The Wood and the Withered Leaves--Statues--Sun-dials--The
Snow--Plans for the Spring--Conclusion.
_November 7._--The soft autumn weather still spares what flowers the
rains have left us, and here and there are signs as if of another
spring. Violets along the grass walks, Strawberries in flower, and
to-day a little yellow Brier Rose blossoming on an almost leafless
spray, remind us of the early months of the year that is no more. But
here, too, are some of the flowers of November. The Arbutus has again
opened its bunches of waxen pink, and the Chrysanthemums are again
blooming on the shrubbery beds. The year has all but completed its
circle since first I wrote these notes, and I speak to-day of the
flowers, the same, yet not the same, as those of which I wrote eleven
months ago.
The trees have lost nearly every leaf, and our little wood is bare as
the wood wherein poor Millevoye, so soon to die, once strolled when
"De la depouille de nos bois
L'automne avait jonche la terre;
Le bocage etait sans mystere
Le rossignol etait sans voix."
"The autumn's leafy spoil lay strewn
The forest paths along;
The wood had lost its haunted shade,
The nightingale his song."
Had there been in happier days a "mystere" beyond the charm of waving
branches and whispering leaves?
Another French poem on a withered leaf is better known, for it was
Macaulay who translated Arnault's verses, and rendered the last three
lines so perfectly:--
"Je vais ou va toute chose,
Ou va la feuille de Rose,
Et la feuille de Laurier."
"Thither go I, whither goes
Glory's laurel, Beauty's rose."
Among my ideas--I cannot call it plan, for my mind is not quite made up
about it--I half fancy putting up a statue of some sort in a nook in the
little wood, where the Beeches grow the tallest and the Elders are the
thickest. Such things were once common, and then they got so common, and
often so out of place, that they became absurd. Every villa garden had
its statue and its rockery.
Batty Langley has an amusing chapter about statues. He says--"Nothing
adds so much to the beauty and grandeur of gardens as fine statues, and
nothing is more disagreeable than when they are wrongly placed; as
Neptune on a terrace walk, mound, &c.; or Pan, the god of sheep, in a
large basin, canal, or fountain;" and then, "to prevent such
absurdities," he gives the most elaborate directions. Mars and Jupiter,
Fame and Venus, Muses and Fates, Atlas, Hercules, and many more, are for
open centres or lawns. Sylvanus, Actaeon, and Echo, are among those
recommended for woods. Neptune, Oceanus, and the Naiades, will do for
canals and fish-ponds. Pomona and the Hesperides for orchards, Flora and
Runcina ("the goddess of weeding") for flower-gardens, Bacchus for
vineyards, Aeolus for high terrace walks, and "the goddess Vallonta" for
valleys. He gives the right deities for paddocks, for wheat-fields, for
"ambuscados," and for beehives. In short there is no place for which he
does not think a statue ornamental and appropriate. I hope he would
approve of my own very humble idea, which is a statue of
Hyacinthus,--for, where I thought of placing it, the wild Hyacinths or
Bluebells will come clustering up, and make the grass all blue. The
poetry of gardens is so entirely neglected in these days of "bedding
stuff," that it is well to do anything that can properly be done,
without extravagance of taste or method, to revive it.
In the inner garden I think also of placing a sun-dial, which would be
in good keeping with the rather formal character of the beds. Mrs.
Gatty's beautiful book on sun-dials should help me to a motto. They are
of two sorts--the mottoes that warn, and the mottoes that console. "The
night cometh,"[11] or "Pereunt et imputantur," are good examples of the
one; "Horas non numero nisi serenas," or "Post tenebras lucem spero,"
are the best instances of the other. But there is a verse by Mrs.
Browning, which (if I may so adapt it by a slight alteration in the
second line) would make a finer inscription still--
"See, the shadow on the dial,
In the lot of every one,
Marks the passing of the trial,
Proves the presence of the sun."
[11] Many years ago Miss Martineau told me of this motto, and I see
that in her "Autobiography" she speaks of it as "perfect in its way."
She however finally adopted for her own sun-dial the happier "Come,
light! visit me!"
_Nov. 28._--We wake to find snow all thick upon the ground, over lawn
and flower-bed, and the children are out betimes rolling up huge
snowballs on the grass. This snow is the best thing possible for the
garden, for we have already had a night or two of sharp frost, which
killed all it could reach of our herbaceous plants. "Autumn's last
delights were nipped by early cold," as in the garden of Lord Houghton's
"Old Manorial Hall," and the Dahlias and the Fuchsias were all
shrivelled into brown unsightly tufts. We have covered up the Fig-trees
on the wall. We have trenched up the shrubbery borders. We have done our
last planting--a Catalpa in one place, a Paulownia in another--and some
more fruit-trees in the orchard. We have planted our bulbs and sowed our
autumn annuals for spring gardening. I was so pleased with the Nemophila
bed of last May that I am repeating the experiment on a larger scale. I
shall have one bed of Nemophila, and another of Virginian Stock. I shall
have a bed of pink Saponaria edged with white. Along the Vine border I
shall stretch a ribbon of white Saponaria, blue Myosotis, pink Silene,
and many-coloured Sweet Peas.
Then again, at the end of the grass walk, where it runs up against the
hedge of the croft, I am fixing an arched trelliswork of wire, with a
wire seat inside, and over it I shall train and trail the broad leaves
of the Aristolochia and the scarlet blossoms of the Tropaeolum speciosum.
The vineries are of course at rest; but in them are Roman Hyacinths, now
ready for the house, and pots of Polyanthus Narcissus will be also ready
within a week.
The porch of the house is filled on either side with stages of
Chrysanthemums, and the fine glossy foliage of an Aralia looks well in
the inside vestibule.
And now I bring these notes to an end. My aim has been to show how much
interest and pleasure may be gathered out of a garden of moderate
pretensions, and with no great appliances in the way of glass, nor any
advantage in the way of climate.
I have endeavoured, too, to reclaim for our English gardens those old
flowers, which Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Cowley loved. They
have been far too long neglected for flowers, whose only charm is charm
of colour and a certain evenness of growth. The ordinary bedded garden
of to-day is as inferior to the Elizabethan gardens of old, as all
gardens anywhere must be to the delights, which fancy conjures up in
the enchanted gardens of Armida, or the bowered pleasance of Boccaccio.
Meanwhile we can only do what best we can, and when all else fails we
can say, like Candide, "Il faut cultiver _notre_ jardin."
And so I bid a hearty farewell to those readers, who for months past
have followed the fortunes, and shared with me the hopes, of a year in a
Lancashire garden.