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THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I
[Illustration: A SEASIDE GARDEN.]
THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I
BY
BARBARA
AUTHOR OF
"THE GARDEN OF A COMMUTER'S WIFE," "PEOPLE OF
THE WHIRLPOOL," "AT THE SIGN OF THE
FOX," ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1906
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1906.
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1906.
Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
~Dedicated~
TO
J.L.G.
I.M.T.
AND
A.B.P.
THE LITERARY GARDENERS
OF REDDING
GREETING
This book is for those who in treading the garden path have no thought
of material gain; rather must they give,--from the pocket as they
may,--from the brain much,--and from the heart all,--if they would drink
in full measure this pure joy of living.
"Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe--I have tried it--my own feet
have tried it well--be not detained."
--WALT WHITMAN.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE WAYS OF THE WIND 1
II. THE BOOK OF THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I 7
III. CONCERNING HARDY PLANTS 29
IV. THEIR GARDEN VACATION 48
V. ANNUALS--WORTHY AND UNWORTHY 70
VI. THEIR FORTUNATE ESCAPE 92
VII. A SIMPLE ROSE GARDEN 117
VIII. A MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE 155
IX. FERNS, FENCES, AND WHITE BIRCHES 183
X. FRANKNESS--GARDENING AND OTHERWISE 202
LIST OF FLOWER COMBINATIONS FOR THE TABLE
FROM BARBARA'S _Garden Boke_ 230
XI. A SEASIDE GARDEN 233
XII. THE TRANSPLANTING OF EVERGREENS 246
XIII. LILIES AND THEIR WHIMS 262
XIV. FRAGRANT FLOWERS AND LEAVES 281
XV. THE PINK FAMILY OUTDOORS 305
XVI. THE FRAME OF THE PICTURE 320
XVII. THE INS AND OUTS OF THE MATTER 336
XVIII. THE VALUE OF WHITE FLOWERS 352
XIX. PANDORA'S CHEST 365
XX. EPILOGUE 374
APPENDIX
FOR THE HARDY SEED BED 375
SOME WORTHY ANNUALS 387
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A SEASIDE GARDEN (see p. 243) _Frontispiece_
"THE MAGNOLIAS BELOW AT THE ROAD-BEND" 8
ENGLISH LARKSPUR SEVEN FEET HIGH 32
FRAXINELLA--GERMAN IRIS AND CANDY-TUFT 44
LONGFELLOW'S GARDEN 81
THE SUMMER GARDEN--VERBENAS 86
ASTERS 90
THE PICTORIAL VALUE OF EVERGREENS 102
"MY ROSES ARE SCATTERED HERE, THERE,
AND EVERYWHERE" 119
MADAME PLANTIER AT VAN CORTLAND MANOR 128
A CONVENIENT ROSE-BED 138
"THE LAST OF THE OLD ORCHARD" 156
THE SCREEN OF WHITE BIRCHES 166
"AN ENDLESS SHELTER FOR EVERY SORT
OF WILD THING" 184
SPECIOSUM LILIES IN THE SHADE 270
THE POET'S NARCISSUS 278
A BED OF JAPAN PINKS 296
SINGLE AND DOUBLE PINKS 314
"THE SILVER MAPLE BY THE LANE GATE" 326
"A CURTAIN TO THE SIDE PORCH" 328
AN IRIS HEDGE 358
DAPHNE CNEORUM 360
A TERRIBLE EXAMPLE 362
"THE LOW SNOW-COVERED MEADOW" 372
"PUNCH ... HAS A CACHE UNDER THE
SYRINGA BUSHES" 374
THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I
I
THE WAYS OF THE WIND
"Out of the veins of the world comes the blood of me;
The heart that beats in my side is the heart of the sea;
The hills have known me of old, and they do not forget;
Long ago was I friends with the wind; I am friends with it yet."
--GERALD GOULD.
Whenever a piece of the land is to be set apart for a garden, two mighty
rulers must be consulted as to the boundaries. When this earth child is
born and flower garnished for the christening, the same two must be also
bidden as sponsors. These rulers are the Sun and the Wind. The sun, if
the matter in hand is once fairly spread before him and put in his
charge, is a faithful guardian, meeting frankness frankly and sending
his penetrating and vitalizing messengers through well-nigh inviolable
shade. But of the wind, who shall answer for it or trust it? Do we
really ever learn all of its vagaries and impossible possibilities?
If frankness best suits the sun, diplomacy must be our shield of
defence windward, for the wind is not one but a composite of many moods,
and to lure one on, and skilfully but not insultingly bar out another,
is our portion. To shut out the wind of summer, the bearer of vitality,
the uplifter of stifling vapours, the disperser of moulds, would indeed
be an error; therefore, the great art of the planters of a garden is to
learn the ways of the wind and to make friends with it. If the soil is
sodden and sour, it may be drained and sweetened; if it is poor, it may
be nourished; but when all this is done, if the garden lies where the
winds of winter and spring in passing swiftly to and fro whet their
steel-edged tempers upon it, what avails?
What does it matter if violet or pansy frames are set in a sunny nook,
if it be one of the wind's winter playgrounds, where he drifts the snow
deep for his pastime, so that after each storm of snow or sleet a
serious bit of engineering must be undergone before the sashes can be
lifted and the plants saved from dampness; or if the daffodils and
tulips lie well bedded all the winter through, if, when the sun has
called them forth, the winds of March blight their sap-tender foliage?
Yet the lands that send the north winds also send us the means to deter
them--the cold-loving evergreens, low growing, high growing, medium,
woven dense in warp and woof, to be windbreaks, also the shrubs of
tough, twisted fibre and stubborn thorns lying close to the earth for
windbuffers.
Therefore, before the planting of rose or hardy herbs, bulbs or tenderer
flowers, go out, compass in hand, face the four quarters of heaven, and,
considering well, set your windbreaks of sweeping hemlocks, pines,
spruces, not in fortress-like walls barring all the horizon, but in
alternate groups that flank, without appearing to do so heavily, the
north and northwest. Even a barberry hedge on two sides of a garden,
wedge point to north, like the wild-goose squadrons of springtime, will
make that spot an oasis in the winter valley of death.
A wise gardener it is who thinks of the winter in springtime and plants
for it as surely as he thinks of spring in the winter season and longs
for it! If, in the many ways by which the affairs of daily life are
re-enforced, the saying is true that "forethought is coin in the pocket,
quiet in the brain, and content in the heart," doubly does it apply to
the pleasures of living, of which the outdoor life of working side by
side with nature, called gardening, is one of the chief. When a garden
is inherited, the traditions of the soil or reverence for those who
planned and toiled in it may make one blind to certain defects in its
conception, and beginning with _a priori_ set by another one does as one
can.
But in those choosing site, and breaking soil for themselves,
inconsistency is inexcusable. Follow the lay of the land and let it
lead. Nature does not attempt placid lowland pictures on a steep
hillside, nor dramatic landscape effects in a horizonless meadow,
therefore why should you? For one great garden principle you will learn
from nature's close companionship--consistency!
You who have a bit of abrupt hillside of impoverished soil, yet where
the sky-line is divided in a picture of many panels by the trees, you
should not try to perch thereon a prim Dutch garden of formal lines;
neither should you, to whom a portion of fertile level plain has fallen,
seek to make it picturesque by a tortuous maze of walks, curving about
nothing in particular and leading nowhere, for of such is not nature.
Either situation will develop the skill, though in different directions,
and do not forget that in spite of better soil it takes greater
individuality to make a truly good and harmonious garden on the flat
than on the rolling ground.
I always tremble for the lowlander who, down in the depth of his nature,
has a prenatal hankering for rocks, because he is apt to build an
undigested rockery! These sort of rockeries are wholly separate from the
rock gardens, often majestic, that nowadays supplement a bit of natural
rocky woodland, bringing it within the garden pale. The awful rockery of
the flat garden is like unto a nest of prehistoric eggs that have been
turned to stone, from the interstices of which a few wan vines and ferns
protrude somewhat, suggesting the garnishing for an omelet.
Also, if you follow Nature and study her devices, you will alone learn
the ways of the winds and how to prepare for them. Where does Spring set
her first flag of truce--out in the windswept open?
No! the arbutus and hepatica lie bedded not alone in the fallen leaves
of the forest but amid their own enduring foliage. The skunk cabbage
raises his hooded head first in sheltered hollows. The marsh marigold
lies in the protection of bog tussocks and stream banks. The first
bloodroot is always found at the foot of some natural windbreak, while
the shad-bush, that ventures farther afield and higher in air than any,
is usually set in a protecting hedge, like his golden forerunner the
spice-bush.
If Nature looks to the ways of the wind when she plants, why should not
we? A bed of the hardiest roses set on a hill crest is a folly. Much
more likely would they be to thrive wholly on the north side of it. A
garden set in a cut between hills that form a natural blowpipe can at
best do no more than hold its own, without advancing.
But there are some things that belong to the never-never land and may
not be done here. You may plant roses and carnations in the shade or in
dry sea sand, but they will not thrive; you cannot keep upland lilies
cheerful with their feet in wet clay; you cannot have a garden all the
year in our northern latitudes, for nature does not; and you cannot
afford to ignore the ways of the wind, for according as it is kind or
cruel does it mean garden life or death!
"Men, they say, know many things;
But lo, they have taken wings,--
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that anybody knows."
--THOREAU.
II
THE BOOK OF THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I
_April 30._ Gray dawn, into which father and Evan vanished with their
fishing rods; then sunrise, curtained by a slant of rain, during which
the birds sang on with undamped ardour, a catbird making his début for
the season as soloist.
It must not be thought that I was up and out at dawn. At twenty I did so
frequently, at thirty sometimes, now at thirty-five I _can_ do it
_perfectly well_, if necessary, otherwise, save at the change of
seasons, to keep in touch with earth and sky, I raise myself
comfortably, elbow on pillow, and through the window scan garden, wild
walk, and the old orchard at leisure, and then let my arm slip and the
impression deepen through the magic of one more chance for dreams.
_9 o'clock._ The warm throb of spring in the earth, rising in a potent
mist, sap pervaded and tangible, having a clinging, unctuous softness
like the touch of unfolding beech leaves, lured me out to finish the
transplanting of the pansies among the hardy roses, while the first
brown thrasher, high in the bare top of an ash, eyes fixed on the sky,
proclaimed with many turns and changes the exact spot where he did not
intend to locate his nest. This is an early spring, of a truth.
Presently pale sunbeams thread the mist, gathering colour as they filter
through the pollen-meshed catkins of the black birches; an oriole
bugling in the Yulan magnolias below at the road-bend, fire amid snow; a
high-hole laughing his courtship in the old orchard.
Then Lavinia Cortright coming up to exchange Dahlia bulbs and discuss
annuals and aster bugs. She and Martin browse about the country,
visiting from door to door like veritable natives, while their garden,
at first so prim and genteel, like one of Lavinia's own frocks, has
broken bounds and taken on brocade, embroidery, and all sorts of lace
frills, overflowed the south meadow, and only pauses at the stile in the
wall of our old crab-apple orchard, rivalling in beauty and refined
attraction any garden at the Bluffs. Martin's purse is fuller than of
yore, owing to the rise in Whirlpool real estate, and nothing is too
good for Lavinia's garden. Even more, he has of late let the dust rest
peacefully on human genealogy and is collecting quaint garden books and
herbals, flower catalogues and lists, with the solemn intent of writing
a book on Historic Flowers. At least so he declares; but when Lavinia is
in the garden, there too is Martin. To-day, however, he joined my men
before noon at the lower brook. Fancy a house-reared man a convert to
fishing when past threescore! Evan insists that it is because, being
above all things consistent, he wishes to appear at home in the company
of father's cherished collection of Walton's and other fishing books.
Father says, "Nonsense! no man can help liking to fish!"
[Illustration: "THE MAGNOLIAS BELOW AT THE ROAD-BEND."]
Toward evening came home a creel lined with bog moss; within, a rainbow
glimmer of brook trout, a posy of shad-bush, marsh marigolds, anemones,
and rosy spring beauties from the river woods,--with three cheerfully
tired men, who gathered by the den hearth fire with coffee cup and pipe,
inside an admiring but sleepy circle of beagle hounds, who had run free
the livelong day and who could doubtless impart the latest rabbit news
with thrilling detail. All this and much more made up to-day, one of red
letters.
Yesterday, Monday, was quite different, and if not absolutely black, was
decidedly slate coloured. It is only when some one of the household is
positively ill that the record must be set down in black characters, for
what else really counts? Why is it that the city folk persist in judging
all rural days alike, that is until they have once really _lived_ in the
country, not merely boarded and tried to kill time and their own
digestions at one and the same moment.
Such exceptional days as yesterday should only be chronicled now and
then to give an added halo to happy to-morrows,--disagreeables are
remembered quite long enough by perverse human nature.
Yesterday began with the pipe from the water-back bursting, thereby
doing away with hot water for shaving and the range fire at the same
time. The coffee resented hurry, and the contact with an oil stove
developed the peanutty side of its disposition, something that is latent
in the best and most equable of brands.
The spring timetable having changed at midnight Sunday, unobserved by
Evan, he missed the early train, which it was especially important that
he should take. Three other men found themselves in the same
predicament, two being Bluffers and one a Plotter. (These are the names
given hereabout to our two colonies of non-natives. The Bluffers are the
people of the Bluffs, who always drive to the station; the Plotters,
living on a pretty tract of land near the village that was "plotted"
into house-lots a few years ago, have the usual newcomer's hallucination
about making money from raising chickens, and always walk.)
After a hasty consultation, one of the Bluffers telephoned for his
automobile and invited the others to make the trip to town with him. In
order to reach the north turnpike that runs fairly straight to the city,
the chauffeur, a novice in local byways, proposed to take a short cut
through our wood road, instead of wheeling into the pike below
Wakeleigh.
This wood road holds the frost very late, in spite of an innocent
appearance to the contrary; this fact Evan stated tersely. Would a
chauffeur of the Bluffs listen to advice from a man living halfway down
the hill, who not only was autoless but frequently walked to the
station, and therefore to be classed with the Plotters? Certainly not;
while at the same moment the owner of the car decided the matter by
pulling out his watch and murmuring to his neighbour something about an
important committee meeting, and it being the one day in the month when
time meant money!
Into the road they plunged, and after several hair-breadth lurches, for
the cut is deep and in places the rocks parallel with the roadway, the
turnpike was visible; then a sudden jolt, a sort of groan from the
motor, and it ceased to breathe, the heavy wheels having settled in a
treacherous spot not wholly free from frost, its great stomach, or
whatever they call the part that holds its insides, wallowed hopelessly
in the mud!
The gentlemen from the Bluffs deciding that, after all, there was no
real need of going to town, as they had only moved into the country the
week previous, and the auto owner challenged to a game of billiards by
his friend, they returned home, while the Plotter and Evan walked back
two miles to the depot and caught the third train!
At home things still sizzled. Father had an important consultation at
the hospital at ten; ringing the stable call for the horses, he found
that Tim, evidently forgetting the hour, had taken them, Evan's also
being of the trio, to the shoer half an hour before. There was a
moment's consternation and Bertel left the digging over of my hardy beds
to speed down to the village on his bicycle, and when the stanhope
finally came up, father was as nearly irritable as I have ever seen him,
while Tim Saunders's eyes looked extra small and pointed. Evidently
Bertel had said things on his own account.
Was an explosion coming at last to end twelve years of out-of-door
peace, also involving my neighbour and domestic standby, Martha Corkle
Saunders?
No; the two elderly men glanced at each other; there was nothing of the
domineering or resentful attitude that so often renders difficult the
relation of master and man--"I must be getting old and forgetful," quoth
father, stepping into the gig.
"Nae, it's mair like I'm growin' deef in the nigh ear," said Tim, and
without further argument they drove away.
I was still pondering upon the real inwardness of the matter, when the
boys came home to luncheon. Two hungry, happy boys are a tonic at any
time, and for a time I buttered bread--though alack, the real necessity
for so doing has long since passed--when, on explaining father's absence
from the meal, Ian said abruptly, "Jinks! grandpa's gone the day before!
he told Tim _Tuesday_ at 'leven, I heard him!"
But, as it chanced, it was a slip of tongue, not memory, and I blessed
Timothy Saunders for his Scotch forbearance, which Evan insists upon
calling prudence.
My own time of trial came in the early afternoon. During the more than
ten years that I have been a gardener on my own account, I have
naturally tried many experiments and have gradually come to the
conclusion that it is a mistake to grow too many species of
flowers,--better to have more of a kind and thus avoid spinkiness. The
pink family in general is one of those that has stood the test, and this
year a cousin of Evan's sent me over a quantity of Margaret carnation
seed from prize stock, together with that of some exhibition single
Dahlias.
Late in February I sowed the seed in two of the most protected hotbeds,
muffled them in mats and old carpets every night, almost turned myself
into a patent ventilator in order to give the carnations enough air
during that critical teething period of pinks, when the first grasslike
leaves emerge from the oval seed leaves and the little plants are apt to
weaken at the ground level, damp off, and disappear, thinned them out
with the greatest care, and had (day before yesterday) full five hundred
lusty little plants, ready to go out into the deeply dug cool bed and
there wax strong according to the need of pinks before summer heat gains
the upper hand.
The Dahlias had also thriven, but then they are less particular, and if
they live well will put up with more snubs than will a carnation.
Weather and Bertel being propitious, I prepared to plant out my pets,
though of course they must be sheltered of nights for another half
month. As I was about to remove one of the props that held the sash
aloft, to let in air to the Dahlias, and still constitute it a
windbreak, I heard a violent whistling in our grass road north of the
barn that divides the home acres from the upper pastures and Martha's
chicken farm. At first I thought but little of it, as many people use it
as a short cut from the back road from the Bluffs down to the village.
Soon a shout came from the same direction, and going toward the wall, I
saw Mr. Vandeveer struggling along, his great St. Bernard Jupiter, prize
winner in a recent show and but lately released from winter confinement,
bounding around and over him to such an extent that the spruce New
Yorker, who had the reputation of always being on dress parade from the
moment that he left bed until he returned to it in hand-embroidered pink
silk pajamas, was not only covered with abundant April mud, but could
hardly keep his footing.
At the moment I spied the pair, a great brindled cat, who sometimes
ventures on the place, in spite of all the attentions paid her by the
beagles, and who had been watching sparrows in the barnyard, sprang to
the wall. Zip! There was a rush, a snarl, a hiss, and a smash! Dog and
what had been cat crashed through the sash of my Dahlia frame, and in
the rebound ploughed into the soft earth that held the carnations.
The next minute Mr. Vandeveer absolutely leaped over the wall, and
seeing the dog, apparently in the midst of the broken glass, turned
almost apoplectic, shouting, "Ah, his legs will be cut; he'll be ruined,
and Julie will never forgive me! He's her best dog and cost $3000 spot
cash! Get him out, somebody, why don't you? What business have people
to put such dangerous skylights near a public road?"
Meanwhile, as wrath arose in my throat and formed ugly words, Jupiter, a
great friend of ours, who has had more comfortable meals in our kitchen
during the winter than the careless kennel men would have wished to be
known, sprang toward me with well-meant, if rough, caresses,--evidently
the few scratches he had amounted to nothing. I forgave him the cat
cheerfully, but my poor carnations! They do not belong to the grovelling
tribe of herbs that bend and refuse to break like portulaca, chickweed,
and pusley the accursed. Fortunately, just then, a scene of the past
year, which had come to me by report, floated across my vision. Our
young hounds, Bob and Pete, in the heat of undisciplined rat-catching
(for these dogs when young and unbroken will chase anything that runs),
completely undermined the Vandeveers' mushroom bed, the door of the pit
having been left open!
When Mr. Vandeveer recovered himself, he began profuse apologies. Would
"send the glazier down immediately"--"so sorry to spoil such lovely
young onions and spinach!"
"What! not early vegetables, but flowers?" Oh, then he should not feel
so badly. Really, he had quite forgotten himself, but the truth was
Julie thought more of her dogs and horses than even of himself, he
sometimes thought,--almost, but not quite; "ha! ha! really, don't you
know!" While, judging by the comparative behaviour of dog and man, the
balance was decidedly in favour of Jupiter. But you see I never like men
who dress like ladies, I had lost my young plants, and I love dogs from
mongrel all up the ladder (lap dogs excepted), so I may be prejudiced.
After Bertel had carefully removed the splintered glass from the earth,
so that I could take account of my damaged stock, about half seemed to
be redeemable; but even those poor seedlings looked like soldiers after
battle, a limb gone here and an eye missing there.
At supper father, Evan, and I were silent and ceremoniously polite,
neither referring to the day's disasters, and I could see that the boys
were regarding us with open-eyed wonder. When the meal was almost
finished, the bell of the front door rang and Effie returned, bearing a
large, ornamental basket, almost of the proportions of a hamper, with a
card fastened conspicuously to the handle, upon which was printed "With
apologies from Jupiter!" Inside was a daintily arranged assortment of
hothouse vegetables,--cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant eggs,
artichokes,--with a separate basket in one corner brimming with
strawberries, and in the other a pink tissue-paper parcel, tied with
ribbon, containing mushrooms, proving that, after all, fussy Mr.
Vandeveer has the saving grace of humour.
My righteous garden-indignation dwindled; laughter caught me by the
throat and quenched the remainder. Evan, knowing nothing of the
concatenation, but scenting something from the card, joined
sympathetically. Glancing at father, I saw that his nose was twitching,
and in a moment his shoulders began to shake and he led the general
confession that followed. It seems that he arrived at the hospital
really the day of the consultation, but found that the patient, in need
of surgical care, had been seized with nervous panic and gone home!
After such a thoroughly vulgar day there is really nothing to do but
laugh and plan something pleasant for to-morrow, unless you prefer
crying, which, though frequently a relief to the spirit, is particularly
bad for eye wrinkles in the middle-aged.
_May-day._ I always take this as a holiday, and give myself up to any
sort of outdoor folly that comes into my head. There is nothing more
rejuvenating than to let one's self thoroughly go now and then.
Then, besides, to an American, May-day is usually a surprise in itself.
You never can tell what it will bring, for it is by no means the
amiable and guileless child of the poets, breathing perfumed south wind
and followed by young lambs through meadows knee deep in grass and
flowers.
In the course of fifteen years I have seen four May-days when there was
enough grass to blow in the wind and frost had wholly left for the
season; to balance this there have been two brief snow squalls, three
deluges that washed even big beans out of ground, and a scorching
drought that reduced the brooks, unsheltered by leafage, to August
shallowness. But to-day has been entirely lovable and full of the
promise that after all makes May the garden month of the year, the time
of perfect faith, hope, and charity when we may believe all things!
This morning I took a stroll in the woods, partly to please the dogs,
for though they always run free, they smile and wag furiously when they
see the symptoms that tell that I am going beyond the garden. What a
difference there is between the north and south side of things! On the
south slope the hepaticas have gone and the columbines show a trace of
red blood, while on the north, one is in perfection and the other only
as yet making leaves. This is a point to be remembered in the garden, by
which the season of blooming can be lengthened for almost all plants
that do not demand full, unalloyed sun, like the rose and pink families.
Every year I am more and more surprised at the hints that can be carried
from the wild to the cultivated. For instance, the local soil in which
the native plants of a given family nourish is almost always sure to
agree better with its cultivated, and perhaps tropical, cousin than the
most elaborately and scientifically prepared compost. This is a matter
that both simplifies and guarantees better success to the woman who is
her own gardener and lives in a country sufficiently open for her to be
able to collect soil of various qualities for special purposes. Lilies
were always a very uncertain quantity with me, until the idea occurred
of filling my bed with earth from a meadow edge where _Lilium
Canadense_, year after year, mounted her chimes of gold and copper bells
on leafy standards often four feet high.
We may read and listen to cultural ways and methods, but when all is
said and done, one who has not a fat purse for experiments and failures
must live the outdoor life of her own locality to get the best results
in the garden.
Then to have a woman friend to compare notes with and prove rules by is
a comforting necessity. No living being can say positively, "I _will_ do
so and so;" or "I _know_," when coming in contact with the wise old
earth!
Lavinia Cortright has only had a garden for half a dozen summers, and
consults me as a veteran, yet I'm discovering quite as much from her
experiments as she from mine. Last winter, when seed-catalogue time came
round, and we met daily and scorched our shoes before the fire, drinking
a great deal too much tea in the excitement of making out our lists, we
resolved to form a horticulture society of only three members, of which
she elected me the recording secretary, to be called "The Garden, You,
and I."
We expect to have a variety of experiences this season, and frequent
meetings both actual and by pen, for Lavinia, in combination with Horace
and Sylvia Bradford, last year built a tiny shore cottage, three miles
up the coast, at Gray Rocks, where they are going for alternate weeks or
days as the mood seizes them, and they mean to try experiments with real
seashore gardening, while Evan proposes that we should combine pleasure
with business in a way to make frequent vacations possible and take
driving trips together to many lovely gardens both large and small, to
our mutual benefit, his eyes being open to construction and landscape
effect, and mine to the soul of the garden, as it were; for he is
pleased to say that a woman can grasp and translate this more easily and
fully than a man. What if the records of The Garden, You, and I should
turn into a real book, an humble shadow of "Six of Spades" of jovial
memory! Is it possible that I am about to be seized with Agamemnon
Peterkin's ambition to write a book to make the world wise? Alas, poor
Agamemnon! When he had searched the woods for an oak gall to make ink,
gone to the post-office, after hours, to buy a sheet of paper, and
caused a commotion in the neighbourhood and rumour of thieves by going
to the poultry yard with a lantern to pluck a fresh goose quill for a
pen, he found that he had nothing to say, and paused--thereby, at least,
proving his own wisdom.
I'm afraid I ramble too much to be a good recording secretary, but this
habit belongs to my very own garden books that no critical eyes can see.
That reminds me! Father says that he met Bartram Penrose in town last
week and that he seemed rather nervous and tired, and worried about
nothing, and wanted advice. After looking him over a bit, father told
him that all he needed was a long vacation from keeping train, as well
as many other kinds of time, for it seems during the six years of his
marriage he has had no real vacation but his honeymoon.
Mary Penrose's mother, my mother, and Lavinia Cortright were all school
friends together, and since Mary married Bartram and moved to Woodridge
we've exchanged many little visits, for our husbands agree, and now
that she has time she is becoming an enthusiastic gardener, after my own
heart, having last season become convinced of the ugliness of cannas and
coleus beds about a restored colonial farmhouse. Why might they not join
us on our driving trips, by way of their vacation?
Immediately I started to telephone the invitation, and then paused. I
will write instead. Mary Penrose is on the long-distance line,--toll
thirty cents in the daytime! In spring I am very stingy; thirty cents
means six papers of flower seeds, or three heliotropes. Whereas in
winter it is simply thirty cents, and it must be a very vapid
conversation indeed that is not worth so much on a dark winter day of
the quality when neither driving nor walking is pleasant, and if you get
sufficiently close to the window to see to read, you develop a stiff
neck. Also, the difficulty is that thirty cents is only the beginning of
a conversation betwixt Mary Penrose and myself, for whoever begins it
usually has to pay for overtime, which provokes quarterly discussion. Is
it not strange that very generous men often have such serious objections
to the long-distance tails to their telephone bills, and insist upon
investigating them with vigour, when they pay a speculator an extra
dollar for a theatre ticket without a murmur? They must remember that
telephones, whatever may be said to the contrary, are one of the modern
aids to domesticity and preventives of gadding, while still keeping one
not only in touch with a friend but within range of the voice. Surely
there can be no woman so self-sufficient that she does not in silent
moments yearn for a spoken word with one of her kind.
When I had finished sowing my first planting of mignonette and growled
at the prospective labour entailed by thinning out the fall-sown Shirley
poppies (I have quite resolved to plant everything in the
vegetable-garden seed beds and then transplant to the flowering beds as
the easier task), Lavinia Cortright came up, note-book in hand, inviting
herself comfortably to spend the day, and thoroughly inspect the hardy
seed bed, to see what I had for exchange, as well as perfect her plan of
starting one of her own.
By noon the sun had made the south corner, where the Russian violets
grow, quite warm enough to make lunching out-of-doors possible, and
promising to protect Lavinia's rather thinly shod feet from the ground
with one of the rubber mats whereon I kneel when I transplant, she
consented to thus celebrate the coming of the season of liberty, doors
open to the air and sun, the soul to every whisper of Heart of Nature
himself, the steward of the plan and eternal messenger of God.
"Hard is the heart that loveth naught in May!" Yes, so hard that it is
no longer flesh and blood, for under the spell of renewal every grass
blade has new beauty, every trifle becomes of importance, and the humble
song sparrow a nightingale.
The stars that blazed of winter nights have fallen and turned to
dandelions in the grass; the Forsythias are decked in gold, a colour
that is carried up and down the garden borders in narcissus, dwarf
tulips, and pansies, peach blossoms giving a rosy tinge to the snow fall
of cherry bloom.
To-day there are two catbirds, Elle et Lui, and the first Johnny Wren is
inspecting the particular row of cottages that top the long screen of
honeysuckles back of the walk named by Richard _Wren Street_. Why is the
song sparrow calling "Dick, Dick!" so lustily and scratching so testily
in the leaves that have drifted under an old rose shrub? The birds' bath
and drinking basin is still empty; I pour out the libation to the day by
filling it.
The seed bed is reached at last. It has wintered fairly well, and the
lines of plants all show new growth. As I started to point out and
explain, Lavinia Cortright began to jot down name and quantity, and
then, stopping, said: "No, you must write it out as the first record for
The Garden, You, and I. I make a motion to that effect." As I was about
to protest, the postman brought some letters, one being from Mary
Penrose, to whom Mrs. Cortright stands as aunt by courtesy. I opened it,
and spreading it between us we began to read, so that afterward Lavinia
declared that her motion was passed by default.
"WOODRIDGE, _April_ 30.
"MY DEAR MRS. EVAN,
"I am going into gardening in earnest this spring, and I want you and
Aunt Lavinia to tell me things,--things that you have done yourselves
and succeeded or failed in. Especially about the failures. It is a great
mistake for garden books and papers to insist that there is no such word
in horticulture as fail, that every flower bed can be kept in full
flower six months of the year, in addition to listing things that will
bloom outdoors in winter in the Middle States, and give all floral
measurements as if seen through a telephoto lens. It makes one feel the
exceptional fool. It's discouraging and not stimulating in the least.
Doesn't even nature meet with disaster once in a while as if by way of
encouragement to us? And doesn't nature's garden have on and off
seasons? So why shouldn't ours?
"There is a quantity of _Garden Goozle_ going about nowadays that is as
unbelievable, and quite as bad for the constitution and pocket, as the
guarantees of patent medicines. No, _Garden Goozle_ is not my word, you
must understand; it was invented by a clever professor of agriculture,
whom Bart met not long ago, and we loved the word so much that we have
adopted it. The mental quality of _Garden Goozle_ seems to be compounded
of summer squash and milkweed milk, and it would be quite harmless were
it not for the strong catbriers grafted in the mass for impaling the
purses of the trusting.
"Ah, if we only lived a little nearer together, near enough to talk over
the garden fence! It seems cruel to ask you to write answers to all my
questions, but after listing the hardy plants I want for putting the
garden on a consistent old-time footing, I find the amount runs quite to
the impossible three figures, aside from everything else we need, so
I've decided on beginning with a seed bed, and I want to know before we
locate the new asparagus bed how much ground I shall need for a seed
bed, what and how to plant, and everything else!
"I like all the hardy things you have, especially those that are mice,
lice, and water proof! If you will send me ever so rough a list, I
shall be grateful. Would I better begin at once or wait until July or
August, as some of the catalogues suggest?
"Bart has just come in and evidently has something on his mind of which
he wishes to relieve himself via speech.
"Your little sister of the garden,
"MARY P."
"She must join The Garden, You, and I," said Lavinia Cortright, almost
before I had finished the letter. "She will be entertainer in chief, for
she never fails to be amusing!"
"I thought there were to be but three members," I protested, thinking of
the possible complications of a three-cornered correspondence.
"Ah, well," Lavinia Cortright replied quickly, "make the Garden an
_Honorary_ member; it is usual so to rank people of importance from whom
much is expected, and then we shall still be but three--with privilege
of adding your husband as councillor and mine as librarian and custodian
of deeds!"
So I have promised to write to Mary Penrose this evening.
III
CONCERNING HARDY PLANTS
THE SEED BED FOR HARDY FLOWERS
When the Cortrights first came to Oaklands, expecting to remain here but
a few months each summer, their garden consisted of some borders of
old-fashioned, hardy flowers, back of the house. These bounded a
straight walk that, beginning at the porch, went through an arched grape
arbour, divided the vegetable garden, and finally ended under a tree in
the orchard at the barrier made by a high-backed green wooden seat, that
looked as if it might have been a pew taken from some primitive church
on its rebuilding.
There were, at intervals, along this walk, some bushes of lilacs,
bridal-wreath spirea, flowering almond, snowball, syringa, and scarlet
flowering quince; for roses, Mme. Plantier, the half double Boursault,
and some great clumps of the little cinnamon rose and Harrison's yellow
brier, whose flat opening flowers are things of a day, these two
varieties having the habit of travelling all over a garden by means of
their root suckers. Here and there were groups of tiger and lemon
lilies growing out of the ragged turf, bunches of scarlet bee balm, or
Oswego tea, as it is locally called, while plantain lilies, with deeply
ribbed heart-shaped leaves, catnip, southernwood, and mats of grass
pinks. Single hollyhocks of a few colours followed the fence line; tall
phlox of two colours, white and a dreary dull purple, rambled into the
grass and was scattered through the orchard, in company with New England
asters and various golden rods that had crept up from the waste
pasture-land below; and a straggling line of button chrysanthemums,
yellow, white, maroon, and a sort of medicinal rhubarb-pink, had backed
up against the woodhouse as if seeking shelter. Lilies-of-the-valley
planted in the shade and consequently anæmic and scant of bells, blended
with the blue periwinkle until their mingled foliage made a great shield
of deep, cool green that glistened against its setting of faded,
untrimmed grass.
This garden, such as it was, could be truly called hardy, insomuch as
all the care it had received for several years was an annual cutting of
the longest grass. The fittest had survived, and, among herbaceous
things, whatsoever came of seed, self-sown, had reverted nearly to the
original type, as in the case of hollyhocks, phlox, and a few common
annuals. The long grass, topped by the leaves that had drifted in and
been left undisturbed, made a better winter blanket than many people
furnish to their hardy plants,--the word _hardy_ as applied to the
infinite variety of modern herbaceous plants as produced by selection
and hybridization not being perfectly understood.
While a wise selection of flowering shrubs and truly hardy roses will,
if properly planted, pruned, and fertilized, live for many years,
certain varieties even outlasting more than one human generation, the
modern hardy perennial and biennial of many species and sumptuous
effects must be watched and treated with almost as much attention as the
so-called bedding-plants demand in order to bring about the best
results.
The common idea, fostered by inexperience, and also, I'm sorry to say,
by what Mary Penrose dubs _Garden Goozle_, that a hardy garden once
planted is a thing accomplished for life, is an error tending to bitter
disappointment. If we would have a satisfactory garden of any sort, we
must in our turn follow Nature, who never rests in her processes, never
even sleeping without a purpose. But if fairly understood, looked
squarely in the face, and treated intelligently, the hardy garden,
supplemented here and there with annual flowers, is more than worth
while and a perpetual source of joy. If money is not an object to the
planter, she may begin by buying plants to stock her beds, always
remembering that if these thrive, they must be thinned out or the clumps
subdivided every few years, as in the case of hybrid phloxes,
chrysanthemums, etc., or else dug up bodily and reset; for if this is
not done, smaller flowers with poorer colours will be the result.
The foxglove, one of the easily raised and very hardy plants, of
majestic mien and great landscape value, will go on growing in one
location for many years; but if you watch closely, you will find that it
is rarely the original plant that has survived, but a seedling from it
that has sprung up unobserved under the sheltering leaves of its parent.
The old plant grows thick at the juncture of root stock and leaf, the
action of the frost furrows and splits it, water or slugs gain an
entrance, and it disappears, the younger growth taking its place.
Especially true is this also of hollyhocks. The larkspurs have different
roots and more underground vigour, and all tap-rooted herbs hold their
own well, the difficulty being to curb their spreading and undermining
their border companions.
[Illustration: ENGLISH LARKSPUR SEVEN FEET HIGH.]
It is conditions like these that keep the gardener of hardy things ever
on the alert. Beds for annuals or florists' plants are thoroughly dug
and graded each spring, so that the weeds that must be combated are
of new and comparatively shallow growth. The hardy bed, on the contrary,
in certain places must be stirred with a fork only and that with the
greatest care, for, if well-planned, plants of low growth will carpet
the ground between tall standing things, so that in many spots the
fingers, with a small weeding hoe only, are admissible. Thus a blade of
grass here, some chickweed there, the seed ball of a composite dropping
in its aerial flight, and lo! presently weedlings and seedlings are
wrestling together, and you hesitate to deal roughly with one for fear
of injuring the constitution of the other. To go to the other extreme
and keep the hardy garden or border as spick and span clean as a row of
onions or carrots in the vegetable garden, is to do away with the
informality and a certain gracious blending of form and colour that is
one of its greatest charms.
Thus it comes about, with the most successful of hardy mixed borders,
that, at the end of the third season, things will become a little
confused and the relations between certain border-brothers slightly
strained; the central flowers of the clumps of phloxes, etc., grow
small, because the newer growth of the outside circle saps their
vitality.
Personally, I believe in drastic measures and every third or fourth
year, in late September, or else April, according to season and other
contingencies, I have all the plants carefully removed from the beds and
ranged in rows of a kind upon the broad central walk. Then, after the
bed is thoroughly worked, manured, and graded, the plants are divided
and reset, the leavings often serving as a sort of horticultural wampum,
the medium of exchange among neighbours with gardens, or else going as a
freewill offering to found a garden for one of the "plotters" who needs
encouragement.
The limitations of the soil of my garden and surroundings serve as the
basis of an experience that, however, I have found carried out
practically in the same way in the larger gardens of the Bluffs and in
many other places that Evan and I have visited. So that any one thinking
that a hardy garden, at least of herbaceous plants, is a thing that,
once established, will, if not molested, go on forever, after the manner
of the fern banks of the woods or the wild flowers of marsh and meadow,
will be grievously disappointed.
Of course, where hardy plants are massed, as in nurseries, horticultural
gardens, or the large estates, each in a bed or plot of its kind, this
resetting is far simpler, as each variety can receive the culture best
suited to it, and there is no mixing of species.
Another common error in regard to the hardy garden, aided and abetted
by _Garden Goozle_, is that it is easy or even practicable to have every
bed in a blooming and decorative condition during the whole season. It
is perfectly possible always to have colour and fragrance in some part
of the garden during the entire season, after the manner of the natural
sequence of bloom that passes over the land, each bed in bloom some of
the time, but not every bed all of the time. Artifice and not nature
alone can produce this, and artifice is too costly a thing for the woman
who is her own gardener, even if otherwise desirable. For it should
appeal to every one having a grain of garden sense that, if the plants
of May and June are to grow and bloom abundantly, those that come to
perfection in July and August, if planted in their immediate vicinity,
must be overshadowed and dwarfed. The best that can be done is to leave
little gaps or lines between the hardy plants, so that gladioli, or some
of the quick-growing and really worthy annuals, can be introduced to
lend colour to what becomes too severely of the past.
There is one hardy garden, not far from Boston, one of those where the
landscape architect lingers to study the possibilities of the formal
side of his art in skilful adjustment of pillar, urn, pergola, and
basin,--this garden is never out of flower. At many seasons Evan and I
had visited it, early and late, only to find it one unbroken sheet of
bloom. How was it possible, we queried? Comes a day when the complex
secret of the apparent simple abundance was revealed. It was as the
foxgloves, that flanked a long alley, were decidedly waning when, quite
early one morning, we chanced to behold a small regiment of men remove
the plants, root and branch, and swiftly substitute for them immense
pot-grown plants of the tall flower snapdragon (_Antirrhinum_),
perfectly symmetrical in shape, with buds well open and showing colour.
These would continue in bloom quite through August and into September.
So rapidly was the change made that, in a couple of hours at most, all
traces were obliterated, and the casual passer-by would have been
unaware that the plants had not grown on the spot. This sort of thing is
a permissible luxury to those who can afford and desire an exhibition
garden, but it is not watching the garden growing and quivering and
responding to all its vicissitudes and escapes as does the humble owner.
Hardy gardening of this kind is both more difficult and costly, even if
more satisfactory, than filling a bed with a rotation of florists'
flowers, after the custom as seen in the parks and about club-houses: to
wit, first tulips, then pansies and daisies, next foliage plants or
geraniums, and finally, when frost threatens, potted plants of hardy
chrysanthemums are brought into play.
No, The Garden, You, and I know that hardy plants, native and
acclimated, may be had in bloom from hepatica time until ice crowns the
last button chrysanthemum and chance pansy, but to have every bed in
continuous bloom all the season is not for us, any more than it is to be
expected that every individual plant in a row should survive the frost
upheavals and thaws of winter.