade winds and sand half the year; and the rushing to and fro of busy
and excited men, charged as full of electricity as they can hold, and
bent upon charging everybody else, so that at nightfall the sparks will
snap at the finger-ends, and the air will crackle like a brush-heap just
set on fire. Now, the earth is a very good conductor. It is better to
let this surplus electricity run down the fingers on to the spade, and
along its shining steel blade into the ground, than to blow up your best
friend. An hour of honest battle with the weeds is better than any
domestic thunder storm. By that time the sun will have dropped down into
the ocean, just beyond the Golden Gate, glorifying garden and hill-top,
and setting, for a moment, its lamp of flame in the western windows.
Every plant and shrub will have some part in a subtile and soothing
ministry; and then, if ever, it will occur to you that this is a mellow
old world after all.
THE GARDEN ON THE HILL.
THE GARDEN ON THE HILL.
It was a plausible theory, and given out in a demure and confiding way
by a feminine oracle, that honeysuckle cuttings should each be inserted
in a potato, and so planted. As the scion had no root and needed
moisture, it would be supplied by the potato. It seemed the very thing
to do. The wonder was that so simple an expedient had not been suggested
before. That theory was honestly tested, and it has since been laid on
the top shelf with a great many other feminine theories about
floriculture. Twenty honeysuckle scions were each planted with one end
in an enormous red potato. Never did one of those honeysuckles grow; but
there sprang up such a growth of potatoes as never had been seen on the
hill. They were under the doorstep, under the foundation of the house;
they shot up everywhere. Was that the last of the misadventure? By no
manner of means. In the very porch of the church that daughter of Eve
inquired slily, "How are your honeysuckles?" And then she glided in as
if she had done nothing for which she needed forgiveness.
Certain grafting experiments came out a shade better. But every graft
put in on the south side of a tree died, while those on the north side
nearly all lived. These were protected by some degree of shade, while
the hot sun melted the wax on the south side, which ran down in liquid
streams of resin and poisoned the bark around the cleft. All this might
have been known in advance. But a little modicum of knowledge learned by
costly experience will stick to one through life, while that which costs
nothing is rarely laid up as worth having. It ought to be known, also,
that there is no better plan of grafting a tree than that which our
ancestors followed a hundred years ago, when, with a little moist clay
and top-tow, every scion inserted lived. Then the cider mill was an
orthodox institution in every neighborhood. It is not worth your while
to dissent from that proposition, when you have probably played truant
from a summer school to ride around on the sweep of a cider mill, and
suck the new cider through a straw, being stung the meanwhile
occasionally by a "yellow-jacket." Even now a cider mill by the
roadside, with the sour pomace scattered about, is a humanizing
institution. It will send you back to the old orchard, the great
branching elm, and the wide-spreading roof slanting down in the rear,
quicker than any other sign or symbol to be found along the dusty way of
middle life. For one hour's ride on that sweep, and a nibble at the
spice-apples sliding down the hopper, one might still be consoled for
the dreadful frown of the school mistress, and for that feminine
refinement on purgatorial cruelty which compelled the truant to stand
for an hour on one leg, and to hold out a bible at arm's length in his
dexter hand. An acidulated school mistress, who had been losing her
sweetness for forty years, never was a desirable object to meet, after
having tasted the sweets on a summer day at a cider mill. The hornets
were well enough in their way, but the sting of that school mistress was
not.
Note, too, that this grafting process reaches over beyond your apple
trees. The best races, or sub-divisions of people, come of the best
stocks which are continually grafted on. Your blue blood is mixed with
more not so blue, or the stock runs out. Down at the root of those apple
trees yonder you may find traces of the woolly aphis. It is a sign that
the constitution of such trees has been weakened. Digging down you
remove the aphis, put fresh soil around the tree, scrape the rusty
trunk, cut off the top, and put in two or three grafts from a stock that
has vitality; and very soon this rejuvenated tree, bending under its
weight of fruit in early Autumn, is something of which no amateur
horticulturist need be ashamed. A thoroughbred people will impress
language, law, and custom, as none other can upon the world. It is not
isolation which secures this result, but the taking of many stocks upon
the original trunk. If pulmonary New England is to be physically
resuscitated, it will not come of boasting of revolutionary sires, but
rather because Germans, Irish, Danes and Swedes are thronging all the
avenues of her busy life.
The transition from grafting to budding is natural enough. Those twenty
white stakes stand as so many monuments of another horticultural
disaster. On a September day, twenty buds, so rare that the original
stock could not be bought at any price, had been deftly slipped into as
many "suckers," which had come out from the roots of as many rose
bushes. The next Spring they were set and staked, and each was about as
precious as the right eye of any amateur horticulturist. The small buds
had developed into branches a foot long; great double peerless roses had
been hanging pendent from the original stocks--roses with regal names
and titles. There would have been twenty glorified specimens of
floriculture to-day, but for that foreign gardener who had been
"educated in the best schools in Europe," who knew everything, and could
not be told anything. Roses must be cut in to make new wood. Before
night he had clipped those twenty standards each below the bud, and had
taken himself off with his diabolical shears, his insufferable conceit,
and his rustic innocence. He never came back to look at the work of his
hands, nor to hear the wish (mildly expressed) that a pair of shears
might be invented which would shorten the stature of that gardener at
least a foot. There was a special aggravation of the case, because we
had been nursing a theory for years, that by splitting two rose-germs of
different kinds, and putting the odd halves together, if growth could
then be induced, there would be a hybrid rose--either the color of the
one would be distinct on one side, and the other on the opposite side,
or the rose would be mottled, having red and white spots on each leaf.
This Siamese bud had started finely. Bad luck to the gardener's shears
which had abbreviated that experiment and enveloped the vexed question
again in darkness. But here is a bed of mottled pinks, and these could
have all been the result of crosses. It may be that the humming birds,
going from one blossom to another, have mixed the pollen, or some hidden
law may be active which cannot be traced. Note, too, that besides this
promiscuous fleck of red and white, in not a few instances a single
flower will have the red on one-half and the white on the other. The
florists call this sporting. The same class of facts may be observed in
the double petunias, all of which are hybrids, or nearly so--a purple,
white, and red leaf being found in a single flower. There are apples,
too (or there were twenty years ago), one-half of which were sour and
the other half sweet. The qualities were not interblended, and even the
colors were separate.
It was a pretty conceit, and mollifying withal, that a feminine florist
connected with pansies: "When you go past them they will turn their
heads toward you, greeting you so lovingly." That little myth might be
strung on the same string with the buttercup, which only reflects its
golden hue upon the chins of those who love June butter.
That alfalfa experiment is only admitted by special grace under the head
of floriculture, although the lucerne has no lack of handsome blossoms.
A little seed was sprinkled on the ground after the spring rains and
forgotten. When the winter rains came again, that alfalfa reached out
for both the zenith and nadir. Three times a year it is cut to keep it
from falling down. The details are suppressed here, with only an
intimation that they are sufficient for several agricultural addresses.
If that man is a benefactor who has made two blades of grass grow in the
place of one, what is he who has made alfalfa shoot up at the rate of
seven tons to the acre, in the place of miserable sorrel-top? But there
was a discount upon that experiment. The alfalfa drew to it all the
gophers in the neighborhood. They mined and countermined, until the
whole area had been honeycombed. They multiplied by scores and hundreds.
These rodents drew together all the vagrant cats in the neighborhood,
which made this corner of the garden a common hunting ground. Here upon
this small area was a crop of alfalfa, a crop of gophers--which no man
has numbered to this day--and a crop of cats, as fiercely predatory and
as unrelenting in a skirmish as were ever put in battle array. But
somehow this experiment has not been satisfactory. It has branched out
in too many ways. Two empty arnica bottles suggest the muscular strains
which came from moderating those cats with an occasional volley of
rocks. And at this writing, half a dozen felines are on the fence
looking solemnly down at the sapping and mining which is going on below.
There are no birds in this region which domesticate so readily as the
linnets, and which improve more on an intimate acquaintance. They are
not so obstreperous as the wren, nor so shy as the lark and the robin.
The latter is a migratory bird, coming down to this latitude only in the
Winter, and going north for a nesting in the Spring. A single robin has
lived in the garden all Winter, becoming nearly as tame as a chicken,
following the man with the spading-fork, and snapping up the worms in a
sharp competition with his cousin, the brown thrush. The former, in
place of any song, has a lonesome and fugitive call, as though waiting
for his mate. He is probably a bachelor, who has not yet set up an
establishment of his own. A little girl, having gravely considered the
case, suggests that he ought to send a letter inviting a mate to come.
O, my little friend! oral communication is much more interesting; at
least, it was so in our time. Neither was it considered cowardice if the
heart came up into the throat.
The linnets are model birds in their domestic life. A pair built a nest
last year under the porch, and, having brought up one family of four and
dismissed them, the pair furbished up the nest again and brought up a
family of four more the same season. They have held secret conferences
over the nest recently, and it evidently falls in with their views of
domestic economy to use it again. It is possible that they appreciated a
little device which we had to adopt for their safety. As the nest was at
the extremity of a festoon of vines, there was nothing to hinder the
house-cat from going up and feasting on callow birds. An odd lot of
trout hooks, fastened to the lower vines, operated as a powerful
non-conductor.
Some years ago, a pair of linnets having made their nest in the porch of
another house, everything went well until the young had just appeared;
then the mother disappeared one night, and the displaced vines in the
morning told the whole story. Four orphan birds appealed to the
sympathies of the young folk. The nest was taken into the house, the
birds carefully covered with cotton, and every effort was made to save
them. They would eat nothing, and, as a last resort, the nest was
replaced in the vines. The father came back soon, talked with his
children, brooded them, fed them day after day, brought them up to
maturity, and turned out as prosperous a family of young linnets as
there was in that neighborhood. Mr. Linnet can have the most positive
certificate of rare domestic virtues. There is the slight drawback that
he paints, does all the singing, and is rather vain; while Mrs. Linnet
is a plain, unassuming bird, always clad in gray, and is not up in
music. All through the realm of ornithology the male bird has the
brightest colors and does the singing. But analogy is all at fault when
you come to men and women. Who puts on all the bright colors here,
paints, and carols upon the topmost bough of the domestic tree? By what
law has this order been reversed? And yet the sum of your political
economy is, that a woman who can dress more, use pigments more
cunningly, and talk faster, and sing better than a man, shall not vote!
Is that the way to set up your ideal republic?
One may learn secrets of ornithology in the garden which the books will
not yield up. That boy coming up the rear garden walk, who has swung
himself into a pear tree to look into the nest of a finch, has done the
same thing consecutively on a dozen mornings. He will be able to tell
just how many days are required for incubation, and how many days
intervene before the birds are full-fledged. I should have had more hope
for him as a future ornithologist, had not the young heathen asked for
the eggs to put upon his string. There is not such a great difference,
after all, between an Apache with a string of scalps at his belt, and a
school boy with his string of birds' eggs. If it were not for that
infernal cruelty which has been inbred by false teaching, or no
teaching, our relations with all the lower forms of life would be
intimate and confidential, instead of suspicious and oftentimes
revolting. One can match the worst specimens of cannibalism by pointing
out strings of larks hung up by their bills any day in the market. I
know of no cannibal who ever became ferocious enough to eat singing
birds, or to find pleasure in killing them.
There are two or three notes in the song of the lark which are not
surpassed in sweetness by any of the oriole or finch family. If one will
take a dash into the country some bright morning, on horseback, and note
how this joyous bird goes before him, alighting on the fence and calling
down a benediction from the heavens, either he will come back filled
with gladness, or his liver trouble has got the best of him. All the
song birds of much note in this State may be assigned to the three
families of thrushes, orioles and finches. In the first of these we have
the robin; in the second, the lark; and in the third, the linnet. The
sub-families will reach nearly a hundred, and there is not one of them
which will not pay in songs and in the destruction of insects for all
the mischief he does. Now, a bird that pays his bills in advance, has a
right to protection. Observe, too, how soon they recognize any attempt
to establish friendly relations with them. Last year a finch had her
feet entangled by a string with which she had lined her nest. A little
help rendered to set her free, made her an intimate friend, and a
shallow pan of water in the grass drew daily dividends of fresh songs. A
box with a few holes in it, set on a post, will not remain empty a year;
either the blue-birds or the martins will take possession of it.