* * * * *
And now when you look out of the little bedroom window again, to the
accompaniment of an early cup of tea, what a change has taken place
since yesterday! Last night the ranges of opposite hills, with the sun
setting behind them, looked vague and mysterious with shadows. This
morning the sun is full on them, but now there is another mystery—or so
it seems to those who see it for the first time.
Instead of looking down into the green tree-clad valley to where the
river winds along at the base of the steep hills, you now look down
on to a bank of solid white—the mist that rises up at night and fills
the lower part of the valley, reminding one of the mist that went up
from the earth in the first Garden, “and watered the whole face of the
ground.”
With the sun on it, the mist gives back a dazzling light. And then
slowly, slowly, the whole white bank in the valley lifts silently and
wonderfully; up and up it goes in a solid mass, and as the higher
parts of the hills, which were previously in sunshine, are temporarily
hidden by the uprising mass, so the lower part of the valley gradually
becomes visible, first only a strip at the very bottom, then more and
more as the white curtain is raised. Finally the white mass disappears
and joins its fellows in the sky above, a fragment of cloud lingering
sometimes a little below the summit of the highest hill. If the day is
going to be fine, this last trail of silvery cloud disappears, and then
the sun lights up the woods and the upland meadows, showing you distant
cottages and far-off farmhouses where you saw nothing but tremulous
shadows the night before.
However often one looks upon this sight, the marvel never lessens,
and the “simple scientific explanation,” which every learned person
who visits this cottage pours over the breakfast-table, is quite
unnecessary. Scientific explanations are admirable for cities, but when
we set foot on these hills, it is just sufficient for us that Nature
“is.”
* * * * *
One drawback about this cottage is the fact that one’s poetic thoughts
and soulful dreams are constantly being interrupted by things
material, more especially those appertaining to food! And even as
you are gazing out of the window at the glorious scenery all around
you, there arises the odour of frizzling ham (that originally ran
about, uncooked, in a field lower down), fried potatoes (the good
old-fashioned sort done in the frying-pan), coffee, and other hungry
things; and you find to your surprise that a substantial breakfast is
on the table by eight o’clock, though (and this is where guests bless
their hostess) no one need get up to breakfast, if they prefer to have
it in bed, for very tired people come here sometimes.
But it does not matter what nervous wrecks Virginia and Ursula may
have landed at the door overnight, the first morning sees them up with
the lark and out gardening; and one of the earliest sounds you hear
is the clink of the brown pitcher on the stones, as Virginia sets it
down after filling it at the little spring outside the garden gate.
This is a thirsty garden; it is everywhere on the slope, remember,
and is composed of the lightest soil imaginable with rock everywhere
beneath. As fast as you put water on it, it runs away downhill; hence,
a moment’s leisure, morning or evening, always means some pitchers of
water for the garden.
All the cottages on the hillside seem to have been built in the same
way. Someone evidently hunted about for a few feet of land where
it was slightly less sloping than the rest, and within reach of a
spring of water, and this plot he levelled a bit by excavating the big
boulders and smaller stones which make up our substratum, and often the
top-stratum too. Then if the piece of land wasn’t quite large enough,
he cut away part of the hill behind, banking it up with some of the
biggest of the boulders, to keep it from tumbling down on to the piece
he had cleared.
Next he excavated more rocky pieces from the up-and-down land around
his clearing; this gave him a bit of clean ground for a garden, and
also provided him with enough stone to build his habitation. Any stone
he might have over he made into a wall around his plot, by the simple
process of piling one piece on top of another. That, apparently, is all
man does to the place. Then Nature sets to work; and, oh, what festoons
of loveliness she flings over all!
As several different owners have had a hand at my particular cottage,
the garden has been extended in various directions, but always
requiring stone walls to prop it up. Hence you get a moderately level
patch, with a drop of four or six feet over the edge of the garden-bed.
A few rough stone steps take you down to the next level, where there
is another bit of garden, the steps themselves sprouting in every
chink, with wild strawberry, primroses, ferns, columbines, and a stray
Canterbury bell. In this way the cottage is surrounded with steps going
up or going down, with a flower-bed running along here, and some more
a few feet lower down; another terrace of flowers and some more steps
(nearly smothered with big periwinkle, these are) take you down to an
absurd lawn, that some enterprising person levelled up so delightfully
on the tilt that neither chair nor table will remain where you place
it! If they roll far enough, they go over the edge of the lawn, a drop
of about twenty feet, into the lower orchard! Nevertheless, this lawn
is popular, because it is edged at one side with white and pink moss
rose-trees.
Thus perhaps you can picture it—big beds and little beds, some running
one way, some spreading out in another direction; sometimes large
patches where flowers grow by the quarter-acre; sometimes little scraps
and corners no bigger than a hearth-rug, where we managed to dig out
some more stones, and make a further bit of clearing. But everywhere
you go there are the big plateaux or little terraces supported by
massive grey stone walls, which vary from two to twenty feet in height,
according to the amount of hillside they are required to prop up.
And how these walls bloom! Ivy and moss and ferns seem to love them,
for all the local walls sprout ferns without any apparent provocation,
and the walls about this garden are no exception.
But, in addition, white arabis hangs over in cascades, in
the spring, and you see then why the country people call it
“Snow-on-the-Mountains”; and mingling with the white is the exquisite
mauve variety; wallflowers of lovely colouring, rose pink, deep
purple, pale primrose, bright orange, as well as the richly-streaked
brown-and-yellow flowers, bloom gaily on the rocky ledges; snapdragons
flower later, with nasturtiums, and even some blue-eyed forget-me-nots
have sown themselves up there, and bloom with the rest. Honesty plants
have established themselves in the crevices; masses of wild Herb Robert
have been allowed to remain; and carpeting everything are all manner
of sedums, and Alpine and ice plants, some with grey-green foliage and
ruby-coloured stems, some with white flowers, some with crimson; and in
the hottest places there are clumps of houseleeks looking sturdy and
homely.
Certain weeks in the year the tops of some of the walls are a golden
mass when the yellow stonecrop is in bloom; but whatever the season,
there is always something to look at—something holding up a brave head
and preaching as loudly as ever a plant can preach of the advantages of
making the best of your surroundings.
Does the wall face a sunless north? Very well; out come the ferns and
up creeps the ivy; the Rock Stonecrop, with its blue-green stems and
leaves (looking almost like a huge moss) fills every shady spot it can
find, seemingly appearing from nowhere.
Is the wall sunny? All right; the wallflowers laugh at you, pinks climb
over the top edge, just to see what is going on down below; one baking
spot supports a mass of sage about a yard and a half in diameter, a
smother of blue flowers in the summer; no one planted it, it just came!
A red ribis has hooked itself in at one spot; what it lives on I don’t
know; while white, mauve and purple Honesty seeds itself everywhere,
making a brave show of colour in the spring. In fact, white and mauve
are the prevailing colours on the walls in April.
Later on you may expect—and will find—anything; for annuals and
bi-annuals seed themselves, continually dropping the seed to a lower
level; hence there is always a self-planted garden bed at the base of
each wall, reminiscent of what was growing above the season before.
On the shady side of one wall, we have made a moss garden—it was
Virginia’s idea, and she takes a very special pride in it, adding
new sorts whenever she finds them. Hence you will sometimes find her
coming home from a ramble, carrying a huge stone with her, or lugging
along a veritable boulder. In this way she brings the moss home,
local habitation and all, annexing any stone she sees (a wild stone,
of course, not a tame one from someone’s garden wall) that bears a
promising crop of some new variety.
As a result, she fairly bulges with pride whenever she exhibits
the moss garden, and explains how much of it is her own particular
handiwork.
We have not yet settled whether she ought to pay me rent for my wall
that she uses for her moss garden, or I ought to pay her wages for
moss-gardening my wall.
One characteristic of this garden is an ever-changing show of colour.
It varies according to the season, but whatever the time of year there
are usually gorgeous splashes of colour that make you stand and wonder.
Do not forget that this is only a cottage garden, even though it is
a roomy one. I hope you are not picturing to yourself an orthodox
country-house garden, with expanses of well-kept lawns, with
proper-looking beds of geraniums, and lordly pampas grass at intervals,
and well-groomed rose-bushes in tidy beds, and correct herbaceous
borders, and beds of begonias and heliotropes planted out from the
greenhouses, and all the other nice-mannered, polite flowers that every
well-paid, certificated gardener conscientiously insists on planting in
exactly the same way all the country over.
This garden grows a little of everything, and a great deal of
some things, and when you look at it you might easily imagine that
everything had planted itself just where it pleased. The garden is
not tidy, for the things are constantly growing over each other, and
then out across the paths. Moreover, it lacks someone there all the
time to keep it tidy; the ministrations of the handy man are decidedly
erratic. But at least it is bright, always bright, and you can pick as
many flowers as you please—handfuls, armfuls, apronfuls—with no fear of
an autocratic gardener glaring at you; and the flowers will never be
missed.
In the spring wallflowers predominate, every colour that the modern
varieties produce. Ursula’s remark that she had planted over nine
hundred seedlings was well within the mark. A thousand or two of
wallflower seedlings do not go very far in this garden, because at one
time of the year the place appears to be a waving mass of wallflowers
from end to end.
And have you any idea what the scent is like when you have thousands of
wallflowers smiling on a sunny spring morning?
But there are all sorts of oddments, some things you do not expect and
some things you do. The cowslip bed is very pretty. Here are yellow,
orange, copper-coloured and mahogany brown cowslips; pale-coloured
oxlips, and polyanthuses in as many shades as the wallflowers, from
rosy red to dark purple-brown with every petal edged with bright yellow
as though they had been buttonholed round.
There is no need to cultivate primroses in the garden beds, for
the two orchards are thick with them; where there are also large
patches of wild snowdrops with crowds of wild daffodils, and dancing
wind-flowers—or wood anemones; while tall spikes of the pale mauve
spotted orchises grow in the grass around the edge near the walls.
Before the wallflowers have finished flowering the tulips are out,
the old-fashioned “cottage tulips,” many of them, tall and with large
cup-like flowers—pink and crimson, brown and yellow, showy “parrots,”
and delicate mauve feathered with white, purple-black, deep maroon;
such a brilliant army those tulips make, with hundreds of them in bloom
at once.
Before the tulip petals have fallen, the peonies have opened out great
heavy heads of flowers that can’t keep upright. The scarlet oriental
poppies with their blue-black centres make masses of colour that have
to be kept very much to themselves or they kill every other flower
within reach; these are therefore planted near the clumps of white
irises, and the deep blue and pure white perennial lupins, that make a
beautiful show all down one border.
Speaking of lupins reminds me of the tree-lupins. Virginia brought some
harmless-looking little plants with her one year, remembering my love
for lupins.
“These are tree-lupins,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t know what they
will grow into, but the man said they were just like lupins, only much
more so; therefore I bought them. Don’t blame _me_ if they die.”
She planted them comfortably and cosily in a bed along with white
foxgloves and pink pentstemons, all the members of this happy family
looking about the same size.
The following year when Virginia visited the cottage she asked, “Where
are my tree-lupins?” She was shown great bushes each the size of a
round dining-table, and each holding aloft hundreds of yellow spikes,
and filling the air with the scent of a bean-field. There were the
tree-lupins all right! But where were the foxgloves and pentstemons?
* * * * *
Perhaps you think there must be large, dull spaces when the wallflowers
cease blooming, but in between the wallflower plants are others coming
on, and by the time the wallflowers have finished—and are ready to be
pulled up—these beds are filling with sweet williams and snapdragons.
The young plants were there, and they come into bloom as the
wallflowers finish. And then, where only a short time before there were
beds all purples and yellows and browns, you have now reds and pinks
and every shade of rosy tint that the bright eyes of the sweet williams
can produce.
The snapdragons once played a joke on the garden. I was ordering some
seeds from Sutton’s, and said, “I want some very hardy snapdragons,
that will stand being planted in the windiest part of the garden where
nothing of any height will grow.” The seeds were guaranteed to grow in
the most uprooting of hurricanes.
In due time the seedlings appeared above ground, and Ursula devoted
several back-aching evenings to planting them out into the windswept
beds. By the middle of the following summer those jaunty snapdragons
had each grown six feet high, and there, waving in that exposed place,
where any well-conducted plant would have sternly refused to grow more
than a foot high, was a plantation of great flowers, each tied to a
stout stake like hollyhocks, and the blooms seemed to have outgrown
their normal size just as the rest of the plants had done.
Of course, people came from ever so far to gaze at these snapdragons;
and unbelievers surreptitiously pulled out tape-measures and two-foot
rules, and one and all, after meditating seriously on the subject, and
looking at it from all points of view, would finally shake their heads
and say, “Well, I’ll just tell you what it is—the place evidently
suits them.” We never got any further than that!
By every law and reason known to properly-trained gardeners and
horticulturists, this garden ought to be able to produce nothing but
low-growing flowers and shrubs. Every local resident kindly volunteered
this information directly he or she set eyes on the cottage; they said
it was too high up, too bleak in winter, too exposed, too dry, too
rocky, or too glaringly sunny—for anything above six inches high to
have a chance in it.
And yet Nature goes on laughing at the pessimists, and so do those who
tend this flower-patch. And the columbines, yellow, pink, pale blue,
purple, and white, send up tall heads of flower. The coreopsis plants
grow so big and bushy they have to be staked. The cornflowers, a streak
of blue at the end of the cabbage bed, are taller than the broad beans
adjoining. Then there are the hollyhocks and the larkspurs—these hold
their heads as high as anyone could desire, and the tall red salvias
are not far behind. The foxgloves are also a brave sight (though
I do not include in this category those that are buried under the
tree-lupins!).
Of course, there are low-growing things in the garden as well as the
more lofty-minded. There is one bed that is a ramping mass of giant
mimulus of various colours. Convolvulus minor spreads about the ground
in one of the white lily beds; and eschscholtzias cover the earth for
another row of lilies. Pansies rove about at their own sweet will in
this garden, and the old-fashioned white pinks and the pink variety
spread themselves out over the big stones that edge the borders.
The mignonette bed has a row of lavenders at the side, and mounds of
nasturtiums grow where the earth is too rocky and barren to support
anything else.
Naturally, there are hedges of sweet peas; sometimes they are heavy
with flowers, sometimes the slugs or birds settle the matter at the
beginning of the season. One hedge runs along at the back of the herb
garden, and the herbs have so spread themselves out that the sweet peas
were getting swamped. Virginia has been cutting them back.
Do you know what the scent of cut herbs is like on a hot summer day,
with sweet peas in the background? In this herb garden there is sage,
with its lovely blue flowers, lemon thyme, silver thyme, savory,
hyssop, lavender, rosemary, rue, balm, marjoram, black peppermint,
spearmint and parsley.
In this bed also grows the old-time bergamot, with its heavily-scented
leaves and lovely tufts of crimson flowers.
But though one part of the garden is set apart for herbs and another
for vegetables, you must not imagine that they are only to be found
there. Fine clumps of parsley have planted themselves in among the
annual larkspurs; mint persists in running riot among the pink and
white mallows (but the mint family never remains quietly at home);
a sturdy scarlet runner comes up, year after year, beside a great
bush of gum cistus, which makes me think it might be treated as a
perennial; it seems impossible to get the artichokes to part company
with the Michaelmas daisies, while raspberry canes shoot up among
the old-fashioned red fuchsia bushes; radishes are flourishing like
the green bay-tree underneath the sweetbriar; a regiment of pickling
onions is living on most neighbourly terms with a row of cup-and-saucer
Canterbury bells; and as for rhubarb—well, what can you expect when one
man, whom I employed for a brief spell, remarked:
“You’ll see where I’ve put in that thur special rubbub, miss, because
I’ve planted a traveller’s joy a-top of he to mark the spot.”
* * * * *
Cupid’s Border is another section of this garden that may interest you.
Here you naturally find Love-in-a-mist and Love-lies-bleeding. The
flowers which the country folks call Love-lockets dangle pink and white
from their graceful curving stems; (alas, in catalogues and places
where they know, this plant is merely regarded as dielytra). In this
border you of course find forget-me-nots “that grow for happy lovers”;
bachelor’s buttons, too, hold up their heads in a very sprightly
manner, and please notice that they are getting nearer and nearer to
the clump of Sweet Betsy. But the bachelor’s buttons have a rival, for
the other side of Sweet Betsy stands lad’s love—and though not so showy
as the bachelor’s buttons, lad’s love claims to be of more solid worth.
I leave them to settle the matter between themselves, however; I’m not
one to interfere in such affairs.
At the other side of the border stands a maiden’s blush rose, and
gallantly waving beside it is a clump of Prince’s Feather (sometimes
referred to in common parlance as “they laylock bushes”). At the
edge of the border you naturally find heartsease, not the stiff,
over-developed article of modern flower-shows, but the old-fashioned
sort, all streaks and splashes of rich purple and yellow.
There is no time now to go round the vegetable garden—not that this
can be regarded as an entirely separate part of the estate, for the
vegetables have got mixed up in a terribly haphazard way with the rest
of things, as I hinted just now. The potato-plot, for instance, has a
border of golden wallflowers all round and double daisies at the edge,
with a row of giant sunflowers, hollyhocks, and clumps of honesty at
the back.
This mixture is partly in the nature of a compromise. The gentleman
who wields the spade has to be taken into account. No matter who
he is, no matter how often he discharges me and I have to beg yet
someone else to “oblige” me, it is always the same, the tiller of
the soil regards space given over to flowers as a grievous waste,
not to say an indication of feeble-mindedness! Therefore he inserts
a row of vegetables or seeds whenever I happen to have cleared out
some flowering plants and left a morsel of space _pro tem._ It seems
a prevailing idea among the non-qualified working classes, in rural
districts, that the cultivation of flowers ranks about on a level with
doing the washing—work derogatory to a man and only fit for women!
To the credit of the handy man I must say that on one occasion he did
kindly present me with a load of pig manure. He put it on the flower
garden the day before we arrived, as a pleasant surprise, which it
certainly was! Next day we all had relatives with broken legs, who
needed our immediate return to town.
* * * * *
Nevertheless the vegetables play their part, and assume no small
importance, in due course; for it is another unwritten law of this
cottage that visitors shall go out and select the day’s vegetables,
and cut them with the dew on; of course, if they are superlatively
lazy, they can meanly get some early riser to do it for them; also they
can confer together, or each can gather her own choice.
Hence you will see Virginia or Ursula in a large hat that is all
brim, with basket on arm, and wearing an apron (not a lacy, frilly
muslin thing, but a good-sized, well-made, old-fashioned lilac print
apron), going up the garden and gathering broad beans, cutting young
cauliflowers, or “curly greens,” or turnip tops, or a marrow, forking
up potatoes, pulling carrots, collecting lettuces, spring onions, cress
and other salading—all according to the season.
And if it should chance that you have never yourself put on a big
apron, and cut your own vegetables before the dew is off them, then
Virginia will be truly sorry for you.
* * * * *
There is plenty of time to be lazy, however; and a hot summer day means
long leisure in this garden; for when the sun is high the brown pitcher
rests (though the brown teapot does not) until the fir-trees throw
shadows from the west.
All day you can sit in the shade at the bottom of the garden, looking
up the hill at the wonderful mass of colour before you. Along the ridge
of the cottage roof perches a row of swallows, chirping and chattering
in their usual way. The starlings, who have built under the tiles,
are ordering their respective families to cease clamouring for more,
explaining that hunting caterpillars is hot work. Most other birds are
quiet when the sun is fiercest, but over all the garden there is the
hum, hum of thousands of industrious bees, while literally hundreds of
white butterflies keep up a perpetual flutter over the tall blue spikes
of bloom on the lavender bushes.
Even the small white dog with the brown ears ceases to tear about the
garden, and bark at nothing in a consequential way; he just lies down
on the edge of somebody’s dress, and hangs out a little pink tongue for
air.
This is the time when the flower-patch among the hills spells REST.
An old woman passing up the lane a few nights ago paused at the gate.
“How them pinnies do blow, miss!” she said, gazing admiringly at a
clump of peonies. Then she added—
“Ain’t it strange, now, that it do take a woman to make a flower
garden? A man ain’t no good at that; he simply can’t help hisself
a-running to veg’tables!”
But after thinking this over, and despite all that strong-minded
womankind tells me to the contrary, I cannot really believe that there
is such total depravity in the other sex!