Home Life in Colonial Days Part 20

At the lower end of the aisle is a large summer-house, a long square containing three rooms, the middle paved with marble and hung with landscapes. On the right is a large private library adorned with curious carvings. There are espaliers of fruit-trees at each end of the garden and curious flowering shrubs. The room on the left is beautifully designed for music and contains a spinnet.

But the whole garden discovered the desolations of war."

In the Southern colonies men of wealth soon had beautiful gardens. In an early account of South Carolina, written in 1682, we find:--

"Their Gardens are supplied with such European Plants and Herbs as are necessary for the Kitchen, and they begin to be beautiful and adorned with such Flowers as to the Smell or Eye are pleasing or agreeable, viz.: the Rose, Tulip, Carnation, Lilly, etc."

By the middle of the century many exquisite gardens could be seen in Charleston, and they were the pride of Southern colonial dames. Those of Mrs. Lamboll, Mrs. Hopton, and Mrs. Logan were the largest. The latter flower-lover in 1779, when seventy years old, wrote a treatise on flower-raising called _The Gardener's Kalendar_, which was read and used for many years. Mrs. Laurens had another splendid garden. Those Southern ladies and their gardeners constantly sent specimens to England, and received others in return. The letters of the day, especially those of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, ever interested in floriculture and arboriculture, show a constant exchange with English flower-lovers.

Beverley wrote of Virginia, in 1720: "A garden is nowhere sooner made than there." William Byrd and other travellers, a few years later, saw many beautiful terraced gardens in Virginian homes. Mrs. Anne Grant writes at length of the love and care the Dutch women of the past century had for flowers:--

"The care of plants such as needed peculiar care or skill to rear them, was the female province. Every one in town or country had a garden. Into the garden no foot of man intruded after it was dug in the spring. I think I see yet what I have so often beheld--a respectable mistress of a family going out to her garden, in an April morning, with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and her rake over her shoulders, to her garden of labours. A woman in very easy circ.u.mstances and abundantly gentle in form and manners would sow and plant and rake incessantly."

In New York, before the Revolution, were many beautiful gardens, such as that of Madam Alexander on Broad Street, where in their proper season grew "paus bloemen of all hues, laylocks and tall May roses and s...o...b..a.l.l.s intermixed with choice vegetables and herbs all bounded and hemmed in by huge rows of neatly clipped box edgings." We have a pretty picture also, in the letters of Catharine Rutherfurd, of an entire company gathering rose-leaves in June in Madam Clark's garden, and setting the rose-still at work to turn their sweet-scented spoils into rose-water.

A trade in flower and vegetable seeds formed a lucrative and popular means by which women could earn a livelihood in colonial days. I have seen in one of the dingy little newspaper sheets of those days, in the large total of nine advertis.e.m.e.nts, contained therein, the announcements, by five Boston seedswomen, of lists of their wares.

The earliest list of names of flower-seeds which I have chanced to note was in the _Boston Evening Post_ of March, 1760, and is of much interest as showing to us with exactness the flowers beloved and sought for at that time. They were "holly-hook, purple Stock, white Lewpins, Africans, blew Lewpins, candy-tuff, cya.n.u.s, pink, wall-flower, double larkin-spur, venus navelwort, brompton flock, princess feather, balsam, sweet-scented pease, carnation, sweet williams, annual stock, sweet feabus, yellow lewpins, sunflower, convolus minor, catch-fly, ten week stock, globe thistle, globe amaranthus, nigella, love-lies-bleeding, casent hamen, polianthus, canterbury bells, carnation poppy, india pink, convolus major, Queen Margrets." This is certainly a very pretty list of flowers, nearly all of which are still loved, though sometimes under other names--thus the Queen Margrets are our asters. And the homely old English names seem to bring the flowers to our very sight, for we do not seem to be on very friendly intimacy, on very sociable terms with flowers, unless they have what Miss Mitford calls "decent, well-wearing English names"; we can have no flower memories, no affections that cling to botanical nomenclature. Yet nothing is more fatal to an exact flower knowledge, to an acquaintance that shall ever be more than local, than a too confident dependence on the folk-names of flowers. Our bachelor's-b.u.t.tons are ragged sailors in a neighboring state; they are corn-pinks in Plymouth, ragged ladies in another town, blue bottles in England, but cya.n.u.s everywhere. Ragged robin is, in the garden of one friend, a pink, in another it flaunts as London-pride, while the true glowing London-pride has half a dozen pseudonyms in as many different localities, and only really recognizes itself in the botany. An American cowslip is not an English cowslip, an American primrose is no English primrose, and the English daisy is no country friend of ours in America.

What cheerful and appropriate furnishings the old-time gardens had; benches full of straw beeskepes and wooden beehives, those homelike and busy dwelling-places; frequently, also, a well-filled dove-cote.

Sometimes was seen a sun-dial--once the every-day friend and suggestive monitor of all who wandered among the flowers of an hour; now known, alas! only to the antiquary. Sentiment and even spirituality seem suggested by the sun-dial, yet few remain to cast their instructive shadow before our sight.

One stood for years in the old box-bordered garden at h.o.m.ogansett Farm, at Wickford, in old Narragansett. Governor Endicott's dial is in the Ess.e.x Inst.i.tute, at Salem; and my forbear, Jacob Fairbanks, had one dated 1650, which is now in the rooms of the Dedham Historical Society.

Dr. Bowditch, of Boston, had a sun-dial which was thus inscribed:--

"With warning hand I mark Times rapid flight From life's glad morning to its solemn night.

And like G.o.d's love I also show Theres light above me, by the shade below."

Another garden dial thus gives, "in long, lean letters," its warning word:--

"You'll mend your Ways To-morrow When blooms that budded Flour?

Mortall! Lern to your Sorrow Death may creep with his Arrow And pierce yo'r vitall Marrow Long ere my warning Shadow Can mark that Hour."

These dials are all of heavy metal, usually lead; sometimes with gnomon of bra.s.s. But I have heard of one which was unique; it was cut in box.

At the edge of the farm garden often stood the well-sweep, one of the most picturesque adjuncts of the country dooryard. Its successor, the roofed well with bucket, stone, and chain, and even the homely long-handled pump, had a certain appropriateness as part of the garden furnishings.

So many thoughts crowd upon us in regard to the old garden; one is the age of its flowers. We have no older inhabitants than these garden plants; they are old settlers. Clumps of flower-de-luce, double b.u.t.tercups, peonies, yellow day-lilies, are certainly seventy-five years old. Many lilac bushes a century old still bloom in New England, and syringas and flowering currants are as old as the elms and locusts that shade them.

This established constancy and yearly recurrence of bloom is one of the garden's many charms. To those who have known and loved an old garden in which,

"There grow no strange flowers every year, But when spring winds blow o'er the pleasant places, The same dear things lift up the same fair faces,"

and faithfully tell and retell the story of the changing seasons by their growth, blossom, and decay, nothing can seem more artificial than the modern show-beds of full-grown plants which are removed by a.s.siduous gardeners as soon as they have flowered, to be replaced by others, only in turn to bloom and disappear. These seem to form a real garden no more than does a child's posy-bed stuck with short-stemmed flowers to wither in a morning.

And the tiresome, tasteless ribbon-beds of our day were preceded in earlier centuries by figured beds of diverse-colored earths--and of both we can say with Bacon, "they be but toys, you may see as good sights many times in tarts."

The promise to Noah, "while the earth remaineth seed-time and harvest shall not cease," when heeded in the garden, brings various interests.

The seed-time, the springing-up of familiar favorites, and the cherishing of these favorites through their in-gathering of seeds or bulbs or roots for another year, bring pleasure as much as does their inflorescence.

Another pathetic trait of many of the old-time flowers should not be overlooked--their persistent clinging to life after they had been exiled from the trim garden borders where they first saw the chill sun of a New England spring. You see them growing and blooming outside the garden fence, against old stone walls, where their up-torn roots have been thrown to make places for new and more popular favorites. You find them cheerfully spreading, pushing along the foot-paths, turning into vagrants, becoming flaunting weeds. You see them climbing here and there, trying to hide the deserted chimneys of their early homes, or wandering over and hiding the untrodden foot-paths of other days. A vivid imagination can shape many a story of their life in the interval between their first careful planting in colonial gardens and their neglected exile to highways and byways, where the poor bits of depauperated earth can grow no more lucrative harvest.

The sites of colonial houses which are now destroyed, the trend, almost the exact line of old roads, can be traced by the cheerful faces of these garden-strays. The situation of old Fort Na.s.sau, in Pennsylvania, so long a matter of uncertainty, is said to have been definitely determined by the familiar garden flowers found growing on one of these disputed sites. It is a tender thought that this indelible mark is left upon the face of our native land through the affection of our forbears for their gardens.

The botany tells us that bouncing-bet has "escaped from cultivation"--she has been thrust out, but unresentfully lives and smiles; opening her tender pinky-opalescent flowers adown the dusty roadsides, and even on barren gravel-beds in railroad cuts.

b.u.t.ter-and-eggs, tansy, chamomile, spiked loosestrife, velvet-leaf, bladder-campion, cypress spurge, live-for-ever, star of Bethlehem, money-vine,--all have seen better days, but now are flower-tramps. Even the larkspur, beloved of children, the moss-pink, and the grape-hyacinth may sometimes be seen growing in country fields and byways. The homely and cheerful blossoms of the orange-tawny ephemeral lily, and the spotted tiger-lily, whose gaudy colors glow with the warmth of far Cathay--their early home--now make gay many of our roadsides and crowd upon the sweet cinnamon roses of our grandmothers, which also are undaunted garden exiles.

Driving once along a country road, I saw on the edge of a field an expanse of yellow bloom which seemed to be an unfamiliar field-tint. It proved to be a vast bed of coreopsis, self-sown from year to year; and the blackened outlines of an old cellar wall in its midst showed that in that field once stood a home, once there a garden smiled.

I am always sure when I see bouncing-bet, b.u.t.ter-and-eggs, and tawny lilies growing in a tangle together that in their midst may be found an untrodden door-stone, a fallen chimney, or a filled-in well.

Still broader field expanses are filled with old-country plants. In June a golden glory of bud and blossom covers the hills and fields of Ess.e.x County in Ma.s.sachusetts from Lynn to Danvers, and Ryal Side to Beverly; it is the English gorse or woad-wax, and by tradition it was first brought to this country in spray and seed as a packing for some of the household belongings of Governor Endicott. Thrown out in friendly soil, the seeds took root and there remain in the vicinity of their first American homes. It is a stubborn squatter, yielding only to scythe, plough, and hoe combined.

Chicory or blue weed was, it is said, brought from England by Governor Bowdoin as food for his sheep. It has spread till its extended presence has been a startling surprise to all English visiting botanists. It hurts no one's fields, for it invades chiefly waste and neglected land--the "dear common flower"--and it has redeemed many a city suburb of vacant lots, many a railroad ash heap from the abomination of desolation.

Whiteweed or ox-eye daisy, a far greater pest than gorse or chicory, has been carried intentionally to many a township by homesick settlers whose descendants to-day rue the sentiment of their ancestors.

While the vallied garden of our old neighbors was sweet with blossoms, my mother's garden bore a still fresher fragrance--that of green growing things; of "posies," lemon-balm, rose geranium, mint, and sage. I always a.s.sociate with it in spring the scent of the strawberry bush, or calycanthus, and in summer of the fraxinella, which, with its tall stem of larkspur-like flowers, its still more graceful seed-vessels and its shining ash-like leaves, grew there in rich profusion and gave forth from leaf, stem, blossom, and seed a pure, a memory-sweet perfume half like lavender, half like anise.

Truly, much of our tenderest love of flowers comes from a.s.sociation, and many are lovingly recalled solely by their odors. Balmier breath than was ever borne by blossom is to me the pure pungent perfume of ambrosia, rightly named, as fit for the G.o.ds. Not the miserable weed ambrosia of the botany, but a lowly herb that grew throughout the entire summer everywhere in "our garden"; sowing its seeds broadcast from year to year; springing up unchecked in every unoccupied corner, and under every shrub and bushy plant; giving out from serrated leaf and irregular raceme of tiny pale-green flowers, a spicy aromatic fragrance if we brushed past it, or pulled a weed from amongst it as we strolled down the garden walk. And it is our very own--I have never seen it elsewhere than at my old home, and in the gardens of neighbors to whom its seeds were given by the gentle hand that planted "our garden" and made it a delight. Goethe says, "Some flowers are lovely to the eye, but others are lovely to the heart." Ambrosia is lovely to my heart, for it was my mother's favorite.

And as each "spring comes slowly up the way," I say in the words of Solomon, "Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out"--that the balm and mint, the thyme and southernwood, the sweetbrier and ambrosia, may spring afresh and shed their tender incense to the memory of my mother, who planted them and loved their pure fragrance, and at whose presence, as at that of Eve, flowers ever sprung--

"And touched by her fair tendance gladlier grew."

Index

Abington, church vote in, 286.

Acrelius, Dr., quoted, 146.

Adams, Abigail, garden of, 435.

Adams, John, quoted, 71, 160; Sunday dinner of, 159-160; cider-drinking of, 161.

Adams, John Quincy, Mrs., straw bonnet of, 261.

Adams family, homes of, 22.

Albany, houses at, 9; deer in, 109; beer at, 161; bad boys in, 374-375; first church in, 385; cow-herding in, 399.

Alchymy, 88.

Alewives, in New England waters, 120.

Ambrosia, a flower, 450.