The Garden, You, and I
by Mabel Osgood Wright · English · Gutenberg #17514 · 544,843 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Garden, You, and I
Author: Mabel Osgood Wright
Release date: January 14, 2006 [eBook #17514]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17514
Credits: Produced by Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I ***
Produced by Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I
[Illustration: A SEASIDE GARDEN.]
THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I
BY
BARBARA
AUTHOR OF
"THE GARDEN OF A COMMUTER'S WIFE," "PEOPLE OF
THE WHIRLPOOL," "AT THE SIGN OF THE
FOX," ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1906
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1906.
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1906.
Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
~Dedicated~
TO
J.L.G.
I.M.T.
AND
A.B.P.
THE LITERARY GARDENERS
OF REDDING
GREETING
This book is for those who in treading the garden path have no thought
of material gain; rather must they give,--from the pocket as they
may,--from the brain much,--and from the heart all,--if they would drink
in full measure this pure joy of living.
"Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe--I have tried it--my own feet
have tried it well--be not detained."
--WALT WHITMAN.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE WAYS OF THE WIND 1
II. THE BOOK OF THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I 7
III. CONCERNING HARDY PLANTS 29
IV. THEIR GARDEN VACATION 48
V. ANNUALS--WORTHY AND UNWORTHY 70
VI. THEIR FORTUNATE ESCAPE 92
VII. A SIMPLE ROSE GARDEN 117
VIII. A MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE 155
IX. FERNS, FENCES, AND WHITE BIRCHES 183
X. FRANKNESS--GARDENING AND OTHERWISE 202
LIST OF FLOWER COMBINATIONS FOR THE TABLE
FROM BARBARA'S _Garden Boke_ 230
XI. A SEASIDE GARDEN 233
XII. THE TRANSPLANTING OF EVERGREENS 246
XIII. LILIES AND THEIR WHIMS 262
XIV. FRAGRANT FLOWERS AND LEAVES 281
XV. THE PINK FAMILY OUTDOORS 305
XVI. THE FRAME OF THE PICTURE 320
XVII. THE INS AND OUTS OF THE MATTER 336
XVIII. THE VALUE OF WHITE FLOWERS 352
XIX. PANDORA'S CHEST 365
XX. EPILOGUE 374
APPENDIX
FOR THE HARDY SEED BED 375
SOME WORTHY ANNUALS 387
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A SEASIDE GARDEN (see p. 243) _Frontispiece_
"THE MAGNOLIAS BELOW AT THE ROAD-BEND" 8
ENGLISH LARKSPUR SEVEN FEET HIGH 32
FRAXINELLA--GERMAN IRIS AND CANDY-TUFT 44
LONGFELLOW'S GARDEN 81
THE SUMMER GARDEN--VERBENAS 86
ASTERS 90
THE PICTORIAL VALUE OF EVERGREENS 102
"MY ROSES ARE SCATTERED HERE, THERE,
AND EVERYWHERE" 119
MADAME PLANTIER AT VAN CORTLAND MANOR 128
A CONVENIENT ROSE-BED 138
"THE LAST OF THE OLD ORCHARD" 156
THE SCREEN OF WHITE BIRCHES 166
"AN ENDLESS SHELTER FOR EVERY SORT
OF WILD THING" 184
SPECIOSUM LILIES IN THE SHADE 270
THE POET'S NARCISSUS 278
A BED OF JAPAN PINKS 296
SINGLE AND DOUBLE PINKS 314
"THE SILVER MAPLE BY THE LANE GATE" 326
"A CURTAIN TO THE SIDE PORCH" 328
AN IRIS HEDGE 358
DAPHNE CNEORUM 360
A TERRIBLE EXAMPLE 362
"THE LOW SNOW-COVERED MEADOW" 372
"PUNCH ... HAS A CACHE UNDER THE
SYRINGA BUSHES" 374
THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I
I
THE WAYS OF THE WIND
"Out of the veins of the world comes the blood of me;
The heart that beats in my side is the heart of the sea;
The hills have known me of old, and they do not forget;
Long ago was I friends with the wind; I am friends with it yet."
--GERALD GOULD.
Whenever a piece of the land is to be set apart for a garden, two mighty
rulers must be consulted as to the boundaries. When this earth child is
born and flower garnished for the christening, the same two must be also
bidden as sponsors. These rulers are the Sun and the Wind. The sun, if
the matter in hand is once fairly spread before him and put in his
charge, is a faithful guardian, meeting frankness frankly and sending
his penetrating and vitalizing messengers through well-nigh inviolable
shade. But of the wind, who shall answer for it or trust it? Do we
really ever learn all of its vagaries and impossible possibilities?
If frankness best suits the sun, diplomacy must be our shield of
defence windward, for the wind is not one but a composite of many moods,
and to lure one on, and skilfully but not insultingly bar out another,
is our portion. To shut out the wind of summer, the bearer of vitality,
the uplifter of stifling vapours, the disperser of moulds, would indeed
be an error; therefore, the great art of the planters of a garden is to
learn the ways of the wind and to make friends with it. If the soil is
sodden and sour, it may be drained and sweetened; if it is poor, it may
be nourished; but when all this is done, if the garden lies where the
winds of winter and spring in passing swiftly to and fro whet their
steel-edged tempers upon it, what avails?
What does it matter if violet or pansy frames are set in a sunny nook,
if it be one of the wind's winter playgrounds, where he drifts the snow
deep for his pastime, so that after each storm of snow or sleet a
serious bit of engineering must be undergone before the sashes can be
lifted and the plants saved from dampness; or if the daffodils and
tulips lie well bedded all the winter through, if, when the sun has
called them forth, the winds of March blight their sap-tender foliage?
Yet the lands that send the north winds also send us the means to deter
them--the cold-loving evergreens, low growing, high growing, medium,
woven dense in warp and woof, to be windbreaks, also the shrubs of
tough, twisted fibre and stubborn thorns lying close to the earth for
windbuffers.
Therefore, before the planting of rose or hardy herbs, bulbs or tenderer
flowers, go out, compass in hand, face the four quarters of heaven, and,
considering well, set your windbreaks of sweeping hemlocks, pines,
spruces, not in fortress-like walls barring all the horizon, but in
alternate groups that flank, without appearing to do so heavily, the
north and northwest. Even a barberry hedge on two sides of a garden,
wedge point to north, like the wild-goose squadrons of springtime, will
make that spot an oasis in the winter valley of death.
A wise gardener it is who thinks of the winter in springtime and plants
for it as surely as he thinks of spring in the winter season and longs
for it! If, in the many ways by which the affairs of daily life are
re-enforced, the saying is true that "forethought is coin in the pocket,
quiet in the brain, and content in the heart," doubly does it apply to
the pleasures of living, of which the outdoor life of working side by
side with nature, called gardening, is one of the chief. When a garden
is inherited, the traditions of the soil or reverence for those who
planned and toiled in it may make one blind to certain defects in its
conception, and beginning with _a priori_ set by another one does as one
can.
But in those choosing site, and breaking soil for themselves,
inconsistency is inexcusable. Follow the lay of the land and let it
lead. Nature does not attempt placid lowland pictures on a steep
hillside, nor dramatic landscape effects in a horizonless meadow,
therefore why should you? For one great garden principle you will learn
from nature's close companionship--consistency!
You who have a bit of abrupt hillside of impoverished soil, yet where
the sky-line is divided in a picture of many panels by the trees, you
should not try to perch thereon a prim Dutch garden of formal lines;
neither should you, to whom a portion of fertile level plain has fallen,
seek to make it picturesque by a tortuous maze of walks, curving about
nothing in particular and leading nowhere, for of such is not nature.
Either situation will develop the skill, though in different directions,
and do not forget that in spite of better soil it takes greater
individuality to make a truly good and harmonious garden on the flat
than on the rolling ground.
I always tremble for the lowlander who, down in the depth of his nature,
has a prenatal hankering for rocks, because he is apt to build an
undigested rockery! These sort of rockeries are wholly separate from the
rock gardens, often majestic, that nowadays supplement a bit of natural
rocky woodland, bringing it within the garden pale. The awful rockery of
the flat garden is like unto a nest of prehistoric eggs that have been
turned to stone, from the interstices of which a few wan vines and ferns
protrude somewhat, suggesting the garnishing for an omelet.
Also, if you follow Nature and study her devices, you will alone learn
the ways of the winds and how to prepare for them. Where does Spring set
her first flag of truce--out in the windswept open?
No! the arbutus and hepatica lie bedded not alone in the fallen leaves
of the forest but amid their own enduring foliage. The skunk cabbage
raises his hooded head first in sheltered hollows. The marsh marigold
lies in the protection of bog tussocks and stream banks. The first
bloodroot is always found at the foot of some natural windbreak, while
the shad-bush, that ventures farther afield and higher in air than any,
is usually set in a protecting hedge, like his golden forerunner the
spice-bush.
If Nature looks to the ways of the wind when she plants, why should not
we? A bed of the hardiest roses set on a hill crest is a folly. Much
more likely would they be to thrive wholly on the north side of it. A
garden set in a cut between hills that form a natural blowpipe can at
best do no more than hold its own, without advancing.
But there are some things that belong to the never-never land and may
not be done here. You may plant roses and carnations in the shade or in
dry sea sand, but they will not thrive; you cannot keep upland lilies
cheerful with their feet in wet clay; you cannot have a garden all the
year in our northern latitudes, for nature does not; and you cannot
afford to ignore the ways of the wind, for according as it is kind or
cruel does it mean garden life or death!
"Men, they say, know many things;
But lo, they have taken wings,--
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that anybody knows."
--THOREAU.
II
THE BOOK OF THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I
_April 30._ Gray dawn, into which father and Evan vanished with their
fishing rods; then sunrise, curtained by a slant of rain, during which
the birds sang on with undamped ardour, a catbird making his début for
the season as soloist.
It must not be thought that I was up and out at dawn. At twenty I did so
frequently, at thirty sometimes, now at thirty-five I _can_ do it
_perfectly well_, if necessary, otherwise, save at the change of
seasons, to keep in touch with earth and sky, I raise myself
comfortably, elbow on pillow, and through the window scan garden, wild
walk, and the old orchard at leisure, and then let my arm slip and the
impression deepen through the magic of one more chance for dreams.
_9 o'clock._ The warm throb of spring in the earth, rising in a potent
mist, sap pervaded and tangible, having a clinging, unctuous softness
like the touch of unfolding beech leaves, lured me out to finish the
transplanting of the pansies among the hardy roses, while the first
brown thrasher, high in the bare top of an ash, eyes fixed on the sky,
proclaimed with many turns and changes the exact spot where he did not
intend to locate his nest. This is an early spring, of a truth.
Presently pale sunbeams thread the mist, gathering colour as they filter
through the pollen-meshed catkins of the black birches; an oriole
bugling in the Yulan magnolias below at the road-bend, fire amid snow; a
high-hole laughing his courtship in the old orchard.
Then Lavinia Cortright coming up to exchange Dahlia bulbs and discuss
annuals and aster bugs. She and Martin browse about the country,
visiting from door to door like veritable natives, while their garden,
at first so prim and genteel, like one of Lavinia's own frocks, has
broken bounds and taken on brocade, embroidery, and all sorts of lace
frills, overflowed the south meadow, and only pauses at the stile in the
wall of our old crab-apple orchard, rivalling in beauty and refined
attraction any garden at the Bluffs. Martin's purse is fuller than of
yore, owing to the rise in Whirlpool real estate, and nothing is too
good for Lavinia's garden. Even more, he has of late let the dust rest
peacefully on human genealogy and is collecting quaint garden books and
herbals, flower catalogues and lists, with the solemn intent of writing
a book on Historic Flowers. At least so he declares; but when Lavinia is
in the garden, there too is Martin. To-day, however, he joined my men
before noon at the lower brook. Fancy a house-reared man a convert to
fishing when past threescore! Evan insists that it is because, being
above all things consistent, he wishes to appear at home in the company
of father's cherished collection of Walton's and other fishing books.
Father says, "Nonsense! no man can help liking to fish!"
[Illustration: "THE MAGNOLIAS BELOW AT THE ROAD-BEND."]
Toward evening came home a creel lined with bog moss; within, a rainbow
glimmer of brook trout, a posy of shad-bush, marsh marigolds, anemones,
and rosy spring beauties from the river woods,--with three cheerfully
tired men, who gathered by the den hearth fire with coffee cup and pipe,
inside an admiring but sleepy circle of beagle hounds, who had run free
the livelong day and who could doubtless impart the latest rabbit news
with thrilling detail. All this and much more made up to-day, one of red
letters.
Yesterday, Monday, was quite different, and if not absolutely black, was
decidedly slate coloured. It is only when some one of the household is
positively ill that the record must be set down in black characters, for
what else really counts? Why is it that the city folk persist in judging
all rural days alike, that is until they have once really _lived_ in the
country, not merely boarded and tried to kill time and their own
digestions at one and the same moment.
Such exceptional days as yesterday should only be chronicled now and
then to give an added halo to happy to-morrows,--disagreeables are
remembered quite long enough by perverse human nature.
Yesterday began with the pipe from the water-back bursting, thereby
doing away with hot water for shaving and the range fire at the same
time. The coffee resented hurry, and the contact with an oil stove
developed the peanutty side of its disposition, something that is latent
in the best and most equable of brands.
The spring timetable having changed at midnight Sunday, unobserved by
Evan, he missed the early train, which it was especially important that
he should take. Three other men found themselves in the same
predicament, two being Bluffers and one a Plotter. (These are the names
given hereabout to our two colonies of non-natives. The Bluffers are the
people of the Bluffs, who always drive to the station; the Plotters,
living on a pretty tract of land near the village that was "plotted"
into house-lots a few years ago, have the usual newcomer's hallucination
about making money from raising chickens, and always walk.)
After a hasty consultation, one of the Bluffers telephoned for his
automobile and invited the others to make the trip to town with him. In
order to reach the north turnpike that runs fairly straight to the city,
the chauffeur, a novice in local byways, proposed to take a short cut
through our wood road, instead of wheeling into the pike below
Wakeleigh.
This wood road holds the frost very late, in spite of an innocent
appearance to the contrary; this fact Evan stated tersely. Would a
chauffeur of the Bluffs listen to advice from a man living halfway down
the hill, who not only was autoless but frequently walked to the
station, and therefore to be classed with the Plotters? Certainly not;
while at the same moment the owner of the car decided the matter by
pulling out his watch and murmuring to his neighbour something about an
important committee meeting, and it being the one day in the month when
time meant money!
Into the road they plunged, and after several hair-breadth lurches, for
the cut is deep and in places the rocks parallel with the roadway, the
turnpike was visible; then a sudden jolt, a sort of groan from the
motor, and it ceased to breathe, the heavy wheels having settled in a
treacherous spot not wholly free from frost, its great stomach, or
whatever they call the part that holds its insides, wallowed hopelessly
in the mud!
The gentlemen from the Bluffs deciding that, after all, there was no
real need of going to town, as they had only moved into the country the
week previous, and the auto owner challenged to a game of billiards by
his friend, they returned home, while the Plotter and Evan walked back
two miles to the depot and caught the third train!
At home things still sizzled. Father had an important consultation at
the hospital at ten; ringing the stable call for the horses, he found
that Tim, evidently forgetting the hour, had taken them, Evan's also
being of the trio, to the shoer half an hour before. There was a
moment's consternation and Bertel left the digging over of my hardy beds
to speed down to the village on his bicycle, and when the stanhope
finally came up, father was as nearly irritable as I have ever seen him,
while Tim Saunders's eyes looked extra small and pointed. Evidently
Bertel had said things on his own account.
Was an explosion coming at last to end twelve years of out-of-door
peace, also involving my neighbour and domestic standby, Martha Corkle
Saunders?
No; the two elderly men glanced at each other; there was nothing of the
domineering or resentful attitude that so often renders difficult the
relation of master and man--"I must be getting old and forgetful," quoth
father, stepping into the gig.
"Nae, it's mair like I'm growin' deef in the nigh ear," said Tim, and
without further argument they drove away.
I was still pondering upon the real inwardness of the matter, when the
boys came home to luncheon. Two hungry, happy boys are a tonic at any
time, and for a time I buttered bread--though alack, the real necessity
for so doing has long since passed--when, on explaining father's absence
from the meal, Ian said abruptly, "Jinks! grandpa's gone the day before!
he told Tim _Tuesday_ at 'leven, I heard him!"
But, as it chanced, it was a slip of tongue, not memory, and I blessed
Timothy Saunders for his Scotch forbearance, which Evan insists upon
calling prudence.
My own time of trial came in the early afternoon. During the more than
ten years that I have been a gardener on my own account, I have
naturally tried many experiments and have gradually come to the
conclusion that it is a mistake to grow too many species of
flowers,--better to have more of a kind and thus avoid spinkiness. The
pink family in general is one of those that has stood the test, and this
year a cousin of Evan's sent me over a quantity of Margaret carnation
seed from prize stock, together with that of some exhibition single
Dahlias.
Late in February I sowed the seed in two of the most protected hotbeds,
muffled them in mats and old carpets every night, almost turned myself
into a patent ventilator in order to give the carnations enough air
during that critical teething period of pinks, when the first grasslike
leaves emerge from the oval seed leaves and the little plants are apt to
weaken at the ground level, damp off, and disappear, thinned them out
with the greatest care, and had (day before yesterday) full five hundred
lusty little plants, ready to go out into the deeply dug cool bed and
there wax strong according to the need of pinks before summer heat gains
the upper hand.
The Dahlias had also thriven, but then they are less particular, and if
they live well will put up with more snubs than will a carnation.
Weather and Bertel being propitious, I prepared to plant out my pets,
though of course they must be sheltered of nights for another half
month. As I was about to remove one of the props that held the sash
aloft, to let in air to the Dahlias, and still constitute it a
windbreak, I heard a violent whistling in our grass road north of the
barn that divides the home acres from the upper pastures and Martha's
chicken farm. At first I thought but little of it, as many people use it
as a short cut from the back road from the Bluffs down to the village.
Soon a shout came from the same direction, and going toward the wall, I
saw Mr. Vandeveer struggling along, his great St. Bernard Jupiter, prize
winner in a recent show and but lately released from winter confinement,
bounding around and over him to such an extent that the spruce New
Yorker, who had the reputation of always being on dress parade from the
moment that he left bed until he returned to it in hand-embroidered pink
silk pajamas, was not only covered with abundant April mud, but could
hardly keep his footing.
At the moment I spied the pair, a great brindled cat, who sometimes
ventures on the place, in spite of all the attentions paid her by the
beagles, and who had been watching sparrows in the barnyard, sprang to
the wall. Zip! There was a rush, a snarl, a hiss, and a smash! Dog and
what had been cat crashed through the sash of my Dahlia frame, and in
the rebound ploughed into the soft earth that held the carnations.
The next minute Mr. Vandeveer absolutely leaped over the wall, and
seeing the dog, apparently in the midst of the broken glass, turned
almost apoplectic, shouting, "Ah, his legs will be cut; he'll be ruined,
and Julie will never forgive me! He's her best dog and cost $3000 spot
cash! Get him out, somebody, why don't you? What business have people
to put such dangerous skylights near a public road?"
Meanwhile, as wrath arose in my throat and formed ugly words, Jupiter, a
great friend of ours, who has had more comfortable meals in our kitchen
during the winter than the careless kennel men would have wished to be
known, sprang toward me with well-meant, if rough, caresses,--evidently
the few scratches he had amounted to nothing. I forgave him the cat
cheerfully, but my poor carnations! They do not belong to the grovelling
tribe of herbs that bend and refuse to break like portulaca, chickweed,
and pusley the accursed. Fortunately, just then, a scene of the past
year, which had come to me by report, floated across my vision. Our
young hounds, Bob and Pete, in the heat of undisciplined rat-catching
(for these dogs when young and unbroken will chase anything that runs),
completely undermined the Vandeveers' mushroom bed, the door of the pit
having been left open!
When Mr. Vandeveer recovered himself, he began profuse apologies. Would
"send the glazier down immediately"--"so sorry to spoil such lovely
young onions and spinach!"
"What! not early vegetables, but flowers?" Oh, then he should not feel
so badly. Really, he had quite forgotten himself, but the truth was
Julie thought more of her dogs and horses than even of himself, he
sometimes thought,--almost, but not quite; "ha! ha! really, don't you
know!" While, judging by the comparative behaviour of dog and man, the
balance was decidedly in favour of Jupiter. But you see I never like men
who dress like ladies, I had lost my young plants, and I love dogs from
mongrel all up the ladder (lap dogs excepted), so I may be prejudiced.
After Bertel had carefully removed the splintered glass from the earth,
so that I could take account of my damaged stock, about half seemed to
be redeemable; but even those poor seedlings looked like soldiers after
battle, a limb gone here and an eye missing there.
At supper father, Evan, and I were silent and ceremoniously polite,
neither referring to the day's disasters, and I could see that the boys
were regarding us with open-eyed wonder. When the meal was almost
finished, the bell of the front door rang and Effie returned, bearing a
large, ornamental basket, almost of the proportions of a hamper, with a
card fastened conspicuously to the handle, upon which was printed "With
apologies from Jupiter!" Inside was a daintily arranged assortment of
hothouse vegetables,--cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant eggs,
artichokes,--with a separate basket in one corner brimming with
strawberries, and in the other a pink tissue-paper parcel, tied with
ribbon, containing mushrooms, proving that, after all, fussy Mr.
Vandeveer has the saving grace of humour.
My righteous garden-indignation dwindled; laughter caught me by the
throat and quenched the remainder. Evan, knowing nothing of the
concatenation, but scenting something from the card, joined
sympathetically. Glancing at father, I saw that his nose was twitching,
and in a moment his shoulders began to shake and he led the general
confession that followed. It seems that he arrived at the hospital
really the day of the consultation, but found that the patient, in need
of surgical care, had been seized with nervous panic and gone home!
After such a thoroughly vulgar day there is really nothing to do but
laugh and plan something pleasant for to-morrow, unless you prefer
crying, which, though frequently a relief to the spirit, is particularly
bad for eye wrinkles in the middle-aged.
_May-day._ I always take this as a holiday, and give myself up to any
sort of outdoor folly that comes into my head. There is nothing more
rejuvenating than to let one's self thoroughly go now and then.
Then, besides, to an American, May-day is usually a surprise in itself.
You never can tell what it will bring, for it is by no means the
amiable and guileless child of the poets, breathing perfumed south wind
and followed by young lambs through meadows knee deep in grass and
flowers.
In the course of fifteen years I have seen four May-days when there was
enough grass to blow in the wind and frost had wholly left for the
season; to balance this there have been two brief snow squalls, three
deluges that washed even big beans out of ground, and a scorching
drought that reduced the brooks, unsheltered by leafage, to August
shallowness. But to-day has been entirely lovable and full of the
promise that after all makes May the garden month of the year, the time
of perfect faith, hope, and charity when we may believe all things!
This morning I took a stroll in the woods, partly to please the dogs,
for though they always run free, they smile and wag furiously when they
see the symptoms that tell that I am going beyond the garden. What a
difference there is between the north and south side of things! On the
south slope the hepaticas have gone and the columbines show a trace of
red blood, while on the north, one is in perfection and the other only
as yet making leaves. This is a point to be remembered in the garden, by
which the season of blooming can be lengthened for almost all plants
that do not demand full, unalloyed sun, like the rose and pink families.
Every year I am more and more surprised at the hints that can be carried
from the wild to the cultivated. For instance, the local soil in which
the native plants of a given family nourish is almost always sure to
agree better with its cultivated, and perhaps tropical, cousin than the
most elaborately and scientifically prepared compost. This is a matter
that both simplifies and guarantees better success to the woman who is
her own gardener and lives in a country sufficiently open for her to be
able to collect soil of various qualities for special purposes. Lilies
were always a very uncertain quantity with me, until the idea occurred
of filling my bed with earth from a meadow edge where _Lilium
Canadense_, year after year, mounted her chimes of gold and copper bells
on leafy standards often four feet high.
We may read and listen to cultural ways and methods, but when all is
said and done, one who has not a fat purse for experiments and failures
must live the outdoor life of her own locality to get the best results
in the garden.
Then to have a woman friend to compare notes with and prove rules by is
a comforting necessity. No living being can say positively, "I _will_ do
so and so;" or "I _know_," when coming in contact with the wise old
earth!
Lavinia Cortright has only had a garden for half a dozen summers, and
consults me as a veteran, yet I'm discovering quite as much from her
experiments as she from mine. Last winter, when seed-catalogue time came
round, and we met daily and scorched our shoes before the fire, drinking
a great deal too much tea in the excitement of making out our lists, we
resolved to form a horticulture society of only three members, of which
she elected me the recording secretary, to be called "The Garden, You,
and I."
We expect to have a variety of experiences this season, and frequent
meetings both actual and by pen, for Lavinia, in combination with Horace
and Sylvia Bradford, last year built a tiny shore cottage, three miles
up the coast, at Gray Rocks, where they are going for alternate weeks or
days as the mood seizes them, and they mean to try experiments with real
seashore gardening, while Evan proposes that we should combine pleasure
with business in a way to make frequent vacations possible and take
driving trips together to many lovely gardens both large and small, to
our mutual benefit, his eyes being open to construction and landscape
effect, and mine to the soul of the garden, as it were; for he is
pleased to say that a woman can grasp and translate this more easily and
fully than a man. What if the records of The Garden, You, and I should
turn into a real book, an humble shadow of "Six of Spades" of jovial
memory! Is it possible that I am about to be seized with Agamemnon
Peterkin's ambition to write a book to make the world wise? Alas, poor
Agamemnon! When he had searched the woods for an oak gall to make ink,
gone to the post-office, after hours, to buy a sheet of paper, and
caused a commotion in the neighbourhood and rumour of thieves by going
to the poultry yard with a lantern to pluck a fresh goose quill for a
pen, he found that he had nothing to say, and paused--thereby, at least,
proving his own wisdom.
I'm afraid I ramble too much to be a good recording secretary, but this
habit belongs to my very own garden books that no critical eyes can see.
That reminds me! Father says that he met Bartram Penrose in town last
week and that he seemed rather nervous and tired, and worried about
nothing, and wanted advice. After looking him over a bit, father told
him that all he needed was a long vacation from keeping train, as well
as many other kinds of time, for it seems during the six years of his
marriage he has had no real vacation but his honeymoon.
Mary Penrose's mother, my mother, and Lavinia Cortright were all school
friends together, and since Mary married Bartram and moved to Woodridge
we've exchanged many little visits, for our husbands agree, and now
that she has time she is becoming an enthusiastic gardener, after my own
heart, having last season become convinced of the ugliness of cannas and
coleus beds about a restored colonial farmhouse. Why might they not join
us on our driving trips, by way of their vacation?
Immediately I started to telephone the invitation, and then paused. I
will write instead. Mary Penrose is on the long-distance line,--toll
thirty cents in the daytime! In spring I am very stingy; thirty cents
means six papers of flower seeds, or three heliotropes. Whereas in
winter it is simply thirty cents, and it must be a very vapid
conversation indeed that is not worth so much on a dark winter day of
the quality when neither driving nor walking is pleasant, and if you get
sufficiently close to the window to see to read, you develop a stiff
neck. Also, the difficulty is that thirty cents is only the beginning of
a conversation betwixt Mary Penrose and myself, for whoever begins it
usually has to pay for overtime, which provokes quarterly discussion. Is
it not strange that very generous men often have such serious objections
to the long-distance tails to their telephone bills, and insist upon
investigating them with vigour, when they pay a speculator an extra
dollar for a theatre ticket without a murmur? They must remember that
telephones, whatever may be said to the contrary, are one of the modern
aids to domesticity and preventives of gadding, while still keeping one
not only in touch with a friend but within range of the voice. Surely
there can be no woman so self-sufficient that she does not in silent
moments yearn for a spoken word with one of her kind.
When I had finished sowing my first planting of mignonette and growled
at the prospective labour entailed by thinning out the fall-sown Shirley
poppies (I have quite resolved to plant everything in the
vegetable-garden seed beds and then transplant to the flowering beds as
the easier task), Lavinia Cortright came up, note-book in hand, inviting
herself comfortably to spend the day, and thoroughly inspect the hardy
seed bed, to see what I had for exchange, as well as perfect her plan of
starting one of her own.
By noon the sun had made the south corner, where the Russian violets
grow, quite warm enough to make lunching out-of-doors possible, and
promising to protect Lavinia's rather thinly shod feet from the ground
with one of the rubber mats whereon I kneel when I transplant, she
consented to thus celebrate the coming of the season of liberty, doors
open to the air and sun, the soul to every whisper of Heart of Nature
himself, the steward of the plan and eternal messenger of God.
"Hard is the heart that loveth naught in May!" Yes, so hard that it is
no longer flesh and blood, for under the spell of renewal every grass
blade has new beauty, every trifle becomes of importance, and the humble
song sparrow a nightingale.
The stars that blazed of winter nights have fallen and turned to
dandelions in the grass; the Forsythias are decked in gold, a colour
that is carried up and down the garden borders in narcissus, dwarf
tulips, and pansies, peach blossoms giving a rosy tinge to the snow fall
of cherry bloom.
To-day there are two catbirds, Elle et Lui, and the first Johnny Wren is
inspecting the particular row of cottages that top the long screen of
honeysuckles back of the walk named by Richard _Wren Street_. Why is the
song sparrow calling "Dick, Dick!" so lustily and scratching so testily
in the leaves that have drifted under an old rose shrub? The birds' bath
and drinking basin is still empty; I pour out the libation to the day by
filling it.
The seed bed is reached at last. It has wintered fairly well, and the
lines of plants all show new growth. As I started to point out and
explain, Lavinia Cortright began to jot down name and quantity, and
then, stopping, said: "No, you must write it out as the first record for
The Garden, You, and I. I make a motion to that effect." As I was about
to protest, the postman brought some letters, one being from Mary
Penrose, to whom Mrs. Cortright stands as aunt by courtesy. I opened it,
and spreading it between us we began to read, so that afterward Lavinia
declared that her motion was passed by default.
"WOODRIDGE, _April_ 30.
"MY DEAR MRS. EVAN,
"I am going into gardening in earnest this spring, and I want you and
Aunt Lavinia to tell me things,--things that you have done yourselves
and succeeded or failed in. Especially about the failures. It is a great
mistake for garden books and papers to insist that there is no such word
in horticulture as fail, that every flower bed can be kept in full
flower six months of the year, in addition to listing things that will
bloom outdoors in winter in the Middle States, and give all floral
measurements as if seen through a telephoto lens. It makes one feel the
exceptional fool. It's discouraging and not stimulating in the least.
Doesn't even nature meet with disaster once in a while as if by way of
encouragement to us? And doesn't nature's garden have on and off
seasons? So why shouldn't ours?
"There is a quantity of _Garden Goozle_ going about nowadays that is as
unbelievable, and quite as bad for the constitution and pocket, as the
guarantees of patent medicines. No, _Garden Goozle_ is not my word, you
must understand; it was invented by a clever professor of agriculture,
whom Bart met not long ago, and we loved the word so much that we have
adopted it. The mental quality of _Garden Goozle_ seems to be compounded
of summer squash and milkweed milk, and it would be quite harmless were
it not for the strong catbriers grafted in the mass for impaling the
purses of the trusting.
"Ah, if we only lived a little nearer together, near enough to talk over
the garden fence! It seems cruel to ask you to write answers to all my
questions, but after listing the hardy plants I want for putting the
garden on a consistent old-time footing, I find the amount runs quite to
the impossible three figures, aside from everything else we need, so
I've decided on beginning with a seed bed, and I want to know before we
locate the new asparagus bed how much ground I shall need for a seed
bed, what and how to plant, and everything else!
"I like all the hardy things you have, especially those that are mice,
lice, and water proof! If you will send me ever so rough a list, I
shall be grateful. Would I better begin at once or wait until July or
August, as some of the catalogues suggest?
"Bart has just come in and evidently has something on his mind of which
he wishes to relieve himself via speech.
"Your little sister of the garden,
"MARY P."
"She must join The Garden, You, and I," said Lavinia Cortright, almost
before I had finished the letter. "She will be entertainer in chief, for
she never fails to be amusing!"
"I thought there were to be but three members," I protested, thinking of
the possible complications of a three-cornered correspondence.
"Ah, well," Lavinia Cortright replied quickly, "make the Garden an
_Honorary_ member; it is usual so to rank people of importance from whom
much is expected, and then we shall still be but three--with privilege
of adding your husband as councillor and mine as librarian and custodian
of deeds!"
So I have promised to write to Mary Penrose this evening.
III
CONCERNING HARDY PLANTS
THE SEED BED FOR HARDY FLOWERS
When the Cortrights first came to Oaklands, expecting to remain here but
a few months each summer, their garden consisted of some borders of
old-fashioned, hardy flowers, back of the house. These bounded a
straight walk that, beginning at the porch, went through an arched grape
arbour, divided the vegetable garden, and finally ended under a tree in
the orchard at the barrier made by a high-backed green wooden seat, that
looked as if it might have been a pew taken from some primitive church
on its rebuilding.
There were, at intervals, along this walk, some bushes of lilacs,
bridal-wreath spirea, flowering almond, snowball, syringa, and scarlet
flowering quince; for roses, Mme. Plantier, the half double Boursault,
and some great clumps of the little cinnamon rose and Harrison's yellow
brier, whose flat opening flowers are things of a day, these two
varieties having the habit of travelling all over a garden by means of
their root suckers. Here and there were groups of tiger and lemon
lilies growing out of the ragged turf, bunches of scarlet bee balm, or
Oswego tea, as it is locally called, while plantain lilies, with deeply
ribbed heart-shaped leaves, catnip, southernwood, and mats of grass
pinks. Single hollyhocks of a few colours followed the fence line; tall
phlox of two colours, white and a dreary dull purple, rambled into the
grass and was scattered through the orchard, in company with New England
asters and various golden rods that had crept up from the waste
pasture-land below; and a straggling line of button chrysanthemums,
yellow, white, maroon, and a sort of medicinal rhubarb-pink, had backed
up against the woodhouse as if seeking shelter. Lilies-of-the-valley
planted in the shade and consequently anæmic and scant of bells, blended
with the blue periwinkle until their mingled foliage made a great shield
of deep, cool green that glistened against its setting of faded,
untrimmed grass.
This garden, such as it was, could be truly called hardy, insomuch as
all the care it had received for several years was an annual cutting of
the longest grass. The fittest had survived, and, among herbaceous
things, whatsoever came of seed, self-sown, had reverted nearly to the
original type, as in the case of hollyhocks, phlox, and a few common
annuals. The long grass, topped by the leaves that had drifted in and
been left undisturbed, made a better winter blanket than many people
furnish to their hardy plants,--the word _hardy_ as applied to the
infinite variety of modern herbaceous plants as produced by selection
and hybridization not being perfectly understood.
While a wise selection of flowering shrubs and truly hardy roses will,
if properly planted, pruned, and fertilized, live for many years,
certain varieties even outlasting more than one human generation, the
modern hardy perennial and biennial of many species and sumptuous
effects must be watched and treated with almost as much attention as the
so-called bedding-plants demand in order to bring about the best
results.
The common idea, fostered by inexperience, and also, I'm sorry to say,
by what Mary Penrose dubs _Garden Goozle_, that a hardy garden once
planted is a thing accomplished for life, is an error tending to bitter
disappointment. If we would have a satisfactory garden of any sort, we
must in our turn follow Nature, who never rests in her processes, never
even sleeping without a purpose. But if fairly understood, looked
squarely in the face, and treated intelligently, the hardy garden,
supplemented here and there with annual flowers, is more than worth
while and a perpetual source of joy. If money is not an object to the
planter, she may begin by buying plants to stock her beds, always
remembering that if these thrive, they must be thinned out or the clumps
subdivided every few years, as in the case of hybrid phloxes,
chrysanthemums, etc., or else dug up bodily and reset; for if this is
not done, smaller flowers with poorer colours will be the result.
The foxglove, one of the easily raised and very hardy plants, of
majestic mien and great landscape value, will go on growing in one
location for many years; but if you watch closely, you will find that it
is rarely the original plant that has survived, but a seedling from it
that has sprung up unobserved under the sheltering leaves of its parent.
The old plant grows thick at the juncture of root stock and leaf, the
action of the frost furrows and splits it, water or slugs gain an
entrance, and it disappears, the younger growth taking its place.
Especially true is this also of hollyhocks. The larkspurs have different
roots and more underground vigour, and all tap-rooted herbs hold their
own well, the difficulty being to curb their spreading and undermining
their border companions.
[Illustration: ENGLISH LARKSPUR SEVEN FEET HIGH.]
It is conditions like these that keep the gardener of hardy things ever
on the alert. Beds for annuals or florists' plants are thoroughly dug
and graded each spring, so that the weeds that must be combated are
of new and comparatively shallow growth. The hardy bed, on the contrary,
in certain places must be stirred with a fork only and that with the
greatest care, for, if well-planned, plants of low growth will carpet
the ground between tall standing things, so that in many spots the
fingers, with a small weeding hoe only, are admissible. Thus a blade of
grass here, some chickweed there, the seed ball of a composite dropping
in its aerial flight, and lo! presently weedlings and seedlings are
wrestling together, and you hesitate to deal roughly with one for fear
of injuring the constitution of the other. To go to the other extreme
and keep the hardy garden or border as spick and span clean as a row of
onions or carrots in the vegetable garden, is to do away with the
informality and a certain gracious blending of form and colour that is
one of its greatest charms.
Thus it comes about, with the most successful of hardy mixed borders,
that, at the end of the third season, things will become a little
confused and the relations between certain border-brothers slightly
strained; the central flowers of the clumps of phloxes, etc., grow
small, because the newer growth of the outside circle saps their
vitality.
Personally, I believe in drastic measures and every third or fourth
year, in late September, or else April, according to season and other
contingencies, I have all the plants carefully removed from the beds and
ranged in rows of a kind upon the broad central walk. Then, after the
bed is thoroughly worked, manured, and graded, the plants are divided
and reset, the leavings often serving as a sort of horticultural wampum,
the medium of exchange among neighbours with gardens, or else going as a
freewill offering to found a garden for one of the "plotters" who needs
encouragement.
The limitations of the soil of my garden and surroundings serve as the
basis of an experience that, however, I have found carried out
practically in the same way in the larger gardens of the Bluffs and in
many other places that Evan and I have visited. So that any one thinking
that a hardy garden, at least of herbaceous plants, is a thing that,
once established, will, if not molested, go on forever, after the manner
of the fern banks of the woods or the wild flowers of marsh and meadow,
will be grievously disappointed.
Of course, where hardy plants are massed, as in nurseries, horticultural
gardens, or the large estates, each in a bed or plot of its kind, this
resetting is far simpler, as each variety can receive the culture best
suited to it, and there is no mixing of species.
Another common error in regard to the hardy garden, aided and abetted
by _Garden Goozle_, is that it is easy or even practicable to have every
bed in a blooming and decorative condition during the whole season. It
is perfectly possible always to have colour and fragrance in some part
of the garden during the entire season, after the manner of the natural
sequence of bloom that passes over the land, each bed in bloom some of
the time, but not every bed all of the time. Artifice and not nature
alone can produce this, and artifice is too costly a thing for the woman
who is her own gardener, even if otherwise desirable. For it should
appeal to every one having a grain of garden sense that, if the plants
of May and June are to grow and bloom abundantly, those that come to
perfection in July and August, if planted in their immediate vicinity,
must be overshadowed and dwarfed. The best that can be done is to leave
little gaps or lines between the hardy plants, so that gladioli, or some
of the quick-growing and really worthy annuals, can be introduced to
lend colour to what becomes too severely of the past.
There is one hardy garden, not far from Boston, one of those where the
landscape architect lingers to study the possibilities of the formal
side of his art in skilful adjustment of pillar, urn, pergola, and
basin,--this garden is never out of flower. At many seasons Evan and I
had visited it, early and late, only to find it one unbroken sheet of
bloom. How was it possible, we queried? Comes a day when the complex
secret of the apparent simple abundance was revealed. It was as the
foxgloves, that flanked a long alley, were decidedly waning when, quite
early one morning, we chanced to behold a small regiment of men remove
the plants, root and branch, and swiftly substitute for them immense
pot-grown plants of the tall flower snapdragon (_Antirrhinum_),
perfectly symmetrical in shape, with buds well open and showing colour.
These would continue in bloom quite through August and into September.
So rapidly was the change made that, in a couple of hours at most, all
traces were obliterated, and the casual passer-by would have been
unaware that the plants had not grown on the spot. This sort of thing is
a permissible luxury to those who can afford and desire an exhibition
garden, but it is not watching the garden growing and quivering and
responding to all its vicissitudes and escapes as does the humble owner.
Hardy gardening of this kind is both more difficult and costly, even if
more satisfactory, than filling a bed with a rotation of florists'
flowers, after the custom as seen in the parks and about club-houses: to
wit, first tulips, then pansies and daisies, next foliage plants or
geraniums, and finally, when frost threatens, potted plants of hardy
chrysanthemums are brought into play.
No, The Garden, You, and I know that hardy plants, native and
acclimated, may be had in bloom from hepatica time until ice crowns the
last button chrysanthemum and chance pansy, but to have every bed in
continuous bloom all the season is not for us, any more than it is to be
expected that every individual plant in a row should survive the frost
upheavals and thaws of winter.
If a garden is so small that half a dozen each of the ten or twelve
best-known species of hardy herbs will suffice, they may be bought of
one of the many reliable dealers who now offer such things; but if the
place is large and rambling, affording nooks for hardy plants of many
kinds and in large quantities, then a permanent seed bed is a positive
necessity.
This advice is especially for those who are now so rapidly taking up old
farmsteads, bringing light again to the eyes of the window-panes that
have looked out on the world of nature so long that they were growing
dim from human neglect. In these places, where land is reckoned by the
acre, not by the foot, there is no excuse for the lack of seed beds for
both hardy and annual flowers (though these latter belong to another
record), in addition to space for cuttings of shrubs, hardy roses, and
other woody things that may be thus rooted.
If there is a bit of land that has been used for a vegetable garden and
is not wholly worn out, so much the better. The best seed bed I have
ever seen belongs to Jane Crandon at the Jenks-Smith place on the
Bluffs. It was an old asparagus bed belonging to the farm, thoroughly
well drained and fertilized, but the original crop had grown thin and
spindling from being neglected and allowed to drop its seed.
In the birth of this bed the wind and sun, as in all happy gardens, had
been duly consulted, and the wind promised to keep well behind a thick
wall of hemlocks that bounded it on the north and east whenever he was
in a cruel mood. The sun, casting his rays about to get the points of
compass, promised that he would fix his eye upon the bed as soon as he
had bathed his face in mist on rising and turned the corner of the
house, and then, after watching it until past noon, turn his back, so no
wonder that the bed throve.
Any well-located bit of fairly good ground can be made into a hardy seed
bed, provided only that it is not where frozen water covers it in
winter, or in the way of the wind, coming through a cut or sweeping
over the brow of a hill, for flowers are like birds in this
respect,--they can endure cold and many other hardships, but they quail
before the blight of wind.
For all gardens of ordinary size a bit of ground ten feet by thirty feet
will be sufficient. If the earth is heavy loam and inclined to cake or
mould, add a little sifted sand and a thin sprinkling of either nitrate
of soda or one of the "complete" commercial manures. Barn-yard manure,
unless very well rotted and thoroughly worked under, is apt to develop
fungi destructive to seedlings. This will be sufficient preparation if
the soil is in average condition; but if the earth is old and worn out,
it must be either sub-soiled or dug and enriched with barnyard (not
stable) manure to the depth of a foot, or more if yellow loam is not met
below that depth.
If the bed is on a slight slope, so much the better. Dig a shallow
trench of six or eight inches around it to carry off the wash. An abrupt
hillside is a poor place for such a bed, as the finer seeds will
inevitably be washed out in the heavy rains of early summer. If the
surface soil is lumpy or full of small stones that escape fine raking,
it must be shovelled through a sand-screen, as it is impossible for the
most ambitious seed to grow if its first attempt is met by the pressure
of what would be the equivalent of a hundred-ton boulder to a man.
It is to details such as these that success or failure in seed raising
is due, and when people say, "I prefer to buy plants; I am very unlucky
with seeds," I smile to myself, and the picture of something I once
observed done by one of the so-called gardeners of my early married days
flits before me.
The man scraped a groove half an inch deep in hard-baked soil, with a
pointed stick, scattered therein the dustlike seeds of the dwarf blue
lobelia as thickly as if he had been sprinkling sugar on some very sour
article, then proceeded to trample them into the earth with all the
force of very heavy feet. Of course the seeds thus treated found
themselves sealed in a cement vault, somewhat after the manner of
treating victims of the Inquisition, the trickle of moisture that could
possibly reach them from a careless watering only serving to prolong
their death from suffocation.
The woman gardener, I believe, is never so stupid as this; rather is she
tempted to kill by kindness in overfertilizing and overwatering, but too
lavish of seed in the sowing she certainly is, and I speak from the
conviction born of my own experience.
When the earth is all ready for the planting, and the sweet, moist
odour rises when you open the seed papers with fingers almost trembling
with eagerness, it seems second nature to be lavish. If a few seeds will
produce a few plants, why not the more the merrier? If they come up too
thick, they can be thinned out, you argue, and thick sowing is being on
the safe side. But is it? Quite the contrary. When the seedlings appear,
you delay, waiting for them to gain a good start before jarring their
roots by thinning. All of a sudden they make such strides that when you
begin, you are appalled by the task, and after a while cease pulling the
individual plants, but recklessly attack whole "chunks" at once, or else
give up in a despair that results in a row of anæmic, drawn-out
starvelings that are certainly not to be called a success. After having
tried and duly weighed the labour connected with both methods, I find it
best to sow thinly and to rely on filling gaps by taking a plant here
and there from a crowded spot. For this reason, as well as that of
uniformity also, it is always better to sow seeds of hardy or annual
flowers in a seed bed, and then remove, when half a dozen leaves appear,
to the permanent position in the ornamental part of the garden.
With annuals, of course, there are some exceptions to this rule,--in the
case of sweet peas, nasturtiums, mignonette, portulaca, poppies, and
the like, where great quantities are massed.
When you have prepared a hardy seed bed of the dimensions of ten by
thirty feet, which will allow of thirty rows, ten feet long and a foot
apart (though you must double the thirty feet if you intend to cultivate
between the rows with any sort of weeding machine, and if you have room
there should be two feet or even three between the rows), draw a garden
line taut across the narrow way of the plot at the top, snap it, and you
will have the drill for your first planting, which you may deepen if the
seeds be large.
Before beginning, make a list of your seeds, with the heights marked
against each, and put the tallest at the top of the bed.
"Why bother with this, when they are to be transplanted as soon as they
are fist up?" I hear Mary Penrose exclaim quickly, her head tipped to
one side like an inquisitive bird.
Because this seed bed, if well planned, will serve the double purpose of
being also the "house supply bed." If, when the transplanting is done,
the seedlings are taken at regular intervals, instead of all from one
spot, those that remain, if not needed as emergency fillers, will bloom
as they stand and be the flowers to be utilized by cutting for house
decoration, without depriving the garden beds of too much of their
colour. At the commercial florists, and in many of the large private
gardens, rows upon rows of flowers are grown on the vegetable-garden
plan, solely for gathering for the house, and while those with limited
labour and room cannot do this extensively, they can gain the same end
by an intelligent use of their seed beds.
Many men (and more especially many women), many minds, but however much
tastes may differ I think that a list of thirty species of herbaceous
perennials should be enough to satisfy the ambition of an amateur, at
least in the climate of the middle and eastern United States. I have
tried many more, and I could be satisfied with a few less. Of course by
buying the seeds in separate colours, as in the single case of pansies,
one may use the entire bed for a single species, but the calculation of
size is based upon either a ten-foot row of a mixture of one species, or
else that amount of ground subdivided among several colours.
Of the seeds for the hardy beds themselves, the enticing catalogues
offer a bewildering array. The maker of the new garden would try them
all, and thereby often brings on a bit of horticultural indigestion in
which gardener and garden suffer equally, and the resulting plants
frequently perish from pernicious anæmia. Of the number of plants
needed, each gardener must be the judge; also, in spite of many warnings
and directions, each one must finally work on the lines of personally
won experience. What is acceptable to the soil and protected by certain
shelter in my garden on one side of hill crest or road may not flourish
in a different soil and exposure only a mile away. One thing is very
certain, however,--it is time wasted to plant a hardy garden of
herbaceous plants in shallow soil.
In starting the hardy seed bed it is always safe to plant columbines,
Canterbury bells, coreopsis, larkspur, pinks in variety, foxgloves,
hollyhocks, gaillardia, the cheerful evergreen candy-tuft, bee balm and
its cousin wild bergamot, forget-me-nots, evening primroses, and the
day-flowering sundrops, Iceland and Oriental poppies, hybrid phlox, the
primrose and cowslips of both English fields and gardens, that are quite
hardy here (at least in the coastwise New England and Middle states),
double feverfew, lupins, honesty, with its profusion of lilac and white
bloom and seed vessels that glisten like mother-of-pearl, the tall
snapdragons, decorative alike in garden or house, fraxinella or gas
plant, with its spikes of odd white flowers, and pansies, always
pansies, for the open in spring and autumn, in rich, shady nooks all
summer, and even at midwinter a few tufts left in a sunny spot, at the
bottom of a wall by the snowdrops, will surprise you with round,
cheerful faces with the snow coverlet tucked quite under their chins.
[Illustration: FRAXINELLA,--GERMAN IRIS AND CANDY-TUFT.]
It is well to keep a tabulated list of these old-time perennials in the
_Garden Boke_, so that in the feverish haste and excitement of the
planting season a mere glance will be a reminder of height, colour, and
time of bloom. I lend you mine, not as containing anything new or
original, but simply as a suggestion, a hint of what one garden has
found good and writ on its honour list. Newer things and hybrids are now
endless, and may be tested and added, one by one, but it takes at least
three seasons of this adorably unmonotonous climate of alternate
drought, damp, open or cold winter, to prove a plant hardy and worthy a
place on the honour roll. (See p. 376.)
Before you plant, sit down by yourself with the packages spread before
you and examine the seeds at your leisure. This is the first uplifting
of the veil that you may see into the real life of a garden, a personal
knowledge of the seed that mothers the perfect plant.
It may seem a trivial matter, but it is not so; each seed, be it
seemingly but a dust grain, bears its own type and identity. Also, from
its shape, size, and the hardness or thinness of its covering, you may
learn the necessities of its planting and development, for nowhere more
than in the seed is shown the miraculous in nature and the forethought
and economy of it all.
The smaller the seed, the greater the yield to a flower, as if to guard
against chances of loss. The stately foxglove springs from a dust grain,
and fading holds aloft a seed spike of prolific invention; the lupin has
stout, podded, countable seeds that must of necessity fall to the ground
by force of weight. Also in fingering the seeds, you will know why some
are slow in germinating: these are either hard and gritty, sandlike,
like those of the English primrose, smooth as if coated with varnish,
like the pansy, violet, columbine, and many others, or enclosed in a
rigid shell like the iris-hued Japanese morning-glories and other
ipomeas. Heart of Nature is never in a hurry, for him time is not. What
matters it if a seed lies one or two years in the ground?
With us of seed beds and gardens, it is different. We wish present
visible growth, and so we must be willing to lend aid, and first aid to
such seeds is to give them a whiff of moist heat to soften what has
become more hard than desirable through man's intervention. For in wild
nature the seed is sown as soon as it ripens, and falls to the care of
the ground before the vitality of the parent plant has quite passed
from it. That is why the seed of a hardy plant, self-sown at midsummer,
grows with so much more vigour than kindred seed that has been lodged in
a packet since the previous, season.
My way of "first aiding" these seeds is to tie them loosely in a wisp of
fine cheese-cloth or muslin, leaving a length of string for a handle (as
tea is sometimes prepared for the pot by those who do not like mussy tea
leaves). Dip the bag in hot (not boiling) water, and leave it there at
least an hour, oftentimes all night. In this way the seed is softened
and germination awakened. I have left pansy seeds in soak for
twenty-four hours with good results. Of course the seed should be
planted before it dries, and rubbing it in a little earth (after the
manner of flouring currants for cake) will keep the seeds from sticking
either to the fingers or to each other.
What a contrast it all is, our economy and nature's lavishness; our
impatience, nature's calm assurance! In the garden the sower feels a
responsibility, the sweat beads stand on the brow in the sowing. With
nature undisturbed it may be the blind flower of the wild violet
perfecting its moist seed under the soil, a nod of a stalk to the wind,
a ball of fluff sailing by, or the hunger of a bird, and the sowing is
done.
IV
THEIR GARDEN VACATION
(From Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)
WOODRIDGE, _May_ 10.
"DEAR MRS. EVAN,
"For the past week I have been delving in the seed bed, and until it was
an accomplished fact, that is as far as putting on the top sheet of
finely sifted dirt over the seeds sleeping in rows and rounding the
edges after the most approved methods of bed-making, praying the while
for a speedy awakening, I had neither fingers for pen, ink, and paper,
nor the head to properly think out the answer to your May-day
invitation.
"So you have heard that we are to take a long vacation this summer, and
therefore ask us to join your driving and tramping trip in search of
garden and sylvan adventure; in short to become your fellow-strollers in
the Forest of Arden, now transported to the Berkshires.
"It was certainly a kind and gracious thought of yours to admit
outsiders into the intimacies of such a journey, and on the moment we
both cried, 'Yes, we will go!' and then appeared _but_--that little
word of three letters, and yet the condensation of whole volumes, that
is so often the stumbling-block to enthusiasm.
"The translation of this particular _but_ will take a quire of paper,
much ink, and double postage on my part, and a deal of perusive patience
on yours, so to proceed. Like much else that is hearable the report is
partly true, insomuch that your father, Dr. Russell, thinks it necessary
for Bart to take a real vacation, as he put it, 'An entire change in a
place where time is not beaten insistently at the usual
sixty-seconds-a-minute rate, day in and out,' where he shall have no
train-catching or appointments either business or social hanging over
him. At the same time he must not hibernate physically, but be where he
will feel impelled to take plenty of open-air exercise, as a matter of
course! For you see, as a lawyer, Bart breathes in a great deal of bad
air, and his tongue and pen hand get much more exercise than do his
legs, while all the spring he has 'gone back on his vittles that
reckless it would break your heart,' as Anastasia, our devoted, if
outspoken, Celtic cook puts it.
"The exact location of this desired valley of perfection, the ways and
means of reaching it, as well as what shall become of the house and
Infant during our absence, have formed a daily dialogue for the past
fortnight, or I should say triologue, for Anastasia has decided
opinions, and has turned into a brooding raven, informing us constantly
of the disasters that have overtaken various residents of the place who
have taken vacations, the head of one family having acquired typhoid in
the Catskills, a second injured his spine at the seaside by diving in
shallow water, while the third was mistaken for a moose in Canada and
shot. However, her interest is comforting from the fact that she
evidently does not wish to part with us at present.
"It must be considered that if we take a really comfortable trip of a
couple of months' duration, and Bart's chief is willing to allow him a
three months' absence, as it will be his first real vacation since we
were married six years ago, it will devour the entire sum that we have
saved for improving the farm and garden.
"You live on the place where you were born, which has developed by
degrees like yourselves, yet you probably know that rescuing, not an
abandoned farm but the abode of ancient and decayed gentility, even
though the house is oak-ribbed Colonial, and making it a tangible home
for a commuter, is not a cheap bit of work.
"As to the Infant--to take a human four-and-a-half-year-old travelling,
for the best part of a summer, is an imposition upon herself, her
parents, and the public at large. To leave her with Bart's mother, whose
forte is Scotch crossed with Pennsylvania Dutch discipline, will
probably be to find on her return that she has developed a quaking fear
of the dark; while, if she goes to my mother, bless her! who has the
beautiful and soothing Southern genius for doing the most comfortable
thing for the moment, regardless of consequences, the Infant for months
after will expect to be sung to sleep, my hand cuddled against her
cheek, until I develop laryngitis from continued vocal struggles with
'Ole Uncle Ned,' 'Down in de Cane Brake,' and 'De Possum and de Coon.'
"This mental and verbal struggle was brought to an end yesterday by _The
Man from Everywhere_. Do you remember, that was the title that we gave
Ross Blake, the engineer, two summers ago, when you and Evan visited us,
because he was continually turning up and always from some new quarter?
Just now he has been put in charge of the construction of the reservoir
that is to do away with our beloved piece of wild-flower river woods in
the valley below Three Brothers Hills.
"As usual he turned up unexpectedly with Bartram Saturday afternoon and
'made camp,' as a matter of course. A most soothing sort of person is
this same _Man from Everywhere_, and a special dispensation to any woman
whose husband's best friend he chances to be, as in my case, for a man
who is as well satisfied with crackers, cheese, and ale as with your
very best company spread, praises the daintiness of your guest chamber,
but sleeps equally sound in a hammock swung in the Infant's attic
play-room, is not to be met every day in this age of finnickiness. Then
again he has the gift of saying the right thing at difficult moments,
and meaning it too, and though a born rover, has an almost feminine
sympathy for the little dilemmas of housekeeping that are so vital to us
and yet are of no moment to the masculine mind. Yes, I do admire him
immensely, and only wish I saw an opportunity of marrying him either
into the family or the immediate neighbourhood, for though he is nearly
forty, he is neither a misanthrope nor a woman hater, but rather seems
to have set himself a difficult ideal and had limited opportunities.
Once, not long ago, I asked him why he did not marry. 'Because,' he
answered, 'I can only marry a perfectly frank woman, and the few of that
clan I have met, since there has been anything in my pocket to back my
wish, have always been married!'
"'I have noticed that too,' said Bart, whom I did not know was
listening; 'then there is nothing for us to do but find you a widow!'
"'No, that will not do, either; I want born, not acquired, frankness,
for that is only another term for expediency,' he replied with emphasis.
"So you see this _Man_ is not only somewhat difficult, but he has
observed!
"Last night after dinner, when the men drew their chairs toward the
fire,--for we still have one, though the windows are open,--and the
fragrance from the bed of double English violets, that you sent me,
mingled with the wood smoke, we all began to croon comfortably. As soon
as _he_ had settled back in the big chair, with closed eyes and finger
tips nicely matched, we propounded our conundrum of taking three from
two and having four remain.
"A brief summary of the five years we have lived here will make the
needs of the place more clear.
"The first year, settling ourselves in the house and the arrival of the
Infant completely absorbed ourselves, income, and a good bit of savings.
Repairing the home filled the second year. The outdoor time and money of
the third year was eaten up by an expensive and obliterative process
called 'grading,' a trap for newly fledged landowners. This meant taking
all the kinks and little original attitudes out of the soil and
reproving its occasional shoulder shrugs, so to speak,--Delsarte methods
applied to the earth,--and you know that Evan actually laughed at us for
doing it.
"Even in the beginning we didn't care much for this grading, but it was
in the plan that father Penrose had made for us by a landscape gardener,
renowned about Philadelphia at the time he gave us the place as a 'start
in life,' so we felt in some way mysteriously bound by it. And I may as
well assert right here that, though it is well to have a clear idea of
what you mean to do in making a garden, or ever so small pleasure
grounds, that every bit of labour, however trivial, may go toward one
end and not have to be undone, a conventional plan unsympathetically
made and blindly followed often becomes a cross between Fetish and
Juggernaut. It has taken me exactly four years of blundering to find
that you must live your garden life, find out and study its
peculiarities and necessities yourself, just as you do that of your
indoor home, if success is to be the result!
"As it was, the grading began behind the lilac bushes inside the front
fence and proceeded in fairly graceful sweeps, dividing each side of the
level bit where the old garden had been, the still remaining boxwood
bushes and outlines of walks and beds, saving this from obliteration,
and meeting again at the drying yard.
"Here the proceeding stopped abruptly, as if it had received a shock,
which it had, as at this point the family purse wholly collapsed with a
shudder, for the next requirement of the plan was the turning of a long
crest of rocky woodland, shaped like a three-humped camel, that bounded
us on the northwest, into a series of terraces, to render the assent
from a somewhat trim residential section to the pastures of the real
farming country next door less abrupt.
"In its original state this spur of woodland had undoubtedly been very
beautiful, with hemlocks making a windbreak, and all manner of shrubs,
wild herbs, and ferns filling in the leaf-mould pockets between the
boulders. Now it is bare of everything except a few old hemlocks that
sweep the pasture and the rocks, wandering cattle and excursionists from
the village, during the 'abandoned' period of the place, having caused
havoc among the shrubs and ferns.
"Various estimates have been given, but $1000 seemed to be the average
for carrying out the terrace plan even partially, as much blasting is
involved, and $1000 is exactly one-fourth of the spendable part of
Bart's yearly earnings!
"The flower garden also cries for proper raiment, for though the
original lines have been preserved and the soil put in a satisfactory
shape, in lieu of the hardy plants and old-time favourites that belong
to such a place, in emergency we were reduced, last summer, to the
quick-growing but monotonous bedding plants for fillers. Can you imagine
anything more jarring and inconsistent than cannas, castor-oil beans,
coleus, and nasturtiums in a prim setting of box?
"Then, too, last Christmas, Bart's parents sent us a dear old sundial,
with a very good fluted column for a base. The motto reads 'Never
consult me at night,' which Bart insists is an admonition for us to
keep, chickenlike, early hours! Be this as it may, in order to live up
to the dial, the beds that form its court must be consistently
clothed--for cannas, coleus, and beans, read peonies, Madonna lilies,
sweet-william, clove-pinks, and hollyhocks, which latter the seed bed I
hope will duly furnish.
"All these details, and more too, I poured into the ears of _The Man
from Everywhere_, while Bart kept rather silent, but I could tell by the
way his pipe breathed, short and quick, that he was thinking hard. One
has to be a little careful in talking over plans and wishes with Bart;
his spirit is generous beyond his pocket-power and he is a bit
sensitive. He wants to do so much for the Infant, the home, and me, that
when desire outruns the purse, he seems to feel that the limit lies
somewhere within the range of his own incapacity, and that bare,
camel-backed knoll outlining the horizon, as seen from the dining-room
window, showing the roof of the abandoned barn and hen yards, and the
difficulty of wrestling with it, is an especially tender spot.
"'If it was anything possible, I'd hump my back and do it, but it
isn't!' he jerked, knocking his pipe against the chimney-side before it
was half empty and then refilling it; 'it's either a vacation _or_ the
knoll--which shall it be?
"'I don't hanker after leaving home, but that's what a complete change
means, I suppose, though I confess I should enjoy a rest for a time from
travelling to and fro, like a weaver's shuttle! Mary hates to leave home
too; she's a regular sit-by-the-fire! Come, which shall it be? This
indecision makes the cure worse than the disease!' and Bart fingered a
penny prior to giving it the decisive flip--'head, a vacation; tail, an
attack on the knoll!' The penny spun, and then taking a queer backward
leap fell into the ashes, where it lay buried.
"'That reads like neither!' said Bart, sitting up with a start.
"'No, both!' replied _The Man from Everywhere_, opening his eyes and
gazing first at Bart and then at me with a quizzical expression.
"Instantly curiosity was piqued, for compared to this most domestic of
travelled bachelors, the Lady from Philadelphia was without either
foresight or resources.
"'You said that your riddle was to take three from two and have four. My
plan is very simple; just add three to two and you have not only four
but five! Take a vacation from business, but stay at home; do your own
garden improvements with your head and a horse and cart and a pair of
strong hands with a pick and spade to help you out, for you can't, with
impunity, turn an office man, all of a sudden, into a day labourer. As
to hewing the knoll into terraces up and down again, tear up that
confounded plan. Restore the ground on nature's lines, and you'll have a
better windbreak for your house and garden in winter than the best
engineer could construct, besides having a retreat for hot weather where
you can sit in your bones without being observed by the neighbours!'
"He spoke very slowly, letting the smoke wreaths float before his eyes,
as if in them he sought the solution he was voicing.
"'A terrace implies closely shorn turf and formal surroundings, out of
keeping with this place; besides, young people with only a general maid
and a useful man can't afford to be formal,--if they would, the game
isn't worth the strain.' (Did I not tell you that he observes?)
"'Let us take a look at the knoll to-morrow and see what has grown there
and guess at what may be coaxed to grow, and then you can spend a couple
of months during this summer and autumn searching the woods and byways
for native plants for the restoration. This reservoir building is your
opportunity; you can rob the river valley with impunity, for the
clearing will begin in October, consequently anything you take will be
in the line of a rescue. So there you are--living in the fresh air,
improving your place, and saving money at both ends.'
"'By George! It sounds well, as far as I'm concerned!' ejaculated Bart,
'but how will such a scheme give Mary a vacation from housekeeping and
the everlasting three meals a day? She seldom growls, but the last month
she too has confessed to feeling tired.'
"'I think it's a perfectly fascinating idea, but how will it give Bart
a "complete change, away from the sound of the beat of time," as the
doctor puts it?' I asked with more eagerness than I realized, for I
always dislike to be far away from home at night, and you see there has
been whooping cough in the neighbourhood and there are also green apples
to be reckoned with in season, even though the Infant has long ago
passed safely through the mysteries of the second summer.
"_The Man from Everywhere_ did not answer Bart at all, but, turning to
me with the air of a paternal sage and pointing an authoritative
forefinger, said, somewhat sarcastically, I thought, 'What greater
change can an American have than leisure in which to enjoy his own home?
For giving Time the slip, all you have to do is to stop the clocks and
follow the sun and your own inclinations. As to living out of doors, the
old open-sided hay barn on the pasture side of the knoll, that you have
not decided whether to rebuild or tear down, will make an excellent
camp. Aside from the roof, it is as open as a hawk's nest. Don't hurry
your decision; incubate the idea over Sunday, Madam Penrose, and I'll
warrant by Monday you will have hatched a really tangible plan, if not a
brood of them.'
"I looked at Bart, he nodded back approvingly, so I slipped out, first
to see that the Infant was sleeping properly, head up, and not down
under the clothes, as I had once found her, and then to walk to and fro
under the budding stars for inspiration, leaving the pair to talk the
men's talk that is so good and nourishing for a married man like Bart,
no matter how much he cares for the Infant and me.
"Jumbled up as the garden is, the spring twilight veils all deficiencies
and releases persuasive odours from every corner, while the knoll, with
its gnarled trees outlined against the sky, appealed to me as never
before, a thing desirable and to be restored and preserved even at a
cost rather than obliterated.
"'Oh, Mrs. Evan, I wish I could tell you how _The Man's_ plan touches me
and seems made for me especially this spring. I seem fairly to have a
passion for home and the bit of earth about and sky above it that is all
our own. And unlike other times when I loved to have my friends come and
visit me, and share and return the hospitality of neighbours, I want to
be alone with myself and Bart, to spend long days under the sky and
trees and have nothing come between our real selves and God, not even
the ticking and dictation of a clock! There is so much that I want to
tell my husband just now, that cannot be put in words, and that he may
only read by intuition. When I was younger and first married, I did not
feel this need so much, but now life seems to take on so much deeper a
meaning! Do you understand? Ah, yes, I know you do! But I am wandering
from the point, just as I yearn to wander from all the stringencies of
life this summer.
"Evidently seeing me, the Rural Delivery man whistled from his cart,
instead of leaving the evening mail in its wren box, as usual. I went to
the gate rather reluctantly, I was so absorbed in garden dreams, took
the letters from the carrier, and, as the men were still sitting in the
dark, carried them up to the lamp in my own sitting room, little
realizing that even at that moment I was holding the key to the 'really
tangible plan' in my hand.
* * * * *
"_The next morning._ Two of the letters I received on Saturday night
would have been of great importance if we were still planning to go away
for a vacation, instead of hoping to stay at home for it. The first,
from mother, told me that she and my brother expect to spend the summer
in taking a journey, in which Alaska is to be the turning-point. She
begs us to go with them and offers to give me her right-hand-reliable,
Jane McElroy, who cared for me when a baby, to stay here with the
Infant. The second letter was from Maria Maxwell, a distant cousin of
Bart's. She has also heard of our intended vacation,--indeed the
rapidity with which the news travels and the interest it causes are good
proofs of our stay-at-home tendencies and the general sobriety of our
six years of matrimony!
"Maria is a very bright, adaptable woman of about thirty-five, who
teaches music in the New York public schools, is alone in the world, and
manages to keep an attractive home in a mere scrap of a flat. When she
comes to visit us, we like her as well the last day of her stay as the
first, which fact speaks volumes for her character! Though forced by
circumstances to live in town, she has a deep love for the country, and
wishes, if we intend to leave the house open, to come and care for it in
our absence, even offering to cook for herself if we do not care to have
the expense of a maid, saying, 'to cook a real meal, with a real fire
instead of gas, will be a great and refreshing change for me, so you
need feel under no obligation whatever!'
"Thinking of the pity of wasting such tempting offers as these, I went
to church with my body only, my mind staying outside under a
horse-chestnut tree, and instead of listening as I should, I looked
sidewise out of the window at my double in the shade and wondered if,
after all, the stay-at-home vacation was not a wild scheme. There being
a Puritan streak in me, via my father, I sometimes question the right of
what I wish to do simply because I like to do it.
"At dinner I was so grumpy, answering in monosyllables, that sensitive
Bart looked anxious, and as if he thought I was disappointed at the
possible turn of affairs, but _The Man from Everywhere_ laughed, saying,
'Let her alone; she is not through incubating the plan, and you know the
best of setting hens merely cluck and growl when disturbed.'
"Immediately after dinner Bart and _The Man_ went for a walk up the
river valley, and I, going to the living room, seated myself by the
window, where I could watch the Infant playing on the gravel outside, it
being the afternoon out of both the general maid Anastasia and Barney
the man, between whom I suspect matrimonial intentions.
"The singing of the birds, the hum of bees in the opening lilacs, and
the garden fragrance blending with the Infant's prattle, as she babbled
to her dolls, floated through the open door and made me drowsy, and I
turned from the light toward the now empty fireplace.
"A snap! and the air seemed suddenly exhilarating! Was it an electric
spark from the telephone? No, simply the clarifying of the thoughts that
had been puzzling me.
"Maria Maxwell shall come during our vacations,--at that moment I
decided to separate the time into several periods,--she shall take
entire charge of all within doors.
"Bart and I will divide off a portion of the old hay-barn with screens,
and camp out there (unless in case of very bad thunder or one of the
cold July storms that we sometimes have). Anastasia shall serve us a
very simple hot dinner at noon in the summer kitchen, and keep a supply
of cooked food in the pantry, from which we can arrange our breakfasts
and suppers in the opposite side of the barn from our sleeping place,
and there we can have a table, chairs, and a little oil stove for making
tea and coffee.
"Maria, besides attending to domestic details, must also inspect the
mail and only show us letters when absolutely necessary, as well as to
say 'not at home,' with the impenetrable New York butler manner to every
one who calls.
"Thus Bart and I will be equally free without the rending of heart
strings--free to love and enjoy home from without, for it is really
strange when one comes to think of it, we learn of the outside world by
looking out the windows, but we so seldom have time to stand in another
view-point and look in. Thus it occurred to me, instead of taking one
long vacation, we can break the time into three or four in order to
follow the garden seasons and the work they suggest. A bit at the end of
May for both planning and locating the spring wild flowers before they
have wholly shed their petals, and so on through the season, ending in
October by the transplanting of trees and shrubs that we have marked and
in setting out the hardy roses, for which we shall have made a garden
according to the plan that Aunt Lavinia says is to be among the early
Garden, You, and I records.
"_May 15._ Maria Maxwell has joyfully agreed to come the twenty-first,
having obtained a substitute for her final week of teaching, as well as
rented her 'parlor car,' as she calls her flat, to a couple of students
who come from the South for change of air and to attend summer school at
Columbia College. It seems that many people look upon New York as a
summer watering place. Strange that a difference in climate can be
merely a matter of point of view.
"Now that we have decided to camp out at home, we are beginning to
realize the positive economy of the arrangement, for as we are not going
among people,--neither are they coming to us,--we shall need no new
clothes!
"We, a pair of natural spendthrifts, are actually turning miserly for
the garden's sake.
"Last night Bart went to the attic with a lantern and dragged from
obscurity two frightful misfit suits of the first bicycle
cuff-on-the-pants period, that were ripening in the camphor chest for
future missionary purposes, announcing that these, together with some
flannel shirts, would be his summer outfit, while this morning I went
into town and did battle at a sale of substantial, dollar shirt-waists,
and turning my back upon all the fascinations of little girls' frills
and fur-belows, bought stout gingham for aprons and overalls, into which
I shall presently pop the Infant, and thus save both stitches and
laundry work.
"Mother has sent a note expressing her pleasure in our plan and
enclosing a cheque for $50, suggesting that it should be put into a
birthday rose bed--my birthday is in two days--in miniature like the old
garden at her home on the north Virginia border. I'm sending you the
list of such roses as she remembered that were in it, but I'm sure
many, like Gloire de Dijon, would be winter killed here. Will you revise
the list for me?
"Bart has arranged to shut off the back hall and stairs, so that when we
wish, we can get to our indoor bedroom and bath at any hour without
going through the house or disturbing its routine.
"Anastasia has been heard to express doubts as to our entire sanity
confidentially to Barney, on his return from the removal of two cots
from the attic to the part of the barn enclosed by some old piazza
screens, thereby publicly declaring our intention of sleeping out in all
seasonable weather.
"_May 20._ The Blakes, next door below, are going to Europe, and have
offered us their comfortable family horse, the buggy, and a light-work
wagon, if we will feed, shoe, pet, and otherwise care for him (his name,
it seems, is Romeo). Could anything be more in keeping with both our
desires and needs?
"To-day, half as a joke, I've sent out P.P.C. cards to all our formal
friends in the county. Bart frowns, saying that they may be taken
seriously and produce like results!
"_May 22._ Maria has arrived, taken possession of the market-book,
housekeeping box, and had a satisfactory conference with Anastasia.
"Hurrah for Liberty and outdoors! _It_ begins to-morrow. You may label
it Their Garden Vacation, and admit it to the records of The Garden,
You, and I, at your own risk and peril; but as you say that if you are
to boil down the practical part of your garden-boke experiences for the
benefit of Aunt Lavinia and me and I must send you my summer doings, I
shall take this way of accomplishing it, at intervals, the only regular
task, if gossiping to you can be so called, that I shall set myself this
summer.
"A new moon to-night. Will it prove a second honeymoon, think you, or
end in a total eclipse of our venture? I'm poppy sleepy!
"_May 23._ 10 A.M. (A postal.) Starting on vacation; stopped bedroom
clock and put away watches last night, and so overslept. It seems quite
easy to get away from Time! Please tell me what annuals I can plant as
late in the season as this, while we are locating the rose bed.
"MARY PENROSE."
V
ANNUALS--WORTHY AND UNWORTHY
THE MIDSUMMER GARDEN
_Oaklands, May 25._ A garden vacation! Fifty dollars to spend for roses!
What annuals may be planted now to tide you easily over the summer?
Really, Mary Penrose, the rush of your astonishing letter completely
took away my breath, and while I was recovering it by pacing up and down
the wild walk, and trying to decide whether I should answer your
questions first, and if I did which one, or ask you others instead,
Scotch fashion, about your unique summer plans, Evan came home a train
earlier than usual, with a pair of horticultural problems for which he
needed an immediate solution.
Last evening, in the working out of these schemes, we found that we were
really travelling on lines parallel with your needs, and so in due
course you shall have Evan's prescription and design for A Simple Rose
Garden (if it isn't simple enough, you can begin with half, as the
proportions will be the same), while I now send you my plans for an
inexpensive midsummer garden, which will be useful to you only as a part
of the whole chain, but for which Evan has a separate need.
Over at East Meadow, a suburb of Bridgeton that lies toward the shore
and is therefore attractive to summer people, a friend of Evan's has put
up a dozen tasteful, but inexpensive, Colonial cottages, and Evan has
planned the grounds that surround them, about an acre being allotted to
each house, for lawn and garden of summer vegetables, though no
arbitrary boundaries separate the plots. The houses are intended for
people of refined taste and moderate means who, only being able to leave
town during the school vacation, from middle June to late September, yet
desire to have a bit of garden to tend and to have flowers about them
other than the decorative but limited piazza boxes or row of geraniums
around the porch.
The vegetable gardens consist of four squares, conveniently intersected
by paths, these squares to be edged by annuals or bulbs of rapid growth,
things that, planted in May, will begin to be interesting when the
tenants come a month later.
But here am I, on the verge of rushing into another theme, without
having expressed our disappointment that you cannot bear us company
this summer, yet I must say that the edge of regret is somewhat dulled
by my interest in the progress and result of your garden vacation, which
to us at least is a perfectly unique idea, and quite worthy of the
inventive genius of _The Man from Everywhere_.
Plainly do I see by the scope of this same letter of yours that the
records of The Garden, You, and I, instead of being a confection of
undistinguishable ingredients blended by a chef of artistic soul, will
be a home-made strawberry shortcake, for which I am to furnish the
necessary but uninspired crust, while you will supply the filling of
fragrant berries.
With the beginning of your vacation begin my questions domestic that
threaten to overbalance your questions horticultural. If the Infant
should wail at night, do you expect to stay quietly out "in camp" and
not steal on tiptoe to the house, and at least peep in at the window?
Also, you have put a match-making thought in a head swept clean of all
such clinging cobwebs since Sukey Crandon married Carthy Latham and,
turning their backs on his ranch experiment, they decided to settle near
the Bradfords at the Ridge, where presently there will be another garden
growing. If you have no one either in the family or neighbourhood likely
to attract _The Man from Everywhere_, why may we not have him? Jane
Crandon is quite unexpectedly bright, as frank as society allows, this
being one of his requirements, besides having grown very pretty since
she has virtually become daughter to Mrs. Jenks-Smith and had sufficient
material in her gowns to allow her chest to develop.
But more of this later; to return to the annuals, I understand that you
have had your hardy beds prepared and that you want something to
brighten them, as summer tenants, until early autumn, when the permanent
residents may be transplanted from the hardy seed bed.
Annuals make a text fit for a very long sermon. Verily there are many
kinds, and the topic forms easily about a preachment, for they may be
divided summarily into two classes, the worthy and the unworthy, though
the worth or lack of it in annuals, as with most of us humans, is a
matter of climate, food, and environment, rather than inherent original
sin. The truth is, nature, though eternally patient and good-natured,
will not be hurried beyond a certain point, and the life of a flower
that is born under the light cloud shelter of English skies, fed by
nourishing mist through long days that have enough sunlight to stimulate
and not scorch, has a different consummation than with us, where the
climate of extremes makes the perfection of flowers most uncertain, at
least in the months of July and August when the immature bud of one day
is the open, but often imperfect, flower of the next. As no one may
change climatic conditions, the only thing to be done is to give to this
class of flowers of the summer garden room for individual development,
all the air they need to breathe both below ground, by frequent stirring
of the soil, and above, by avoidance of over-crowding, and then select
only those varieties that are really worth while.
This qualification can best be settled by pausing and asking three
questions, when confronting the alluring portrait of an
above-the-average specimen of annual in a catalogue, for _Garden Goozle_
applies not only to the literature of the subject, but to the pictures
as well, and a measurement of, for instance, a flower stalk of Drummond
phlox, taken from a specimen pot-grown plant, raised at least partly
under glass, is sure to cause disappointment when the average border
plant is compared with it.
First--is the species of a colour and length of flowering season to be
used in jungle-like masses for summer colour? Second--has it fragrance
or decorative quality for house decoration? Thirdly, has it the
backbone to stand alone or will the plant flop and flatten shapelessly
at the first hard shower and so render an array of conspicuous stakes
necessary? Stakes, next to unsightly insecticides and malodorous
fertilizers, are the bane of gardening, but that subject is big enough
for a separate chronicle.
By ability to stand alone, I do not mean is every branchlet stiff as if
galvanized, like a balsam, for this is by no means pretty, but is the
plant so constructed that it can languish gracefully, petunia fashion,
and not fall over stark and prone like an uprooted castor bean.
Hybridization, like physical culture in the human, has evidently infused
grace in the plant races, for many things that in my youth seemed the
embodiment of stiffness, like the gladiolus, have developed suppleness,
and instead of the stiff bayonet spike of florets, this useful and
indefatigable bulb, if left to itself and not bound to a stake like a
martyr, now produces flower sprays that start out at right angles,
curve, and almost droop, with striking, orchid-like effect.
For making patches of colour, without paying special heed to the size of
flower or development of individual plants, annuals may be sown thinly
broadcast, raked in lightly, and, if the beds or borders are not too
wide for reaching, thinned out as soon as four or five leaves appear.
Portulaca, sweet alyssum, Shirley poppies, and the annual gaillardias
belong to this class, as well as single petunias of the inexpensive
varieties used to edge shrubberies, and dwarf nasturtiums.
Sweet peas, of course, are to be sown early and deep, where they are to
stand half an inch apart, like garden peas, and then thinned out so that
there is not less than an inch between (two is better, but it is usually
heartbreaking to pull up so many sturdy pealets) and reënforced by brush
or wire trellising. Otherwise I plant the really worthy, or what might
be called major annuals, in a seed bed much like that used for the hardy
plants, at intervals during the month of May, according to the earliness
of the season, and the time they are wanted to bloom. Later, I
transplant them to their summer resting places, leaving those that are
not needed, for it is difficult to calculate too closely without
scrimping, in the seed bed, to cut for house decoration, as with the
perennials. Of course if annuals are desired for very early flowering,
many species may be started in a hotbed and taken from thence to the
borders. Biennials that it is desired shall flower the first season are
best hurried in this way, yet for the gardenerless garden of a woman
this makes o'er muckle work. The occasional help of the "general useful"
is not very efficient when it comes to tending hotbeds, giving the
exact quantity of water necessary to quench the thirst of seedlings
without producing dropsy, and the consequent "damping off" which, when
it suddenly appears, seems as intangible and makes one feel as helpless
as trying to check a backing horse by helpless force of bit. A frame for
Margaret carnations, early asters, and experiments in seedling Dahlias
and chrysanthemums will be quite enough.
The woman who lives all the year in the country can so manage that her
spring bulbs and hardy borders, together with the roses, last well into
July. After this the annuals must be depended upon for ground colour,
and to supplement the phloxes, gladioli, Dahlias, and the like. By the
raising of these seeds in hotbeds they are apt to reach their high tide
of bloom during the most intense heat of August, when they quickly
mature and dry away; while, on the other hand, if they are reared in an
open-air seed bed, they are not only stronger but they last longer,
owing to more deliberate growth. Asters sown out-of-doors in May bloom
well into October, when the forced plants barely outlast August.
Of many annuals it is writ in the catalogues, "sow at intervals of two
weeks or a month for succession." This sounds very plausible, for are
not vegetables so dealt with, the green string-beans in our garden being
always sown every two weeks from early April until September first? Yes,
but to vegetables is usually given fresher and deeper soil for the crop
succession than falls to flower seeds, and in addition the seeds are of
a more rugged quality.
My garden does not take kindly to this successive sowing, and I have
gradually learned to control the flower-bearing period by difference in
location. Spring, and in our latitude May, is the time of universal seed
vitality, and seeds germinating then seem to possess the maximum of
strength; in June this is lessened, while a July-sown seed of a common
plant, such as a nasturtium or zinnia, seems to be impressed by the
lateness of the season and often flowers when but a few inches high, the
whole plant having a weazened, precocious look, akin to the progeny of
people, or higher animals, who are either born out of due season or of
elderly parents. On the other hand, the plant retarded in its growth by
a less stimulating location, when it blooms, is quite as perfect and of
equal quality with its seed-bed fellows who were transplanted at once
into full sunlight.
Take, for example, mignonette, which in the larger gardens is always
treated by successive sowings. A row sown early in April, in a sunny
spot in the open garden and thinned out, will flower profusely before
very hot weather, bloom itself out, and then leave room for some late,
flowering biennial. That sown in the regular seed bed early in May may
be transplanted (for this is the way by which large trusses of bloom may
be obtained) early in June into three locations, using it as a border
for taller plants, except in the bed of sweet odours, where it may be
set in bunches of a dozen plants, for in this bed individuality may be
allowed to blend in a universal mass of fragrance.
In order to judge accurately of the exact capabilities for shade or
sunlight of the different portions of a garden, one must live with it,
follow the shadows traced by the tree fingers on the ground the year
through, and know its moods as the expressions that pass over a familiar
face. For you must not transplant any of these annuals, that only live
to see their sun father for one brief season, into the shade of any tree
or overhanging roof, but at most in the travelling umbra of a distant
object, such as a tall spruce, the northeastern side of a hedge, or such
like.
In my garden one planting of mignonette in full sun goes in front of the
March-planted sweet peas; of the two transplantings from the seed, one
goes on the southwest side of the rose arbour and the other on the upper
or northeast side, where it blooms until it is literally turned into
green ice where it stands.
This manipulation of annuals belongs to the realm of the permanent
resident; the summer cottager must be content to either accept the
conditions of the garden as arranged by his landlord, or in a brief
visit or two made before taking possession, do his own sowing where the
plants are to stand. In this case let him choose his varieties carefully
and spare his hand in thickness of sowing, and he may have as many
flowers for his table and as happy an experience with the summer garden,
even though it is brief, as his wealthy neighbour who spends many
dollars for bedding plants and foliage effects that may be neither
smelled, gathered nor familiarized.
Among all the numerous birds that flit through the trees as visitors, or
else stay with us and nest in secluded places, how comparatively few do
we really depend upon for the aerial colour and the song that opens a
glimpse of Eden to our eager eyes and ears each year, for our eternal
solace and encouragement? There are some, like the wood thrush,
song-sparrow, oriole, robin, barn-swallow, catbird, and wren, without
which June would not be June, but an imperfect harmony lacking the
dominant note.
[Illustration: LONGFELLOW'S GARDEN.]
Down close to the earth, yes, in the earth, the same obtains. Upon how
few of all the species of annuals listed does the real success of the
summer garden rest? This is more and more apparent each year, when the
fittest are still further developed by hybridization for survival and
the indifferent species drop out of sight.
We often think erroneously of the beauty of old-time gardens. This
beauty was largely that of consistency of form with the architecture of
the dwelling and simplicity, rather than the variety, of flowers grown.
Maeterlinck brings this before us with forcible charm in his essay on
Old-Fashioned Flowers, and even now Martin Cortright is making a little
biography of the flowers of our forefathers, as a birthday surprise for
Lavinia. These flowers depended more upon individuality and association
than upon their great variety.
First among the worthy annuals come sweet peas, mignonette, nasturtiums,
and asters, each one of the four having two out of the three necessary
qualifications, and the sweet pea all of them,--fragrance and decorative
value for both garden and house. To be sure, the sweet pea, though an
annual, must be planted before May if a satisfactory, well-grown hedge
with flowers held on long stems well above the foliage is to be
expected, and in certain warm, well-drained soils it is practicable to
sow seed the autumn before. This puts the sweet pea a little out of the
running for the hirer of a summer cottage, unless he can have access to
the place early in the season, but sown thinly and once fairly rooted
and kept free from dead flowers and pods, the vines will go on yielding
quite through September, though on the coming of hot weather the flower
stems shorten.
I often plant seeds of the climbing nasturtium in the row with the sweet
peas at a distance of one seed to the fist, the planting not being done
until late May. The peas mature first, and after the best of their
season has passed they are supplanted by the nasturtiums, which cover
the dry vines and festoon the supporting brush with gorgeous colour in
early autumn, keeping in the same colour scheme with salvia, sunflowers,
gaillardias, and tritomas. This is excellent where space is of account,
and also where more sweet peas are planted for their early yield than
can be kept in good shape the whole season. Centaurea or cornflower, the
bachelor's button or ragged sailor of old gardens, is in the front rank
of the worthies. The flowers have almost the keeping qualities of
everlastings, and are of easy culture, while the sweet sultan, also of
this family, adds fragrance to its other qualities. The blue cornflower
is best sown in a long border or bed of unconventional shape, and may be
treated like a biennial, one sowing being made in September so that the
seedlings will make sturdy tufts before cold weather. These, if lightly
covered with salt hay or rough litter (not leaves), will bloom in May
and June, and if then replaced by a second sowing, flowers may be had
from September first until freezing weather, so hardy is this true, blue
_Kaiser-blumen_.
All the poppies are worthy, from the lovely Shirley, with its
butterfly-winged petals, to the Eschscholtzia, the state flower of
California.
One thing to be remembered about poppies is not to rely greatly upon
their durability and make the mistake of expecting them to fill too
conspicuous a place, or keep long in the marching line of the garden
pageant. They have a disappointing way, especially the great,
long-stemmed double varieties, of suddenly turning to impossible
party-coloured mush after a bit of damp weather that is most
discouraging. Treated as mere garden episodes and massed here and there
where a sudden disappearance will not leave a gap, they will yield a
feast of unsurpassed colour.
To me the Shirley is the only really satisfactory annual poppy, and I
sow it in autumn and cover it after the fashion of the cornflower, as
it will survive anything but an open, rainy winter, and in the resulting
display that lasts the whole month of June it rivals the roses in
everything but perfume.
Godetia is a good flower for half-shady places that it is difficult to
fill, and rings the colour change from white through pink to crimson and
carmine. Marigolds hold their own for garden colour, but not for
gathering or bringing near the nose, and zinnias meet them on the same
plane.
The morning-glory tribe of _ipomæa_ is both useful and decorative for
rapid-growing screens, but heed should be taken that the common
varieties be not allowed to scatter their seeds at random, or the next
season, before you know it, every plant in the garden will be held tight
in their insinuating grasp. Especially beautiful are the new Imperial
Japanese morning glories that are exquisitely margined and fringed, and
of the size and pattern of rare glass wine cups. Petunias, if
judiciously used, and of good colour, belong in the second grade of the
first rank. They have their uses, but the family has a morbid tendency
to run to sad, half-mourning hues, and I have put a black mark against
it as far as my own garden is concerned.
Drummond phlox deserves especial mention, for so wide a colour range
has it, and so easy is its growth (if only you give it plenty of water
and elbow room, and remember that a crowded Drummond phlox is an unhappy
plant of short life), that a very tasteful group of beds could be made
of this flower alone by a careful selection of colours, while by
constant cutting for the house the length of the blooming season is
prolonged.
The dwarf salvias, too, grow readily from seed, and balsams, if one has
room, line up finely along straight walks, the firm blossoms of the
camelia-flowered variety, with their delicate rosettes of pink, salmon,
and lavender, also serving to make novel table decorations when arranged
in many ways with leaves of the laurel, English ivy, or fern fronds.
Portulaca, though cousin to the objectionable "pusley," is most useful
where mere colour is wanted to cover the ground in beds that have held
early tulips or other spring bulbs, as well as for covering dry, sandy
spots where little else will grow. It should not be planted until really
warm weather, and therefore may be scattered between the rows of
narcissi and late tulips when their tops are cut off, and by the time
they are quite withered and done away with, the cheerful portulaca,
feeding upon the hottest sunbeams, will begin to cover the ground, a
pleasure to the eye as well as a decorative screen to the bulbs
beneath, sucking the fiercest sun rays before they penetrate.
Chief among the low-growing worthies comes the verbena, good for
bedding, good for cutting, and in some of the mammoth varieties subtly
fragrant. Verbenas may be raised to advantage in a hotbed, but if the
seed be soaked overnight in warm water, it will germinate freely out of
doors in May and be a mass of bloom from July until late October. For
beds grouped around a sundial or any other garden centre, the verbena
has no peer; its trailing habit gives it grace, the flowers are borne
erect, yet it requires no staking and it is easily controlled by
pinching or pinning to the soil with stout hair-pins.
One little fragrant flower, fraught with meaning and remembrance,
belongs to the annuals, though its family is much better known among the
half-hardy perennials that require winter protection here. This is the
gold and brown annual wall-flower, slender sister of _die gelbe violet_,
and having that same subtle violet odour in perfect degree. It cannot be
called a decorative plant, but it should have plenty of room given it in
the bed of sweet odours and be used as a border on the sunny side of
wall or fence, where, protected from the wind and absorbing every ray of
autumn sunlight, it will often give you at least a buttonhole bouquet
on Christmas morning.
[Illustration: THE SUMMER GARDEN--VERBENAS.]
The cosmos is counted by catalogues and culturists one of the most
worthy of the newer annuals, and so it is when it takes heed to its ways
and behaves its best, but otherwise it has all the terrible uncertainty
of action common to human and garden parvenues. From the very beginning
of its career it is a conspicuous person, demanding room and abundance
of food. Thinking that its failure to bloom until frost threatened was
because I had sown the seed out of doors in May, I gave it a front room
in my very best hotbed early in March, where, long before the other
occupants of the place were big enough to be transplanted, Mrs. Cosmos
and family pushed their heads against the sash and insisted upon seeing
the world. Once in the garden, they throve mightily, and early in July,
at a time when I had more flowers than I needed, the entire row
threatened to bloom. After two weeks of coquettish showing of colour
here and there, up and down the line, they concluded that midsummer sun
did not agree with any of the shades of pink, carmine, or crimson of
which their clothes were fashioned, and as for white, the memory of
recent acres of field daisies made it too common, so they changed their
minds and proceeded to grow steadily for two months. When they were
pinched in on top, they simply expanded sidewise; ordinary and
inconspicuous staking failed to restrain them, and they even pulled away
at different angles from poles of silver birch with stout rope between,
like a festive company of bacchantes eluding the embraces of the police.
A heavy wind storm in late September snapped and twisted their hollow
trunks and branches. Were they discouraged? Not a particle; they simply
rested comfortably upon whatever they had chanced to fall and grew again
from this new basis. Meanwhile the plants in front of them and on the
opposite side of the way began to feel discouraged, and a fine lot of
asters, now within the shadow, were attacked by facial paralysis and
developed their blossoms only on one side.
The middle of October, the week before the coming of Black Frost, the
garden executioner, the cosmos, now heavy with buds, settled down to
bloom. Two large jars were filled with them, after much difficulty in
the gathering, and then the axe fell. Sometimes, of course, they behave
quite differently, and those who can spare ground for a great hedge
backed by wall or fence and supported in front by pea brush deftly
insinuated betwixt and between ground and plants, so that it restrains,
but is at the same time invisible, may feast their eyes upon a spectacle
of billows of white and pink that, at a little distance, are reminiscent
of the orchards of May.
But if you, Mary Penrose, are leaning toward cosmos and reading in the
seed catalogue of their size and wonderful dawn-like tints, remember
that the best of highly hybridized things revert unexpectedly to the
commonest type, and somewhere in this family of lofty Mexicans there
must have been a totally irresponsible wayside weed. Then turn backward
toward the front of the catalogue, find the letter A, and buy, in place
of cosmos, aster seeds of every variety and colour that your pocket will
allow.
Of course the black golden-rod beetle may try to dwell among the aster
flowers, and the aphis that are nursery maids to the ants infest their
roots; you must pick off the one and dig sulphur and unslaked lime
deeply into the soil to discourage the other, but whatever labour you
spend will not be lost.
Other annuals there are, and their name is legion, that are pretty
enough, perhaps, and well adapted to special purposes, like the
decorative and curious tassel flower, cockscombs, gourds, four o'clocks,
etc., and the great tribe of "everlastings" for those people, if such
there be, who still prefer dried things for winter bouquets, when an
ivy-wreathed window filled with a succession of bulbs, ferns, or oxalis
is so easily achieved! It is too harsh, perhaps, to call these minor
annuals unworthy, but as they are unimportant and increase the labour
rather than add to the pleasure, they are really unworthy of admission
to the woman's garden where there is only time and room for the best
results.
But here I am rambling at large instead of plainly answering your
question, "What annuals can we plant as late as this (May 25) while we
are locating the rose bed?" You may plant any or all of them up to the
first of June, the success of course depending upon a long autumn and
late frosts. No, not quite all; the tall-growing sweet peas should be in
the ground not later than May 1 in this south New England latitude,
though in the northern states and Canada they are planted in June as a
matter of course. Blanche Ferry, of the brilliant pink-and-white
complexion, however, will do very nicely in the light of a labour-saving
afterthought, as, only reaching a foot and a half high, little, if any,
brush is needed.
[Illustration: ASTERS WELL MASSED.]
We found your rose list replete with charming varieties, but most of
them too delicate for positive success hereabouts. I'm sending you
presently the list for a fifty-dollar rose garden, which it seems is
much in demand, so that I've adapted my own experience to the simple
plan that Evan drew to enlighten amateur rose lovers and turn them from
coveting their wealthy neighbours' goods to spending their energy in
producing covetable roses of their own!
By the way, I send you my own particular list of Worthy Annuals to match
the hardy plants and keep heights and colours easily before you until
your own Garden Book is formulated and we can compare notes. (See page
387.)
You forgot to tell me whether you have decided to keep hens or not! I
know that the matter has been discussed every spring since you have
lived at Woodridge. If you are planning a hennery, I shall not encourage
the rosary, for the days of a commuter's wife are not long enough for
both without encountering nervous prostration on the immediate premises.
Some problems are ably solved by coöperation. As I am a devotee of the
ornamental and comfortable, Martha Saunders _née_ Corkle runs a
coöperative hen-yard in our north pasture for the benefit of the
Cortrights and ourselves to our mutual joy!
VI
THEIR FORTUNATE ESCAPE
CONCERNING EVERGREENS AND HENS
(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)
_June 5._ I have not dipped pen in ink for an entire week, which has
been one of stirring events, for not only have we wholly emerged from
indoor life, but we have had a hair-breadth escape from something that
not only threatened to mar the present summer, but to cast so heavy a
shadow over the garden that no self-respecting flowers could flourish
even under the thought of it. You cannot possibly guess with what we
were threatened, but I am running ahead of myself.
The day that we began _it_--the vacation--by stopping the clocks, we
overslept until nine o'clock. When we came downstairs, the house was in
a condition of cheerful good order unknown to that hour of the day.
There is such a temperamental difference in this mere setting things to
rights. It can be done so that every chair has a stiffly repellent look,
and the conspicuous absence of dust makes one painfully conscious that
it has not always been thus, while the fingers inadvertently stray over
one's attire, plucking a shred here and a thread there. Even flowers can
be arranged in a vase so as to look thoroughly and reproachfully
uncomfortable, and all the grace and meaning crushed out of them. But
Maria Maxwell has the touch gracious that makes even a plainly furnished
room hold out detaining hands as you go through, and the flowers on the
greeting table in the hall (yes, Lavinia Cortright taught me that little
fancy of yours during her first visit), though much the same as I had
been gathering for a week past, wore an air of novelty!
For a moment we stood at the foot of the stairs looking about and
getting our bearings, as guests in an unfamiliar place rather than
householders. It flitted through my body that I was hungry, and one of
the "must be's" of the vacation country was that we were to forage for
breakfast. At the same time Bart sauntered unconsciously toward the
mail-box under the hat-rack and then, suddenly putting his hands behind
him, turned to me with a quizzical expression, saying: "Letters are
forbidden, I know, but how about the paper? Even the 'Weekly Tribune'
would be something; you know that sheet was devised for farmers!"
"If this vacation isn't to be a punishment, but a pleasure, I think we
had both better 'have what we want when we want it'!" I replied, for at
that moment I spied the Infant out on the porch, and to hug her ladyship
was a swiftly accomplished desire. For some reason she seemed rather
astonished at this very usual performance, and putting her hands,
boy-fashion, into the pockets of her checked overalls, surveyed herself
deliberately, and then looking up at me rather reproachfully remarked,
"Tousin Maria says that now you and father are tumpany!"
"And what is company?" I asked, rather anxious to know from what new
point we were to be regarded.
"Tumpany is people that comes to stay in the pink room wif trunks, and
we play wif them and make them do somfing to amuse 'em all the time
hard, and give 'em nicer things than we have to eat, and father shaves
too much and tuts him and wears his little dinky coat to dinner. And by
and by when they've gone away Ann-stasia says, 'Glory be!' and muvver
goes to sleep. But muvver, if you are the tumpany, you can't go to sleep
when you've gone away, can you?"
A voice joined me in laughter, Maria Maxwell's, from inside the open
window of the dining room. Looking toward the sound, I saw that, though
the dining table itself had been cleared, a side table drawn close to
the window was set with places for two, a posy of poets' narcissus and
the last lilies-of-the-valley between, while a folded napkin at one
place rested on a newspaper!
"I thought we were to get our own breakfasts," I said, in a tone of very
feeble expostulation, which plainly told that, at that particular
moment, it was the last thing I wished to do.
"You are, the very minute you feel like it, and not before! You must let
yourselves down gradually, and not bolt out of the house as if you had
been evicted. If Bart went paperless and letterless this very first
morning, until he has met something that interests him more, he would
think about the lack of the news and the mail all day until they became
more than usually important!" So saying, Maria swept the stems and
litter of the flowers she had been arranging into her apron, and
annexing the Infant to one capable finger, all the other nine being
occupied, she went down the path toward the garden for fresh supplies,
leaving Ann-stasia, as the Infant calls her, to serve the coffee, a
prerogative of which she would not consent to be bereft, not even upon
the plea of lightening her labours!
"Isn't this perfect!" I exclaimed, looking toward a gap in the hills
that was framed by the debatable knoll on one side and reached by a
short cut across the old orchard and abandoned meadows of the farm
above, the lack of cultivation resulting in a wealth of field flowers.
"Entirely!" assented Bart, his spoon in the coffee cup stirring
vigorously and his head enveloped in the newspaper. But what did the
point of view matter: he was content and unhurried--what better
beginning for a vacation? In fact in those two words lies the real
vacation essence.
Meanwhile, as I munched and sipped, with luxurious irresponsibility, I
watched Maria moving to and fro between the shrubs that bounded the east
alley of the old garden. In her compressed city surroundings she had
always seemed to me a very big sort of person, with an efficiency that
was at times overpowering, whose brown eyes had a "charge bayonet" way
of fixing one, as if commanding the attention of her pupils by force of
eye had become a habit. But here, her most cherished belongings given
room to breathe in the spare room that rambles across one end of the
house, while her wardrobe has a chance to realize itself in the deep
closet, Maria in two short days had become another person.
She does not seem large, but merely well built. The black gowns and
straight white collars that she always wore, as a sort of professional
garb, have vanished before a shirtwaist with an openwork neck and half
sleeves, while the flesh exposed thereby is pink and wholesome. Hair not
secured for the wear and tear of the daily rounds of school, but allowed
to air itself, requires only a few hair-pins, and, if it is naturally
wavy, follows its own will with good effect. While as to her eyes, what
in them seemed piercing at short range melted to an engaging frankness
in the soft light under the trees. In short, if she had been any other
than Maria Maxwell, music teacher, Bart's staid cousin and the avowed
family spinster, I should have thought of her as a fine-looking woman
who only needed a magic touch of some sort to become positively
handsome. Coffee and paper finished, I became aware that Bart was gazing
at me.
"Well," I said, extending my hand, "what next?" I had speedily made up
my mind that Bart should take the initiative in our camping-out
arrangement, and I therefore did not suggest that the first thing to be
done was to set our camp itself in order.
"Come out," he said, taking my hand in the same way that the Infant does
when she wishes to lead the way to the discovery of the fairyland that
lies beyond the meadows of the farm. So we sauntered out. Once under
the sun, the same delicious thought occurred to each that, certain
prudences having been seen to, we were for the time without
responsibilities, and the fact made us laugh for the very freedom of it
and pull one another hither and thither like a couple of children.
Meanwhile the word _knoll_ had not been uttered, but our feet were at
once drawn in its direction by an irresistible force, and presently we
found ourselves standing at the lower end of the ridge and looking up
the slope!
"I wish we had a picture of it as it must have been before the land was
cleared,--it would be a great help in replanting," I said; "it needs
something dense and bold for a background to the rocks."
"The skeleton of the old barn on the other side spoils it; it ought to
come down," was Bart's rejoinder. "It seems as if everything we wish to
do hinges on some other thing."
This barn had been set back against the knoll so that from the house the
hayloft window seemed like a part of a low shed. Certainly our forbears
knew the ways of the New England wind very thoroughly, judging by the
way they huddled their houses and outbuildings in hollows or under
hillsides to avoid its stress. And when they couldn't do that, they
turned sloping, humpbacked roofs toward the northeast to shed the snow
and tempt the wind in its wild moods to play leapfrog and thus pass
over.
Such a roof as this has the house at the next farm, and judging by the
location of the old hay barn, and the lay of the road, it must have once
belonged to this adjoining property rather than to ours.
Slowly we circled the knoll, dropped into the hollow, and stood upon the
uneven floor of wide chestnut planks that was to be our camp. Other
lodgers had this barn besides ourselves and, unlike ourselves,
hereditary tenants. Swallows of steel-blue wings hung their nests in a
whispering colony against the beams, a pair of gray squirrels arched
their tails at us and chattering whisked up aloft, where they evidently
have a family in the dilapidated pigeon cote, while among some
cornstalks and other litter in the low earth cellar beneath we could
hear the rustling doubtless born of the swift little feet of mice. (Yes,
I know that it is a feminine quality lacking in me, but I have never yet
been able to conjure up any species of fear in connection with these
playful little rodents.)
The cots, table, chairs, and screens were as I had placed them several
days ago; but it was not the interior that held us but the view looking
eastward across the sunlit meadows. In fact this side of the barn had
the wide openings of an observatory. The gnarled apple trees of the
orchard still bore pink-and-white wreaths on the shady side, and the
purling of bluebirds blended with the voice of the river that ran
between the hills afar off--the same stream that further up country was
to be pent between walls and prisoned to make a reservoir. Sitting
there, we gazed upon the soft yet glowing beauty of it all, with never a
thought of pick and spade, grub axe or crowbar, to pry between the rocks
of the knoll to find the depth or quality of its soil or test the
planting possibilities.
"Let us go up to the woods and see Blake; he wrote me that he is to be
there to-day, and suggested we should both meet him and see the
treasure-trove to be found there before the spring blossoms are quite
shed," said Bart, suddenly, fumbling among the letters in his pocket;
"and by the way, he said he would come back with us. He evidently
forgets that we are not 'at home' to company!"
"But _The Man from Everywhere_ is not company. He is simply a permanent
institution and can go on dropping in as usual all summer if he likes.
Ann-stasia adores him, for did he not bring her a beautiful sandalwood
rosary of carved beads from somewhere and a pair of real tortoise-shell
combs not two months ago? And of course Maria Maxwell will not object;
why should she? he will come and go as usual, and she will hardly know
that he is in the house."
Barney harnessed the mild-faced horse of our neighbour's lending to that
most comfortable of all vehicles, a buggy with an ample box behind and a
top that can be dropped and made into a deep pocket to hold gleanings,
or raised as a shield from sun and rain. Ah! dear Mrs. Evan, is there
anything that turns a sober, settled married couple backward to the
enchanted "engaged" region like driving away through the spring lanes in
a buggy pulled by a horse who has had nature-loving owners, so that he
seems to know by intuition when to pause and when it would be most
acceptable to his passengers to have him wander from the beaten track
and browse among the tender wayside grasses that always seem so much
more tempting than any pasture grazing?
As you will infer from this, Romeo is not only of a gentle, meditative
disposition, but his harness is destitute of a check rein, overdraw, or
otherwise.
"Have you put in the trowels?" I asked, as we drove out the gate, the
reins hanging so loosely from between Bart's knees, as he lit his pipe,
that it was by mere chance that Romeo took the right turn.
"No, I never thought of them; this is merely a prospecting trip. Did you
put in the lunch?"
I was obliged to confess that I had not, but later on a box of
sandwiches was found under the seat in company with Romeo's nose-bag of
oats, this indication being that, as Barney alone knew directly of our
destination, he must have informed Anastasia, who took pity, regarding
us, as she does, as a cross between lunatics and the babes in the woods.
We chose byways, and only crossed the macadamized highroad, that haunt
of automobiles, once, and after an hour's sauntering crossed the river
and drove into the woodlots to the north of it, now the property of the
water company, who have already posted warning to trespassers. We
straightway began to trespass, seeing _The Man from Everywhere_ on
horseback coming down to meet us.
Without an apparent change of soil or altitude, the scenery at once grew
more bold and dramatic.
"What is it?" I said. "We have been driving through lanes lined by
dogwood and yet that little tree below and the scrubby bit of hillside
make a more perfect picture than any we have seen!"
[Illustration: THE PICTORIAL VALUE OF EVERGREENS.]
Bart, who had left the buggy and was walking beside it with _The Man_,
who had dismounted and led his nag, turned and looked backward, but did
not answer.
"It is the evergreens that give it the quality," said _The Man_, "even
though they are only those stiff little Noah's-ark cedars. I notice it
far and wide, wherever I go; a landscape is never monotonous so long as
there is a pine, spruce, hemlock, or bit of a cedar to bind it together.
I believe that is why I am never content for long in the land of palms!"
"I love evergreens in winter, but I've never thought much about them in
the growing leafy season; they seem unimportant then," I said.
"Unimportant or not, they are still there. Look at that wall of trees
rising across the river! Every conceivable tint of green is there,
besides shades of pink and lavender in leaf case and catkin, but what
dominates and translates the whole? The great hemlocks on the crest and
the dark pointed cedars off on the horizon where the woodland thins
toward the pastures. Whether you separate them or not, they are there.
People are only just beginning to understand the value of evergreens in
their home gardens, both as windbreaks and backgrounds. No, I don't mean
stark, isolated specimens, stiff as Christmas trees. You have a
magnificent chance to use them on that knoll of yours that you are going
to restore!"
As he was speaking I thought Bart paid very scant attention, but
following his pointing finger I at once saw what had absorbed him. On
the opposite side of the river, extending into the brush lots, was a
knoll the size and counterpart of ours, even in the way that it lay by
the compass, only this was untouched, as nature planned it, and the
model for our restoration.
"Do you clear the land as far back as this?" Bart asked of _The Man_,
eagerly.
"Yes, not for the sake of the land, but for the boulders and loose rock
on those ledges; all the rock hereabout will be little enough for our
masonry!"
"Then," said Bart, "I'm going to transplant the growth on this knoll,
root and branch, herb and shrub, moss and fern, to our own, if it takes
me until Christmas! It isn't often that a man finds an illustrated plan
with all the materials for carrying it out under his hand for merely the
taking. There are enough young hemlocks up there to windbreak our whole
garden. The thing I'm not sure about is just when it will do to begin
the transplanting. Meanwhile I'll make a list of the plants we know that
we can add to as others develop and blossom."
So he set to work on his list then and there, _The Man from Everywhere_
helping, because he can name a plant from its leaves or even the twigs.
I said that I would write to you _at once_ and ask you or Evan to tell
us about the best way to transplant all the wild things, except woody
shrubs and trees, because we know it's best to wait for those until leaf
fall. But as it turns out, I've waited six days--oh! such aggravating
days when there is so much to decide and do!
That afternoon _The Man_ rode home with us, as a matter of course, we
quite forgetting that instead of late dinner, as usual, the meal would
be tea, as the Infant and Maria Maxwell are to dine now at one! As a
shower threatened, it seemed much more natural for us to turn into the
house than the camp, and before I knew how it happened I was sitting at
the head of my own table serving soup instead of tea! I dared not look
at Maria, but as the meal was nearly ended she remarked demurely,
looking out of the west window to where the shower was passing off
slantwise, leaving a glorious sunset trail in its wake, "Wouldn't you
like to have your coffee in camp, as the rain forced you to take dinner
indoors?" by which I knew that Maria would not allow us to lose sight of
our outdoor intentions.
Bart laughed, and _The Man_, gazing around the table innocently said,
"Oh, has _it_ begun, and am I intruding and breaking up plans? Why
didn't you tell me?"
So we went out through the sweet-smelling twilight, or rather the glow
that comes before it, and as we idly sipped the coffee, lo and behold,
the old farm lay before us--a dream picture painted by the twilight! The
little window-panes, iridescent with age and bulged into odd shapes by
yielding sashes, caught the sunset hues and turned to fire opals; the
light mist rising over the green meadows where the flowers now slept
with heads bent and eyes closed lent the green and pearl tints of those
mysterious gems to which drops of rain or dew strung everywhere made
diamond settings.
"By Jove!" exclaimed Bart, "how beautiful the Opie farm looks to-night!
If a real-estate agent could only get a photograph of what we see, we
should soon have a neighbour to rescue the place!"
"You mustn't call it the Opie farm any more; it is Opal Farm from
to-night!" I cried, "and no one shall buy it unless they promise to
leave in the old windows and let the meadow and crab orchard stay as
they are, besides giving me right of way through it quite down to the
river woods!"
But to get back by this circuitous route to the threatened danger with
which I opened this letter--
The postman whistled, as he has an alluring way of doing when he brings
the evening mail, always hoping that some one will come out for a bit of
evening gossip, in which he is rarely disappointed.
We all started to our feet, but Maria, whose special duty it had become
to look over the mail, distanced us all by taking a short cut,
regardless of wet grass.
Talk branched into divers pleasant ways, and we had almost forgotten her
errand when she returned and, breaking abruptly into the conversation,
said to Bart, "Sorry to interrupt, but the postman reports that there
are three large crates of live stock down at the station, and the agent
says will you please send for them to-night, as he doesn't dare leave
them out, there are so many strangers about, and they will surely stifle
if he crowds them into the office!"
"Live stock!" exclaimed Bart, "I'm sure I've bought nothing!" Then, as
light broke in his brain,--"Maybe it's that setter pup that Truesdale
promised me as soon as it was weaned, which would be about now!"
"Would a setter pup come in three crates?" inquired _The Man_, solemnly.
"It must be live plants and not live stock!" I said, coming to Bart's
rescue, "for Aunt Lavinia Cortright wrote me last week that she was
sending me some of her prize pink Dahlias, and some gladioli bulbs!"
"Possibly these might fill three large cases!" laughed Bart, in his
turn.
"Why not see if any of those letters throw light upon the mystery, and
then I'll help 'hook up,' as I suppose Barney has gone home, and we will
bring up the crates even if they contain crocodiles!" said _The Man_,
cheerfully. Complications always have an especially cheering effect upon
him, I've often noticed.
The beams of a quarter moon were picturesque, but not a satisfactory
light by which to read letters, especially when under excitement, so
Bart brought out a carriage lantern with which we had equipped our camp,
and proceeded to sort the mail, tossing the rejected letters into my
lap.
Suddenly he paused at one, extra bulky and bearing the handwriting of
his mother, weighed it on the palm of his hand, and opened it slowly.
From it fell three of the yellow-brown papers upon which receipts for
expressage are commonly written; I picked them up while Bart read
slowly--
"MY DEAR SON,
"We were most glad to hear through daughter Mary of your eminently
sensible and frugal plan for passing your summer vacation in the
improvement of your land without the expense of travel.
"Wishing to give you some solid mark of our approval, as well as to
contribute what must be a material aid to your income, father and I send
you to-day, by express, three crates of Hens--one of White Leghorns, one
of Plymouth Rocks, and one of Brown Dorkings, a male companion
accompanying each crate, as I am told is usual. We did not select an
incubator, thinking you might have some preference in the matter, but it
will be forthcoming when your decision is made.
"Of course I know that you cannot usually spare the time for the care of
these fowls, but it will be a good outdoor vocation for Mary, amusing
and lucrative, besides being thoroughly feminine, for such poultry
raising was considered even in my younger days.
"A book, _The Complete Guide to Poultry Farming_, which I sent Mary a
year ago on her birthday, as a mere suggestion, will tell her all she
need know in the beginning, and the responsibility and occupation itself
will be a good corrective for giving too much time to the beauties of
the flower garden, which are merely pleasurable.
"I need not remind you that the different breeds should be housed
separately, but you who always had a gift for carpentry can easily
arrange this. Indeed it was only yesterday that in opening a chest of
drawers I came across a small lead saw bought for sixpence, with which
you succeeded in quite cutting through the large Wisteria vine on
Grandma Bartram's porch! I wished to punish you, but she said--'No,
Susanna, rather preserve the tool as a memento of his industry and
patience.'
"I wish that I could be near to witness your natural surprise on
receiving this token of our approval, but I must trust Mary to write us
of it.
"Your mother,
"SUSAN BARTRAM PENROSE."
With something between a groan and a laugh Bart dropped this letter into
my lap, with the others.
"So, after a successful struggle all these five years of our country
life against the fatal magnetism of _Hens_ that has run epidemic up and
down the population of commuting householders, bringing financial
prostration to some and the purely nervous article to others; after
avoiding 'The Wars of the Chickens, or Who scratched up those Early
Peas,'--events as celebrated in local history as the Revolution or War
of the Rebellion,--we are to be forced into the chicken business for the
good of Bart's health and pocket, and my mental discipline, and also
that a thrifty Pennsylvania air may be thrown about our altogether too
delightful and altruistic summer arrangements! It's t-o-o bad!" I
wailed.
Of course I know, Mrs. Evan, that I was in a temper, and that my
"in-laws" mean well, but since comfortable setting hens have gone out of
fashion, and incubators and brooders taken their place, there is no more
pleasure or sentiment about raising poultry than in manufacturing any
other article by rule. It's a business, and a very pernickety one to
boot, and it's to keep Bart away from business that we are striving.
Besides, that chicken book tells how many square feet per hen must be
allowed for the exercising yards, and how the pens for the little chicks
must be built on wheels and moved daily to fresh pasture. All the
vegetable garden and flower beds and the bit of side lawn which I want
for mother's rose garden would not be too much! But I seem to be leaving
the track again.
Bart didn't say a word, except that "At any rate we must bring the fowls
up from the station," and as the stable door was locked and the key in
Barney's pocket, Bart and _The Man_ started to walk down to the village
to look him up in some of his haunts, or failing in this to get the
express wagon from the stable.
Maria and I sat and talked for some time about _The_ _Man from
Everywhere_, the chickens, and the location of the rose beds. She is
surprisingly keen about flowers, considering that it is quite ten years
since her own home in the country was broken up, but then I think this
is the sort of knowledge that stays by one the longest of all. I hope
that I have succeeded in convincing her that _The Man_ is not company to
be bothered about, but a comfortable family institution to come and go
as he likes, to be taken easily and not too seriously.
When the moon disappeared beyond the river woods, we went to the
southwest porch, and there decided that the piece of lawn where we had
some uninteresting foliage beds one summer was the best place for the
roses and we might possibly have a trellis across the north wall for
climbers. Would you plant roses in rows or small separate beds? And how
about the soil? But perhaps the plan you are sending me will explain all
this.
It was more than an hour before the men returned, and, not having found
Barney, Bart had signed for the poultry in order to leave the express
agent free to go home, and had left word at the stable for them to send
the crates up as soon as the long wagon returned from Leighton, whither
it had gone with trunks.
After much discussion we decided that the fowls should be housed for
the night in the small yard back of the stable, where the Infant's cow
(a present from _my_ mother) spends her nights under the shed.
"Did you find any signs of a chicken house on the place when you first
came?" asked Maria, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if its location was the
only thing now to be considered.
"Yes, there was one directly in the fence line at the eastern gap where
we see the Three Brothers Hills," said Bart, "and I've always intended
to plant a flower bed of some sort there both to hide the gap in the
wall and that something may be benefited by the hen manure of decades
that must have accumulated there!"
"How would the place do for the new hen-house?" pursued Maria,
relentlessly.
"Not at all!" I snapped very decidedly: "it is directly in the path the
cool summer winds take on their way to the dining room, and you know at
best fowl houses are not bushes of lemon balm!"
"Then why not locate your bed of good-smelling things in the gap, and
sup on nectar and distilled perfume," said _The Man from Everywhere_,
soothingly.
"The very thing! and I will write Mrs. Evan at once for a list of the
plants in her 'bed of sweet odours,' as she calls it." Then presently,
as the men sat talking, Maria having gone into the house, our summer
work seemed to lie accomplished and complete before me, even as you once
saw your garden of dreams before its making,--the knoll restored to its
wildness, ending not too abruptly at the garden in some loose rock; the
bed of sweet odours filling the gap between it and the gate of the
little pasture in the rear; straight beds of hardy plants bordering the
vegetable squares; the two seed beds topping the furthest bit, then a
space of lawn with the straight walk of the old garden running through,
to the sundial amid some beds of summer flowers at the orchard end,
while the open lawn below the side porch is given up to roses!
I even crossed the fence in imagination, and took in the possibilities
of Opal Farm. If only I could have some one there to talk flowers and
other perplexities to, as you have Lavinia Cortright, without going
through the front gate!
Two hours must have passed in pleasant chat, for the hall clock, the
only one in the front part of the house we had not stopped, was chiming
eleven when wheels paused before the house and the latch of the gate
that swung both ways gave its double click!
"The hens have come!" I cried in dismay, the dream garden vanishing
before an equally imaginary chorus of clucks and crows.
Mr. Hale himself, the stable keeper, appeared at the house corner at the
same moment that Bart and _The Man_ reached it. Consternation sat upon
his features, and his voice was fairly husky as he jerked out,--"They've
gone,--clean gone,--Mr. Penrose, all three crates! and the dust is so
kicked up about that depot that you can't read out no tracks. Some
loafers must hev seen them come and laid to get in ahead o' you, as
hevin' signed the company ain't liable! What! don't you want to drive
down to the sheriff's?" and Mr. Hale's lips hung loose with dismay at
Bart's apparent apathy.
"Mr. Hale," said Bart, in mock heroic tones, "I thank you for your
sympathy, but because some troubles fall upon us unawares, it does not
follow that we should set bait for others!"
Whereupon Mr. Hale the next day remarked that he didn't know whether or
not Penrose was taking action in the matter, because you could never
judge a good lawyer's meanings by his speech.
However, if the hens escaped, so did we, and the next morning Bart
forgot his paper until afternoon, so eager was he to test the depth of
soil in the knoll.
I'm sending you a list of the wild things at hand. Will you tell me in
due course which of the ferns are best for our purpose? I've noticed
some of the larger ones turn quite shabby early in August.
VII
A SIMPLE ROSE GARDEN
(Barbara Campbell to Mary Penrose)
_Oaklands, June 5._ Yesterday my roses began to bloom. The very old bush
of thorny, half-double brier roses with petals of soft yellow crêpe, in
which the sunbeams caught and glinted, took the lead as usual. Before
night enough Jacqueminot buds showed rich colour to justify my filling
the bowl on the greeting table, fringing it with sprays of the yellow
brier buds and wands of copper beech now in its velvety perfection of
youth. This morning, the moment that I crossed my bedroom threshold, the
Jacqueminot odour wafted up. Is there anything more like the incense of
praise to the flower lover? Not less individual than the voice of
friends, or the song of familiar birds, is the perfume of flowers to
those who live with them, and among roses none impress this
characteristic more poignantly than the crimson Jacqueminot and the
silver-pink La France, equally delicious and absolutely different.
As one who has learned by long and sometimes disastrous experience, to
one who is now really plunging headlong into the sea of garden
mysteries and undercurrents for the first time, I give you warning! if
you have a real rose garden, or, merely what Lavinia Cortright calls
hers, a rosary of assorted beads, try as far as possible to have all
your seed sowing and transplanting done before the June rose season
begins, that you may give yourself up to this one flower, heart, soul,
yes, and body also! It was no haphazard symbolist that, in troubadour
days, gave Love the rose for his own flower, for to be its real self the
rose demands all and must be all in all to its possessor.
As for you, Mary Penrose, who eschewed hen-keeping as a deceitful
masquerade of labour, under the name of rural employment, ponder deeply
before you have spade put to turf in your south lawn, and invest your
birthday dollars in the list of roses that at this very moment I am
preparing to send you, with all possible allurement of description to
egg you on. For unless you have very poor luck, which the slope of your
land, depth of soil, and your own pertinacity and staying qualities
discount, many more dollars in quarters, halves, or entire will follow
the first large outlay, and I may even hear of your substituting the
perpetual breakfast prune of boarding-houses for your grapefruit in
winter, or being overcome in summer by the prevailing health-food
epidemic, in order that you may plunder the housekeeping purse
successfully.
[Illustration: MY ROSES ARE SCATTERED HERE, THERE, AND
EVERYWHERE.]
But this is the time and hour that one gardener, on a very modest scale,
may be excused if she overrates the charms of rose possessing, for it is
a June morning, both bright and overcast by turns. A wood thrush is
practising his arpegios in the little cedar copse on one side, and a
catbird is hurling every sort of vocal challenge and bedevilment from
his ancestral syringa bush on the other, and all between is a gap filled
with a vista of rose-bushes--not marshalled in a garden together, but
scattered here, there, and everywhere that a good exposure and deep
foothold could be found.
As far as the arrangement of my roses is concerned, "do as I say, not as
I do" is a most convenient motto. I have tried to formalize my roses
these ten years past, but how can I, for my yellow brier (Harrison's)
has followed its own sweet will so long that it makes almost a hedge.
The Madame Plantiers of mother's garden are stalwart shrubs, like many
other nameless bushes collected from old gardens hereabout, one
declining so persistently to be uprooted from a particularly cheerful
corner that it finds itself in the modern company of Japanese iris, and
inadvertently sheds its petals to make rose-water of the birds' bath.
An English sweetbrier of delicious leafage hobnobs with honeysuckle and
clematis on one of the wren arbours, while a great nameless bush of
exquisite blush buds, quite destitute of thorns (one of the many
cuttings sent "the Doctor's wife" in the long ago), stands an
unconscious chaperone between Marshall P. Wilder and Mrs. John Lang.
I must at once confess that it is much better to keep the roses apart in
long borders of a kind than to scatter them at random. By so doing the
plants can be easily reached from either side, more care being taken not
to overshadow the dwarf varieties by the more vigorous.
Lavinia Cortright has left the old-fashioned June roses that belonged to
her garden where they were, but is now gathering the new hybrids after
the manner of Evan's little plan. In this way, without venturing into
roses from a collector's standpoint, she can have representatives of the
best groups and a continuous supply of buds of some sort both outdoors
and for the house from the first week in June until winter.
To begin with, roses need plenty of air. This does not mean that they
flourish in a draught made by the rushing of north or east wind between
buildings or down a cut or roadway. If roses are set in a mixed border,
the tendency is inevitably to crowd or flank them by some succulent
annual that overgrows the limit we mentally set for it, thereby stopping
the circulation of air about the rose roots, and lo! the harm is done!
If you want good roses, you must be content to see a little bare, brown
earth between the bushes, only allowing a narrow outside border of
pansies, the horned bedding violets (_cornuta_), or some equally compact
and clean-growing flower. To plant anything thickly between the roses
themselves prevents stirring the soil and the necessary seasonal
mulchings, for if the ground-covering plants flourish you will dislike
to disturb them.
The first thing to secure for your rosary is sun--sun for all the
morning. If the shadow of house, barn, or of distant trees breaks the
direct afternoon rays in July and August, so much the better, but no
overhead shade at any time or season. This does not prevent your
protecting a particularly fine quantity of buds, needed for some special
occasion, with a tentlike umbrella, such as one sees fastened to the
seat in pedlers' wagons. A pair of these same umbrellas are almost a
horticultural necessity for the gardener's comfort as well, when she
sits on her rubber mat to transplant and weed.
Given your location, consideration of soil comes next, for this can be
controlled in a way in which the sun may not be, though if the ground
chosen is in the bottom of a hollow or in a place where surface water is
likely to settle in winter, you had better shift the location without
more ado. It was a remark pertinent to all such places that Dean Hole
made to the titled lady who showed him an elaborately planned rose
garden, in a hollow, and waited for his praise. She heard only the
remark that it was an admirable spot for _ferns_!
If your soil is clayey, and holds water for this reason, it can be
drained by porous tiles, sunk at intervals in the same way as meadow or
hay land would be drained, that is if the size of your garden and the
lay of the land warrants it. If, however, the roses are to be in
separate beds or long borders, the earth can be dug out to the depth of
two and a half or three feet, the good fertile portion being put on one
side and the clay or yellow loam, if any there be, removed. Then fill
the hole with cobblestones, rubbish of old plaster, etc., for a foot in
depth (never tin cans); mix the good earth thoroughly with one-third its
bulk of well-rotted cow dung, a generous sprinkling of unslaked lime and
sulphur, and replace, leaving it to settle for a few days and watering
it thoroughly, if it does not rain, before planting.
One of the advantages of planting roses by themselves is that the
stirring of the soil and giving of special fertilizers when needful may
be unhampered.
In the ordinary planting of roses by the novice, the most necessary
rules are usually the first violated. The roses are generally purchased
in pots, with a certain amount of foliage and a few buds produced by
forcing. A hole is excavated, we will suppose, in a hardened border of
hardy plants that, owing to the tangle of roots, can be at best but
superficially dug and must rely upon top dressing for its nutriment.
Owing to the difficulty of digging the hole, it is likely to be a tight
fit for the pot-bound ball of calloused roots that is to fill it. Hence,
instead of the woody roots and delicate fibres being carefully spread
out and covered, so that each one is surrounded by fresh earth, they are
jammed just as they are (or often with an additional squeeze) into a
rigid socket, and small wonder if the conjunction of the two results in
blighting and a lingering death rather than the renewal of vitality and
increase.
Evan, who has had a wide experience in watching the development of his
plans, both by professional gardeners and amateurs, says that he is
convinced more and more each day that, where transplanting of any sort
fails, it is due to carelessness in the securing of the root anchors,
rather than any fault of the dealer who supplies the plants, this of
course applying particularly to all growths having woody roots, where
breakage and wastage cannot be rapidly restored. When a rose is once
established, its persistent roots may find means of boring through soil
that in its first nonresistant state is impossible. While stiff,
impervious clay is undesirable, a soil too loose with sand, that allows
the bush to shift with the wind, instead of holding it firmly, is quite
as undesirable.
In planting all hardy or half-hardy roses,--whether they are of the type
that flower once in early summer, the hybrid perpetuals that bloom
freely in June and again at intervals during late summer and autumn, or
the hybrid teas that, if wisely selected and protected, combine the
wintering ability of their hardy parents with the monthly blooming cross
of the teas,--it is best to plant dormant field-grown plants in October,
or else as early in April as the ground is sufficiently dry and frost
free.
These field-grown roses have better roots, and though, when planted in
the spring, for the first few months the growth is apparently slower
than that of the pot-grown bushes, it is much more normal and
satisfactory, at least in the Middle and New England states of which I
have knowledge.
All roses, even the sturdy, old-fashioned damasks, Madame Plantier, and
the like, should have some covering in winter, such as stable litter of
coarse manure with the straw left in. Hybrid perpetuals I hill up well
with earth after the manner of celery banked for bleaching, the trenches
between making good water courses for snow water, while in spring cow
manure and nitrate of soda is scattered in these ruts before the soil is
restored to its level by forking.
The hybrid teas, of which La France is the best exponent, should be
hilled up and then filled in between with evergreen branches, upland
sedge grass, straw or corn stalks, and if you have the wherewithal, they
may be capped with straw.
I do not care for leaves as a covering, unless something coarse
underlies them, for in wet seasons they form a cold and discouraging
poultice to everything but the bob-tailed meadow mice, who love to bed
and burrow under them. Such tea roses as it is possible to winter in the
north should be treated in the same way, but there is something else to
be suggested about their culture in another place.
The climbing roses of arbours, if in very exposed situations, in
addition to the mulch of straw and manure, may have corn stalks stacked
against the slats, which makes a windbreak well worth the trouble. But
the more tender species of climbing roses should be grown upon pillars,
English fashion. These can be snugly strawed up after the fashion of
wine bottles, and then a conical cap of the waterproof tar paper used by
builders drawn over the whole, the manure being banked up to hold the
base firmly in place. With this device it is possible to grow the lovely
Gloire de Dijon, in the open, that festoons the eaves of English
cottages, but is our despair.
[Illustration: PILLAR FOR CORNERS OF ROSE BED.]
Not long ago we invented an inexpensive "pillar" trellis for roses and
vines which, standing seven feet high and built about a cedar
clothes-pole, the end well coated with tar before setting, is both
symmetrical and durable, not burning tender shoots, as do the metal
affairs, and costing, if the material is bought and a carpenter hired by
the day, the moderate price of two dollars and a half each, including
paint, which should be dark green.
[Illustration: ROSE GARDEN WITH OUTSIDE BORDER OF GRAVEL AND
GRASS.]
Evan has made a sketch of it for you. He finds it useful in many ways,
and in laying out a new garden these pillars, set at corners or at
intervals along the walks, serve to break the hot look of a wide expanse
and give a certain formality that draws together without being too stiff
and artificial.
For little gardens, like yours and mine, I think deep-green paint the
best colour for pergola, pillars, seats, plant tubs, and the like. White
paint is clean and cheerful, but stains easily. If one has the
surroundings and money for marble columns and garden furniture, it must
form part of a well-planned whole and not be pitched in at random, but
the imitation article, compounded of cement or whitewashed wood, belongs
in the region of stage properties or beer gardens!
The little plan I'm sending you needs a bit of ground not less than
fifty feet by seventy-five for its development, and that, I think, is
well within the limits of your southwest lawn. The pergola can be made
of rough cedar posts with the bark left on. Evan says that there are any
quantity of cedar trees in your river woods that are to be cleared for
the reservoir, and you can probably get them for a song.
The border enclosing the grass plots is four feet in width, which allows
you to reach into the centre from either side. Two rows of hybrid
perpetuals or three of hybrid tea or summer roses can be planted in
these beds, according to their size, thus allowing, at the minimum, for
one hundred hybrid perpetuals, fifty hybrid teas, fifty summer roses,
and eighteen climbers, nine on either side of the pergola, with four
additional for the corner pillars.
The irregular beds in the small lawns should not be planted in set rows,
but after the manner of shrubberies. Rugosa roses, if their colours be
well chosen, are best for the centre of these beds. They are striking
when in flower and decorative in fruit, while the handsome leaves, that
are very free from insects, I find most useful as green in arranging
other roses the foliage of which is scanty. The pink-and-white damask
roses belong here, and the dear, profuse, and graceful Madame
Plantier,--a dozen bushes of this hybrid China rose of seven leaflets
are not too many. For seventy years it has held undisputed sway among
hardy white roses and has become so much a part of old gardens that we
are inclined to place its origin too far back in the past among
historic roses, because we cannot imagine a time when it was not. This
is a rose to pick by the armful, and grown in masses it lends an air of
luxury to the simplest garden.
[Illustration: MADAME PLANTIER AT VAN CORTLAND MANOR.]
Personally, I object to the rambler tribe of roses for any but large
gardens, where in a certain sense the personality of flowers must
sometimes be lost in decorative effect. A scentless rose has no right to
intrude on the tender intimacies of the woman's garden, but pruned back
to a tall standard it may be cautiously mingled with Madame Plantier
with good effect, lending the pale lady the reflected touch of the
colour that gives life.
For the pergola a few ramblers may be used for rapid effect, while the
slower growing varieties are making wood, but sooner or later I'm sure
that they will disappear before more friendly roses, and even to-day the
old-fashioned Gem of the Prairies, Felicité Perpetual, and Baltimore
Belle seem to me worthier. Colour and profusion the rambler has, but
equally so has the torrent of coloured paper flowers that pours out of
the juggler's hat, and they are much bigger.
No, I'm apt to be emphatic (Evan calls it pertinacious), but I'm sure
the time will come when at least the crimson rambler, trained over a
gas-pipe arch, except for purely decorative purposes, will be as much
disliked by the real rose lover as the tripod with the iron pot painted
red and filled with red geraniums!
The English sweetbrier is a climbing or pillar rose, capable of being
pruned into a bush or hedge that not only gives fragrance in June but
every time the rain falls or dew condenses upon its magic leaves.
This you must have as well as some of its kin, the Penzance
hybrid-sweetbriers, either against the pergola or trained to the corner
pillars, where you will become more intimate with them.
You may be fairly sure of success in wintering well-chosen hybrid
perpetual roses and the hybrid teas. If, for any reason, certain
varieties that succeed in Lavinia Cortright's garden and ours do not
thrive with you, they must be replaced by a gradual process of
elimination. You alone may judge of this. I'm simply giving you a list
of varieties that have thriven in my garden; others may not find them
the best. Only let me advise you to begin with roses that have stood a
test of not less than half a dozen years, for it really takes that long
to know the influence of heredity in this highly specialized race. After
the rose garden has shown you all its colours, it is easy to supplement
a needed tint here or a proven newcomer there without speculating, as
it were, in garden stock in a bull market. Too much of spending money
for something that two years hence will be known no more is a financial
side of the _Garden-Goozle_ question that saddens the commuter, as well
as his wife. It is a continual proof of man's, and particularly woman's,
innocency that such pictures as horticultural pedlers show when
extolling their wares do not deter instead of encouraging purchasers. If
the fruits and flowers were believable, as depicted, still they should
be unattractive to eye and palate.
The hybrid perpetuals give their great yield in June, followed by a more
or less scattering autumn blooming. It is foolish to expect a rose
specialized and proven by the tests climatic and otherwise of Holland,
England, or France, and pronounced a perpetual bloomer, to live up to
its reputation in this country of sudden extremes: unveiled summer heat,
that forces the bud open before it has developed quality, causing
certain shades of pink and crimson to fade and flatten before the flower
is really fit for gathering. Americans in general must be content with
the half loaf, as far as garden roses are concerned, for in the cooler
parts of the country, where the development of the flower is slower and
more satisfactory, the winter lends added dangers.
Good roses--not, however, the perfect flowers of the connoisseur or
even of the cottage exhibitions of England--may be had from early June
until the first week of July, but the hybrid tea roses that brave the
latter part of that month and August are but short lived, even when
gathered in the bud. Those known as summer bedders of the Bourbon class,
chiefly scentless, of which Appoline is a well-known example, are simply
bits of decorative colour without the endearing attributes of roses, and
garden colour may be obtained with far less labour.
In July and August you may safely let your eyes wander from the rosary
to the beds of summer annuals, the gladioli, Japan lilies, and Dahlias,
and depend for fragrance on your bed of sweet odours. But as the nights
begin to lengthen, at the end of August, you may prepare for a tea-rose
festival, if you have a little forethought and a very little money.
You have, I think, a florist in your neighbourhood who raises roses for
the market. This is my method, practised for many years with comforting
success. Instead of buying pot-grown tea roses in April or May, that,
unless a good price (from twenty-five cents up) is paid for them, will
be so small that they can only be called bushes at the season's end, I
go to our florist and buy fifty of the bushes that he has forced during
the winter and being considered spent are cast out about June first, in
order to fill in the new stock.
All such roses are not discarded each season, but the process is carried
on in alternate benches and years, so that there are always some to be
obtained. These plants, big, tired-looking, and weak in the branches, I
buy for the nominal sum of ten dollars per hundred, five dollars' worth
filling a long border when set out in alternating rows. On taking these
home, I thin out the woodiest shoots, or those that interfere, and plant
deep in the border, into which nitrate of soda has been dug in the
proportion of about two ounces to a plant.
After spreading out the roots as carefully as possible, I plant firmly
and water thoroughly, but do not as yet prune off the long branches. In
ten days, having given meanwhile two waterings of liquid manure, I prune
the bushes back sharply. By this time they will have probably dropped
the greater part of their leaves, and having had a short but sufficient
nap, are ready to grow, which they proceed to do freely. I do not
encourage bloom in July, but as soon as we have dew-heavy August nights
it begins and goes on, increasing in quality until hard frost. Many of
these bushes have wintered comfortably and on being pruned to within
three inches of the ground have lasted many years.
As to the varieties so treated, that is a secondary consideration, for
under these circumstances you must take what the florist has to offer,
which will of course be those most suitable to the winter market. I have
used Perle des Jardins, Catherine Mermet, Bride and Bridesmaid, Safrano,
Souvenir d'un Ami, and Bon Silene (the rose for button-hole buds) with
equal success, though a very intelligent grower affirms that both Bride
and Bridesmaid are unsatisfactory as outdoor roses.
I do not say that the individual flowers from these bushes bear relation
to the perfect specimens of greenhouse growth in anything but fragrance,
but in this way I have roses all the autumn, "by the fistful," as
Timothy Saunders's Scotch appreciation of values puts it, though his
spouse, Martha Corkle, whose home memories are usually expanded by the
perspective of time and absence, in this case speaks truly when she says
on receiving a handful, "Yes, Mrs. Evan, they're nice and sweetish and I
thank you kindly, but, ma'am, they couldn't stand in it with those that
grows as free as corn poppies round the four-shillin'-a-week cottages
out Gloucester way, and _no_ disrespec' intended."
The working season of the rose garden begins the first of April with
the cutting out of dead wood and the shortening and shaping of last
year's growth. With hardy roses the flowers come from fresh twigs on old
growth. I never prune in the autumn, because winter always kills a bit
of the top and cutting opens the tubular stem to the weather and induces
decay. Pruning is a science in itself, to be learned by experience. This
is the formula that I once wrote on a slate and kept in my attic desk
with my first _Boke of the Garden_.
_April 1._ Uncover bushes, prune, and have the winter mulch thoroughly
dug in. Place stakes in the centre of bushes that you know from
experience will need them. Re-tie climbers that have broken away from
supports, but not too tightly; let some sprays swing and arch in their
own way.
_May._ As soon as the foliage begins to appear, spray with whale-oil
soap lotion mixed hot and let cool: strength--a bit the size of a walnut
to a gallon of water. Do this every two weeks until the rosebuds show
decided colour, then stop. This is to keep the rose Aphis at bay, the
little soft green fly that is as succulent as the sap upon which it
feeds.
If the spring is damp and mildew appears, dust with sulphur flower in a
small bellows.
_June._ The Rose Hopper or Thrip, an active little pale yellow,
transparent-winged insect that clings to the under side of the leaf,
will now come if the weather is dry; dislodged easily by shaking, it
immediately returns. _Remedy_, spraying leaves from underneath with
water and applying powdered helebore with a bellows.
If _Black Spot_, a rather recent nuisance, appears on the leaves, spray
with Bordeaux Mixture, bought of a horticultural dealer, directions
accompanying.
Meanwhile the leaf worm is sure to put in appearance. This is also
transparent and either brownish green, or yellow, seemingly according to
the leaves upon which it feeds. _Remedy_, if they won't yield to
helebore (and they seldom do unless very sickly), brush them off into a
cup. An old shaving brush is good for this purpose, as it is close set
but too soft to scrape the leaf.
_June 15._ When the roses are in bloom, stop all insecticides. There is
such a thing as the cure being worse than the disease, and a rose garden
redolent of whale-oil soap and phosphates and encrusted with helebore
and Bordeaux Mixture has a painful suggestion of a horticultural
hospital.
Now is the time for the Rose Chafer, a dull brownish beetle about half
an inch long, who times his coming up out of the ground to feast upon
the most fragrant and luscious roses. These hunt in couples and are
wholly obnoxious. Picking into a fruit jar with a little kerosene in
the bottom is the only way to kill them. In one day last season Evan
came to my rescue and filled a quart jar in two hours; they are so fat
and spunky they may be considered as the big game among garden bugs, and
their catching, if not carried to an extreme, in the light of sport.
_July._ See that all dead flowers are cut off and no petals allowed to
mould on the ground. Mulch with short grass during hot, dry weather, and
use liquid manure upon hybrid teas and teas every two weeks, immediately
after watering or a rain. Never, at any season, allow a rose to wither
on the bush!
_August._ The same, keeping on the watch for all previous insects but
the rose beetle; this will have left. Mulch hybrid perpetuals if a dry
season, and give liquid manure for the second blooming.
_September._ Stir the ground after heavy rains, and watch for tendencies
of mould.
_October._ The same.
_November._ Begin to draw the soil about roots soon after black frost,
and bank up before the ground freezes, but do not add straw, litter, or
manure in the trenches until the ground is actually frozen, which will
be from December first onward, except in the case of teas, which should
be covered gradually until the top is reached.
By this you will judge, Mary Penrose, that a rosary has its labours, as
well as pleasures, and that like all other joys it is accompanied by
difficulties. Yet you can grow good roses if you _will_, but the
difficulty is that most people _won't_. I think, by the way, that remark
belongs to Dean Hole of fragrant rose-garden memory, and of a truth he
has said all that is likely to be spoken or written about the rose on
the side of both knowledge and human fancy for many a day.
Modern roses of the hybrid-perpetual and hybrid-tea types may be bought
of several reliable dealers for twenty-five dollars per hundred, in two
conditions, either grown on their own roots or budded on Manette or
brier stock. Personally I prefer the first or natural condition, if the
constitution of the plant is sufficiently vigorous to warrant it. There
are, however, many indispensable varieties that do better for the
infusion of vigorous brier blood. A budded rose will show the junction
by a little knob where the bud was inserted; this must be planted at
least three inches below ground so that new shoots will be encouraged to
spring from _above_ the bud, as those below are merely wild, worthless
suckers, to be removed as soon as they appear.
[Illustration: A CONVENIENT ROSE BED.]
How can you tell wild suckers from the desired growth? At first by
following them back to the root until you have taken their measure, but
as soon as experience has enlightened you they will be as easily
recognized at sight as the mongrel dog by a connoisseur. Many admirable
varieties, like Jacqueminot, Anne de Diesbach, Alfred Colomb, Madame
Plantier, and all the climbers, do so well on their own roots that it is
foolish to take the risk of budded plants, the worse side of which is a
tendency to decay at the point of juncture. Tea roses, being of rapid
growth and flowering wholly upon new wood, are perfectly satisfactory
when rooted from cuttings.
Of many well-attested varieties of hybrid perpetuals, hybrid China, or
other so-called June roses, you may at the start safely select from the
following twenty.
_Pink, of various shades_
1. Anne de Diesbach. One of the most fragrant, hardy, and
altogether satisfactory of hybrid
perpetual roses. Forms a large bush,
covered with large deep carmine-pink
flowers. Should be grown on own root.
2. Paul Neyron. Rose pink, of large size, handsome
even when fully open. Fragrant and
hardy.
3. Cabbage, or Rose The Provence rose of history and old
of 100 Leaves. gardens, supposed to have been known
to Pliny. Rich pink, full, fragrant,
and hardy. Own roots.
4. Magna Charta. A fine fragrant pink rose of the
hybrid China type. Not seen as often
as it should be. Own roots.
5. Clio. A vigorous grower with flesh-coloured
and pink-shaded blossoms.
6. Oakmont. Exquisite deep rose, fragrant,
vigorous, and with a long blooming
season.
_White_
7. Marchioness of Free, full, and fragrant. Immense
Londonderry. cream-white flowers, carried on long
stems. Very beautiful.
8. Madame Plantier A medium-sized, pure white rose,
(Hybrid China). with creamy centre; flowers so
profusely as to appear to be in
clusters. Delicately fragrant, leaves
deep green and remarkably free from
blights. Perfectly hardy; forms so
large a bush in time that it should
be placed in the rose shrubbery
rather than amid smaller species.
9. Margaret Dickson. A splendid, finely formed, fragrant
white rose, with deep green foliage.
10. Coquette des Blanches. One of the very hardy white roses,
an occasional pink streak tinting the
outside petals. Cup-shaped and a
profuse bloomer.
11. Coquette des Alps. A very hardy bush, coming into bloom
rather later than the former and
lasting well. Satisfactory.
_Red and Crimson_
12. General Jacqueminot. Bright velvety crimson. The
established favourite of its
colour and class, though fashion has
in some measure pushed it aside for
newer varieties. May be grown to a
large shrub. Fragrant and hardy. Best
when in bud, as it opens rather flat.
13. Alfred Colomb. Bright crimson. Full, sweet. A
vigorous grower and entirely
satisfactory. If you can grow but one
red rose, take this.
14. Fisher Holmes. A seedling of Jacqueminot, but of
the darkest velvety crimson; fragrant,
and blooms very early.
15. Marshal P. Wilder. Also a seedling of Jacqueminot.
Vigorous and of well-set foliage.
Full, large flowers of a bright
cherry red. Very fragrant.
16. Marie Bauman. A crimson rose of delicious
fragrance and lovely shape. This does
best when budded on brier or Manette
stock, and needs petting and a diet of
liquid manure, but it will repay the
trouble.
17. Jules Margottin. A fine, old-fashioned, rich red
rose, fragrant, and while humble in
its demands, well repays liberal
feeding.
18. John Hopper. A splendid, early crimson rose,
fragrant and easily cared for.
19. Prince Camille de Rohan. The peer of dark red roses, not
large, but rich in fragrance and of
deep colour.
20. Ulrich Brunner. One of the best out-of-door roses,
hardy, carries its bright cerise
flowers well, which are of good shape
and substance; has few diseases.
_Moss Roses_
1. Blanch Moreau (Perpetual). A pure, rich white; the buds, which
are heavily mossed, borne in clusters.
2. White Bath. The most familiar white moss rose,
sometimes tinged with pink. Open
flowers are attractive as well as
buds.
3. Crested Moss. Rich pink, deeply mossed, each bud
having a fringed crest; fragrant and
full.
4. Gracilis. An exquisite moss rose of fairylike
construction, the deep pink buds being
wrapped and fringed with moss.
5. Common Moss. A hardy pink variety, good only in
the bud.
The moss roses as a whole only bloom satisfactorily in June.
_Climbers_
1.
1. English Sweetbrier. Single pink flowers of the wild-rose
type. Foliage of delicious fragrance,
perfuming the garden after rain the
season through.
_Penzance Hybrid Sweetbriers,
Having Fragrant Foliage and Flowers
of Many Beautiful Colours_
2. Amy Robsart. Pink.
3. Anne of Geierstein. Crimson.
4. Minna. White.
5. Rose Bradwardine. Deep rose.
2.
1. Climbing Jules Margottin. Rosy carmine, very fragrant
and full, satisfactory for the
pergola, but more so for a pillar,
where in winter it can be protected
from wind by branches or straw.
2. Baltimore Belle. The old-fashioned blush rose, with
clean leaves and solid flowers of good
shape. Blooms after other varieties are
over. Trustworthy and satisfactory,
though not fragrant in flower or leaf.
3. Gem of the Prairie. Red flowers of large size, but
rather flat when open. A seedling from
Queen of the Prairie, and though not
as free as its parent, it has the
desirable quality of fragrance.
4. Climbing Belle Siebrecht Fragrant, vigorous, and of
(Hybrid Tea). the same deep pink as the standard
variety. Grow on pillars.
5. Gloire de Dijon. Colour an indescribable blending of
rose, buff, and yellow, deliciously
fragrant, double to the heart of
crumpled, crêpelike petals. A tea rose
and, as an outdoor climber, tender
north of Washington, yet it can be
grown on a pillar by covering as
described on page 126.
_Hybrid Tea Roses_
1. La France. The fragrant silver-pink rose, with
full, heavy flowers,--the combination
of all a rose should be. In the open
garden the sun changes its delicate
colour quickly. Should be gathered in
the bud at evening or, better yet,
early morning. Very hardy if properly
covered, and grows to a good-sized
bush.
2. Kaiserin Augusta White, with a lemon tint in the
Victoria. folds; the fragrance is peculiar to
itself, faintly suggesting the
Gardenia.
3. Gruss an Teplitz. One of the newer crimson roses,
vigorous, with well-cupped flowers.
Good for decorative value in the
garden, but not a rose of sentiment.
4. Killarney. One of the newer roses that has made
good. Beautiful pointed buds of
shell-pink, full and at the same time
delicate. The foliage is very
handsome. If well fed, will amply
repay labour.
5. Souvenir de Malmaison. A Bourbon rose that should be
treated like a hybrid tea. Shell-pink,
fragrant flowers, that have much the
same way of opening as Gloire de
Dijon. A constant bloomer.
6. Clothilde Soupert. A polyantha or cluster rose of
vigorous growth and glistening
foliage, quite as hardy as the hybrid
tea. It is of dwarf growth and
suitable for edging beds of larger
roses. The shell-pink flowers are of
good form and very double; as they
cluster very thickly on the ends of
the stems, the buds should be thinned
out, as they have an aggravating
tendency to mildew before opening.
7. Souvenir de President A charming rose with shadows of all
Carnot. the flesh tints, from white through
blush to rose; sturdy and free.
8. Caroline Testout. Very large, round flowers, of a
delicate shell-pink, flushed with
salmon; sturdy.
_Teas_
1. Bon Silene. The old favourite, unsurpassed for
fragrance as a button-hole flower, or
table decoration when blended with
ferns or fragrant foliage plants.
Colour "Bon Silene," tints of shaded
pink and carmine, all its own.
2. Papa Gontier. A rose as vigorous as the hybrid
teas, and one that may be easily
wintered. Pointed buds of deep rose
shading to crimson and as fragrant as
Bon Silene, of which it is a hybrid.
Flowers should be gathered in the bud.
3. Safrano. A true "tea" rose of characteristic
shades of buff and yellow, with the
tea fragrance in all its perfection.
Best in the bud. Vigorous and a fit
companion for Papa Gontier and Bon
Silene.
4. Perle des Jardins. An exquisite, fragrant double rose
of light clear yellow, suggesting the
Marechal Niel in form, but of paler
colour. Difficult to winter out of
doors, but worth the trouble of
lifting to cold pit or light cellar,
or the expense of renewing annually.
One of the lovable roses.
5. Bride. The clear white rose, sometimes with
lemon shadings used for forcing; clean,
handsome foliage and good fragrance.
Very satisfactory in my garden when
old plants are used, as described.
6. Bridesmaid. The pink companion of the above with
similar attributes.
7. Etoille de Lyon. A vigorous, deep yellow rose, full
and sweet. Almost as hardy as a hybrid
tea and very satisfactory.
8. Souvenir d'un Ami. A deliciously fragrant light pink
rose, with salmon shadings. Very
satisfactory and as hardy as some of
the hybrid teas.
_Miscellaneous Roses for the Shrubbery_
1. Harrison's Yellow. An Austrian brier rose with clear
yellow semi-double flowers. Early and
very hardy. Should be grown on its own
roots, as it will then spread into a
thicket and make the rosary a mass of
shimmering gold in early June.
_Damask Roses_
Should be grown on own root, when
they will form shrubs five feet high.
2. Madame Hardy. Pure white. Very fragrant,
well-cupped flower, Time tried and
sturdy.
3. Rosa Damascena Rose colour.
Triginitipela.
_Rugosa_
The tribe of Japanese origin,
conspicuous as bushes of fine foliage
and handsome shape, as well as for the
large single blossoms that are
followed by seed vessels of brilliant
scarlet hues.
4. Agnes Emily Carman. Flowers in clusters, "Jacqueminot"
red, with long-fringed golden stamens.
Continuous bloomer. Hardy and perfect.
5. Rugosa alba. Pure white, highly scented.
6. Rugosa rubra. Single crimson flowers of great
beauty.
7. Chedane Guinoisseau. Flowers, satin pink and very large.
Blooms all the summer.
Now, Mary Penrose, having made up your mind to have a rosary, cause
garden line and shovel to be set in that side lawn of yours without
hesitation. Do not wait until autumn, because you cannot plant the hardy
roses until then and do not wish to contemplate bare ground. This sight
is frequently wholesome and provocative of good horticultural digestion.
You need only begin with one-half of Evan's plan, letting the pergola
enclose the walk back of the house, and later on you can add the other
wing.
If the pergola itself is built during the summer, you can sit under it,
and by going over your list and colour scheme locate each rose finally
before its arrival. By the way, until the climbers are well started you
may safely alternate them with vines of the white panicled clematis,
that will be in bloom in August and can be easily kept from clutching
its rose neighbours!
By and by, when you have planted your roses, tucked them in their winter
covers, and can sit down with a calm mind, I will lend you three
precious rose books of mine. These are Dean Hole's _Book about Roses_,
for both the wit and wisdom o't; _The Amateur Gardener's Rose Book_,
rescued from the German by John Weathers, F.R.H.S., for its common
sense, well-arranged list of roses, and beautiful coloured plates, and
H.B. Ellwanger's little treatise on _The Rose_, a competent chronology
of the flower queen up to 1901, written concisely and from the American
standpoint. If I should send them now, you would be so bewildered by the
enumeration of varieties, many unsuited to this climate, intoxicated by
the descriptions of Rose-garden possibilities, and carried away by the
literary and horticultural enthusiasm of the one-time master of the
Deanery Garden, Rochester, that, like the child turned loose in the toy
shop, you would lose the power of choosing.
Lavinia Cortright lost nearly a year in beginning her rosary, owing to a
similar condition of mind, and Evan and I long ago decided that when we
read we cannot work, and _vice versa_, so when the Garden of Outdoors is
abed and asleep each year, we enter the Garden of Books with fresh
delight.
Have you a man with quick wit and a straight eye to be the spade hand
during the Garden Vacation? If not, make haste to find him, for, as you
have had Barney for five years, he is probably too set in his ways to
work at innovations cheerfully!
VIII
A MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE
(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)
_June 21._ The rosary has been duly surveyed, staked according to the
plan, and the border lines fixed with the garden line dipped in
whitewash, so that if we only plant a bed at a time, our ambition will
always be before us. But as yet no man cometh to dig. This process is of
greater import than it may seem, because with the vigorous
three-year-old sod thus obtained do we purpose to turf the edges of the
beds for hardy and summer flowers that border the squares of the
vegetable garden. These strips now crumble earth into the walks, and the
slightest footfall is followed by a landslide. We had intended to use
narrow boards for edging, but Bart objects, like the old retainer in
Kipling's story of _An Habitation Enforced_, on the ground that they
will deteriorate from the beginning and have to be renewed every few
years, whereas the turf will improve, even if it is more trouble to care
for.
At present the necessity of permanence is one of the things that is
impressing us both, for after us--the Infant! Until a year ago I had a
positive dread of being so firmly fixed anywhere that to spread wings
and fly here and there would be difficult, but now it seems the most
delightful thing to be rooted like the old apple tree on the side hill,
the last of the old orchard, that has leaned against the upland winds so
many years that it is well-nigh bent double, yet the root anchors hold
and it is still a thing of beauty, like rosy-cheeked old folk with snowy
hair. I do not think that I ever realized this in its fulness until I
left the house and came out, though but a short way, to live with and in
it all.
You were right in thinking that Barney would not encourage
innovations,--he does not! He says that turf lifted in summer always
lies uneasy and breeds worms.
This seems to be an age for the defiance of horticultural tradition, for
we are finding out every day that you can "lift" almost anything of
herbaceous growth at any time and make it live, if you are willing to
take pains enough, though of course transplanting is done with less
trouble and risk at the prescribed seasons.
The man-with-the-shovel question is quite a serious one hereabouts at
present, for the Water Company has engaged all the rough-and-ready
labourers for a long season and that has raised both the prices and
the noses of the wandering accommodators in the air. Something will
probably turn up. Now we are transplanting hardy ferns; for though the
tender tops break, there is yet plenty of time for a second growth and
rooting before winter.
[Illustration: THE LAST OF
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