The Summer Garden--The Buddleia--Ghent Azaleas--The Mixed
Borders--Roses--The Green Rose.
_July 13._--There is a longer interval than usual since my last notes;
but I have been away among the Soldanellas and the Gentians of
Switzerland, and I have had to leave my garden to the gardener's care.
Now that I have returned, I find how much has gone on, and how much I
must have missed. The Nemophila bed, I hear, gradually filled up and
became a perfect sheet of brilliant blue. The Anemone bed was very good,
and that of Ranunculus very fair; but best of all, as I knew it would
be, was the bed of Brier Roses, with their trained branches laden with
sweet little yellow blossoms.
The Kalmias too are over, and the alpine Rhododendrons (Roses des Alpes)
are also nearly at an end; but I have just found them wild upon the
Wengern Alp, and that must be my consolation. There is nothing I am
more sorry to have missed than the great shrub--almost tree--of Buddleia
globosa, which grows in the centre of one of the herbaceous borders. It
has been, as it always is, covered with its golden balls, smelling of
honey, and recalling an old garden in Somersetshire which I knew years
ago. It is certainly true that nothing calls up associations of the past
as does the sense of smell. A whiff of perfume stealing through the air,
or entering into an open window, and one is reminded of some far-off
place on some long-past day when the same perfume floated along, and for
one single moment the past will seem more real than the present. The
Buddleia, the Magnolia, and one or two other flowers always have this
power over me.
I have still one Azalea, and only one, in blossom; it has a small and
very fragrant white flower.
I have been lately reading several articles about the fly-catching
flowers. Is it generally known that no fly-catcher is more cruel and
more greedy than the common Ghent Azalea, especially, I think, the large
sweet yellow one? On one single blossom, which I gathered just before
leaving home, at the end of May, I found no less than six flies; four of
them were quite dead, and of one or two nothing remained but a shred of
wing. Two others were still alive, but the Azalea had already nearly
drained their life away, and held them so tightly with its viscid hairs
that I could hardly release them from its grasp. On the other blossoms
in the truss were other flies, three, four, or five; so that the entire
Azalea shrub had probably caught some hundreds.[4]
[4] See note II. on the Azalea viscosa.
The mixed borders are almost past their best,--at least the hairy red
Poppy, the day Lily, and the early purple Gladiolus are over, and, of
course, the Irises and Paeonies. At present various Canterbury Bells,
Valerian (which I saw bedded out the other day at Liege), and the white
and orange Lily, are the gayest things we have. There is a Mullein, too,
which is well worth a corner in any garden. Not long since I saw, in
some book of rambles through our southern counties, the spire of a
cathedral with its pinnacles and crockets compared to a spike of Mullein
flower. It is certainly the Mullein (the distinctive name of which I do
not know) which is now in bloom with me; and, indeed, the resemblance
had occurred to me before I had read the book.
But I hardly care to linger over other flowers, when the Rose-beds are
in their fullest splendour. The summer Roses must have been better a
fortnight back, but the perpetuals are as good as can be, and many of
the summer Roses yet remain. I sometimes fear that the passion for
large, well-formed blossoms, and the desire of novelty, will make some
of the dear old Roses of our childhood pass into entire neglect; yet,
when we think of a Rose, of which any poet has written, it will not be
La France, or Senateur Vaisse, or Alfred Colomb--beautiful as they are.
When Herrick warns us--
"Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may,"
or when Hood tells us--
"It was the month of Roses,
We plucked them as we passed,"
--their Roses were other than the favourite Roses of to-day. Perhaps
they were the old Cabbage Rose, a great bush of which grows next to a
bed of Lavender, and pleasantly scents the garden as you enter it.
Perhaps they were the Portland Rose, of which I have some three beds,
and than which no Rose is better for the making of Pot Pourri, as the
young ladies in Mr. Leslie's picture may learn to their advantage.
Perhaps they were the Moss Rose, with its mossed buds and fragrant
blossoms, of which I have another bed entirely for itself. Perhaps they
were the Maiden Blush, or the York and Lancaster, or the sweet old
China, with its pink shell petals, which comes so soon and lingers on so
late--the last Rose, not of summer but of autumn.[5] Then there are
other old Roses which should not be neglected. The Rose Unique, which is
a white Cabbage Rose, is one; the Rose Celeste, the thin delicate buds
of which are so beautiful, is another. Then there is the little Rose de
Meaux, and the old Damask, which indeed seems to have nearly
disappeared.
[5] It is mentioned in the _Baroness Bunsen's Life_ how Mrs. Delany
loved to fill her china bowls with the pink buds of the Monthly Rose,
surrounded by sea-green shoots of the young Lavender.
It must have been one of these Roses, be sure, and not a Tea or a
perpetual, which Lady Corisande finds in her garden for Lothair.
Not of course that we are not grateful for the new Roses, with their
brilliant colouring and their perfect form, but we are unwilling that
the old should be forgotten. The Gloire de Dijon and General Jaqueminot
seem to me the most vigorous and most useful, if not the finest; but I
have two old standards which are at the moment more effective than
anything I have. One is Boule de Nantes, the other an old summer Rose,
the name of which I do not know, but which, when fully out, much
resembles the Comtesse de Jaucourt. They are not trained in any way, and
I find, measuring round their heads, that one has a circumference of 12
feet, and the other of 12-1/2 feet. In the South of England it is no
doubt different, but for us these are large dimensions; and certainly
nothing I now get from the nursery gardens seems inclined to attain to
half the size.
There is one Rose in my garden which flourishes abundantly, but which is
the only Rose, of which I should decline to give a cutting. It is so
ugly that it is worth nothing, except as a curiosity; and if it ceased
to be a curiosity it would be quite valueless. It is a _green_ Rose. I
got a small plant from Baltimore, in America, some years ago, and I find
it perfectly hardy. It flowers very freely, and all through the summer;
the bud is a perfect Rose bud in appearance, but the open flower shows
that the Rose is of monstrous and not natural growth; the petals are, it
seems to me, no real petals at all, but an expansion of the green heart,
which often appears in Roses, and which has here been so cultivated as
to take the place of the natural Rose. These petals are coarse and
irregular, and have serrated edges, with a very faint scent.[6]
[6] Mr. Buist, of the Rosedale Nurseries, Philadelphia, has since
written to the _Gardeners' Chronicle_ on the origin of the Green
Rose:--"There appears to be some uncertainty in regard to the origin of
this Rose. It is a sport from Rosa Indica (the China Rose of England and
Daily Rose of America). It was caught in Charleston, S.C., about 1833,
and came to Baltimore through Mr. R. Halliday, from whom I obtained it,
and presented two plants to my old friend, Thomas Rivers, in 1837."
How the Rose twines itself around all history and all literature! There
are the Rose gardens of Persia, and the loves of the Rose and
nightingale; there are those famous Roses once plucked in the Temple
Garden, of which "the pale and bloody petals" (to use a fine expression
of Hawthorne's) were strewed over many an English battle-field; there is
the golden Rose which the Pope gives as the best of gifts to the
foremost among Catholic monarchs--emblem at once of a fading earthly
life, and of the unfading life in heaven.
Of English poets is there one, who does not celebrate the Rose, and of
all is there one, who draws from it a more tender morality than Waller
in "Go, lovely Rose"?
But no nation ever loved the Rose as did the Greeks, and it was _their_
legend that told us how the Rose sprang to birth. Bion's "Lament for
Adonis" has been translated by Mrs. Browning, and I know no translation
equal to it in general fidelity and vigour of expression. It appears to
me, on the whole, perhaps the very best translation in the language.
Here are the lines which tell this part of the story:--
"Ah, ah, Cytherea! Adonis is dead;
She wept tear after tear with the blood which was shed,
And both turned into flowers for the earth's garden close,--
Her tears to the Windflower, his blood to the Rose."
Another still more famous Greek poem about the Rose is one by Sappho,
which Mrs. Browning has also most beautifully translated--a fit task,
which unites the names of the two great poetesses of Greece and England.
The poem begins:--
"If Zeus chose us a king of the flowers in his mirth,
He would call to the Rose and would royally crown it:
For the Rose, ho! the Rose, is the grace of the earth;
Is the light of the plants that are growing upon it."
No wonder the Greeks wove their wreaths of the Rose, or that "under the
Rose" they passed many a gay and happy hour, to be kept in memory, if
untold in words.
My bedding-out is of course finished, but of this I must speak on the
next occasion. The weather has been hot, and rain will now be welcome.