JASMINE AND CHEROKEE ROSES
Almost a half century ago Harriet Beecher Stowe lived on the banks of
the St. Johns River and wrought for noble ideals in her own brave,
cheery way. In “Palmetto Leaves” she tells of the beautiful country
round about her home, of the three great live-oaks that sheltered it,
and of a caged cardinal grosbeak that used to sit on his perch by her
door and sing enthusiastically, “What cheer! What cheer!” The slaves for
whom she wrote and wrought are now but a memory, and the State of
Florida itself forbids the caging of wild birds, however sweetly they
sing or however cheerily they bear their captivity. The fine old house
that nestled beneath the live-oaks so confidingly that its broad veranda
partly clasped one of them has long since been torn down; and its very
foundations obliterated by the tangle of wild verdure that rises here so
soon from the unvexed earth; but the live-oaks remain, towering with
rounded heads still higher and stretching noble arms in still wider
benediction.
From the very tip of one of them this morning a tiny crimson flame
burned in the sun as if a spirit of clear fire had grown up from the
earth her feet had pressed, traversing all the arteries of the noble oak
and finally lingering a moment poised for celestial flight, and from the
flame fell the voice of a cardinal grosbeak shouting in clear mellow
notes, “What cheer! What cheer!” A half-century is but a breath carved
out of time, yet in it both birds and men have found freedom, and still
spirits of clear flame poise upon the heights and bravely call, “What
cheer!” For all I know this cardinal may be a lineal descendant of that
other and have caught a voice of joyous prophecy from the place.
I have yet to see nobler specimens of the live-oak than these trees that
still hold their ground where the old-time battle was so bravely and
cheerily fought. To the cardinal as he swam into the morning glow and
vanished they must have seemed three mighty domes of dense green. To me
standing below they were the pillars and arches of a cool cathedral in
whose dim upper recesses the mystic mistletoe hangs its strange,
yellowish-green leaves and its pearl-white berries. More is born of
thought than we are yet willing to acknowledge. Who knows what
exaltation has come down the ages wrapped within the fiber of these
druidical plants, to be subtly distilled on all beneath?
As the oaks are green above, so are they ghostly gray below with the
long swaying draperies of Spanish moss that drip deep from every limb.
These make prophets of eld of the great trees, and one stands beneath as
in the inner council of the Sanhedrim. Great ideals could have found no
braver setting than this, and the cool north wind that sings across the
river seems to make one feel here the very breath of Puritanical
austerity, of renunciation of self for the sake of others, and perhaps
too of the Puritan’s scorn for any other method than his own. The
sweetly surgent life of blossoming vines that climb in friendly embrace
over all wild things here at Mandarin caresses and wooes with perfume
all the spot and dares the rugged trunks of the great oaks themselves,
yet it may not touch the cathedral mystery and majesty of their shadowy
arches a half-hundred feet up. The high, clear spirit of the place is
still regnant.
Round about Mandarin sweeps Florida, which has been touched and in tiny
spots remodeled by alien hands ever since the days of De Soto, yet
remains Florida still, wayward, lavish, wild and loving all things with
sunny, sensuous profusion. It has been the scene of one experiment
after another, and has obliterated the remains. Its tangle of vivid
growth sweeps over many a ruin, from Fernandino to Biscayne Bay, the
very building of which has been forgotten save perhaps in musty archives
of some distant and less sunny clime in which the scheme originated.
Just at this corner of the State, a quarter-century ago, the sweep of
the river on one side and of untrammeled Florida on the other, inclosed
a bit of Old England in a tiny colony of English people who had settled
here, cleared the jungle and the level stretches of tall, long-leaved
pine, and planted orange groves.
They brought with them sturdy English thrift and unchanging English
ways, and soon the orange groves were everywhere, filling the spring air
with the rich scent of their waxy white blooms and making the autumn
days yellow with golden fruit. Docks sprang in narrow white lines far
over the shallows to the deep waters where ships might load with the
precious cargo for Northern ports, and English lanes and hedgerows
divided and connected the groves. In English gardens bloomed roses and
lilies and violets, and English ivy climbed over wide porches and set a
somber background for all the odorous tropic and semi-tropic wild vines
that loving hands planted with it. I can fancy the jungle leaning in
wild gorgeousness over the outermost hedgerows and biding its time. For
fifty years, since 1835, no harmful cold had reached this portion of
Florida, but the jungle knew. Fifty years was but as a day in its
experience.
It was on a February day in 1886 that it came. That noon the mercury
stood at eighty degrees and all the gorgeous profusion of semi-tropical
spring growth filled the air about with perfume of flowers that spangled
all things. The kind sun steeped the land in content and the negroes
sang at their work, knowing and loving its fervor on their bent backs.
By mid-afternoon clouds had come up out of the southwest and much rain
fell bringing a chill in the air such as may often be felt here in
February, or indeed at any time between November and April. But this
chill instead of passing with the clouds grew with the setting sun and
when his last red light came across the river the rain had turned to
icicles that hung in alien glory from all the trees. There they swayed
and clashed in the keen northwest wind all night, and before morning the
astonished glass had registered the temperature of a Northern winter
night, fifteen above or thereabouts.
The very jungle itself must have been black in the face with dismay and
a thousand acres of orange groves that were bearing five to fifteen
boxes of noble fruit to the tree were frozen to the very roots. It was a
black day for the little English colony, a day from which it has never
recovered. The trees sprang from the roots, were rebudded by the more
courageous only to be cut to the ground again about ten years later. A
second time the more tenacious spirits began their work over again, but
the courage of the colony was gone and though there are still groves of
five hundred to a thousand trees here that for a third time are
beginning to bear well, all faith in the prosperity of orange growing so
far north in the peninsula is gone.
New prosperity is growing up in the little town and another type of
people are making good here, but the fine houses of the orange growers
stand for the most part tenantless, some for almost a score of years.
The ancient gardens have taken pattern from the jungle and grown with
all its lawless luxuriance, and the once trim hedgerows riot in a
profusion that is as bewildering as it is beautiful.
Sometimes at night I think the tenants have come back. In the slender
light of the new moon I seem to see white hands reaching out to refasten
blinds that swing drunkenly from one hinge, and desisting in despair as
the rude wind snatches them away and slams them. Sometimes in the full
glare of day, peering through a broken pane I seem to see an old-time
owner moving about in a room that a second later holds but
long-forgotten furniture and a transparent form that dissolves in
dancing motes of sun-smitten dust.
I find the ghosts nearest and friendliest, however, in the tangled
growth of the old gardens. One that I love best lies far from the
present town and I like to come to it from the jungle side, lured by the
spicy breath of oleander blossoms. The north wind loses the salt breath
of the river tides as he passes the house and draws deep on these rosy
blooms, taking such store that he spills it through the foot-long
needles of every pine that he passes. Coming from the swamp tangle
beneath the sweet-gums and cypress, pushing through chin-high purple
wood-grass, I let it lead me to-day straight to a huge ridge of wild
cherokee rose plants that had once, no doubt, been an orderly hedge. It
is winter now and sometimes the night brings frost, but the wild
cherokee roses do not seem to mind that. The life vigor in them is such
that it pushes out pointed white buds even now, and these open into five
broad petals of pure white with a golden heart of close-pressed stamens.
The plant is so rough with its stubborn, hooked thorns set shoulder to
shoulder along its stout interlacing stems that no finer hedge plant
could be imagined. Not the deepest-flanked wild bull could push through
this tangle were it devoid of thorns. Not the toughest-hided one could
attempt those thorns without being torn and repulsed. And out of these
stout stems, from among the defiant thorns spring these dainty white
blooms bearing in their gold hearts a faint, fine perfume that is too
modest to sail forth as does that of the oleanders on the errant wind.
You must put your face close to the bloom and dare the thorns as you
sniff deep before you know its fineness; but it is worth the trouble.
In and out among the cherokee thorns the wanton jasmine climbs. There is
no place that it does not caress. Along the sand, amid brown leaves of
deciduous trees, it creeps. It slips under porches and puts bud noses up
through the cracked floors of long-disused buildings. It climbs trees
and swings boldly from their topmost boughs, and later it blows yellow
trumpets of invitation to the whole world and sends a sensuous perfume
far and wide that all who pass may breathe their fill. The jasmine is
common to all of the Florida world, yet withal it is so friendly sweet
to each that none may have the heart to disapprove. The cherokee rose is
different. He who would win the perfume of its heart of gold must bleed
a bit, perchance, and wear an individual bloom very close before he gets
it.
Coasting the thorn hedge, swinging the ancient gate on rusty hinge, a
roadway leads me beneath sweet-gum and live-oak to the tennis court. Its
level rectangle is still bare and close turfed with flat-bladed grass
and a tiny, stemless plant whose reniform leaves are no bigger than my
little finger nail, and help hold the even level of close green. Only in
one spot has this turf been invaded. There a lawless honeysuckle has
made a patch of its own glossy with green leaves. All else is as it
stood when the last tennis ball bounded freely from its elastic surface.
The sun steeps all this rectangle till it is one deep pool of golden
light where silence and forgetfulness bathe.
The wilderness noises which come to the edge of this space but emphasize
its silence and forgetfulness. In the trees that rim the court about
ever-changing flocks of birds flit and chatter. Blue jays clang
tintinnabulations, woodpeckers tap and croak tree-toad notes, warblers
and sparrows and titmice and fly-catchers twinkle and chirp, and often
try a half song of almost forgotten melody. Cardinals cry “tut, tut”
much as uneasy robins do, but in softer and more cooing tones. A
Carolina wren grows nervously curious in the cedar beneath which I sit,
and flirts and quivers and scolds as only a wren can, coming nearer and
nearer till I might almost put up my hand and touch his vibrating brown
body. Then he withdraws a little and whistles till the cardinals lift
their crested heads and listen and a tufted titmouse answers.
“Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle,” he cries, and the very spirit of an
English garden descends into the golden air. Gossamer threads of
spider-web float silverly from tree to tree, argent ghosts of the
old-time net, till I hear in the bird notes the chatter of laughing
voices, and for a moment the place is peopled with gay young folk in
flannels and the game goes merrily on.
It may have been that the lady of the house served the tea for which the
wren called so lustily in the shade of the garden tangle which now rises
twenty feet on the house side and completely hides it, though it is but
a stone-toss away. Here cedar, spice bush, bayberry and oleander crowd
one another in a struggle for upward supremacy in which the oleanders
win, their trunks, as large as a man’s thigh at the base, dividing into
long, aspiring branches that are pinnacled with pointed leaves and
sprays of fragrant bloom. The jasmine climbs here, too, twining and
straggling, loving and leaving, but the garden cherokees shoot upward in
clean, noble sweeps that carry their brave stems almost to the oleander
tops, whence they bound in long exultation, arching to the ground
again.
I do not find these in bloom out of season, but the roses that crowd the
crumbling arbor within toss up sprays of pink whose scent intertwines
with that of the oleanders. It is a sad garden now, for all its riot of
growth, for the ground beneath is dank with shade and decay and its once
prim palings fall this way and that in a snarl of rough weeds where the
sesbania opens its two-beaned pods and rattles in every passing breeze.
The old house itself, once so prim and erect, seems to droop wearily, in
round-shouldered senility, to the ground which already claims corners of
the wide verandas. The pinnate-leaved stems of a twining vine, starred
with white blooms, reach up to it lovingly and climb wistfully, only to
drag it down with the tiny weight which it once held up so
unconsciously. Within, the wind which sighs through broken panes carries
light footfalls from room to room and as it sways long unlatched doors
these grumble one to another, mumbling like uneasy sleepers who wait
long for the cockcrow of dawn.
Down on the waterfront an ancient cement breakwater still guards smooth
sands and the waves lap patiently at this, wearing it away
infinitesimally and talking to one another in liquid undertones. They
alone of all the voices of the place are oblivious of tenants past and
present, of growth or decay, telling in changeless tones the tales the
waters have told since long before man began, a primordial cell in their
unending depths. The waterfront of the old place seems most melancholy
of all, for there nature has failed most to hide the swift decay of
man’s work. Yet there I notice with satisfaction one thing. That is the
defiant erectness and primness of the English ivy that climbs one side
of the house. This neither straggles nor retreats, but goes squarely
upward as it was long ago set to do. It seems to hold the house up
rather than to drag it down, an epitome of that British sturdiness from
which it was transplanted but from which it may not swerve.
The low swinging sun faded into dun clouds to westward, letting a winter
chill fall upon the place and bringing thoughts of the open fire at home
with the big pitch logs shooting crimson flames up the wide chimney. Yet
through all the chill air the oleanders held their rosy blooms proudly
aloft and the pink roses sent their perfume too, following me along the
sandy, hedge-bordered road on the homeward way. After all, the memory of
the old place which always follows farthest is that of perfume and
golden sunshine and the ghosts of merry voices echoing through the
garden tangle and down the golden depths of the forgotten tennis court.
Dearest of all is the heart of the wild cherokee rose, holding its
faint, elusive perfume for those only who care enough to dare the stab
of its keen, defensive thorns.
Dark clouds gloomed the west as I passed the Stowe place. It seemed
inexpressibly gloomy and lonesome under the great arching oaks where the
wild tangle of grape and jasmine, greenbrier, and I know not what other
vines and shrubs cloaks the crumbling foundations and makes a thorny and
impenetrable jungle of the walks the gracious lady’s feet once trod, and
crowds and smothers the plants and shrubs she once tended. The
sheltering oaks seemed to brood a silence of sorrow, failure, and
forgetfulness. Of the chapel, the school, and the work she nobly tried
to do among the poor and ignorant, what traces here remained? And then
the sun shone low under the western clouds and sent red beams in beneath
the brooding live-oak limbs and touched all the swaying moss with fire,
lighting up the cathedral arches with a golden warmth and radiance that
glorified the place and all thoughts connected with it. Over on the
darkening lane a negro boy, born free, whistled on his way home, a
little cadenced fragment of a tune without beginning or end--a whistle
like that of the cardinal that had flown, a crimson flame, into the
morning air. I knew then that whatever crumbles, the spirit of cheer and
devotion and self-sacrifice lives on unquenched. The jungle may ride
over and obliterate the Stowe place and the lovely English gardens, but
the spirit of devotion that burned in the one and of homemaking
hospitality that glowed in the other can never be quenched.