spring had come. Its fruit in the late summer was like the pomegranate
in its rich color, "blood-tinctured with a veined humanity;" and its
friendly limbs held a swing in which we cleft the air like the birds.
Yet even now the sight of an Indian peach brings melancholy thoughts.
A yellow honeysuckle clambered over a wall. But this flower has no
perfume, and a honeysuckle without perfume is a base pretender, to be
cast out of the family of the real sweet-scented honeysuckle. There
were two roses of similar quality, one that detestable mockery known
as the burr-rose. I have for this flower the feeling of repulsion that
one has for certain disagreeable human beings,--people with cold,
clammy hands, for instance. I hated its feeble pink color, its rough
calyx, and its odor always made me think of vast fields of snow, and
icicles hanging from snow-covered roofs under leaden wintry skies.
Unhappy mistake to call such a thing a rose, and plant it in a child's
garden! The only place where it might fitly grow is by the side of the
road that led Childe Roland to the Dark Tower: between the bit of
"stubbed ground" and the marsh near to the "palsied oak," with its
roots set in the "bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth."
The other rose I recall with the same dislike, though it was pleasing
to the eye. The bush was tall, and had the nature of a climber; for it
drooped in a lackadaisical way, and had to be tied to a stout post. I
think it could have stood upright, had it chosen to do so; and its
drooping seemed only an ugly habit, without grace. The cream-white
flowers grew in clusters, and the buds were really beautiful, but
color and form are only the body of the rose; the soul, the real self,
is the rose odor, and no rose-soul was incarnated in its petals. Again
and again, deceived by its beauty, I would hold it close to my face to
breathe its fragrance, and always its faint sickening-sweet odor
brought me only disappointment and disgust. It was a Lamia among
roses. Another peculiarity was that it had very few thorns, and those
few were small and weak. Yet the thorn is as much a part of the true
rose as its sweetness; and lacking the rose thorn and the rose
perfume, what claim had it to the rose name? I never saw this false
rose elsewhere than in the false garden, and because it grew there,
and because it dishonored its royal family, I would not willingly meet
it face to face again.
We children cultivated sweet-scented geraniums in pots, but a flower
in a pot was to me like a bird in a cage, and the fragrant geraniums
gave me no more pleasure than did the scentless many-hued
lady's-slippers that we planted in tiny borders, and the purple
flowering beans and white blossoms of the madeira vines that grew on
a tall trellis by the cistern's grassy mound. There was nothing here
to satisfy my longing, and I turned hungrily to other gardens whose
gates were open to me in those early days. In one of these was a vast
bed of purple heartsease, flower of the beautiful name. Year after
year they had blossomed and gone to seed till the harvest of flowers
in their season was past gathering, and any child in the neighborhood
was at liberty to pluck them by handfuls, while the wicked ones played
at "chicken fighting" and littered the ground with decapitated bodies.
There is no heartsease nowadays, only the magnificent pansy of which
it was the modest forerunner. But one little cluster of dark, spicy
blooms like those I used to gather in that old garden would be more to
me than the most splendid pansy created by the florist's art.
The lily of the valley calls to mind a garden, almost in the heart of
town, where this flower went forth to possess the land and spread
itself in so reckless a growth that at intervals it had to be uprooted
to protect the landed rights of the rest of the community. Never were
there such beds of lilies! And when they pierced the black loam with
their long sheath-like leaves, and broke their alabaster boxes of
perfume on the feet of spring, the most careless passer-by was forced
to stay his steps for one ecstatic moment to look and to breathe, to
forget and to remember. The shadow of the owner's house lay on this
garden at the morning hour, and a tall brick building intercepted its
share of the afternoon sunshine; but the love and care of the wrinkled
old woman who tended it took the place of real sunshine, and
everything planted here grew with a luxuriance not seen in sunnier and
more favored spots. The mistress of the garden, when questioned as to
this, would say it was because she gave her flowers to all who asked,
and the God of gardens loved the cheerful giver and blessed her with
an abundance of bud and blossom. The highest philosophy of human life
she used in her management of this little plant world; for, burying
the weeds at the roots of the flowers, the evil was made to minister
to the good; and the nettle, the plantain and all their kind were
transmuted by nature's fine chemistry into pinks, lilies, and roses.
The purple splendor of the wisteria recalls the garden that I always
entered with a fearful joy, for here a French gardener reigned
absolute, and the flowers might be looked at, but not pulled. How
different from those wild gardens of the neighboring woods where we
children roamed at will, shouting rapturously over the finding of a
bed of scentless blue violets or delicate anemones that withered and
were thrown away before we reached home,--an allegory, alas! of our
later lives.
There was one garden that I coveted in those days as Ahab coveted his
neighbor's vineyard. After many years, so many that my childish
longing was almost forgotten, I had it, I and my children. Together we
played under the bee-haunted lindens, and looked at the sunset through
the scarlet and yellow leaves of the sugar maples, and I learned that
"every desire is the prophecy of its own fulfilment;" and if the
fulfilment is long delayed, it is only that it may be richer and
deeper when it does come.
All these were gardens of the South; but before childhood was over I
watched the quick, luxuriant growth of flowers through the brief
summer of a northern clime. The Canterbury-bell, so like a prim,
pretty maiden, the dahlia, that stately dame always in court costume
of gorgeous velvet, remind me of those well-kept beds where not a leaf
or flower was allowed to grow awry; and in one ancient garden the
imagination of a child found wings for many an airy flight. The town
itself bore the name of the English nobleman, well known in
Revolutionary days. Not far away his mansion sturdily defied the touch
of time and decay, and admonished the men of a degenerate present to
remember their glorious past. The house that sheltered me that summer
was known in colonial days as the Black-Horse Tavern. Its walls had
echoed to the tread of patriot and tory, who gathered here to drink a
health to General Washington or to King George; and patriot, and tory,
too, had trod the paths of the garden and plucked its flowers and its
fruit in the times that tried men's souls. By the back gate grew a
strawberry apple tree, and every morning the dewy grass held a night's
windfall of the tiny red apples that were the reward of the child who
rose earliest. A wonderful grafted tree that bore two kinds of fruit
gave the place a touch of fairyland's magic, and no explanation of the
process of grafting ever diminished the awe I felt when I stood under
this tree and saw ripe spice apples growing on one limb and green
winter pearmains on all the others. The pound sweeting, the
spitzenberg, and many sister apples were there; and I stayed long
enough to see them ripen into perfection. While they ripened I
gathered the jewel-like clusters of red and white currants and a
certain rare English gooseberry which English hands had brought from
beyond the seas and planted here when the sign of the Black-Horse
swung over the tavern door. The ordinary gooseberry is a plebeian
fruit, but this one was more patrician than its name, and its name was
"the King George." Twice as large as the common kind, translucent and
yellowish white when fully ripe, and of an incomparable sweetness and
flavor, it could have graced a king's table and held its own with the
delicate strawberry or the regal grape. And then, best of all, it was
a forbidden fruit, whereof we children ate by stealth, and solemnly
declared that we had not eaten. Could the Garden of the Hesperides
have held more charms?
At the end of the long Dutch "stoop" I found the wands of the
snowberry, whose tiny flowers have the odor and color of the trailing
arbutus, and whose waxen berries reminded me of the crimson
"buckberry" of Southern fields. Fuchsias and dark-red clove pinks grew
in a peculiarly rich and sunny spot by the back fence, and over a pot
of the musk-plant I used to hang as Isabella hung over her pot of
basil. I had never seen it before, and have never seen it since, but
by the witchery of perfume one of its yellow flowers, one of its soft
pale green leaves could place me again in that garden of the old inn,
a child walking among the ghosts and memories of a past century.
In all these flowery closes there are rich aftermaths; but when Memory
goes a-gleaning, she dwells longest on the evenings and mornings once
spent in Aunt Jane's garden.
"I don't reckon Solomon was thinkin' about flower gyardens when he
said there was a time for all things," Aunt Jane was wont to say, "but
anyhow it's so. You know the Bible says that the Lord God walked in
the gyarden of Eden in 'the cool of the day,' and that's the best time
for seein' flowers,--the cool of the mornin' and the cool of the
evenin'. There's jest as much difference between a flower with the dew
on it at sun-up and a flower in the middle o' the day as there is
between a woman when she's fresh from a good night's sleep and when
she's cookin' a twelve-o'clock dinner in a hot kitchen. You think them
poppies are mighty pretty with the sun shinin' on 'em, but the poppy
ain't a sun flower; it's a sunrise flower."
And so I found them when I saw them in the faint light of a summer
dawn, delicate and tremulous, like lovely apparitions of the night
that an hour of sun will dispel. With other flowers the miracle of
blossoming is performed so slowly that we have not time to watch its
every stage. There is no precise moment when the rose leaves become a
bud, or when the bud turns to a full-blown flower. But at dawn by a
bed of poppies you may watch the birth of a flower as it slips from
the calyx, casting it to the ground as a soul casts aside its outgrown
body, and smoothing the wrinkles from its silken petals, it faces the
day in serene beauty, though the night of death be but a few hours
away.
"And some evenin' when the moon's full and there's a dew fallin',"
continued Aunt Jane, "that's the time to see roses, and to smell
roses, too. And chrysanthemums, they're sundown flowers. You come into
my gyarden about the first o' next November, child, some evenin' when
the sun's goin' down, and you'll see the white ones lookin' like
stars, and the yeller ones shinin' like big gold lamps in the dusk;
and when the last light o' the sun strikes the red ones, they look
like cups o' wine, and some of 'em turn to colors that there ain't any
names for. Chrysanthemums jest match the red and yeller leaves on the
trees, and the colors you see in the sky after the first frosts when
the cold weather begins to set in. Yes, honey, there's a time and a
season for everything; flowers, too, jest as Solomon said."
An old garden is like an old life. Who plants from youth to age writes
a record of the years in leaf and blossom, and the spot becomes as
sacred as old wine, old books, and old friends. Here in the garden of
Aunt Jane's planting I found that flowers were also memories; that
reminiscences were folded in the petals of roses and lilies; that a
rose's perfume might be a voice from a vanished summer; and even the
snake gliding across our path might prove a messenger bearing a story
of other days. Aunt Jane made a pass at it with her hoe, and laughed
as the little creature disappeared on the other side of the fence.
"I never see a striped snake," she said, "that I don't think o' Sam
Amos and the time he saw snakes. It wasn't often we got a joke on Sam,
but his t'u'nament and his snake kept us laughin' for many a day.
"Sam was one o' them big, blunderin' men, always givin' Milly trouble,
and havin' trouble himself, jest through pure keerlessness. He meant
well; and Milly used to say that if what Sam did was even half as good
as what Sam intended to do, there'd be one perfect man on God's
earth. One of his keerless ways was scatterin' his clothes all over
the house. Milly'd scold and fuss about it, but Sam got worse instead
o' better up to the day he saw the snake, and after that Milly said
there wasn't a more orderly man in the state. The way of it was this:
Sam was raisin' an embankment 'round one of his ponds, and Uncle Jim
Matthews and Amos Crawford was helpin' him. It was one Monday mornin',
about the first of April, and the weather was warm and sunny, jest the
kind to bring out snakes. I reckon there never was anybody hated a
snake as much as Sam did. He'd been skeered by one when he was a
child, and never got over it. He used to say there was jest two things
he was afraid of: Milly and a snake. That mornin' Uncle Jim and Amos
got to the pond before Sam did, and Uncle Jim hollered out, 'Well,
Sam, we beat you this time.' Uncle Jim never got tired tellin' what
happened next. He said Sam run up the embankment with his spade, and
set it in the ground and put his foot on it to push it down. The next
minute he give a yell that you could 'a' heard half a mile, slung the
spade over in the middle o' the pond, jumped three feet in the air,
and run down the embankment yellin' and kickin' and throwin' his arms
about in every direction, and at last he fell down on the ground a
good distance from the pond.
"Amos and Uncle Jim was so taken by surprise at first that they jest
stood still and looked. Amos says, says he: 'The man's gone crazy all
at once.' Uncle Jim says: 'He's havin' a spell. His father and
grandfather before him used to have them spells.'
"They run up to him and found him shakin' like a leaf, the cold sweat
streamin' out of every pore, and gaspin' and sayin', 'Take it away!
Take it away!' and all the time he was throwin' out his left foot in
every direction. Finally Uncle Jim grabbed hold of his foot and there
was a red and black necktie stickin' out o' the leg of his pants. He
pulled it out and says he: 'Why, Sam, what's your Sunday necktie doin'
up your pants leg?'
"They said Sam looked at it in a foolish sort o' way and then he fell
back laughin' and cryin' at the same time, jest like a woman, and it
was five minutes or more before they could stop him. Uncle Jim brought
water and put on his head, and Amos fanned him with his hat, and at
last they got him in such a fix that he could sit up and talk, and
says he:
"'I took off my necktie last night and slung it down on a chair where
my everyday pants was layin'. When I put my foot in my pants this
mornin' I must 'a' carried the necktie inside, and by the time I got
to the pond it'd worked down, and I thought it was a black snake with
red stripes.'
"He started to git up, but his ankle was sprained, and Uncle Jim says:
'No wonder, Sam; you jumped about six feet when you saw that snake
crawlin' out o' your pants leg.'
"And Sam says: 'Six feet? I know I jumped six hundred feet, Uncle
Jim.'
"Well, they got him to the house and told Milly about it, and she
says: 'Well, Sam, I'm too sorry for you to laugh at you like Uncle
Jim, but I must say this wouldn't 'a' happened if you'd folded up that
necktie and put it away in the top drawer.'
"Sam was settin' on the side of the bed rubbin' his ankle, and he give
a groan and says he: 'Things has come to a fine pass in Kentucky when
a sober, God-fearin' man like me has to put his necktie in the top
drawer to keep from seein' snakes.'
"I declare to goodness!" laughed Aunt Jane, as she laid down her
trowel and pushed back her calico sunbonnet, "if I never heard
anything funny again in this world, I could keep on laughin' till I
died jest over things I ricollect. The trouble is there ain't always
anybody around to laugh with me. Sam Amos ain't nothin' but a name to
you, child, but to me he's jest as real as if he hadn't been dead
these many years, and I can laugh over the things he used to do the
same as if they happened yesterday."
Only a name! And I had read it on a lichen-covered stone in the old
burying-ground; but as I walked home through the twilight I would
hardly have been startled if Sam Amos, in the pride of life, had come
riding past me on his bay mare, or if Uncle Jim Matthews' voice of
cheerful discord had mingled with the spring song of the frogs
sounding from every marsh and pond.
It was Aunt Jane's motto that wherever a weed would grow a flower
would grow; and carrying out this principle of planting, her garden
was continually extending its boundaries; and denizens of the garden
proper were to be found in every nook and corner of her domain. In the
spring you looked for grass only; and lo! starting up at your feet,
like the unexpected joys of life, came the golden daffodil, the paler
narcissus, the purple iris, and the red and yellow tulip, flourishing
as bravely as in the soil of its native Holland; and for a few sunny
weeks the front yard would be a great flower garden. Then blossom and
leaf would fade, and you might walk all summer over the velvet grass,
never knowing how much beauty and fragrance lay hidden in the darkness
of the earth. But when I go back to Aunt Jane's garden, I pass through
the front yard and the back yard between rows of lilac, syringas,
calycanthus, and honeysuckle; I open the rickety gate, and find myself
in a genuine old-fashioned garden, the homely, inclusive spot that
welcomed all growing things to its hospitable bounds, type of the days
when there were no impassable barriers of gold and caste between man
and his brother man. In the middle of the garden stood a
"summer-house," or arbor, whose crumbling timbers were knit together
by interlacing branches of honeysuckle and running roses. The
summer-house had four entrances, opening on four paths that divided
the ground into quarter-sections occupied by vegetables and small
fruits, and around these, like costly embroidery on the hem of a
homespun garment, ran a wide border of flowers that blossomed from
early April to late November, shifting from one beauty to another as
each flower had its little day.
There are flower-lovers who love some flowers and other flower-lovers
who love all flowers. Aunt Jane was of the latter class. The commonest
plant, striving in its own humble way to be sweet and beautiful, was
sure of a place here, and the haughtiest aristocrat who sought
admission had to lay aside all pride of place or birth and acknowledge
her kinship with common humanity. The Bourbon rose could not hold
aside her skirts from contact with the cabbage-rose; the lavender
could not disdain the companionship of sage and thyme. All must live
together in the concord of a perfect democracy. Then if the great
Gardener bestowed rain and sunshine when they were needed, mid-summer
days would show a glorious symphony of color around the gray
farmhouse, and through the enchantment of bloom and fragrance flitted
an old woman, whose dark eyes glowed with the joy of living, and the
joy of remembering all life's other summers.
To Aunt Jane every flower in the garden was a human thing with a life
story, and close to the summer-house grew one historic rose, heroine
of an old romance, to which I listened one day as we sat in the arbor,
where hundreds of honeysuckle blooms were trumpeting their fragrance
on the air.
"Grandmother's rose, child, that's all the name it's got," she said,
in answer to my question. "I reckon you think a fine-lookin' rose like
that ought to have a fine-soundin' name. But I never saw anybody yet
that knew enough about roses to tell what its right name is. Maybe
when I'm dead and gone somebody'll tack a French name on to it, but as
long as it grows in my gyarden it'll be jest grandmother's rose, and
this is how it come by the name:
"My grandfather and grandmother was amongst the first settlers of
Kentucky. They come from the Old Dominion over the Wilderness Road way
back yonder, goodness knows when. Did you ever think, child, how
curious it was for them men to leave their homes and risk their own
lives and the lives of their little children and their wives jest to
git to a new country? It appears to me they must 'a' been led jest
like Columbus was when he crossed the big ocean in his little ships. I
reckon if the women and children had had their way about it, the bears
and wildcats and Indians would be here yet. But a man goes where he
pleases, and a woman's got to foller, and that's the way it was with
grandfather and grandmother. I've heard mother say that grandmother
cried for a week when she found she had to go, and every now and then
she'd sob out, 'I wouldn't mind it so much if I could take my
gyarden.' When they began packin' up their things, grandmother took up
this rose and put it in an iron kittle and laid plenty of good rich
earth around the roots. Grandfather said the load they had to carry
was heavy enough without puttin' in any useless things. But
grandmother says, says she: 'If you leave this rose behind, you can
leave me, too.' So the kittle and the rose went. Four weeks they was
on their way, and every time they come to a creek or a river or a
spring, grandmother'd water her rose, and when they got to their
journey's end, before they'd ever chopped a tree or laid a stone or
broke ground, she cut the sod with an axe, and then she took
grandfather's huntin' knife and dug a hole and planted her rose.
Grandfather cut some limbs off a beech tree and drove 'em into the
ground all around it to keep it from bein' tramped down, and when that
was done, grandmother says: 'Now build the house so's this rose'll
stand on the right-hand side o' the front walk. Maybe I won't die of
homesickness if I can set on my front door-step and see one flower
from my old Virginia gyarden.'
"Well, grandmother didn't die of homesickness, nor the rose either.
The transplantin' was good for both of 'em. She lived to be ninety
years old, and when she died the house wouldn't hold the children and
grandchildren and great-grandchildren that come to the funeral. And
here's her rose growin' and bloomin' yet, like there wasn't any such
things in the world as old age and death. And every spring I gether a
basketful o' these pink roses and lay 'em on her grave over yonder in
the old buryin'-ground.
"Some folks has family china and family silver that they're mighty
proud of. Martha Crawford used to have a big blue and white bowl that
belonged to her great-grandmother, and she thought more o' that bowl
than she did of everything else in the house. Milly Amos had a set o'
spoons that'd been in her family for four generations and was too
precious to use; and I've got my family rose, and it's jest as dear to
me as china and silver are to other folks. I ricollect after father
died and the estate had to be divided up, and sister Mary and brother
Joe and the rest of 'em was layin' claim to the claw-footed mahogany
table and the old secretary and mother's cherry sideboard and such
things as that, and brother Joe turned around and says to me, says
he:
"'Is there anything you want, Jane? If there is, speak up and make it
known.' And I says: 'The rest of you can take what you want of the
furniture, and if there's anything left, that can be my part. If there
ain't anything left, there'll be no quarrelin'; for there's jest one
thing I want, and that's grandmother's rose.'
"They all laughed, and sister Mary says, 'Ain't that jest like Jane?'
and brother Joe says, says he:
"'You shall have it, Jane, and further than that, I'll see to the
transplantin'.'
"That very evenin' he come over, and I showed him where I wanted the
rose to stand. He dug 'way down into the clay--there's nothin' a rose
likes better, child, than good red clay--and got a wheelbarrer load o'
soil from the woods, and we put that in first and set the roots in it
and packed 'em good and firm, first with woods' soil, then with clay,
waterin' it all the time. When we got through, I says: 'Now, you
pretty thing you, if you could come all the way from Virginia in a old
iron kittle, you surely won't mind bein' moved from father's place to
mine. Now you've got to live and bloom for me same as you did for
mother.'