said she had a bed, as big as the barn-door, of "June" lilies, and that,
as they were going to build a hen-house next autumn on the spot where
they grew, she was going to lift some into one of her raised mounds (an
awful construction, being a cross between a gigantic dirt pie and a
grave), and said that I might have all the spare lily bulbs that I
wanted if I would give her what she termed a "hatching" of gladiolus
bulbs. Just at present the lilies have entirely disappeared, and nothing
but bare earth is visible, but I think from the description that they
must be the lovely Madonna lilies of grandmother's Virginia garden that
made a procession from the tea-house quite down to the rose garden,
like a bevy of slender young girls in confirmation array. If so, they do
not take kindly to handling, and I have an indistinct remembrance of
some rather unusual time of year when it must be done if necessary.
Please let me know about this, for I can be of little use in the moving
of the evergreens and I want something to potter about in the garden.
There are two places for a lily bed, but I am uncertain which is best
until I hear from you. Either will have to be thoroughly renovated in
the matter of soil, so that I am anxious to start upon the right basis.
One of these spots is in full sun, with a slope toward the orchard; in
the other the sun is cut off after one o'clock, though there are no
overhanging branches; there is also a third place, a squashy spot down
in the bend of the old wall.
On our return, toward evening, we met _The Man from Everywhere_ driving
down from the reservoir ground toward Opal Farm, a pink-cheeked young
fellow of about twenty sharing the road wagon with him. As he has again
been away for a few days, we drew up to exchange greetings and _The Man_
said, rather aside, "I'm almost sorry that Larry fell from the skies to
help out your gardening, for here is a young German who has come from a
distance, with a note from a man I know well, applying for work at the
quarry; but there will be nothing suitable for him there for several
months, for he's rather above the average. He would have done very well
for you, as, though he speaks little English, I make out that his father
was an under-forester in the fatherland. As it is, I'm taking him to the
farm with me for the night and will try to think of how I may help him
on in the morning."
Instantly both Maria and I began to tell of Larry's defection in
different keys, the young man meanwhile keeping up a deferential and
most astonishing bowing and smiling.
Having secured the seal of Bart's approval, Meyer has been engaged, and
after to-day we must accustom our ears to a change from Larry's rich
brogue to the juicy explosiveness of German; and worse yet, I must rack
my brains for the mostly forgotten dialect of the schoolroom language
that is learned with such pain and so quickly forgotten.
I'm wondering very much about _The Man's_ sudden return to Opal Farm and
if it will interfere with Maria Maxwell's daily care of Amos Opie; for,
as it turns out, he is really ill, the chill resulting from Larry's
prank having been the final straw, and no suitable woman having been
found, who has volunteered to tend the old man in the emergency, but
Maria! That is, to the extent of taking him food and giving him
medicines, for though in pain he is able to sit in an easy-chair. Maria
certainly is capable, but so stupid about _The Man_. However, as the
farm-house is now arranged as two dwellings, with the connecting door
opening in the back hall and usually kept locked on Amos's side, she
cannot possibly feel that she is putting herself in _The Man's_ way!
XIII
LILIES AND THEIR WHIMS
(Barbara Campbell to Mary Penrose)
_Oaklands, August 18._ As a suitable text for this chronicle, as well as
an unanswerable argument for its carrying out, combined with a sort of
premium, I'm sending you to-day, freight paid, a barrel of
lily-of-the-valley roots, all vigorous and with many next year's
flowering pips attached.
No,--I hear your decorous protest,--I have not robbed myself, neither am
I giving up the growing of this most exquisite of spring flowers, whose
fragrance penetrates the innermost fastnesses of the memory, yet is
never obtrusive. Simply my long border was full to overflowing and last
season some of the lily bells were growing smaller. When this happens,
as it does every half a dozen years, I dig two eight-inch trenches down
the bed's entire length, and taking out the matted roots, fill the gap
with rich soil, adding the plants thus dispossessed to my purse of
garden wampum, which this time falls into your lap entire. Of the
treatment of the little flower, that is erroneously supposed to feast
only upon leaf-mould in the deep shade, you shall hear later.
By all means begin your lily bed now, for the one season at which the
Madonna lily resents removal the least is during the August resting
time. Then, if you lift her gently while she sleeps, do not let the cool
earth breath that surrounds her dry away, and bed her suitably, she will
awaken and in a month put forth a leafy crown of promise to be fulfilled
next June. Madonna does not like the shifting and lifting that falls to
the lot of so many garden bulbs owing to the modern requirements that
make a single flower bed often a thing of three seasonal changes. Many
bulbs, many moods and whims. Hyacinths and early tulips blossom their
best the first spring after their autumn planting (always supposing that
the bob-tailed meadow-mice, who travel in the mole tunnels, thereby
giving them a bad reputation, have not feasted on the tender heart buds
in the interval).
The auratum lily of the gorgeous gold-banded and ruby-studded flower
exults smilingly for a season or two and then degenerates sadly.
Madonna, if she be healthy on her coming, and is given healthy soil free
from hot taint of manure, will live with you for years and love you and
give you every season increasing yield of silver-white-crowned stalks,
at the very time that you need them to blend with your royal blue
delphiniums. But this will be only if you obey the warning of "hands and
spade off."
The three species of the well-known recurved Japan lily--_speciosum
roseum_, _s. rubrum_, and _s. album_--have the same love of permanence;
likewise the lily-of-the-valley and all the tribe of border narcissi and
daffodils; so if you wish to keep them at their best, you must not only
give them bits of ground all of their own, but study their individual
needs and idiosyncrasies.
Lilies as a comprehensive term,--the Biblical grass of the field,--as
far as concerns a novice or the Garden, You, and I, may be made to cover
the typical lilies themselves, tulips, narcissi (which are of the
amaryllis flock), and lilies-of-the-valley, a tribe by itself. You will
wish to include all of them in your garden, but you must limit yourself
to the least whimsical varieties on account of your purse, the labor
entailed, and the climate.
Of the pieces of ground that you describe, take that in partial shade
for your Madonna lilies and their kin, and that in the open sun for your
lilies-of-the-valley, while I would keep an earth border free from
silver birches, on the sunny side of your tumble-down stone-wall
rockery, for late tulips and narcissi; and grape hyacinths, scillas,
trilliums, the various Solomon's seals, bellworts, etc., can be
introduced in earth pockets between the rocks if, in case of the
deeper-rooted kinds, connection be had with the earth below.
It is much more satisfactory to plant spring bulbs in this way,--in
groups, or irregular lines and masses, where they may bloom according to
their own sweet will, and when they vanish for the summer rest, scatter
a little portulaca or sweet alyssum seed upon the soil to prevent too
great bareness,--than to set them in formal beds, from which they must
either be removed when their blooming time is past, or else one runs the
risk of spoiling them by planting deep-rooted plants among them.
The piece of sunny ground in the angled dip of the old wall, which you
call "decidedly squashy," interests me greatly, for it seems the very
place for Iris of the Japanese type,--lilies that are not lilies in the
exact sense, except by virtue of being built on the rule of three and
having grasslike or parallel-veined leaves. But these closely allied
plant families and their differences are a complex subject that we need
not discuss, the whole matter being something akin to one of the dear
old Punch stories that adorn Evan's patriotic scrap-book.
A railway porter, puzzled as in what class of freight an immense
tortoise shall be placed, as dogs are the only recognized standard,
pauses, gazing at it as he scratches his head, and mutters, "Cats is
dogs and rabbits is dogs, but this 'ere hanimal's a hinsect!" The Iris
may be, in this respect, a "hinsect," but we will reckon it in with the
lilies.
The culture of this Japan Iris is very simple and well worth while, for
the species comes into bloom in late June and early July, when the
German and other kinds are through. I should dig the wet soil from the
spot of which you speak, for all muck is not good for this Iris, and
after mixing it with some good loam and well-rotted cow manure replace
it and plant the clumps of Iris two feet apart, for they will spread
wonderfully. In late autumn they should have a top dressing of manure
and a covering of corn stalks, but, mind, water must not stand on your
Iris bed in winter; treating them as hardy plants does not warrant their
being plunged into water ice. It is almost impossible, however, to give
them too much water in June and July, when the great flowers of rainbow
hues, spreading to a size that covers two open hands, cry for drink to
sustain the exhaustion of their marvellous growth. So if your "squashy
spot" is made so by spring rains, all is well; if not, it must be
drained in some easy way, like running a length of clay pipe beneath, so
that the overplus of water will flow off when the Iris growth cannot
absorb it.
Ah me! the very mention of this flower calls up endless visions of
beauty. Iris--the flower of mythology, history, and one might almost say
science as well, since its outline points to the north on the face of
the mariner's compass; the flower that in the dawn of recorded beauty
antedates the rose, the fragments of the scattered rainbow of creation
that rests upon the garden, not for a single hour or day or week, but
for a long season. The early bulbous _Iris histriodes_ begins the season
in March, and the Persian Iris follows in April. In May comes the sturdy
German Iris of old gardens, of few species but every one worthy, and to
be relied upon in mass of bloom and sturdy leafage to rival even the
peony in decorative effect. Next the meadows are ribboned by our own
blue flags; and the English Iris follows and in June and July meets the
sumptuous Iris of Japan at its blooming season, for there seems to be
no country so poor as to be without an Iris.
There are joyous flowers of gold and royal blue, the Flower de Luce
(Flower of Louis) of regal France, and sombre flowers draped in deep
green and black and dusky purple, "The widow" (_Iris tuberosa_) and the
Chalcedonian Iris (_Iris Susiana_), taking its name from the Persian
Susa. _Iris Florentina_ by its powdered root yields the delicate violet
perfume orris, a corruption doubtless of Iris.
Many forms of root as well as blossom has the Iris, tuberous, bulbous,
fibrous, and if the rose may have a garden to itself, why may not the
Iris in combination with its sister lilies have one also? And when my
eyes rest upon a bed of these flowers or upon a single blossom, I long
to be a poet.
* * * * *
Now to begin: will your shady place yield you a bed four feet in width
by at least twenty in length? If so, set Barney to work with pick and
spade. The top, I take it, is old turf not good enough to use for
edging, so after removing this have it broken into bits and put in a
heap by itself. When the earth beneath is loosened, examine it
carefully. If it is good old mellow loam without the pale yellow colour
that denotes the sterile, undigested soil unworked by roots or
earthworms, have it taken out to eighteen inches in depth and shovelled
to one side. When the bad soil is reached, which will be soon, have it
removed so that the pit will be three feet below the level.
Next, let Barney collect any old broken bits of flower-pots, cobbles, or
small stones of any kind, and fill up the hole for a foot, and let the
broken turf come on top of this. If possible, beg or buy of Amos Opie a
couple of good loads of the soil from the meadow bottom where the red
bell-lilies grow, and mix this with the good loam, together with a
scattering of bone, before replacing it. The bed should not only be
full, but well rounded. Grade it nicely with a rake and wait a week or
until rain has settled it before planting. When setting these lilies,
let there be six inches of soil above the bulb, and sprinkle the hole
into which it goes with fresh-water sand mixed with powdered sulphur.
This bed will be quite large enough for a beginning and will allow you
four rows of twenty bulbs in a row, with room for them to spread
naturally into a close mass, if so desired. Or better yet, do not put
them in stiff rows, but in groups, alternating the early-flowering with
the late varieties. A row of German Iris at the back of this bed will
give solidity and the sturdy foliage make an excellent windbreak in the
blooming season. If your friendly woman in the back country will give
you two dozen of the Madonna lily bulbs, group them in fours, leaving a
short stake in the middle of each group that you may know its exact
location, for the other lilies you cannot obtain before October, unless
you chance to find them in the garden of some near-by florist or friend.
These are--
_Lilium speciosum album_--white recurved.
_Lilium speciosum rubrum_--spotted with ruby-red.
_Lilium speciosum roseum_--spotted with rose-pink.
All three flower in August and September, _rubrum_ being the latest, and
barring accidents increase in size and beauty with each year.
In spite of the fact of their fickleness, I would buy a dozen or two of
the auratum lilies, for even if they last but for a single year, they
are so splendid that we can almost afford to treat them as a fleeting
spectacle. As the _speciosum_ lilies (I wish some one would give them a
more gracious name--we call them curved-shell lilies here among
ourselves) do not finish flowering sometimes until late in September,
the bulbs are not ripe in time to be sold through the stores, until
there is danger of the ground being frozen at night.
[Illustration: SPECIOSUM LILIES IN THE SHADE.]
On the other hand, if purchased in spring, unless the bulbs have been
wintered with the greatest care in damp, not wet, peat moss, or sand,
they become so withered that their vitality is seriously impaired. There
are several dealers who make a specialty of thus wintering lily
bulbs,[A] and if you buy from one of these, I advise spring planting.
If, however, for any reason you wish to finish your bed this fall, after
planting and covering each bulb, press a four or five inch flower-pot
lightly into the soil above it. This will act as a partial watershed to
keep the drip of rain or snow water from settling in the crown of the
bulb and decaying the bud. Or if you have plenty of old boards about the
place, they may be put on the bed and slightly raised in the centre,
like a pitched roof, so as to form a more complete watershed, and the
winter covering of leaves, salt, hay, or litter, free of manure, can be
built upon this. Crocuses, snowdrops, and scillas make a charming border
for a lily bed and may be also put between the lilies themselves to lend
colour early in the season.
To cover your bed thoroughly, so that it will keep out cold and damp and
not shut it in, is a _must be_ of successful lily culture. Have you ever
tried to grow our hardiest native lilies like the red-wood, Turk's cap,
and Canada bell-lily in an open border where the porous earth, filled by
ice crystal, was raised by the frost to the consistency of bread sponge?
I did this not many years ago and the poor dears looked pinched and
woebegone and wholly unlike their sturdy sisters of meadow and upland
wood edges. Afterward, in trying to dig some of these lilies from their
native soil, I discovered why they were uncomfortable in the open
borders; the Garden, You, and I would have to work mighty hard to find a
winter blanket for the lily bed to match the turf of wild grasses
sometimes half a century old.
Many other beautiful and possible lilies there are besides these four,
but these are to be taken as first steps in lily lore, as it were; for
to make anything like a general collection of this flower is a matter of
more serious expense and difficulty than to collect roses, owing to the
frailness of the material and the different climatic conditions under
which the rarer species, especially those from India and the sea
islands, originated; but given anything Japanese and a certain
cosmopolitan intelligence seems bred in it that carries a reasonable
hope of success under new conditions.
We have half a dozen species of beautiful native lilies, but like some
of our most exquisite ferns they depend much for their attractiveness
upon the setting their natural haunts offer, and I do not like to see
them caged, as it were, within strict garden boundaries.
The red wood-lily should be met among the great brakes of a sandy wood
edge, where white leafless wands of its cousin, star-grass, or colic
root, wave above it, and the tall late meadow-rue and white angelica
fringe the background.
The Canada bell-lily needs the setting of meadow grasses to veil its
long, stiff stalks, while the Turk's-cap lily seems the most at home of
all in garden surroundings, but it only gains its greatest size in the
deep meadows, where, without being wet, there is a certain moisture
beneath the deep old turf, and this turf itself not only keeps out
frost, but moderates the sun's rays in their transit to the ground.
Two lilies there are that, escaping from gardens, in many places have
become half wild--the brick-red, black-spotted tiger lily with recurved
flowerets, after the shape of the Japanese _roseum_, _rubrum_, and
_album_, being also a native of Japan and China, and the tawny orange
day lily, that is found in masses about old cellars and waysides, with
its tubular flowers, held on leafless stems, springing from a matted
bed of leaves. This day lily (_hemerocallis fulva_) is sister to the
familiar and showy lemon lily of old gardens (_hemerocallis flava_). If
you have plenty of room by your wall, I should lodge a few good bunches
by it when you find some in a location where digging is possible. It is
a decorative flower, but hardly worthy of good garden soil. The same may
be said of the tiger lily, on account of the very inharmonious shade of
red it wears; yet if you have a half-wild nook, somewhere that a dozen
bulbs of it may be tucked in company with a bunch of the common tall
white phlox that flowers at the same time, you will have a bit of colour
that will care for itself.
The lemon lily should have a place in the hardy border well toward the
front row and be given enough room to spread into a comfortable circle
after the manner of the white plantain lily (_Funkia subcordata_). This
last lily, another of Japan's contributions to the hardy garden, blooms
from August until frost and unlike most of the lily tribe is pleased if
well-rotted manure is deeply dug into its resting-place.
As with humanity the high and lowly born are subject to the same
diseases, so is it with the lily tribe, and because you choose the
sturdiest and consequently least expensive species for your garden, do
not think that you may relax your vigilance.
There is a form of fungous mould that attacks the bulbs of lilies
without rhyme or reason and is the insidious tuberculosis of the race.
_Botrytis cinerea_ is its name and it seizes upon stalk and leaves in
the form of spots that are at first yellow and then deepen in colour,
until finally, having sapped the vitality of the plant, it succumbs.
Cold, damp, insufficient protection in winter, all serve to render the
lily liable to its attacks, but the general opinion among the wise is
that the universal overstimulation of lilies by fertilizers during late
years, especially of the white lilies used for church and other
decorative purposes, has undermined the racial constitution and made it
prone to attacks of the enemy. Therefore, if you please, Mary Penrose,
sweet soil, sulphur, sand, and good winter covering, if you would not
have your lily bed a consumptives' hospital!
Some lilies are also susceptible to sunstroke. When growing in the full
light and heat of the sun, and the buds are ready to open, suddenly the
flowers, leaves, and entire stalk will wither, as when in spring a tulip
collapses and we find that a meadow-mouse has nipped it in the core.
But with the lily the blight comes from above, and the only remedy is to
plant in half shade.
On the other hand the whims of the flower require that this be done
carefully, for if the scorching sun is an evil, a soaking, sopping rain,
coming at the height of the blooming season and dripping from
overhanging boughs, is equally so. The gold-and-copper pollen turns to
rusty tears that mar the petals of satin ivory or inlaid enamel, and a
sickly transparency that bodes death comes to the crisp, translucent
flower!
"What a pother for a bed of flowers!" I hear you say, "draining,
subsoiling, sulphuring, sanding, covering, humouring, and then sunstroke
or consumption at the end!" So be it, but when success does come, it is
something worth while, for to be successful with these lilies is "aiming
the star" in garden experience.
The plantain lilies and hemerocallis seem free from all of these whims
and diseases, but it is when we come to the lily-of-the-valley that we
have the compensation for our tribulations with the royal lilies of pure
blood.
The lily-of-the-valley asks deep, very rich soil in the open sun; if a
wall or hedge protects it from the north, so much the better. I do not
know why people preach dense shade for this flower; possibly because
they prefer leaves to flowers, or else that they are of the sheeplike
followers of tradition instead of practical gardeners of personal
experience. One thing grows to perfection in the garden of this
commuter's wife, and that is lilies-of-the-valley, and shade knows them
not between eight in the morning and five at night, and we pick and pick
steadily for two weeks, for as the main bed gives out, there are strips
here and there in cooler locations that retard the early growth, but
never any overhanging branches.
In starting a wholly new bed, as you are doing, it is best to separate
the tangled roots into small bunches, seeing to it that a few buds or
"pips" remain with each, and plant in long rows a foot apart, three rows
to a four-foot bed. Be sure to bury a well-tarred plank a foot in width
edgewise at the outer side of the bed, unless you wish, in a couple of
years' time, to have this enterprising flower walk out and about the
surrounding garden and take it for its own. Be sure to press the roots
in thoroughly and cover with three inches of soil.
In December cover the bed with rotten _cow_ manure for several inches
and rake off the coarser part in April, taking care not to break the
pointed "pips" that will be starting, and you will have a forest of
cool green leaves and such flowers as it takes much money to buy. Not
the first season, of course, but after that--forever, if you thin out
and fertilize properly.
In the back part of your lily-of-the-valley bed plant two or three rows
of the lovely poets' narcissus (_poeticus_). It opens its white flowers
of the "pheasant's eye" cup at the same time as the lilies bloom, it
grows sufficiently tall to make a good upward gradation, and it likes to
be let severely alone. But do not forget in covering in the fall to put
leaves over the narcissi instead of manure. Of other daffodils and
narcissi that I have found very satisfactory, besides the good mixtures
offered by reliable houses at only a dollar or a dollar and a quarter a
hundred (the poets' narcissi only costing eighty cents a hundred for
good bulbs), are Trumpet Major, Incomparabilis, the old-fashioned
"daffy," and the monster yellow trumpet narcissus, Van Sion.
The polyanthus narcissi, carrying their many flowers in heads at the top
of the stalk, are what is termed half hardy and they are more frequently
seen in florists' windows than in gardens. I have found them hardy if
planted in a sheltered spot, covered with slanted boards and leaves,
which should not be removed before April, as the spring rain and
winds, I am convinced, do more to kill the species than winter cold. The
flowers are heavily fragrant, like gardenias, and are almost too sweet
for the house; but they, together with violets, give the garden the
opulence of odour before the lilacs are open, or the heliotropes that
are to be perfumers-in-chief in summer have graduated from thumb pots in
the forcing houses.