THE NICE OTHER THINGS
A pool of water twenty feet long shining in the sun, or glimmering deeply
in the twilight, that and nothing else save a few straggling annuals
wrongly placed about it--yet it made Twin Fires over, it caused us weeks
of toil, it got into our dreams, it got into our pockets, too.
"Now I know why sunken gardens are so called," said Stella, as she
figured out the cost of the fall bulb planting we had already planned.
"It's because you sink so much money in 'em!"
Of course there was little that we could do to the margin of the pool
that summer, but there was plenty to do beyond the margin. The first
thing of all was to place the flower beds differently. This took
considerable experimenting, and Stella, being ingenious, hit upon a
scheme for testing various possible arrangements. She filled all sorts
of receptacles, from tumblers to pitchers, with cut flowers, low and
high, and stood them in masses here and there, till the spot was found
where they looked the best. As the pool centred on the line between the
front door of the house and the yet-to-be-built garden bench against the
stone wall, and as the orchard came down to within forty feet of the
brook on the slope from the house, it was something of a problem to
lead naturally from a grassy orchard slope into a water feature and a
bit of almost formal gardening, without making the transition stiff and
abrupt. We finally solved it with the aid of a lawn mower, flower beds,
and imagination.
Going over the grass between the last apple trees and the brook again
and again with the mower, I finally reduced that section to something
like a lawn, and also kept mowed a straight path from the pool up to the
front door. Then, beginning just beyond the last shadows, we cut a
bed, thirty inches wide, on each side of the line of the path, running
parallel with it to within ten feet of the pool; then they swung to
left and right, following the curve of the bank until they flanked the
pool. By planting low flowers at the beginning, and gradually increasing
their height till we had larkspur and hollyhocks and mallow in the
flanking beds, we could both make the transition from orchard to water
feature, and also screen off the pool, increasing its intimacy, without,
however, hiding it from the front door, where it was glimpsed down a
path of trees and flowers. Of course we had no flowers now in mid-July
to put into those beds, save what few we could dig up from elsewhere,
setting poor little annual phloxes two feet apart; but we could, and
did, use them for seed beds for next year's perennials, and to the eye
of faith they were beautiful.
Now we were confronted by the problem of the other side of the pool,
which included the problem of how to get to the other side! Stella
suggested tentatively a tiny Japanese moon bridge above the pool, but I
would have none of it.
"The only way to build a Japanese garden in New England is to utilize
New England features," I insisted. "We won't copy anybody."
"All right," she answered, "then we want stepping-stones above the
pool, and some more down below the dam, where we can see the waterfall."
"More suitable--and much easier," I agreed.
Once more we robbed the stone wall, building our two flanking paths of
stepping-stones to the other side of the brook.
On the other side we decided to eliminate all flower beds in the open,
merely planting iris and forget-me-not on the rim of the pool. We would
clear out a wide semicircle of lawn, with the bench at the centre of
the circumference, and plant our remaining flowers against the shrubbery
on the sides, which was chiefly the wild red osier dogwood (_cornus
stolonifera_). I got a brush scythe, a hatchet, a spade, a grub hoe,
and a rake, and we went to work.
Work is certainly the word. It was not difficult to clear the brush and
the tall, rank weeds and grasses away from our semicircle, which was
hardly more than thirty feet in diameter, but to spade up the black
soil thereafter, to eliminate the long, tenacious roots of the witch
grass and the weeds, to clear out the stubborn stumps of innumerable
little trees and wild shrubs which had overrun the place, to spread
evenly the big pile of soil we had excavated from the pool, to reduce
it all to a clean, level condition for sowing grass, was more than I had
bargained for. Stella gave up helping, for it was beyond her strength;
but I kept on, through the long, hot July afternoons, and at last had it
ready. The time of year was anything but propitious for sowing grass
seed, but we planted it, none the less, trusting that in such a low,
moist spot it might make a catch. Then we turned to the bench.
"Gracious, you have to be everything to be a gardener, don't you?"
Stella laughed, as we tried to draw a sketch first, which should satisfy
us. "The bench ought to balance the old Governor Winthrop highboy top of
the front door. But I'm sure I don't know how we're going to make it."
"Patience," said I, turning the leaves of a catalogue of expensive
marble garden furniture. "Just a simple design of the classic period
will do. Colonial furniture was based on the Greek orders."
We found at last the picture of a marble bench which could be duplicated
in general outline with wooden planking, so I telephoned to the lumber
dealer in the next town for two twenty-four-inch wide chestnut planks,
and was fairly staggered by the bill when it came. It appears that a
twenty-four-inch wide plank nowadays has to come from North Carolina, or
some other distant point, and is rarer than charity, at least that is
what they told me.
"I think it would be cheaper in marble," said Stella. "And it looks to
me as if you could make the bench out of one plank."
"We want another bench on the sundial lawn," said I, wisely.
"You do _now_," said she.
"But if I hadn't got two planks," said I, "and had spoiled the first
one, then we'd have had to wait two or three days again."
"Oh, that was the reason!" she smiled.
I sawed one of the planks into one six-foot and two two-foot lengths,
and rounded the edges of the long piece for the top. Then, on the two
short lengths, we carefully drew from the picture the outline of the
supports on the marble original, and went to work with rip saw, hatchet,
and draw knife to carve them out. The seasoned chestnut worked hard,
and we were half a day about our task. The next day we put the three
pieces together with braces and long screws, planed and sandpapered
the wood till we had it smooth, and then painted it with white enamel
paint. While the first coat was drying, we made a deep foundation of
coal ashes and flat stones for the bench to rest on, and the next
afternoon, when the second coat, which Stella had applied before
breakfast, was nearly dry, I hove the heavy thing on a wheelbarrow, and
carted it around the road to the point where it was to go. We put a
little fresh cement on the foundation stones to hold the two legs, and
with Mike's aid the bench was lifted over the stone wall, through the
hedge of ash-leaf maples, put in place, and levelled. Stella hovered
near, with the can of paint, to cover our fingermarks and give the top
a final glistening coat.
"There," I cried, as the job was done, "we have our pool and our
garden bench! We have some of our flowers already planted for next year!
We have our bit of lawn! Let's go up the orchard to the front door
and see how it looks."
I left the wheelbarrow forgotten in the road, and we ran up the slope
together, turned at the door, and gazed back. The pool shimmered in the
afternoon sun. We could hear the water tinkling over the dam. Beyond
the pool was the dark semicircle of fresh mould that was to be green
grass backed by blossoms against the shrubbery, and finally, at the very
rear, now stood the white bench, from this distance gleaming like marble.
"Fine! It looks fine!" I cried.
Stella's eyes were squinted judicially. "Oh, dear," she said, "I wish
there was a cedar, a tall, slender, dark cedar, just behind the bench
at either end. And, John, do you know we ought to have some goldfish in
the pool?"
I sighed profoundly. "You are a real gardener," said I. "Nothing is
ever finished!"
"I'm afraid I am," she answered. "But we will have the goldfish,
won't we?"
"Yes, and the cedars, too," I replied. "I'll ask Mike when is the
best time to put 'em in."
Mike was sure that spring was the best time, and there were some good
ones up in our pasture.
"Oh, dear, spring is the best time for _everything_, it seems to me,
and here it's only July!" cried Stella. "Well, anyhow, I'm going to
draw a plan of the pool garden, and hang it over my desk."
She got paper and pencil and drew the plan, while I lay under an orchard
tree listening to the tinkle of the waterfall and watching her while
Buster came and licked my face.
The plan appears on the following page:
"I think your arrangement of iris on the edge is rather formal," I was
saying, "and it would be rather more decorous, if not decorative, for
you to sit upon the bench, and----" when we heard a motor rumble over
the bridge at the brook, and the engine stop by our side door.
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