SPRING IN THE GARDEN
The excitement of our first spring at Twin Fires will probably never be
equalled in our lives, though no spring can recur in a garden without its
excitements. But about our first spring there was a glorious thrill
of the unexpected which, alas! can come but once. To begin with, it was
Stella's initiation into rural April, and the feet of the south wind
walking up the land brought hourly miracles to her sight. In the second
place, everything in the garden was an experiment. The new hotbeds were
an experiment. The bulbs and perennials sown the year before were an
experiment. The ramblers were an experiment. The fertilizers I put upon
the soil (more or less to Mike's disgust) were an experiment. We were
learning everything, and after all no rapture is quite like that of
learning.
The last snow melted and the ice went out of the brook in March, but cold
nasty weather followed for two weeks. We planted a row of Spencers on
March 20th, but it was not till the first day of April that we could
spade up 200-foot long rows in the vegetable garden and plant early
peas, which I inoculated with nitrogen-gathering bacteria while Mike
looked on with unconcealed scorn. I tried to explain the growing process
of legumes to him, but gave up the task as hopeless.
"Bugs!" he said. "Puttin' bugs in the soil! No good never came o'
that. Manure's the thing."
About this time, too, we started the hotbeds, a long row of them on the
south side of the kitchen. The fresh manure cost us $2 a load, for,
owning but one horse, we did not have enough in our stable; and, as
Stella said, the piles "steamed expensively," like small volcanoes,
as they stood waiting in the sun after a warm, drenching shower. We were
all impatience to start our beds, but Mike kept us waiting till the soil
temperature had gone down. Then the sowing began. While Mike was putting
in his beds large quantities of cauliflowers, which had proved one of
our most profitable crops the year before, and celery and lettuce and
tomatoes and peppers and radishes and cabbages, we divided our beds into
one-foot squares, and sowed our different colours of antirrhinum,
asters, stock, _Phlox Drummondi_, cosmos, annual larkspur, heliotrope,
and _Dimorphotheca Aurantiaca_, a plant chosen by Stella because she
said the name irresistibly appealed to a philologist. Later we agreed
that that was about its only appeal.
While the hotbeds were sprouting, demanding their daily water and nightly
cover, there was the ploughing to be done, the perennial beds to be
uncovered, the new beds by the pool to be made ready, more pruning to be
accomplished, and consequently more litter to be removed, birds to be
watched for excitedly, and crocus spears in the grass, and, of course,
the little lawn beyond the pool to be sowed to grass, and some grass
seeds worked into the sundial lawn, which was still thin and patchy.
"Oh, I don't know which is the real sign of spring," said Stella, one
evening, as we wandered on the terrace before the south room and heard
the shrill chorus of the Hylas from our swamp. "Sometimes I think it's
the Hylas, on the first warm evening; sometimes I think it's the fox
sparrows who appeared suddenly the other day at 10.01 A.M. while you
were working, and began hippity-hopping all over the grass. Sometimes I
think it's the soft coot-coot of our new hens in the sun. Sometimes
I think it's a crocus leaf. Sometimes I think it's the steaming manure
piles. Sometimes it seems to be the figures of Mike and Joe driving old
Dobbin and the plough, against the sky and the lone pine, like a Millet
painting."
"Lump them," I suggested. "It's all of them combined. In New York
it is when the soda fountains have to be extended over the toothbrush
counter."
"New York!" sniffed Stella. "There _is_ no such place!"
April flew past us on gauzy wings, and May came, with violets by our
brook and in our pasture, and the trilliums we had transplanted the
year before burst into bud. Nearly all our perennials had come through
the winter, thanks to the sixty-seven days of snow, and the one plant
of blue May phlox which had survived its fall planting made us eager
for a second trial, the next time in early spring. More sowings of peas
went into the ground. The sundial was set out. Hard Cider came to build
our pergola, and the clematis vines arrived to grow over it. The grape
arbour along the west side of the sundial lawn was also built, of plain
chestnut. The perennials were all moved to their permanent places, the
beds fertilized and trimmed.
About the first of May, too, I took a tip from Luther Burbank and put
early corn into a mixture of leaf mould and fresh manure in a big box.
When the time came the middle of the month for the first planting, my
seeds had developed snaky white roots and stalks. Again to Mike's
disgust, I made a long trench and put these sprouted seeds in thickly.
In a couple of days they were up, and by the time his conventionally
planted hills had sprouted, I had a long row of well-started corn which
I thinned out to the strongest stalks.
"Now, Mike," said I, "I'll beat you and the town in the market."
"Well, bedad, it beats all how you fellers that don't know nothin'
about farmin' can do some things," he said, regarding my corn with
comical amazement.
"That's because we are willing to learn," said I, and left him still
looking at the six-inch high stalks.
(Incidentally, I may remark that I did beat everybody in the market, and
made about $15 extra by my simple experiment.)
But Stella's chief joy in the garden was in the surprises of the
blooms: in the stately clumps of Darwins against the pillars of the rose
aqueduct; in the golden bursts of daffodils here and there where we had
sown a few bulbs and forgotten the spot; in the _Narcissus poeticus_,
which were in their element close to the brook and did verily look at
themselves in the tiny pool below the dam; in the pale gold ring of
the great Empress narcissus bordering the iris spears around the large
pool; above all, perhaps, in the maroon of the trilliums which we had
brought home from that first wonderful walk in the woods. Not alone
her heart, but her feet, danced with the daffodils, and I could hear
her of a morning as I worked, out in the garden singing or bringing in
great bunches of blooms to decorate the house.
On several afternoons we made further trips to the deep woods after
wild-flower plants, and set them in along our brook. The thrush had
returned, the apple blossoms had made all the garden fragrant while
the plants were budding (this year they were carefully sprayed twice,
for, though it cost nearly as much to spray them as the entire value of
the apples, one thing I cannot stand on my farm is poor or neglected
fruit; besides, the improved aspect of the trees themselves was worth
the price). Now that their petals had fallen came the new fragrance,
subtler but no less exquisite, of many flowers after May rain, of a
spring brook running under pines, and near the house the pungent aroma
of lilacs.
Then came the German irises, like soldiers on parade, around the pool,
and the bright lemon lilies in the shady dooryard. Scarce had the irises
begun to fall when the foxgloves began to blossom, and all suddenly one
morning after a very warm night the sundial was surrounded by a stately
conclave of slender queens dressed in white and lavender, while more
queens marched down from the orchard to the pool, and yet more stood
against the shrubbery beyond it, or half hid the bare newness of our
grape arbour.
"I don't need to take digitalis internally for a heart stimulant!"
cried Stella. "Oh, the lovely things! Quick, vases of them below the
Hiroshiges! Quick, your camera! Quick, come and look at them, come and
see the bees swinging in their bells!"
"I suppose they are breakfast bells," said I.
"This is no time for bad puns," she answered, dragging me swiftly down
through the orchard, and up again to the sundial.
Indeed, the June morning was beautiful, and the foxgloves ringing the
white dial post above the fresh green of our lawn had an indescribable
air of delicate stateliness in the sun. And they were murmurous with
bees. Again and again that morning I looked up from my work and saw
them there, in the focussed sunlight, saw my wife hovering over them, saw
beyond them, through the rose arches, Mike and Joe at work on the
farm, saw still farther away the procession of my pines, and then the far
hills and the blue sky. Again, at quiet evening, when a white-throated
sparrow and an oriole were competing in song, we watched the foxgloves
turn to white ghosts glimmering in the dusk, we heard the bird songs
die away, the shrill of night insects arise, and then the tinkle of
our brook came into consciousness, as it ran ever riverward in the night.
"The spring melts into summer," said Stella, "as gently as the little
brook runs toward the sea. I wish it would linger, though. Oh, John,
couldn't we build a dam and hold back the spring? A little pool of
spring forever in our garden?"
"We shall have to make that pool within our hearts," said I.