AUTUMN IN THE GARDEN
I SPENT considerably more money in July and August. Some of the items
would be regarded as necessities even by our rural standards; some
my farming neighbours would deem a luxury, if not downright folly. I
was a green farmer then; I am a green farmer still; but as I began
to get about the region a little more that first summer, especially at
haying time, I was struck with the absurd waste of machinery brought
about by insufficient care and lack of dry housing, and I began to do
some figuring. All my rural neighbours, even Bert, left their ploughs,
harrows, hay rakes, mowers, and even their carts, out of doors in
rain and sun all summer, and many of them all winter. A soaking rain
followed by a scorching sun seemed to me, in my ignorance, a most
effective way of ruining a wagon, of shrinking and splitting hubs, of
loosening the fastenings of shafts even in iron machinery. Neither
do rusted bearings wear so long as those properly protected. I began to
understand why our farmers are so poor, and I sent for Hard Cider.
Just behind the barn he built me a lean-to shed, about seventy-five feet
long, open toward the east, and shingled rainproof. It cost me $500, but
every night every piece of farm machinery and every farm wagon went
under it, and the mowing-machine was further covered with a tarpaulin.
For more than a year my shed was the only one of the kind in Bentford,
and that next winter I used to see machinery standing behind barns,
half buried in snow and ice, going to pieces for want of care. I verily
believe that the New England farmer of to-day is the most shiftless
mortal north of the Mason and Dixon line--and he hasn't hookworm for an
excuse.
My next expenditure was for a cement root cellar, which scarcely needs
defence, as I had no silo on the barn, and it would not pay to install
one for only two cows. But the third item filled Mike with scorn. I had
been making him milk the cows out of doors for some weeks, taking a
tip from one of the big estates, and keeping an eye on him to see that
he washed his hands properly and put on one of the white milking coats I
had purchased. His utter contempt for that white rig was comical, but
when I told him that I was going to have a cork and asphalt brick
floor laid in the cow shed, he was speechless. He had endured the
white apron, and the spectacle of the tuberculin test (the latter
because the law made him), but an expensive floor in the barn was
too much. He gave me one pitying look, and walked away.
The floor was laid, however, and when it was completed, and the drainage
adjusted, Hard Cider trimmed up the supports of the barn cellar door and
the two cellar window frames behind, and built in substantial screens.
I didn't tell Mike about them till they were all in. Then I showed
them to him, and told him he was to keep them closed under penalty
of his job, and he was further to sprinkle chloride of lime on the
manure once a week.
"Well, I niver seen screens on a barn before," said he, "and I guess
nobody else iver did. Shure, it's to be spendin' your money azy ye are.
Are yez goin' to put in a bathroom for the horse?"
Bert was almost as scornful of the screens as Mike, though he understood
the cork-asphalt floor, having, in fact, unconsciously persuaded me to
install it by telling me how the cows of a dairyman in the next town
had been injured by slipping on a concrete floor. My floor had the
advantages of concrete, but gave the cows a footing. There had never
been screens on a barn in Bentford before, however, nor any chloride of
lime used. This was too much for Bert. But Mrs. Bert was interested.
After our screens had been on ten days and the barn cellar had been
limed, Mrs. Pillig pointed out that the number of flies caught on the
fly paper on the kitchen door had decreased at least 400 per cent.
"And I think what's there now come down from your place," she added
to Mrs. Bert. The next thing we knew, Bert was talking of screening his
stable. Truth compels me to admit, however, that he never got beyond the
talking stage.
In the face of these expenditures, our garden expenses were a mere song,
yet we had begun to plant and plan for the following year as soon as the
pool was done. We knew we were green, and we did not scorn the advice
of books and still more of our best practical friend--the head gardener
on one of the large estates, who knew the exactions of our climate and
the conditions of our soil.
"Plant your perennial seeds in as rich and cool a place as you can,"
he told us, "and expect to lose at least three fourths of your larkspur.
When your foxglove plants are large enough to transplant, make long
trenches in the vegetable garden, with manure at the bottom and four
inches of soil on top, and set in the plants. Do it early in September
if you can, so that they can make roots before our early frosts. Then
you'll have fine plants for bedding in spring. If you buy any plants,
get 'em from a nursery farther north if possible. They have to be very
hardy here."
We went through the seed catalogues as one wanders amid manifold
temptations, but we kept to our purpose of planting only the simpler,
more old-fashioned blooms at present. In addition to the bulbs, which
came later, we resolved to sow pansies, sweet William, larkspur,
Canterbury bells, foxglove, peach bells, Oriental poppies, platicodon,
veronica, mallow (for backing to the pool especially), hollyhocks, phlox
(both the early variety, the divaricata, blooming in May, and, of
course, the standard decussata. The May phlox we secured in plants).
All these seeds were carefully planted in the new beds between the
pool and the orchard, where we could water them plentifully, and
Stella, with the instincts of the true gardener, babied and tended those
seedlings almost as if they were human. Without her care, probably,
they would never have pulled through the dry, hot weeks which followed.
We used to walk down to see them every morning after breakfast, when
Stella watered them, dipping the water from the pool and sending Antony
and Cleopatra scurrying. Antony and Cleopatra were the goldfish which
the Eckstroms, true to their promise, had sent us. The poor things
were unnamed when they arrived, but their aspect--the one dark and
sinuous, the other pompously golden--betrayed their identity. Stella
called a few days after their arrival, to convey our thanks--carefully
waiting till she saw the Eckstroms driving out in their car! Their
curiosity having been satisfied regarding us, and our thanks having
been rendered to them, further intercourse lapsed. We have never tried
to maintain relations with those of our neighbours who bore us, or
with whom we have nothing in common. Life is too short.
Not only did Stella water the seedlings religiously, but she kept the
soil mulched and the weeds out, working with her gloved hands in the
earth. All the seeds came up well save the phlox, with which we had
small luck, and the _Papaver Orientalis_, with which we had no luck at
all. Not a seed came up, and not a seed ever has come up in our soil. We
have had to beg the plants from other people. Even as the gardener
predicted, the tender little larkspur plants mysteriously died. We
ringed them with stiff paper, we surrounded them with coal ashes, we
even sprayed them with Bordeaux and arsenate of lead. But still they
were devoured at the roots or the tops, or mysteriously gave up the
ghost with no apparent cause. We started with two hundred, and when
autumn came we had just thirty left.
"Still," said Stella cheerfully, "thirty will make quite a brave
show."
"If they survive the winter," said I gloomily. "I've not the patience
to be a gardener."
"It _is_ a good deal like reform!" Stella replied.
As the busy autumn days came upon us, Twin Fires took on a new aspect,
and one to us greenhorns indescribably thrilling. In the first place,
our field of corn rustled perpetually as we walked past it, and down
in the greenish-golden lanes beneath we could see the orange gleam of
pungkins (I shall so spell the word lest it be mispronounced by the
ignorant). Great ears of the Stowell's evergreen were ripe, for Mike's
prediction about the early frost had not come true, and we ate the
succulent food clean to the cob every day at dinner, besides selling
many dozens of ears to the market. In the long light of afternoon,
Stella loved to go along the path by the hayfield wall and then turn in
amid the corn, losing sight at once of all the universe and wandering
in a new world of rustling leaves. She felt, she said, just as Alice
must have felt after she had eaten the cake; and once a rabbit bounded
across her foot, to her unspeakable delight. She looked to see if he had
dropped his gloves!
Then there was the potato field. We were eating our own new potatoes now.
Often Stella dug them.
"It seems so funny to go and dig up a potato," she declared. "I've
always felt that potatoes _just were_. But to see the whole process of
growth is quite another matter. Oh, John, it makes them so much nicer!"
"Especially when you are getting seventy-five cents a bushel for them,"
I laughed.
The loaded tomato vines, too, with the red fruit hanging out from the
wire frames and sending a pungent odour into the surrounding air,
appealed to Stella endlessly. I used to see her now and then, as I
glanced from the south room of a morning, eating a raw tomato like an
apple, her head bent forward so that the juice would not spoil her dress.
And there were the apples! Already a red astrachan tree invited us on
every trip to the brook, and other old trees were bearing fast reddening
fruit. I had wanted to set out more orchard, but we agreed that we
could not afford it that year, if we were to build chicken houses against
the spring, so I reluctantly gave up the idea. But our old trees, in
spite of (or perhaps because of) my spring pruning, were doing fairly
well. We had enough for baked apples and cream all winter, anyhow,
Stella reckoned, smacking her lips at the thought.
Every day, on our way to the pool, one or the other of us took a hoe
along and scraped a tree for five minutes, gradually getting the old
bark off, and making a final preparation for a thorough spraying the
next winter just so much easier. I used to prune a bit, too, in spare
moments, so that by the end of the summer considerable renovation had
been accomplished.
And now came the foxglove transplanting. According to the gardener's
directions, we took two long rows where the early peas had stood (and
where Mike had disobeyed my instructions to spade the vines under, that
being a form of green manuring your old-time gardener will not see the
value of, I have discovered), trenched them, put in manure and soil, and
set out at least 300 foxglove plants six inches apart. It was a cool,
cloudy day, and they stood up as though nothing had happened. Then,
as an experiment, we moved scores of tiny hollyhocks from the crowded
seed beds into their permanent position as a screen between the south
kitchen windows and the sundial lawn, and as a border on the west side
of the same lawn. They, too, were quite unaffected by the change.
Meanwhile, we ordered our bulbs--hyacinths, daffodils (which in our
climate refuse to take the winds of March with beauty, cowardly waiting
till May), a few crocuses, _Narcissus poeticus_, Empress narcissus,
German iris, Japanese iris, and Darwin tulips. We ordered the iris and
tulips in named varieties.
"They have such nice names," said Stella, "especially the Japanese
iris--Kimi-no-megumi, Shirataki, Momochiguma! The tulips are nice, too.
Here is Ariadne and Kate Greenaway hobnobbing with Professor Rauwenhoff!
What's the use of having plants that aren't named? We must show them
as much respect as Antony and Cleopatra, or Epictetus and Luella!"
We also experimented with lilies--lemon lilies for the shady north side
of the house, tigers for the border beyond the pool, and two or three of
the expensive Myriophyllums, just to show that we, too, could go in for
the exotic, like our neighbours on the big estates.
When the bulbs came, in October, we looked at the boxes sadly.
"Whew!" said Stella, "you can't be lazy and have a garden, can you?"
"I don't work to-morrow, I guess," said I. "Shall we ask Mike's Joe
to help us?"
"Never!" said my wife. "We'll put these bulbs in ourselves. If I had
any help, I should feel like the Eckstroms, which God forbid!"
So the next day at seven-thirty we began. We ringed the pool with
German and Japanese iris, alternated for succession, and planted a
few Japanese both below and above the pool, close to the brook. We set
the _Narcissus poeticus_ bulbs where, if they grew, the flowers could
look at themselves in the mirror below the dam. The Empress narcissus we
placed on both sides of the pool just beyond the iris. On each side of
the bench we placed a bulb of our precious Myriophyllums, and put the
tigers into the borders close to the shrubbery on both sides. The
hyacinths went into the sundial beds, the Darwins into the beds at the
base of the rose aqueduct, a few crocuses into the sundial lawn, and
the daffodils here and there all over the place, where the fancy struck
us and the ground invited.
"Now, I'm going to label everything, and put it on a map besides,"
cried Stella, "except the daffodils. I want to forget where they are. I
want surprises in the spring. Oh, John, do you suppose they'll come up?"
"Yes, I suppose they will," I laughed, "some of them. But do you
suppose we'll ever get the kinks out of our backs?"
"I'm willing to go doubled up the rest of my life, for a garden of
daffodils all my own," she cried.
"'And then my heart with pleasure thrills
And dances with the daffodils----'
It was very thoughtful of old Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, and Masefield,
and all the rest to write nice things about the daffodils, wasn't it,
John? I wonder if gardens would be so wonderful if it weren't for all
their literary suggestions, and the lovely things they remind you of?
Gardens have so much atmosphere! Oh, spring, spring, hurry and come!"
I forgot my lame back in her enthusiasm, and later, when the apples were
gathered, the potatoes dug, the beets and carrots in the root cellar,
our own sweet cider foamed in a glass pitcher on our table, and the
first snow spits of December whistled across the fields, we put a little
long manure over the irises and other bulbs, and pine boughs over the
remaining perennials, and wrapped the ramblers in straw, with almost as
much laughing tenderness as you would put a child to bed.
The cows were back in the stable, and Mike had revised his opinion
of cork-asphalt floors when he realized the ease of cleaning with a
hose; the potatoes and apples and onions and beets and carrots for
our family use were stored in barrels and bins in the cellar, or spread
on shelves, or buried in sand. The vegetable garden was newly ploughed,
and manure spread on the hayfield. Antony and Cleopatra had been
captured and brought into the dining-room, where they were to spend
the winter in a glass bowl. Epictetus and Luella and Gladys and Gaynor
had all burrowed out of sight into the ground. The pageant of autumn on
our hills was over, only an amethyst haze succeeding at sunset time.
Wood fires sparkled on our twin hearths. The summer residents had
departed. Our first Thanksgiving turkey had been eaten, though a great
stone crock of Mrs. Pillig's incomparable mincemeat still yielded up
its treasures for ambrosial pies.
"And now," said Stella, "I'm going to find out at last what a country
winter is like!"
"And your friends are pitying you down in town," said I. "Don't you
want to go back to them till spring?"
Stella looked at the fires, she looked out over the bare garden and
the ploughed fields to the dun hillsides, she listened a moment to the
whistle of the bleak December wind, she looked at me.
In her eyes I read her answer.