"Escaped from Old Gardens"
In the days when I deemed it necessary to hunt down in my well-thumbed
Gray every flower of wood and field, and fit it to its Latin name, I
used often to meet this phrase. At first, being young, I resented it. I
scorned gardens: their carefully planned and duly tended splendors were
not for me. The orchid in the deep woods or by the edge of the lonely
swamp, the rare and long-sought heather in the open moorland, these it
was that roused my ardor. And to find that some newly discovered flower
was not a wild flower at all, but merely a garden flower "escaped"! The
very word carried a hint of reprobation.
But as the years went on, the phrase gathered to itself meanings vague
and subtle. I found myself welcoming it and regarding with a warmer
interest the flower so described. From what old garden had it come? What
associations and memories did it bring out of the past? Had the paths
where it grew been obliterated by the encroachments of a ruthless
civilization, or had the tide of human life drawn away from it and left
it to be engulfed by the forest from which it had once been wrested,
with nothing left to mark it but a gnarled old lilac tree? I have
chanced upon such spots in the heart of the wood, where the lilac and
the apple tree and the old stoned cellar wall are all that are left to
testify to the human life that once centred there. Or had the garden
from which its seed was blown only fallen into a quiet decay, deserted
but not destroyed, left to bloom unchecked and untended, and fling its
seeds to the summer winds that its flowers might "escape" whither they
would?
Lately, I chanced upon such a garden. I was walking along a quiet
roadside, almost dusky beneath the shade of close-set giant maples, when
an unexpected fragrance breathed upon me. I lingered, wondering. It came
again, in a warm wave of the August breeze. I looked up at the tangled
bank beside me--surely, there was a spray of box peeping out through the
tall weeds! There was a bush of it--another! Ah! it was a hedge, a box
hedge! Here were the great stone steps leading up to the gate, and here
the old, square capped fence-posts, once trim and white, now sunken and
silver-gray. The rest of the fence was lying among the grasses and
goldenrod, but the box still lived, dead at the top, its leafless
branches matted into a hoary gray tangle, but springing up from below in
crisp green sprays, lustrous and fragrant as ever, and richly suggestive
of the past that produced it. For the box implies not merely human life,
but human life on a certain scale: leisurely, decorous, well-considered.
It implies faith in an established order and an assured future. A
beautiful box hedge is not planned for immediate enjoyment; it is built
up inch by inch through the years, a legacy to one's heirs.
Beside the gate-posts stood what must once have been two pillars of box.
As I passed between them my feet felt beneath the matted weeds of many
seasons the broad stones of the old flagged walk that led up through the
garden to the house. Following it, I found, not the house, but the wide
stone blocks of the old doorsteps, and beyond these, a ruin--gray ashes
and blackened brick, two great heaps of stone where the chimneys had
been, with the stone slabs that lined the fireplaces fallen together. At
one end was the deep stone cellar filled now with young beeches as tall
as the house once was. Just outside stood two cherry trees close to the
old house wall--so close that they had burned with it and now stood,
black and bare and gaunt, in silent comradeship. At the other end I
almost stumbled into the old well, dark and still, with a glimmer of sky
at the bottom.
But I did not like the ruin, nor the black well lurking in the weeds and
ashes. The garden was better, and I went back to it and followed the
stone path as it turned past the end of the house and led, under another
broad hedge of box now choked by lusty young maples, to the old
rose-garden. Beyond were giant lilacs, and groups of waxberry bushes
covered with the pretty white balls that children love to string; there
was the old-fashioned "burning-bush," already preparing its queer,
angled berries for autumn splendors. And among these, still holding
their own in the tangle, clumps of the tall, rose-lilac phloxes that
the old people seem specially to have loved, swayed in the light breeze
and filled the place with their heavy, languorous fragrance.
Truly, it is a lovely spot, my old garden, lovelier, perhaps, than when
it was in its golden prime, when its hedges were faultlessly trimmed and
its walks were edged with neat flower borders, when their smooth
flagging-stones showed never a weed, and even the little heaps of earth
piled up, grain by grain, by the industrious ants, were swept away each
morning by the industrious broom. Then human life centred here; now it
is very far away. All the sounds of the outside world come faintly to
this place and take on its quality of quiet,--the lowing of cows in the
pastures, the shouts of men in the fields, the deep, vibrant note of the
railroad train which goes singing across distances where its rattle and
roar fail to penetrate. It is very still here. Even the birds are
quieter, and the crickets and the katydids less boisterous. The red
squirrels move warily through the tree-tops with almost a chastened air,
the black-and-gold butterflies flutter indolently about the heads of
the phlox, a hummingbird, flashing green, hovers about some belated
blossom-heads of the scarlet bee-balm, and then, as if to point the
stillness, alights on an apple twig, looking, when at rest, so very
small! Only the cicada, as he rustles clumsily about with his paper
wings against the flaking bark and yellowing leaves of an old apple
tree, seems unmindful of the spell of silence that holds the place.
And the garden is mine now--mine because I have found it, and every one
else, as I like to believe, has forgotten it. Next it is a grove of big
old trees. Would they not have been cut down years ago if any one had
remembered them? And on the other side is a meadow whose thick grass,
waist-high, ought to have been mowed last June and gathered into some
dusky, fragrant barn. But it is forgotten, like the garden, and will go
leisurely to seed out there in the sun; the autumn winds will sweep it
and the winter snow will mat down its dried tangle.
Forgotten--and as I lie in the long grass, drowsy with the scent of the
hedge and the phlox, I seem only a memory myself. If I stay too long I
shall forget to go away, and no one will remember to find me. In truth,
I feel not unwilling that it should be so. Could there be a better
place? "Escaped from old gardens"! Ah, foolish, foolish flowers! If I
had the happiness to be born in an old garden, I would not escape. I
would stay there, and dream there, forever!