best-known species of hardy herbs will suffice, they may be bought of
one of the many reliable dealers who now offer such things; but if the
place is large and rambling, affording nooks for hardy plants of many
kinds and in large quantities, then a permanent seed bed is a positive
necessity.
This advice is especially for those who are now so rapidly taking up old
farmsteads, bringing light again to the eyes of the window-panes that
have looked out on the world of nature so long that they were growing
dim from human neglect. In these places, where land is reckoned by the
acre, not by the foot, there is no excuse for the lack of seed beds for
both hardy and annual flowers (though these latter belong to another
record), in addition to space for cuttings of shrubs, hardy roses, and
other woody things that may be thus rooted.
If there is a bit of land that has been used for a vegetable garden and
is not wholly worn out, so much the better. The best seed bed I have
ever seen belongs to Jane Crandon at the Jenks-Smith place on the
Bluffs. It was an old asparagus bed belonging to the farm, thoroughly
well drained and fertilized, but the original crop had grown thin and
spindling from being neglected and allowed to drop its seed.
In the birth of this bed the wind and sun, as in all happy gardens, had
been duly consulted, and the wind promised to keep well behind a thick
wall of hemlocks that bounded it on the north and east whenever he was
in a cruel mood. The sun, casting his rays about to get the points of
compass, promised that he would fix his eye upon the bed as soon as he
had bathed his face in mist on rising and turned the corner of the
house, and then, after watching it until past noon, turn his back, so no
wonder that the bed throve.
Any well-located bit of fairly good ground can be made into a hardy seed
bed, provided only that it is not where frozen water covers it in
winter, or in the way of the wind, coming through a cut or sweeping
over the brow of a hill, for flowers are like birds in this
respect,--they can endure cold and many other hardships, but they quail
before the blight of wind.
For all gardens of ordinary size a bit of ground ten feet by thirty feet
will be sufficient. If the earth is heavy loam and inclined to cake or
mould, add a little sifted sand and a thin sprinkling of either nitrate
of soda or one of the "complete" commercial manures. Barn-yard manure,
unless very well rotted and thoroughly worked under, is apt to develop
fungi destructive to seedlings. This will be sufficient preparation if
the soil is in average condition; but if the earth is old and worn out,
it must be either sub-soiled or dug and enriched with barnyard (not
stable) manure to the depth of a foot, or more if yellow loam is not met
below that depth.
If the bed is on a slight slope, so much the better. Dig a shallow
trench of six or eight inches around it to carry off the wash. An abrupt
hillside is a poor place for such a bed, as the finer seeds will
inevitably be washed out in the heavy rains of early summer. If the
surface soil is lumpy or full of small stones that escape fine raking,
it must be shovelled through a sand-screen, as it is impossible for the
most ambitious seed to grow if its first attempt is met by the pressure
of what would be the equivalent of a hundred-ton boulder to a man.
It is to details such as these that success or failure in seed raising
is due, and when people say, "I prefer to buy plants; I am very unlucky
with seeds," I smile to myself, and the picture of something I once
observed done by one of the so-called gardeners of my early married days
flits before me.
The man scraped a groove half an inch deep in hard-baked soil, with a
pointed stick, scattered therein the dustlike seeds of the dwarf blue
lobelia as thickly as if he had been sprinkling sugar on some very sour
article, then proceeded to trample them into the earth with all the
force of very heavy feet. Of course the seeds thus treated found
themselves sealed in a cement vault, somewhat after the manner of
treating victims of the Inquisition, the trickle of moisture that could
possibly reach them from a careless watering only serving to prolong
their death from suffocation.
The woman gardener, I believe, is never so stupid as this; rather is she
tempted to kill by kindness in overfertilizing and overwatering, but too
lavish of seed in the sowing she certainly is, and I speak from the
conviction born of my own experience.
When the earth is all ready for the planting, and the sweet, moist
odour rises when you open the seed papers with fingers almost trembling
with eagerness, it seems second nature to be lavish. If a few seeds will
produce a few plants, why not the more the merrier? If they come up too
thick, they can be thinned out, you argue, and thick sowing is being on
the safe side. But is it? Quite the contrary. When the seedlings appear,
you delay, waiting for them to gain a good start before jarring their
roots by thinning. All of a sudden they make such strides that when you
begin, you are appalled by the task, and after a while cease pulling the
individual plants, but recklessly attack whole "chunks" at once, or else
give up in a despair that results in a row of anæmic, drawn-out
starvelings that are certainly not to be called a success. After having
tried and duly weighed the labour connected with both methods, I find it
best to sow thinly and to rely on filling gaps by taking a plant here
and there from a crowded spot. For this reason, as well as that of
uniformity also, it is always better to sow seeds of hardy or annual
flowers in a seed bed, and then remove, when half a dozen leaves appear,
to the permanent position in the ornamental part of the garden.
With annuals, of course, there are some exceptions to this rule,--in the
case of sweet peas, nasturtiums, mignonette, portulaca, poppies, and
the like, where great quantities are massed.
When you have prepared a hardy seed bed of the dimensions of ten by
thirty feet, which will allow of thirty rows, ten feet long and a foot
apart (though you must double the thirty feet if you intend to cultivate
between the rows with any sort of weeding machine, and if you have room
there should be two feet or even three between the rows), draw a garden
line taut across the narrow way of the plot at the top, snap it, and you
will have the drill for your first planting, which you may deepen if the
seeds be large.
Before beginning, make a list of your seeds, with the heights marked
against each, and put the tallest at the top of the bed.
"Why bother with this, when they are to be transplanted as soon as they
are fist up?" I hear Mary Penrose exclaim quickly, her head tipped to
one side like an inquisitive bird.
Because this seed bed, if well planned, will serve the double purpose of
being also the "house supply bed." If, when the transplanting is done,
the seedlings are taken at regular intervals, instead of all from one
spot, those that remain, if not needed as emergency fillers, will bloom
as they stand and be the flowers to be utilized by cutting for house
decoration, without depriving the garden beds of too much of their
colour. At the commercial florists, and in many of the large private
gardens, rows upon rows of flowers are grown on the vegetable-garden
plan, solely for gathering for the house, and while those with limited
labour and room cannot do this extensively, they can gain the same end
by an intelligent use of their seed beds.
Many men (and more especially many women), many minds, but however much
tastes may differ I think that a list of thirty species of herbaceous
perennials should be enough to satisfy the ambition of an amateur, at
least in the climate of the middle and eastern United States. I have
tried many more, and I could be satisfied with a few less. Of course by
buying the seeds in separate colours, as in the single case of pansies,
one may use the entire bed for a single species, but the calculation of
size is based upon either a ten-foot row of a mixture of one species, or
else that amount of ground subdivided among several colours.
Of the seeds for the hardy beds themselves, the enticing catalogues
offer a bewildering array. The maker of the new garden would try them
all, and thereby often brings on a bit of horticultural indigestion in
which gardener and garden suffer equally, and the resulting plants
frequently perish from pernicious anæmia. Of the number of plants
needed, each gardener must be the judge; also, in spite of many warnings
and directions, each one must finally work on the lines of personally
won experience. What is acceptable to the soil and protected by certain
shelter in my garden on one side of hill crest or road may not flourish
in a different soil and exposure only a mile away. One thing is very
certain, however,--it is time wasted to plant a hardy garden of
herbaceous plants in shallow soil.
In starting the hardy seed bed it is always safe to plant columbines,
Canterbury bells, coreopsis, larkspur, pinks in variety, foxgloves,
hollyhocks, gaillardia, the cheerful evergreen candy-tuft, bee balm and
its cousin wild bergamot, forget-me-nots, evening primroses, and the
day-flowering sundrops, Iceland and Oriental poppies, hybrid phlox, the
primrose and cowslips of both English fields and gardens, that are quite
hardy here (at least in the coastwise New England and Middle states),
double feverfew, lupins, honesty, with its profusion of lilac and white
bloom and seed vessels that glisten like mother-of-pearl, the tall
snapdragons, decorative alike in garden or house, fraxinella or gas
plant, with its spikes of odd white flowers, and pansies, always
pansies, for the open in spring and autumn, in rich, shady nooks all
summer, and even at midwinter a few tufts left in a sunny spot, at the
bottom of a wall by the snowdrops, will surprise you with round,
cheerful faces with the snow coverlet tucked quite under their chins.
[Illustration: FRAXINELLA,--GERMAN IRIS AND CANDY-TUFT.]
It is well to keep a tabulated list of these old-time perennials in the
_Garden Boke_, so that in the feverish haste and excitement of the
planting season a mere glance will be a reminder of height, colour, and
time of bloom. I lend you mine, not as containing anything new or
original, but simply as a suggestion, a hint of what one garden has
found good and writ on its honour list. Newer things and hybrids are now
endless, and may be tested and added, one by one, but it takes at least
three seasons of this adorably unmonotonous climate of alternate
drought, damp, open or cold winter, to prove a plant hardy and worthy a
place on the honour roll. (See p. 376.)
Before you plant, sit down by yourself with the packages spread before
you and examine the seeds at your leisure. This is the first uplifting
of the veil that you may see into the real life of a garden, a personal
knowledge of the seed that mothers the perfect plant.
It may seem a trivial matter, but it is not so; each seed, be it
seemingly but a dust grain, bears its own type and identity. Also, from
its shape, size, and the hardness or thinness of its covering, you may
learn the necessities of its planting and development, for nowhere more
than in the seed is shown the miraculous in nature and the forethought
and economy of it all.
The smaller the seed, the greater the yield to a flower, as if to guard
against chances of loss. The stately foxglove springs from a dust grain,
and fading holds aloft a seed spike of prolific invention; the lupin has
stout, podded, countable seeds that must of necessity fall to the ground
by force of weight. Also in fingering the seeds, you will know why some
are slow in germinating: these are either hard and gritty, sandlike,
like those of the English primrose, smooth as if coated with varnish,
like the pansy, violet, columbine, and many others, or enclosed in a
rigid shell like the iris-hued Japanese morning-glories and other
ipomeas. Heart of Nature is never in a hurry, for him time is not. What
matters it if a seed lies one or two years in the ground?
With us of seed beds and gardens, it is different. We wish present
visible growth, and so we must be willing to lend aid, and first aid to
such seeds is to give them a whiff of moist heat to soften what has
become more hard than desirable through man's intervention. For in wild
nature the seed is sown as soon as it ripens, and falls to the care of
the ground before the vitality of the parent plant has quite passed
from it. That is why the seed of a hardy plant, self-sown at midsummer,
grows with so much more vigour than kindred seed that has been lodged in
a packet since the previous, season.
My way of "first aiding" these seeds is to tie them loosely in a wisp of
fine cheese-cloth or muslin, leaving a length of string for a handle (as
tea is sometimes prepared for the pot by those who do not like mussy tea
leaves). Dip the bag in hot (not boiling) water, and leave it there at
least an hour, oftentimes all night. In this way the seed is softened
and germination awakened. I have left pansy seeds in soak for
twenty-four hours with good results. Of course the seed should be
planted before it dries, and rubbing it in a little earth (after the
manner of flouring currants for cake) will keep the seeds from sticking
either to the fingers or to each other.
What a contrast it all is, our economy and nature's lavishness; our
impatience, nature's calm assurance! In the garden the sower feels a
responsibility, the sweat beads stand on the brow in the sowing. With
nature undisturbed it may be the blind flower of the wild violet
perfecting its moist seed under the soil, a nod of a stalk to the wind,
a ball of fluff sailing by, or the hunger of a bird, and the sowing is
done.
IV
THEIR GARDEN VACATION
(From Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)
WOODRIDGE, _May_ 10.
"DEAR MRS. EVAN,
"For the past week I have been delving in the seed bed, and until it was
an accomplished fact, that is as far as putting on the top sheet of
finely sifted dirt over the seeds sleeping in rows and rounding the
edges after the most approved methods of bed-making, praying the while
for a speedy awakening, I had neither fingers for pen, ink, and paper,
nor the head to properly think out the answer to your May-day
invitation.
"So you have heard that we are to take a long vacation this summer, and
therefore ask us to join your driving and tramping trip in search of
garden and sylvan adventure; in short to become your fellow-strollers in
the Forest of Arden, now transported to the Berkshires.
"It was certainly a kind and gracious thought of yours to admit
outsiders into the intimacies of such a journey, and on the moment we
both cried, 'Yes, we will go!' and then appeared _but_--that little
word of three letters, and yet the condensation of whole volumes, that
is so often the stumbling-block to enthusiasm.
"The translation of this particular _but_ will take a quire of paper,
much ink, and double postage on my part, and a deal of perusive patience
on yours, so to proceed. Like much else that is hearable the report is
partly true, insomuch that your father, Dr. Russell, thinks it necessary
for Bart to take a real vacation, as he put it, 'An entire change in a
place where time is not beaten insistently at the usual
sixty-seconds-a-minute rate, day in and out,' where he shall have no
train-catching or appointments either business or social hanging over
him. At the same time he must not hibernate physically, but be where he
will feel impelled to take plenty of open-air exercise, as a matter of
course! For you see, as a lawyer, Bart breathes in a great deal of bad
air, and his tongue and pen hand get much more exercise than do his
legs, while all the spring he has 'gone back on his vittles that
reckless it would break your heart,' as Anastasia, our devoted, if
outspoken, Celtic cook puts it.
"The exact location of this desired valley of perfection, the ways and
means of reaching it, as well as what shall become of the house and
Infant during our absence, have formed a daily dialogue for the past
fortnight, or I should say triologue, for Anastasia has decided
opinions, and has turned into a brooding raven, informing us constantly
of the disasters that have overtaken various residents of the place who
have taken vacations, the head of one family having acquired typhoid in
the Catskills, a second injured his spine at the seaside by diving in
shallow water, while the third was mistaken for a moose in Canada and
shot. However, her interest is comforting from the fact that she
evidently does not wish to part with us at present.
"It must be considered that if we take a really comfortable trip of a
couple of months' duration, and Bart's chief is willing to allow him a
three months' absence, as it will be his first real vacation since we
were married six years ago, it will devour the entire sum that we have
saved for improving the farm and garden.
"You live on the place where you were born, which has developed by
degrees like yourselves, yet you probably know that rescuing, not an
abandoned farm but the abode of ancient and decayed gentility, even
though the house is oak-ribbed Colonial, and making it a tangible home
for a commuter, is not a cheap bit of work.
"As to the Infant--to take a human four-and-a-half-year-old travelling,
for the best part of a summer, is an imposition upon herself, her
parents, and the public at large. To leave her with Bart's mother, whose
forte is Scotch crossed with Pennsylvania Dutch discipline, will
probably be to find on her return that she has developed a quaking fear
of the dark; while, if she goes to my mother, bless her! who has the
beautiful and soothing Southern genius for doing the most comfortable
thing for the moment, regardless of consequences, the Infant for months
after will expect to be sung to sleep, my hand cuddled against her
cheek, until I develop laryngitis from continued vocal struggles with
'Ole Uncle Ned,' 'Down in de Cane Brake,' and 'De Possum and de Coon.'
"This mental and verbal struggle was brought to an end yesterday by _The
Man from Everywhere_. Do you remember, that was the title that we gave
Ross Blake, the engineer, two summers ago, when you and Evan visited us,
because he was continually turning up and always from some new quarter?
Just now he has been put in charge of the construction of the reservoir
that is to do away with our beloved piece of wild-flower river woods in
the valley below Three Brothers Hills.
"As usual he turned up unexpectedly with Bartram Saturday afternoon and
'made camp,' as a matter of course. A most soothing sort of person is
this same _Man from Everywhere_, and a special dispensation to any woman
whose husband's best friend he chances to be, as in my case, for a man
who is as well satisfied with crackers, cheese, and ale as with your
very best company spread, praises the daintiness of your guest chamber,
but sleeps equally sound in a hammock swung in the Infant's attic
play-room, is not to be met every day in this age of finnickiness. Then
again he has the gift of saying the right thing at difficult moments,
and meaning it too, and though a born rover, has an almost feminine
sympathy for the little dilemmas of housekeeping that are so vital to us
and yet are of no moment to the masculine mind. Yes, I do admire him
immensely, and only wish I saw an opportunity of marrying him either
into the family or the immediate neighbourhood, for though he is nearly
forty, he is neither a misanthrope nor a woman hater, but rather seems
to have set himself a difficult ideal and had limited opportunities.
Once, not long ago, I asked him why he did not marry. 'Because,' he
answered, 'I can only marry a perfectly frank woman, and the few of that
clan I have met, since there has been anything in my pocket to back my
wish, have always been married!'
"'I have noticed that too,' said Bart, whom I did not know was
listening; 'then there is nothing for us to do but find you a widow!'
"'No, that will not do, either; I want born, not acquired, frankness,
for that is only another term for expediency,' he replied with emphasis.
"So you see this _Man_ is not only somewhat difficult, but he has
observed!
"Last night after dinner, when the men drew their chairs toward the
fire,--for we still have one, though the windows are open,--and the
fragrance from the bed of double English violets, that you sent me,
mingled with the wood smoke, we all began to croon comfortably. As soon
as _he_ had settled back in the big chair, with closed eyes and finger
tips nicely matched, we propounded our conundrum of taking three from
two and having four remain.
"A brief summary of the five years we have lived here will make the
needs of the place more clear.
"The first year, settling ourselves in the house and the arrival of the
Infant completely absorbed ourselves, income, and a good bit of savings.
Repairing the home filled the second year. The outdoor time and money of
the third year was eaten up by an expensive and obliterative process
called 'grading,' a trap for newly fledged landowners. This meant taking
all the kinks and little original attitudes out of the soil and
reproving its occasional shoulder shrugs, so to speak,--Delsarte methods
applied to the earth,--and you know that Evan actually laughed at us for
doing it.
"Even in the beginning we didn't care much for this grading, but it was
in the plan that father Penrose had made for us by a landscape gardener,
renowned about Philadelphia at the time he gave us the place as a 'start
in life,' so we felt in some way mysteriously bound by it. And I may as
well assert right here that, though it is well to have a clear idea of
what you mean to do in making a garden, or ever so small pleasure
grounds, that every bit of labour, however trivial, may go toward one
end and not have to be undone, a conventional plan unsympathetically
made and blindly followed often becomes a cross between Fetish and
Juggernaut. It has taken me exactly four years of blundering to find
that you must live your garden life, find out and study its
peculiarities and necessities yourself, just as you do that of your
indoor home, if success is to be the result!
"As it was, the grading began behind the lilac bushes inside the front
fence and proceeded in fairly graceful sweeps, dividing each side of the
level bit where the old garden had been, the still remaining boxwood
bushes and outlines of walks and beds, saving this from obliteration,
and meeting again at the drying yard.
"Here the proceeding stopped abruptly, as if it had received a shock,
which it had, as at this point the family purse wholly collapsed with a
shudder, for the next requirement of the plan was the turning of a long
crest of rocky woodland, shaped like a three-humped camel, that bounded
us on the northwest, into a series of terraces, to render the assent
from a somewhat trim residential section to the pastures of the real
farming country next door less abrupt.
"In its original state this spur of woodland had undoubtedly been very
beautiful, with hemlocks making a windbreak, and all manner of shrubs,
wild herbs, and ferns filling in the leaf-mould pockets between the
boulders. Now it is bare of everything except a few old hemlocks that
sweep the pasture and the rocks, wandering cattle and excursionists from
the village, during the 'abandoned' period of the place, having caused
havoc among the shrubs and ferns.
"Various estimates have been given, but $1000 seemed to be the average
for carrying out the terrace plan even partially, as much blasting is
involved, and $1000 is exactly one-fourth of the spendable part of
Bart's yearly earnings!
"The flower garden also cries for proper raiment, for though the
original lines have been preserved and the soil put in a satisfactory
shape, in lieu of the hardy plants and old-time favourites that belong
to such a place, in emergency we were reduced, last summer, to the
quick-growing but monotonous bedding plants for fillers. Can you imagine
anything more jarring and inconsistent than cannas, castor-oil beans,
coleus, and nasturtiums in a prim setting of box?