_July 2d._
June is the paradise of roses. In this month they break forth into
unparalleled splendor. All Rosedom is out in holiday apparel; and
roses white and black, green and pink, scarlet, crimson, and yellow,
striped and mottled, double and single, in clusters and solitary,
moss-roses, damask-roses, Noisette, perpetual, Bourbon, China, tea,
musk, and all other tribes and names, hang in exuberant beauty. The
air is full of their fragrance. The eye can turn nowhere that it is
not attracted to a glowing bush of roses. At first one is exhilarated.
He wanders from bush to bush and cuts the finest specimens, until
there is no room or dish for more. So many roses, and so few to see
them! What would not people shut up in cities give to see such
luxuriance of beauty! How strange that those who have ground do not
gather about them these favorites of every sense! The air and soil
that nourish nettles and thistles, plantain and dock, would bring
forth roses with equal kindness. There is enough ground wasted around
country houses to furnish root-room for a hundred kinds of roses,
without detriment either to fruit trees or ornamental shade trees. Men
admire them when they see them in a friend’s house; they are always
pleased to receive a lapful as a present to their wife or mother or
daughter; but it does not enter their head that they, too, might have
roses to give away.
Roses are easy of culture, easy of propagation, requiring almost as
little care as dandelions or daisies. The wonder is that every other
man is not an enthusiast, and in the month of June a gentle fanatic.
Floral insanity is one of the most charming inflictions to which man
is heir! One never wishes to be cured, nor should any one wish to cure
him. The garden is infectious. Flowers are “catching,” or the love of
them is. Men begin with one or two. In a few years they are struck
through with floral zeal. Not bees are more sedulous in their
researches into flowers than many a man is, and one finds, after the
strife and heat and toil of his ambitious life, that there is more
pure satisfaction in his garden than in all the other pursuits that
promise so much of pleasure and yield so little.
It is pleasant to find in men whose hard and loveless side you see in
society, so much that is gentle and beauty-loving in private. Hard
capitalists, sharp politicians, grinding business men, will often be
found, at home, in full sympathy with the gentlest aspects of nature.
One is surprised to find how rich and sweet these monsters often turn
out to be! Here is the man whom you have for years heard described, in
all the newspapers, as a spectacle of wickedness or a monument of
folly. You are, by some convulsion of nature, thrown into his company,
and travel for days with him. To your surprise his manners are gentle,
his conversation pleasing, his attentions to all about him
considerate. This must be artifice. It is a veil to hide that hideous
heart of which you have heard so much. You watch and wait. But
watching and waiting only satisfy you that this supposed monster is a
kind man, with a world of sympathy for beautiful things. And when, in
after-months, you have been at his summer-house, and know him in his
vineyard and his garden, you smile at yourself that you were ever
subject to that illusion which is so often raised about public men.
A man is not always to be trusted because he loves fine horses, or
because he follows the stream or hunts in the fields. But if a man
that loves flowers, and loves them enough to labor for them, is not to
be trusted, where in this wicked world shall we go for trust? A man
that carries a garden in his heart has got back again a part of the
Eden from which our great forefather was expelled.