Ants and Aphis--Fruit Trees--The Grass Walk--"Lilac-tide"--
Narcissus--Snowflakes--Columbines--Kalmias--Hawthorn Bushes.
_May 4._--May set in this year with (as Horace Walpole somewhere says)
"its usual severity." We felt it all the more after the soft warm summer
weather we had experienced in April. The Lilac, which is only due with
us on the 1st of May, was this year in flower on the 28th of April.
Green Gooseberry tarts, which farther south are considered a May-day
dish, we hardly hope to see in this colder latitude for ten days later,
and now these cold east winds will throw back everything.
I have been going over the fruit walls. The Apricots have, after all,
done fairly well, and, if they do not fall off at the "stoning," we
shall have nothing to complain of. Peaches and Nectarines are even worse
than I had feared. There was not much bloom to begin with; then what
bloom there was has set but badly; and now my most promising trees are
overrun with aphis and with ants. We are doing everything that can be
done to check the plague, but with only a partial success. I am told
that ants do no harm, and, indeed, are useful as against the aphis. I do
not know how this is. They seem to be most excellent friends, and the
more ants there are the more the leaves curl up, and the more the aphis
seems to thrive.[3] Last year one Peach-tree was completely killed, and
this year two of them are looking very miserable. There has been no want
of care or attention, but the enemy increases faster than we can destroy
it. Is it a disease (so to speak) in a particular tree, which spreads to
other trees? Or is it a blight in the air, against which we cannot
guard? And what remedy is there when we have used tobacco-powder and
Gishurst Compound, and all in vain?
[3] I have since learned that the fact of the ant and the aphis being
constantly together is well known; and further, that a sweet juice
exudes from the aphis, on which the ant feeds. Pierre Huber declares
that the aphis is the _milch-cow_ of the ant; and adds, "Who would have
supposed that the ants were a _pastoral people_?"
Two Fig-trees against the wall, in the sunniest corners, are promising a
full crop for this district; another Fig-tree of a smaller variety close
by bears nothing. The old Arabic proverb, which Emerson quotes, that "A
Fig-tree looking upon a Fig-tree becometh fruitful," has not held good
in this case. Lancashire, of course, is not the climate for Figs, but I
should doubt whether Fig-trees are anywhere so common in England as they
were 150 years ago, when Batty Langley of Twickenham wrote. He
recommends them to be grown as dwarfs or standards as well as against a
wall, and says they "are either white, black, yellow, grey, green,
brown, purple, or violet-coloured, consisting of sixteen different
kinds,"--but he adds that the white and the long purple do the best.
The Pears against the wall have but little fruit, but the standards are
setting well, and the Apples will not, I hope, have suffered from this
spell of cold. The new grass walk, of which I wrote on January 5 as
passing right through the garden, is shaded by some Apple-trees, and it
is pleasant to see their flakes of rosy snow falling softly on the fresh
green beneath. Between these old Apple-trees and the young standards I
have planted, there was room, which I am making ornamental with cones of
Scarlet Runners. We have some five circles on each side of the walk, and
shall train up the bean tendrils by strings fastened to a centre pole,
so that in summer we shall have a succession of tents of scarlet and
green. I tried this method of training Scarlet Runners on a smaller
scale last year. The effect was excellent. Then, too, close along the
grass on either side I am planting a broad belt of Violets, so that this
new walk will one day be the sweetest part of the garden. Lastly, to
give colour to the end of the walk, where it is bounded by the hedge of
the croft, I am sowing the large Everlasting Pea, and the strongest
growing Nasturtium, that they may climb and trail among the Hawthorn and
the clipped Beech.
The outside borders and the lawn clumps are beautiful with flowering
shrubs. No season is like "Lilac-tide," as it has been quaintly called,
in this respect. Besides the Lilac itself, there are the long plumes of
the white Broom, the brilliant scarlet of the hybrid Rhododendrons, the
delicious blossoms, both pink and yellow, of the Azaleas, the golden
showers of the Laburnum, and others too numerous to mention. A
Judas-tree at an angle of the house is in bud. The General Jacqueminot
between the vineries has given us a Rose already.
The cuckoo has been calling for days past among the trees beyond the
orchard, and the song birds seem to be awake half through the night.
The foliage of the large forest-trees is particularly fine this year.
The Horse Chestnuts were the first in leaf, and each branch is now
holding up its light of waxen blossom. The Elms came next, the Limes,
the Beeches, and then the Oaks. Yet still
"the tender Ash delays
To clothe herself when all the woods are green,"
and is all bare as in mid-winter. This, however, if the adage about the
Oak and the Ash be true, should be prophetic of a fine hot summer.
_May 21._--I wonder if any effect of bedding out is finer than that
which my mixed borders have now to show. They are at their very best,
for it is the reign of the Paeony and the Iris. Great clumps of each, the
one bowed down with the weight of its huge crimson globes, the other
springing up erect with its purple-headed shafts, appear at intervals
along the borders, and each lends a fresh grace to the form and colour
of the other.
Among other flowers in rare beauty just now are (as once in the garden
of "the Sensitive Plant,")
"Narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess
Till they die of their own dear loveliness."
Was it, I wonder, owing to this story of Narcissus, and as an emblem of
self-seeking, that the Greeks twined the white stars of this flower
among the tangled locks of the Eumenides?
The Snowflakes have been flowering abundantly, but they are now passing.
The Greek name for the Snowflake is the Leucoion--literally the white
Violet--and I think it possible that in a passage of Ovid, where he
speaks of the Violet, the Poppy, and the Lily being broken by a storm,
he is really thinking of the Snowflake. I am satisfied, as I have
already said, that the _Iris_ is never (as Lord Stanhope asserted)
called the Violet.
My Auriculas are not as good as they should be in a Lancashire garden,
for of all flowers it is the old Lancashire favourite. It is still known
as the Basier (a corruption, no doubt, of Bear's Ear), and a pretty
Lancashire ballad ends every verse with the refrain,
"For the Basiers are sweet in the morning of May."
The old-fashioned Columbine is in full bloom, as is also the Aquilegia
glandulosa. I have planted the Aquilegia coerulea, but both the plant
and some seeds which I have sown have failed me, and I half fear I may
never be successful with this finest of the Columbines. Before I leave
the Columbine, let me mention a mistake in one of Jean Ingelow's very
prettiest poems, which her _literary_ critics seem never to have
detected. She says--
"O Columbine, open your folded wrapper,
Where two twin turtle-doves dwell."
But she is confusing the Columbine with the Monk's Hood. The doves of
the Columbine cluster round the centre like the doves of Pliny's vase.
The doves of the Monk's Hood are only seen as you remove the "wrapper,"
and then the old idea was that they are drawing a "Venus' chariot."
The accidental grouping of plants on a mixed border is often very happy.
A week or two back I found growing out of a tuft of Forget-me-not a
plant of the Black Fritillary. The blue eyes of the Forget-me-not seemed
to be looking up into the hanging bells of the Fritillary, and were a
pleasant contrast to the red-brown of its petals. Gerarde's name for the
Fritillary was the "Turkie or Ginnie-hen Flower," and the name of the
Fritillary was itself derived from the _fritillus_ or dice-box, which
the common Fritillary was supposed to resemble in its markings.
In the middle of each group of beds, which the grass walk divides, is a
circular bed full of American shrubs. Among these shrubs are several
rather fine Kalmias. Very often they do not flower at all, or at best
bear a bloom only here and there. This year they are laden with blossom,
which is now just ready to burst, and I shall have a show of Kalmia
flowers such as I have not seen, since two-and-twenty years ago, I
wandered among the Kalmia brakes in the forests of Virginia; and the
flower is so beautiful--pink outside, and, as Ruskin says, inside "like
the beating out of bosses in hollow silver, beaten out apparently in
each petal by the stamens instead of a hammer."
Another bed, which will be very effective in a day or two, is a bed of
the double Persian Brier, pegged and trained. The festoons of yellow
buds are all but out, and will be one mass of sweet and lovely little
Roses.
The Nemophila bed has done very well, but we did not plant it as thickly
as we should have done, and there are bare places here and there.
I have still to mention the great bushes, or rather trees, of Hawthorn,
of which some stand in front of the dining-room windows, while others
fling their perfume across the hedge that divides the garden and the
croft. There is another Lancashire May song, from which I cannot but
quote a few lines, as it is but little known. The Mayers come to the
door and sing (or sang, rather, for the custom no longer holds with
us):--
"We have been rambling all this night,
And almost all this day;
And now, returned back again,
We've brought you a branch of May.
A branch of May we have brought you,
And at your door it stands;
It is but a sprout, but it's well budded out,
By the work of our Lord's hands."