GARDEN FURNISHINGS
"Furnished with whatever may make the place agreeable, melancholy,
and country-like."
--_Forest Trees_, JOHN EVELYN, 1670.
Quaint old books of garden designers show us that much more was
contained in a garden two centuries ago, than now; it had many more
adjuncts, more furnishings; a very full list of them has been given by
Batty Langley in his _New Principles of Gardening_, etc., 1728. Some
seem amusing--as haystacks and woodpiles, which he terms "rural
enrichments." Of water adornments there were to be purling streams,
basins, canals, fountains, cascades, cold baths. There were to be
aviaries, hare warrens, pheasant grounds, partridge grounds, dove-cotes,
beehives, deer paddocks, sheep walks, cow pastures, and "manazeries"
(menageries?); physic gardens, orchards, bowling-greens, hop gardens,
orangeries, melon grounds, vineyards, parterres, fruit yards, nurseries,
sun-dials, obelisks, statues, cabinets, etc., decorated the garden
walks. There were to be land gradings of mounts, winding valleys, dales,
terraces, slopes, borders, open plains, labyrinths, wildernesses,
"serpentine meanders," "rude-coppices," precipices, amphitheatres. His
"serpentine meanders" had large opening spaces at proper distances, in
one of which might be placed a small fruit garden, a "cone of
evergreens," or a "Paradice-Stocks,"--about which latter mysterious
garden adornment I think we must be content to remain in ignorance,
since he certainly has given us ample variety to choose from without it.
Other "landscapists" placed in their gardens old ruins, misshapen rocks,
and even dead trees, in order to look "natural."
In 1608 Henry Ballard brought out _The Gardener's Labyrinth_--a pretty
good book, shut away from the most of us by being printed in black
letter. He says:--
"The framing of sundry herbs delectable, with waies and allies
artfully devised is an upright herbar."
Herbars, or arbors, were of two kinds: an upright arbor, which was
merely a covered lean-to attached to a fence or wall; and a winding or
"arch-arbor" standing alone. He names "archherbs," which are simply
climbing vines to set "winding in arch-manner on withie poles." "Walker
and sitters there-under" are thereby comfortably protected from the heat
of the sun. These upright arbors were in high favor; Ballard says they
offered "fragrant savours, delectable sights, and sharpening of the
memory."
[Illustration: A Garden Lyre at Waterford, Virginia.]
Tree arbors were in use in Elizabethan times, platforms built in the
branches of large trees. Parkinson called one that would hold fifty men,
"the goodliest spectacle that ever his eyes beheld." A distinction was
made between arbors and bowers. The arbor might be round or square, and
was domed over the top; while the long arched way was a bower. In our
Southern states that special use of the word bower is still universal,
especially in the term Rose bowers. A quaint and universal furnishing of
old Southern gardens were the trellises known as garden lyres. Two are
shown in this chapter, from Waterford, Virginia; one bearing little
foliage and another embowered in vines, in order to show what a really
good vine support they were. Garden lyres and Rose bowers are rotting on
the ground in old Virginia gardens, and I fear they will never be
replaced.
The word pergola was seldom heard here a century ago, save as used by
the few who had travelled in Italy; but pergolas were to be found in
many an old American garden. An ancient oval pergola still stands at
Arlington, that beautiful spot which was once the home of the Virginia
Lees, and is now the home of the honored dead of our Civil War. This old
pergola has remained unharmed through fierce conflict, and is wreathed
each spring with the verdure of vines of many kinds. It is twenty feet
wide between the pillars, and forms an oval one hundred feet long and
seventy wide, and when in full greenery is a lovely thing. It was
called--indeed it is still termed in the South--a "green gallery," a
word and thing of mediaeval days.
[Illustration: A Virginia Lyre with Vines.]
There are many pretty trellises and vine supports and arbors which can
be made of light poles and rails, but I do not like to hear the
pretentious name, pergola, applied to them. A pergola must not be a
mean, light-built affair. It should be of good proportions and
substantial materials. It need not be made with brick or marble pillars;
natural tree trunks of good size serve as well. It should look as if it
had been built with care and stability, and that the vines had been
planted and trained by skilled gardeners. A pergola may have a
dilapidated Present and be endurable; but it should show evidences of a
substantial Past.
Little sisters of the pergola are the _charmilles_, or bosquets, arches
of growing trees, whose interlaced boughs have no supports of wood as
have the pergolas. When these arches are carefully trained and pruned,
and the ground underneath is laid with turf or gravel, they form a
delightful shady walk.
Charming covered ways can be easily made by polling and training Plum or
Willow trees. Arches are far too rare in American gardens. The few we
have are generally old ones. In Mrs. Pierson's garden in Salem the
splendid arch of Buckthorn is a hundred and twenty five years old.
Similar ones are at Indian Hill. Cedar was an old choice for hedges and
arches. It easily winter-kills at the base, and that is ample reason for
its rejection and disuse.
The many garden seats of the old English garden were perhaps its chief
feature in distinction from American garden furnishings to-day. In a
letter written from Kenilworth in 1575 the writer told of garden seats
where he sat in the heat of summer, "feeling the pleasant whisking
wynde." I have walked through many a large modern garden in the summer
heat, and longed in vain for a shaded seat from which to regard for a
few moments the garden treasures and feel the whisking wind, and would
gladly have made use of the temporary presence of a wheelbarrow.
[Illustration: Old Iron Gate at Westover-on-James.]
Seats of marble and stone are in many of our modern formal gardens; a
pretty one is in the garden at Avonwood Court.
Grottoes, arbors, and summer-houses were all of importance in those
days, when in our latitude and climate men had not thought to build
piazzas surrounding the house and shadowing all the ground floor rooms.
We are beginning to think anew of the value of sunlight in the parlors
and dining rooms of our summer homes, which for the past thirty or forty
years have been so darkened by our wide piazzas. Now we have fewer
piazzas and more peristyles, and soon we shall have summer-houses and
garden houses also.
There are preserved in the South, in spite of war and earthquake, a
number of fine examples of old wrought-iron garden gates. King William
of England introduced these artistic gates into England, and they were
the height of garden fashion. Among them were the beautiful gates still
at Hampton Court, and those of Bulwich, Northamptonshire. They were
called _clair-voyees_ on account of the uninterrupted view they
permitted to those without and within the walls. These were often
painted blue; but in America they were more sober of tint, though
portions were gilded. One of the old gates at Westover-on-James is here
shown, and on page 390 the rich wrought-iron work in the courtyard at
the home of Colonel Colt in Bristol, Rhode Island. This is as fine as
the house, and that is a splendid example of the best work of the first
years of the nineteenth century.
Fountains were seen usually in handsome gardens in the South; simple
water jets falling in a handsome basin of marble or stone. Statuary of
marble or lead was never common in old American gardens, though
pretentious gardens had examples. To-day, in our carefully thought-out
gardens, the garden statuary is a thing of beauty and often of meaning,
as the figure shown on page 84. Usually our statues are of marble,
sometimes a Japanese bronze is seen.
[Illustration: Iron-work in Court of Colt Mansion, Bristol, Rhode
Island.]
In the old black letter _Gardener's Labyrinth_, a very full description
is given of old modes of watering a garden. There was a primitive and
very limited system of irrigation, the water being raised by
"well-swipes"; there were very handy puncheons, or tubs on wheels, which
could be trundled down the garden walk. There was also a formidable
"Great Squirt of Tin," which was said to take "mighty strength" to
handle, and which looked like a small cannon; with it was an ingenious
bent tube of tin by which the water could be thrown in "great droppes"
like a fountain. The author says of ordinary means of garden watering:--
"The common Watring Pot with us hath a narrow Neck, a Big Belly,
Somewhat large Bottome, and full of little holes with a proper hole
forced in the head to take in the water; which filled full and the
Thumbe laid on the hole to keep in the aire may in such wise be
carried in handsome Manner."
Garden tools have changed but little since Tudor days; spade and rake
were like ours to-day, so were dibble and mattock. Even grafting and
pruning tools, shown in books of husbandry, were surprisingly like our
own. Scythes were much heavier and clumsier. An old fellow is here shown
sharpening in the ancient manner a scythe about three hundred years old.
The art of grafting, known since early days, formed an important part of
the gardener's craft. Large share of ancient garden treatises is devoted
to minute instructions therein. To this day in New England towns a good
grafter is a local autocrat.
[Illustration: Summer-house at Ravensworth.]
Beehives were once found in every garden; bee-skepes they were called
when made of straw. Picturesque and homely were the old straw beehives,
and still are they used in England; the old one shown in the chapter on
sun-dials can scarcely be mated in America. They served as a
conventional emblem of industry. They were made of welts or ropes of
twisted straw, as were the heavy winnowing skepes once used for
winnowing grain. In Maine, in a few out-of-the-way communities, ancient
men still winnow grain with these skepes. I saw a man last autumn, a
giant in stature, standing in a dull light on the crown of a hill
winnowing wheat in one of these great skepes with an indescribably
free and noble gesture. He was a classic, a relic of Homer's age, no
longer a farmer, but a husbandman. Bees and honey were of much value in
ancient days. Honey was the chief ingredient in many wholesome and
pleasing drinks--mead, metheglin, bragget (or braket), morat,
erboule--all very delightful in their ingredients, redolent of meadows
and hedge-rows; thus Cowslip mead was made of Cowslip "pips," honey,
Lemon juice, and "a handful of Sweetbrier." "Athol porridge," demure of
name, was as potent as pleasing--potent as good honey, good cream, and
good whiskey could make it.
[Illustration: Sharpening the Old Dutch Scythe.]
Rows of typical Southern beehives are shown in the two succeeding
illustrations. From their home by the side of a White Rose and under an
old Sweet Apple tree these Waterford bees did not wish to swarm out in a
hurry to find a new home. These beehives are not very ancient in shape,
but when I see a row of them set thus under the trees, or in a
hive-shelter, they seem to tell of olden days. The very bees flying in
and out seem steady-going, respectable old fellows. Such hives have a
cosy look, with rows of Hollyhocks behind them, and hundreds of spires
of Larkspur for these old bees to bury their heads in.
[Illustration: Beehives at Waterford, Virginia.]
The sadly picturesque old superstition of "telling the bees" of a death
in a family and hanging a bit of black cloth on the hives as a
mourning-weed still is observed in some country communities. Whittier's
poem on the subject is wonderfully "countrified" in atmosphere, using
the word chore-girl, so seldom heard even in familiar speech to-day and
never found in verse elsewhere than in this rustic poem. I saw one
summer in Narragansett, on Stony Lane, not far from the old
Six-Principle Church, a row of beehives hung with strips of black cloth;
the house mistress was dead--the friend of bird and beast and bee--who
had reared the guardian of the garden told of on page 396 _et seq._
[Illustration: Beehives under the Trees.]
A pretty and appropriate garden furnishing was the dove-cote. The
possession of a dove-cote in England, and the rearing of pigeons, was
free only to lords of the manor and noblemen. When the colonists came to
America, many of them had never been permitted to keep pigeons. In
Scotland persistent attempts at pigeon-raising by folks of humble
station might be punished with death. The settlers must have revelled in
the freedom of the new land, as well as in the plenty of pigeons, both
wild and domestic. In old England the dove-cote was often built close to
the kitchen door, that squab and pigeon might be near the hand of the
cook. Dove-cotes in America were often simple boxes or houses raised on
stout posts. Occasionally might be seen a fine brick dove-cote like the
one still standing at Shirley-on-the-James, in Virginia, which is shaped
without and within like several famous old dove-cotes in England, among
them the one at Athelhampton Hall, Dorchester, England. The English
dove-cote has within a revolving ladder hung from a central post while
the Virginian squab catcher uses an ordinary ladder. The shelves for the
birds to rest upon and the square recesses for the nests made by the
ingenious placing of the bricks are alike in both cotes.
[Illustration: Spring House at Johnson Homestead, Germantown,
Pennsylvania.]
A beautiful and fitting tenant of old formal gardens was the peacock,
"with his aungelis federys bryghte." On large English estates peacocks
were universally kept. A fine peacock, with full-spread tail, makes many
a gay flower bed pale before his panoply of iridescence and color. The
peahen is a demurely pretty creature. Peacocks are not altogether
grateful to garden owners; on the old Narragansett farm whose garden is
shown on page 35, they were always kept, and it was one of the prides
and pleasures of formal hospitality to offer a roasted peacock to
visitors. But, save when roasted, the vain creatures would not keep
silence, and when they squawked the glory of their plumage was
forgotten. They had an odious habit, too, of wandering off to distant
groves on the farm, usually selecting the nights of bitterest cold, and
roosting in some very high tree, in some very inaccessible spot. They
could not be left in this ill-considered sleeping-place, else they would
all freeze to death; and words fail to tell the labor in lowering
twilight and temperature of discovering their retreat, the dislodging,
capturing, and imprisoning them.
[Illustration: Dove-cote at Shirley-on-James.]
In Narragansett there is a charming old farm garden, which I often visit
to note and admire its old-time blossoms. This garden has a guardian,
who haunts the garden walks as did the terrace peacock of old England;
no watch-dog ever was so faithful, and none half so acute. When I visit
the garden I always ask "Where is Job?" I am answered that he is in the
field with the cattle. Sometimes this is true, but at other times Job
has left the field and is attending to his assumed duties. As he is not
encouraged, he has learned great slyness and dissimulation. Immovable,
and in silence, Job is concealed behind a Syringa hedge or in a Lilac
ambush, and as you stroll peacefully and unwittingly down the paths,
sniffing the honeyed sweetness of the dense edging of Sweet Alyssum, all
is as balmy as the blossoms. But stoop for an instant, to gather some
leaves of Sweet Basil or Sweet Brier, or to collect a dozen seed-pods of
that specially delicate Sweet Pea, and lo! the enemy is upon you,
like a fierce whirlwind. He looks mild and demure enough in his kitchen
yard retreat, whereto, upon piercing outcry for help, the farmer and his
two sons have haled him, and where the camera has caught him. But far
from meek is his aspect when you are dodging him around the great Tree
Peony, or flying frantically before him down the side path to the garden
gate. This fierce wild beast was once that mildest of creatures--a pet
lamb; the constant companion of the farm-wife, as she weeded and watered
her loved garden. Her husband says, "He seems to think folks are
stealing her flowers, if they stop to look." The wife and mother of
these three great men has gone from her garden forever; but a tenderness
for all that she loved makes them not only care for her flowers, but
keeps this rampant guardian of the garden at the kitchen door, just as
she kept him when he was a little lamb. I knew this New England farmer's
wife, a noble woman, of infinite tenderness, strength, and endurance; a
lover of trees and flowers and all living things, and I marvel not that
they keep her memory green.
[Illustration: The Peacock in His Pride.]