rudely," I was forced to confess. "In one way it would seem impossible
to have too many flowers about, and yet in another it is unnatural, for
are not nature's unconscious effects made by using colour as a central
point, a focus that draws the eye from a more sombre and soothing
setting?"
"How could we enjoy a sunset that held the whole circle of the horizon
at once?" chimed in _The Man_, suddenly, as if reading my thoughts. "Or
twelve moons?" added Bart, laughing.
No, Mrs. Evan, I am convinced by so short a trial as two weeks that the
art of arranging flowers for the house is first, your plan of having
some to greet the guest as he enters, a bit of colour or coolness in
each room where we pause to read or work or chat, and a table
garnishing to render æsthetic the aspect and surroundings of the human
animal at his feeding time; otherwise, except at special seasons of
festivity, a surplus of flowers in the house makes for restlessness, not
peace. Two days ago I had thirty-odd vases and jars filled with flowers,
and I felt, as I sat down to sew, as if I was trespassing in a bazaar!
Also, if there are too many jars of various flowers in one room, it is
impossible that each should have its own individuality.
To-day I began my new plan. I put away a part of my jars and vases and
deliberately thought out what flowers I would use before gathering them.
The day being overcast though not threatening, merely the trail, as it
were, of the storm that had passed, and the den being on the north side
of the house and finished in dark woodwork and furniture, I gathered
nasturtiums in three shades for it, the deep crimson, orange-scarlet,
and canary-yellow, but not too many--a blue-and-white jar of the Chinese
"ginger" pattern for one corner of the mantel-shelf, and for the
Japanese well buckets, that are suspended from the central hanging lamp
by cords, a cascade of blossoms of the same colour still attached to
their own fleshy vines and interspersed with the foliage. Strange as it
may seem, this little bit of pottery, though of a peculiar deep pink,
harmonizes wonderfully well with the barbaric nasturtium colours. There
seems to be a kind of magic blended with the form and colour of these
buckets, plain and severe in shape, that swing so gracefully from their
silken cords, for they give grace to every flower that touches them.
When filled with stiff stalks of lilies-of-the-valley or tulips, they
have an equally distinguished air as when hung with the bells of
columbines or garlands of flowering honeysuckles twisted about the cords
climbing quite up to the lamp.
In the hall I placed my tallest green-glass jar upon the greeting table
and filled it with long stalks of red and gold Canada lilies from the
very bottom of Amos Opie's field, where the damp meadow-grass begins to
make way for tussocks and the marshy ground begins.
The field now is as beautiful as a dream; the early grasses have
ripened, and above them, literally by the hundreds,--rank, file,
regiment, and platoon,--stand these lilies, some stalks holding twenty
bells, ranged as regularly as if the will of man had set them there, and
yet poised so gracefully that we know at once that no human touch has
placed them. I wish that you could have stood with me in the doorway of
the camp and looked across that field this morning. Bart declared the
sight to be the first extra dividend upon our payment to Amos Opie for
leaving the grass uncut.
I left the stalks of the lilies full three feet long and used only their
own foliage, together with some broad-leaved grasses, to break the too
abrupt edge of the glass. This is a point that must be remembered in
arranging flowers, the keeping the relative height and habit of the
plant in the mind's eye. These lilies, gathered with short stems and
massed in a crowded bunch, at once lose their individuality and become
mere little freckled yellow gamins of the flower world.
A rather slender jar or vase also gives an added sense of height;
long-stemmed flowers should never be put in a flat receptacle, no matter
how adroitly they may be held in place. Only last month I was called
upon to admire a fine array of long-stemmed roses that were held in a
flat dish by being stuck in wet sand, and even though this was covered
by green moss, the whole thing had a painfully artificial and embalmed
look, impossible to overcome.
For the living room, which is in quiet green tones and
chintz-upholstered wicker furniture, I gathered Shirley poppies. They
are not as large and perfectly developed as those I once saw in your
garden from fall-sown seed, but they are so delicately tinted and the
petals so gracefully winged that it seemed like picking handfuls of
butterflies.
Maria Maxwell has shown me how, by looking at the stamens, I can tell if
the flower is newly opened, for by picking only such they will last two
full days. How lasting are youthful impressions! She remembers all these
things, though she has had no very own garden these ten years and more.
Will the Infant remember creeping into my cot in these summer mornings,
cuddling and being crooned to like a veritable nestling, until her
father gains sufficient consciousness to take his turn and delight her
by the whistled imitation of a few simple bird songs? Yes, I think so,
and I would rather give her this sort of safeguard to keep off harmful
thoughts and influences than any worldly wisdom.
The poppies I arranged in my smallest frosted-white and cut-glass vases
in two rows on the mantel-shelf, before the quaint old oblong mirror,
making it look like a miniature shrine. Celia Thaxter had this way of
using them, if I remember rightly, the reflection in the glass doubling
the beauty and making the frail things seem alive!
For the library, where oak and blue are the prevailing tints, I filled a
silver tankard with a big bunch of blue cornflowers, encircled by the
leaves of "dusty miller," and placed it on the desk.
The dining-room walls are of deep dark red that must be kept cool in
summer. At all seasons I try to have the table decorations low enough
not to oblige us to peer at one another through a green mist, and to-day
I made a wreath of hay-scented ferns and ruby-spotted Japan lilies
(_Speciosum rubrum_, the tag says--they were sent as extras with my
seeds), by combining two half-moon dishes, and in the middle set a
slender, finely cut, flaring vase holding two perfect stems, each
bearing half a dozen lily buds and blossoms. These random bulbs are the
first lilies of my own planting. There are a few stalks of the white
Madonna lilies in the grass of the old garden and a colony of tiger
lilies and an upright red lily with different sort of leaves, all
clustered at the root, following the tumble-down wall, the rockery to
be. I am fascinated by these Japanese lilies and desire more, each stalk
is so sturdy, each flower so beautifully finished and set with jewels
and then powdered with gold, as it were. Pray tell me something about
the rest of the family! Do they come within my range and pocket, think
you? The first cost of a fair-sized bed would be considerable, but if
they are things that by care will endure, it is something to save up
for, _when the rose bed is completed_--take note of that!
When Bart came home this afternoon, he walked through the rooms before
going out and commented on the different flowers, entirely simple in
arrangement, and lingered over them, touching and taking pleasure in
them in a way wholly different from last week, when each room was a
jungle and I was fairly suffering from flower surfeit.
Now I find myself taking note of happy combinations of colour in other
people's gardens and along the highways for further experiments. I seem
to remember looking over a list of flower combinations and suggestions
in your garden book. Will you lend it to me?
By the way, opal effects seem to circle about the place this season--the
sunsets, the farm-house windows, and finally that rainy night when we
were playing whist, when _The Man_, taking a pencil from his pocket,
pulled out a little chamois bag that, being loose at one end, shed a
shower of the unset stones upon the green cloth, where they lay winking
and blinking like so many fiery coals.
"Are you a travelling jeweler's shop?" quizzed Bart.
"No," replied _The Man_, watching the stones where they lay, but not
attempting to pick them up; "the opal is my birth stone, and I've
always had a fancy for picking them up at odd times and carrying them
with me for luck!"
"I thought that they are considered unlucky," said Maria, holding one in
the palm of her hand and watching the light play upon it.
"That is as one reads them," said _The Man_; "to me they are
occasionally contradictory, that is all; otherwise they represent
adaptation to circumstances, and inexpensive beauty, which must always
be a consolation."
Then he gave us each one, "to start a collection," he said. I shall have
mine set as a talisman for the Infant. I like this new interpretation of
the stone, for to divine beauty in simple things is a gift equal to
genius.
Maria, however, insisted upon giving an old-fashioned threepenny bit,
kept as a luck penny in the centre of her purse, in exchange. How can
any woman be so devoid of even the little sentiment of gifts as she is?
A moment later _The Man from Everywhere_ electrified us by saying, in
the most casual manner, "Now that we are on the subject of opals, did I
tell you that, being in some strange manner drawn to the place, I have
made Opie an offer for the Opal Farm?"
"Good enough! but what for?" exclaimed Bart, nearly exposing a very
poor hand.
"How splendid!" I cried, checking an impulse to throw my arms around his
neck so suddenly that I shied my cards across the room--"Then the meadow
need never be cut again!"
"What a preposterous idea! Did he accept the offer?" jerked Maria
Maxwell, with a certain eagerness.
_The Man's_ face, already of a healthy outdoor hue, took a deeper colour
above the outline of his closely cropped black beard, which he declined
to shave, in spite of prevailing custom.
"I'm afraid my popularity as a neighbour is a minor quality, when even
my Lady Lazy makes it evident that her enthusiasm is for meadow weeds
and not myself!"
"When would you live there?" asked practical Bart.
"All the time, when I'm not elsewhere!" said _The Man_. "No, seriously,
I want permanent headquarters, a house to keep my traps in, and it can
easily be somewhat remodelled and made comfortable. I want to own a
resting-place for the soles of my feet when they are tired, and is it
strange that I should pitch my tent near two good friends?"
It was a good deal for _The Man_ to say, and instantly there was
hand-shaking and back-clapping between Bart and himself, and the game
became hopelessly mixed.
As for Maria, she as nearly sniffed audibly at the idea as a well-bred
woman could. It is strange, I had almost fancied during the course of
the past month, and especially this evening, that _The Man's_ glance,
when toward her, held a special approval of a different variety than it
carried to Bart and me! If Maria is going to worry him, she shall go
back to her flat! I've often heard Bart say that men's feelings are very
woundable at forty, while at twenty-five a hurt closes up like water
after a pebble has been dropped in it.
* * * * *
Yes, Maria _has_ been rude to _The Man_, and in my house, too, where she
represents me! Anastasia told me! I suppose I really ought not to have
listened, but it was all over before I realized what she was saying.
"Yes, mem, for all Miss Marie do be fixed out, so tasty and pleasant
like to everybody, and so much chicked up by the country air, she's no
notion o' beaus or of troubling wid the men!"
"What do you mean, Anastasia?" said I, in perfect innocence. "Of course
Miss Maria is not a young girl to go gadding about!"
"It's not gadding I mean, mem, but here on the porch, one foine night,
jest before the last time Mister Blake went off fer good, they was sat
there some toime, so still that, says I to meself, 'When they do foind
spach, it'll be something worth hearing!'
"'Do I annoy you by staying here? Would you prefer I went elsewhere?'
says he, and well I moind the words, for Oi thought an offer was on the
road, and as 'twas the nearest I'd been to wan, small wonder I got
excoited! Then Miss Marie spoke up, smooth as a knife cutting ice
cream,--'To speak frankly,' says she, 'you do not exactly annoy me, but
I'd much rather you went elsewhere!' Och, but it broke me heart, the
sound of it!"
* * * * *
LIST OF FLOWER COMBINATIONS FOR THE TABLE FROM BARBARA'S _GARDEN BOKE_
HEAVILY SCENTED FLOWERS, SUCH AS HYACINTHS, LEMON AND AURATUM LILIES,
POLYANTHUS NARCISSUS, MAGNOLIAS, LILACS, AND THE LIKE, SHOULD BE
AVOIDED.
Snowdrops and pussy-willows.
Hepaticas and moss.
Spice-bush and shad-bush sprays.
Trailing arbutus and sweet, white garden violets.
Double daffodils and willow sprays.
Crocus buds and moss.
Blue garden scillas and wild white saxifrage.
Black-birch catkins and wind-flowers.
Plants of the various wild violets, according to season, arranged
in an earthen pan with a moss or bark covering.
Old-fashioned myrtle, with its glossy leaves, and single narcissus,
or English primroses.
Bleeding-heart and young ferns.
English border primroses in small rose bowls.
Lilies-of-the-valley, with plenty of their own leaves, and poets'
narcissus.
Tulip-tree flowers and leaves.
The wild red-and-gold columbine with young white-birch sprays.
Pinxter flower and the New York or wood fern.
Jack-in-the-pulpit with its own leaves, in a bark or moss
covered jar.
Pink moccasin-flowers with ferns, in bark-covered jar.
Pansies with ivy or laurel leaves, arranged in narrow dishes to
form a parterre about a central mirror.
Iceland poppies with small ferns or grasses.
May pinks and forget-me-nots.
Blue larkspurs and deutzia (always put white with blue flowers).
Peonies with evergreen ferns, in a central jar.
Sweet-william, arranged in separate colours for parterre effect
or in a large blue-and-white bowl, with graceful sprays of
honeysuckle flowers.
Wild roses with plenty of buds and foliage, in blue-and-white
bowls.
Roses in large sprays with branches of the young leaves of copper
beech--or masses of Chinese honeysuckle.
Roses with short stems arranged with their own or _rugosa_ foliage
in blue-and-white dishes that have coarse wire netting fitted
to the top to keep the flowers in place.
White field daisies, clover, and flowering grasses, in a large
bowl or jar.
Mountain laurel with its own leaves, in central jar and parterre
dishes.
Nasturtiums, in cut-glass bowl or vase, with the foliage of
lemon verbena.
Sweet peas of five colours with a fringe of maiden-hair ferns,
the deepest colour in a central jar, with other smaller
bowls at corners, and small ferns laid around mirror and
on cloth between.
Japan lilies, single flowers, in parterre dishes with ivy leaves, and
sprays in central vase.
Balsams arranged in effect of set borders.
Asters in separate colours.
Spotted-leaved pipsissewa of the woods with fern border, in bark-covered
dish.
Red and gold bell meadow lilies, in large jar, with field grasses.
Gladioli--the flowers separated from the stalks and arranged
with various leaves for parterre effect, or stalks laid upon the
cloth with evergreen ferns to separate the places at a
formal meal.
Sweet sultan, in separate colours, in rose bowls, with fragrant
geranium or lemon-verbena foliage.
Shirly poppies with grasses or green rye, in four slender vases
about a larger centrepiece.
Margaret or picotee carnations with mignonette, arranged loosely
in a cut-glass vase or bowl.
Green rye, wheat, or oats with the blue garden cornflower--or
wild blue chickory.
Wild asters with heavy tasselled marsh-grasses.
Goldenrods with purple iron weed and vines of wild white
clematis, arranged about a flat dish of peaches and pears.
All through autumn place your central mirror on a mat made by
laying freshly gathered coloured leaves upon the cloth.
Wallflowers and late pansies.
White Japanese anemonies and ferns.
Grass of Parnassus, ladies tresses, and marsh shield ferns.
Garden chrysanthemums, in blue-and-white jars and bowls, on a
large mat of brown magnolia leaves.
Sprays of yellow witch-hazel flowers and leaves of red oak.
Sprays of coral winterberry, from which leaves have been
removed, and white-pine tassels.
Club-mosses, small evergreen ferns, and partridge vine with its
red berries, in a bark-covered dish of earth.
XI
A SEASIDE GARDEN
(Barbara Campbell to Mary Penrose)
_Gray Rocks, July 19._ Your epistle upon the evils of an excess of
flowers in the house found us here with the Cortrights and Bradfords,
and I read it with Lavinia and Sylvia on either side, as the theme had
many notes in it familiar to us all! There are certainly times and
seasons when the impulse is overpowering to lay hold of every flower
that comes in the way and gather it to one's self, to cram every
possible nook and corner with this portable form of beauty and fairly
indulge in a flower orgie. Then sets in a reaction that shows, as in so
many things, the middle path is the best for every day. Also there are
many enthusiastic gardeners, both among those who grow their own flowers
and those who cause them to be grown, who spare neither pains nor money
until the flowers are gathered; then their grip relaxes, and the house
arrangement of the fruit of their labour is left to chance.
In many cases, where a professional gardener is in charge, several
baskets, containing a confused mass of blossoms, are deposited daily in
porch or pantry, often at a time when the mistress is busy, and they are
either overlooked or at the last moment crammed into the first
receptacle that comes to hand, from their very inopportuneness creating
almost a feeling of dislike.
When once lodged, they are frequently left to their fate until they
become fairly noisome, for is there anything more offensive to æsthetic
taste than blackened and decaying flowers soaking in stagnant water?
Was it not Auerbach, in his _Poet and Merchant_, who said, "The lovelier
a thing is in its perfection, the more terrible it becomes through its
corruption"? and certainly this applies to flowers.
Flowers, like all of the best and lasting pleasures, must be taken a
little seriously from the sowing of the seed to the placing in the vase,
that they may become the incense of home, and the most satisfactory way
of choosing them for this use is to make a daily tour about the garden,
or, if a change is desired, through the fields and highways, and, with
the particular nook you wish to fill in mind, gather them yourself.
Even the woman with too wide a selection to gather from personally can
in this way indicate what she wishes.
In the vegetable garden the wise man thinks out his crop and arranges a
variety for the table; no one wishes every vegetable known to the season
every day, and why should not the eye be educated and nourished by an
equal variety?
We are all very much interested in your flower-holders of natural wood,
and I will offer you an idea in exchange, after the truly coöperative
Garden, You, and I plan. In the flower season, instead of using your
embroidered centrepieces for the table, which become easily stained and
defaced by having flowers laid upon them, make several artistic table
centres of looking-glass, bark, moss, or a combination of all three.
Lavinia Cortright and I, as a beginning, have oval mirrors of about
eighteen inches in length, with invisibly narrow nickel bindings.
Sometimes we use these with merely an edge of flowers or leaves and a
crystal basket or other low arrangement of flowers in the centre. The
glass is only a beginning, other combinations being a birch-bark mat,
several inches wider than the glass, that may be used under it so that a
wide border shows, or the mat by itself as a background for delicate
wood flowers and ferns. A third mat I have made of stout cardboard and
covered with lichens, reindeer moss, and bits of mossy bark, and I never
go to the woods but what I see a score of things that fairly thrust
themselves before me and offer to blend with one of these backgrounds,
and by holding the eye help to render meal-times less "foody," as Sukey
Latham puts it, though none the less nourishing.
Last night when we gathered at dinner, a few moments after our arrival
and our first meeting at this cottage, I at once became aware that
though host and hostess were the same delightful couple, we were not
dining at Meadow's End, their Oaklands cottage, but at Gray Rocks, with
silver sea instead of green grass below the windows. While the sea
surroundings were brought indoors and on the centre of the dinner table
the mirror was edged by a border of sea-sand, glistening pebbles and
little shells were arranged as a background instead of mosses and
lichens, and rich brown seaweeds still moist with the astringent tonic
sea breath edged this frame, and the more delicate rose-coloured and
pale green weeds seemed floating upon the glass, that held a giant
periwinkle shell filled with the pink star-shaped sabbatia, or sea pink,
of the near-by salt marshes. There was no effort, no strain after
effect, but a consistent preparation of the eye for the simple meal of
sea food that followed.
In front of the cottage the rocks slope quickly to the beach, but on
either side there is a stretch of sand pocketed among the rocks, and in
the back a dune stops abruptly at the margin of wide salt meadows,
creek-fed and unctuous, as befits the natural gardens of the sea.
The other cottages lying to the eastward are gay in red-and-white
striped awnings, and porch and window boxes painted red or green are
filled with geraniums, nasturtiums, petunias,--any flowers, in short,
that will thrive in the broiling sun, while some of the owners have
planted buoy-like barrels at the four corners of their enclosures and
filled them with the same assortment of foliage plants with which they
would decorate a village lawn. This use of flowers seemed at once to
draw the coolness from the easterly breeze and intensify the heat that
vibrates from the sand.
Have you ever noticed that the sea in these latitudes has no affinity
for the brightest colours, save as it is a mirror for the fleeting
flames of sunrise and sunset?
The sea-birds are blended tints of rock, sand, sky, and water, save the
dash of coral in bill and foot of a few, just as the coral of the
wild-rose hips blends with the tawny marsh-grasses. Scarlet is a colour
abhorred even by the marshes, until late in autumn the blaze of samphire
consumes them with long spreading tongues of flame. How can people be
so senseless as to come seaward to cool their bodies, and yet so
surround themselves with scarlet that it is never out of range of the
eye?
Lavinia Cortright and the botanical Bradfords, as Evan calls them,
because though equally lovers of flowers, they go further than some for
the reason why that lies hid beneath the colour and perfume, have laid
out and are still developing a sand garden that, while giving the
cottage home the restful air that is a garden's first claim, has still
the distinct identity of the sand and sea!
To begin, with one single exception, they have drawn upon the wild for
this garden, even as you are doing in the restoration of your knoll.
Back of the cottage a dozen yards is a sand ridge covering some fairly
good, though mongrel, loam, for here, as along most of the coasts of
sounds and bays, the sea, year by year, has bitten into the soil and at
the same time strewn it with sand. Considering this as the garden
boundary, a windbreak of good-sized bayberry bushes has been placed
there, not in a stiff line, but in blended groups, enclosing three
sides, these bays being taken from a thicket of them farther toward the
marshes.