Flowering Shrubs--Yuccas--Memorial Trees--Ranunculus--
Pansies--Canna Indica--Summer Flowers--Bluets--
Fruit-blossoms and Bees--Strawberry Leaves--Garden Sounds--
Mowing--Birds--The Swallow--Pleasures of a Garden.
Almost more interesting than herbaceous plants are the flowering shrubs.
Most beautiful of all, if, indeed, it may be called a shrub, is the
Buddleia Globosa, in the inner garden, which I have already mentioned.
When June draws to its close, it is laden with thousands of blossoms
like little golden oranges, and fills the air with honied scent. It is
the largest Buddleia I ever happen to have seen, for it stands sixteen
feet high, and stretches its branches over a round bed of blue Iris to a
circumference of seventy feet.
And just about the time when the Buddleia is in bloom, masses of the
sweet homely English Elder, screening off the little wood, will perfume
all the approach to the house. Common enough it is, but delightful in
its dark foliage, its rich creamy blossoms, its clusters of purple
berries. We do not make the use of it we should, and Elderberry water
and Elderberry Wine are known to me by name alone, but the berries are
excellent for tarts and puddings.
One shrub which I planted a year or two ago has answered far better than
I had any right to hope. It is the Desfontainea Spinosa. It is so like a
holly that it puzzles everybody who sees, for the first time, the
scarlet and yellow tubes of blossom which stand out among the prickly
leaves. The year before last it flowered twice with me, but the cruel
winter we have just had has cut it sadly, and it will be long before it
will recover.
I have spoken of trying whether by the planting of a second Arbutus I
could make my beautiful old shrub fruit. The result has been quite
successful, and I have had for two years past bright red berries hanging
down among the pale waxen blossoms and the dark-green leaves. The
Magnolia between the vineries has become prodigal of flowers as it has
grown older, and last year I had no less than ten blossoms from it, and
it is still young. The Magnolia (also a Grandiflora) on the house has
also begun to flower, but I had nearly lost it altogether, and the story
is rather a curious one. I had noticed that both it and other creepers
were looking unhappy, and I could not guess the reason. The Escallonia
showed bare branches in many places, the Ceanothus seemed shrunken and
brown, and a Gloire de Dijon Rose did no good. At last it occurred to my
gardener that the galvanised wire, which I had put up to avoid driving
nails into the stone work of the windows, was to blame. I pulled it all
down, coated it thickly over with paint, and, when it was again put up,
all the creepers seemed to start into fresh life, and grew strong and
vigorous.
On a patch of green grass near the house stands a Yucca Gloriosa, which
I am always hoping will flower, but it has never done so yet. Not long
ago I was at a stately place in Shropshire, and at the end of a broad
walk, where a circle of Yuccas had been planted, there were no less than
five in full flower, throwing up pale jets of blossom, like fountains,
towards the sky. I never saw anything more perfect in its way. But it is
said that the right time to see a Yucca is by moonlight. There is a very
striking passage in one of the letters of the most remarkable of
American women, Margaret Fuller (afterwards Countess D'Ossoli), in which
she says:--
"This flower" (it was the Yucca Filamentosa) "was made for the moon as
the Heliotrope is for the sun, and refuses other influences, or to
display her beauty in any other light. Many white flowers are far more
beautiful by day. The lily, for instance, with its firm thick leaf,
needs the broadest light to manifest its purity, but these transparent
leaves of greenish white, which look dull in the day, are melted by the
moon to glistening silver...." The second evening I went out into the
garden again. In clearest moonlight stood my flower, more beautiful than
ever. The stalk pierced the air like a spear; all the little bells had
erected themselves around it in most graceful array, with petals more
transparent than silver, and of softer light than the diamond. Their
edges were clearly but not sharply defined--they seemed to have been
made by the moon's rays. The leaves, which had looked ragged by day, now
seemed fringed by most delicate gossamer, and the plant might claim,
with pride, its distinctive epithet of _filamentosa_.
On another grass-plot near I have one of the beautiful Retinosporas of
Japan, which was one day planted for me by a friend. He is the poet,
who says that--
"Eastward roll the orbs of heaven,
Westward tend the thoughts of men:
Let the Poet, nature-driven,
Wander Eastward now and then:--"
and this tree, while it lives, will remind me of the East, and of him
who wrote these lines.
But there are other pleasant ways of recalling one's friends to memory.
I never stay anywhere, where there is a garden, without bringing back
with me some one or more shrubs, as a remembrance of a beautiful place
or happy hours; and, when I plant them, I fasten to them a label,
mentioning their old home, and thus I am reminded--now of a quaint low
house covered with creepers and nestling among the hills of Wales--now
of a magnificent castle with its pleasance in the north of Ireland,--now
of a great hall in Scotland, where a wild glen runs down past the garden
to the woods,--now of an old English abbey, where the flowers of to-day
spring up among the ruins of a thousand years ago.
Among the flowers in the inner garden, which have well repaid me during
the last year or two, have been the Anemones--delightful old
flowers--"pied wind-flowers," Shelley calls them,--which first sprang
to birth when Venus wept Adonis. Then I have had two successful beds of
Ranunculus; one was prettily and fancifully mottled; the other was of
the finest scarlet,--a scarlet so intense that it seemed to be almost
black in the inner shadows of the petals. A gifted American lady once
said to me--"Does not black seem to underlie all bright scarlet?" and I
have thought of this as I have looked at this bed of Ranunculus, and I
think of it often as I see the red coats of our soldiers passing by. I
have often noticed, too, that, in an evening, when there is still light
enough to see flowers, that are yellow, or blue, or pink, the blossoms
of a scarlet Pelargonium give forth no colour, but look as if cut out of
some soft black velvet. Another spring bed, from which I had hoped much,
has disappointed me. It was a bed of Crown Imperials, but for some
reason they flowered irregularly and produced no effect. But the
individual flowers of some were magnificent. I had never examined a
Crown Imperial properly before, and never knew that its great beauty lay
in the little circlet of pearls--nectaries, I suppose they are--which
lie at the bottom of each orange bell. They are quite exquisite in their
grey and white glittering movement, as the light plays upon them, and
are more like pearls than anything else in nature.
Among my humbler flowers, of which I have somehow made no mention, is
the Pansy, yet few flowers have more associations connected with them.
The Pansy--the _Heartsease_ we still sometimes call it--is Shakespeare's
"Love in Idleness," and Milton's "Pansy freak'd with jet." The American
poet, Edgar Poe, speaks of the "beautiful Puritan Pansies;" and I
remember a fine wild passage in one of this same poet's little-known
essays, where two angels are talking, and one of them says--"We will
swoop outward into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where for Pansies,
and Violets, and Heartsease, are the beds of the triplicate and
triple-tinted suns."
Last year my finest bed was one of the Canna Indica, in which every
plant threw up grand broad leaves and spikes of crimson or yellow
blossom. Why is not the Canna far more common in all our gardens? At
present one sees it in public parks, or where gardening on a great scale
is carried on, but in smaller gardens it is very rare, and yet it is
easy enough to grow; and once I think it must have been more known than
it is at present. Gerarde speaks of it as "the flowering reed," and
gives a very fair illustration of it. He adds, however, "Myself have
planted it in my garden divers times, but it never came to flowering or
seeding, for that it is very impatient to endure the injury of our cold
climate." Cowley, too, speaks of the "lustre of the Indian flowering
reed;" and Dr. Darwin, in his _Loves of the Plants_, gives it (with its
single pistil and stamen), as the best type of the conjugal fidelity of
flowers, and tells how--
"The tall Canna lifts his curled brow,
Erect to heaven;"
adding, in prose, that "the seeds are used as shot by the Indians, and
are strung for prayer-beads in some Catholic countries." Indeed, the
plant is often called the "Indian Shot," and as the seeds, shining, hard
and black, ripened with me last year, I can understand how appropriate
is the name.
A bed of double Potentillas, some red, some yellow, and some with the
two colours mingled, has been very fine; and so has a bed of hybrid
Bulbous Begonias, which seem quite hardy. I plant the blue Lobelia
between them, and it contrasts pleasantly with their crimson and orange
bells. A long row of Sweet Peas of every variety of colour extends
along the border in front of the vinery, and fills the garden with its
scent; and not far off is a wire screen, which I cover with the large
Convolvulus, and through the summer months the "Morning Glories," as the
blossoms were once called, display all their short-lived beauty.
On either side of the grass-walk, which runs down the garden, at a right
angle to the vineries, I am making rustic trellises of logs of wood,
round which I shall plant Vegetable Marrows and Gourds, and at intervals
clumps of the great Sunflower.[12] In another corner I am sowing a bed
of the Bluet, or Corn-flower, the favourite flower of the Emperor of
Germany. For some reason the Violets of Napoleon, of which I once had
abundance, have not been so successful with me during the last few
years,--will the Corn-flower do better?--What a glorious blue it is! and
how much we have neglected it! because, I suppose, it is too common, and
grows wild amid the ripening Corn and the scarlet Poppy.
[12] See Note IV. on the Sunflower of the Classics.
Turning to the fruit-garden, my great discovery has been that I _must_
have bees--not at all for the honey, but for the proper setting of the
fruit. A large May Duke Cherry is always covered with blossom, but
scarcely anything has ever come from it. Last year I examined its
blossom closely, and found that the pistil is so much longer than the
stamens that it cannot fertilise itself, and must be dependent on
insects. This is not the case with other varieties of Cherries, so far
as I can see, and I am curious to find out whether my remedy of a
bee-hive will this year have the desired effect. I believe it will be of
service to the other wall-fruit too, and I have already seen the
affection the bees have for the blossoms of the Apricot.
How beautiful a garden is when all the fruit-trees are in bloom! and how
various that bloom is! Each Pear-tree bears a different blossom from its
neighbour, and the handsomest of all, in size and shape of flower and
form of cluster, is the Jargonelle. But no Pear-blossom can compare with
the beauty of blossom on the Apple-trees;--and of all Apple-trees the
Pomeroy is most beautiful, when every bough is laden with clusters of
deep-red buds, which shade off into the softest rosy white, as, one by
one, the blossoms open out.
Of other fruit I have nothing new to notice, unless it be to ask whether
any one now living can smell the scent of dying Strawberry leaves? We
all remember how Mrs. Gaskell in her delightful story gives Lady Ludlow
the power, but now we all seem to have lost it. Certainly my dying
Strawberry leaves give me no sense of sweetness. Was it a mere fond and
foolish fancy? or were the Strawberries of Elizabethan gardens different
from those we are now growing? Bacon tells us that, next to the white
double Violet and the Musk Rose, the sweetest perfume in the open air is
"Strawberry leaves dying, which yield a most excellent cordiale smell;"
and I find in an old play by Sir John Suckling--
"Wholesome
As dying leaves of Strawberries."
But there are sounds that haunt a garden hardly less delightful than its
sights and scents. What sound has more poetry in it than when in the
early morning one hears the strong sharp sweep of the scythe, as it
whistles through the falling grass, or the shrill murmur of the blade
upon the whetstone; and, in spite of mowing machines, at times one hears
the old sound still. How fond Andrew Marvell was of mowing and the
mowers! He has given us "Damon the Mower," "The Mower to the Glow-worm,"
"The Mower's Song," "The Mower against Gardens," and "Ametas and
Thestylis making Hay-ropes;" and again, in his fine poem, on "Appleton
House," he describes the "tawny mowers" dividing the "grassy deeps,"
"With whistling scythe and elbow strong."
One of our latest poets too, Mr. Allingham, has a delicious little
mower's song, with a quite perfect refrain of--
"A scythe-sweep and a scythe-sweep,
We mow the grass together."
And again, what does not the garden owe to the voice of birds; the deep
cawing of the rook in its "curious flight" around the elm-trees; the
clear note of the cuckoo from the limes that bound the orchard; and,
best of all, the rich, full melody of the thrush! The nightingale's song
may be sweeter and stronger, but the nightingale only sings in certain
places (certainly not with us), and the thrush is everywhere. The
nightingale sings later in the night, but the thrush will go on till
nine, and begin again at four, and surely that is all we need. Can
anything be truer, or better said, than these lines of Browning's about
a thrush?--
"Hark! where my blossomed Pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field, and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops, at the bent spray's edge--
That's the wise thrush--he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture."
But there is one bird dearer to us than the thrush, and that is the
swallow, which for some years past has built its nest in our porch. It
has been pretty to mark her skimming round and round with anxious
watching, till we have left the place. Prettier still, when we have kept
ourselves concealed, to see her darting upwards to the nest, which was
fringed by four little heads all in a row, and, going from one to the
other, give each its share. We could hear the sharp little cry of
satisfaction as each nestling was attended to. How much the poets have
written about swallows! There is the charming passage in Longfellow's
"Golden Legend," where the old monk is speaking; he is the librarian,
whose duty it is to illuminate the missals for the convent's use and
pride:--
"How the swallows twitter under the eaves!
There, now there is one in her nest;
I can just catch a glimpse of her head and breast,
And will sketch her thus in her quiet nook,
For the margin of my gospel-book."
Then how delightful is the boast, which Mr. Courthope, in his _Paradise
of Birds_, puts into the nightingale's mouth, that a bird is better than
a man, for--
"He never will mount as the swallows,
Who dashed round his steeples to pair,
Or hawked the bright flies in the hollows
Of delicate air."
And, long before this, Banquo had marked their "pendent beds" on
Macbeth's castle, and noticed that--
"Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed
The air is delicate."