The Garden, You, And I Part 18

The polyanthus narcissi, carrying their many flowers in heads at the top of the stalk, are what is termed half hardy and they are more frequently seen in florists' windows than in gardens. I have found them hardy if planted in a sheltered spot, covered with slanted boards and leaves, which should not be removed before April, as the spring rain and winds, I am convinced, do more to kill the species than winter cold. The flowers are heavily fragrant, like gardenias, and are almost too sweet for the house; but they, together with violets, give the garden the opulence of odour before the lilacs are open, or the heliotropes that are to be perfumers-in-chief in summer have graduated from thumb pots in the forcing houses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE POET'S NARCISSUS.]

Unless one has a large garden and a gardener who can plant and tend parterres of spring colour, I do not set much value upon outdoor hyacinths; they must be lifted each year and often replaced, as the large bulbs soon divide into several smaller ones with the flowers proportionately diminished. To me their mission is, to be grown in pots, shallow pans, or gla.s.ses on the window ledge, for winter and spring comforters, and I use the early tulips much in the same way, except for a cheerful line of them, planted about the foundation of the house, that when in bloom seems literally to lift home upon the spring wings of resurrection!

All my tulip enthusiasm is centred in the late varieties, and chief among these come the fascinating and fantastic "parrots."

When next I have my garden savings-bank well filled, I am going to make a collection of these tulips and guard them in a bed underlaid with stout-meshed wire netting, so that no mole may leave a tunnel for the wicked tulip-eating meadow-mouse.

It is these late May-flowering tulips of long stalks, like wands of tall perennials, that you can gather in your arms and arrange in your largest jars with a sense at once combined of luxury and artistic joy.

Better begin as I did by buying them in mixture; the species you must choose are the bizarre, bybloems, parrots, breeders, Darwin tulips, and the rose and white, together with a general mixture of late singles.

Five dollars will buy you fifty of each of the seven kinds, three hundred and fifty bulbs all told and enough for a fine display. The Darwin tulips yield beautiful shades of violet, carmine, scarlet, and brown; the bizarres, many curious effects in stripes and flakes; the rose and white, delicate frettings and margins of pink on a white ground; but the parrots have petals fringed, twisted, beaked, poised curiously upon the stalks, splashed with reds, yellows, and green, and to come suddenly upon a ma.s.s of them in the garden is to think for a brief moment that a group of unknown birds blown from the tropics in a forced migration have alighted for rest upon the bending tulip stalks.

[A] F.H. Horsford of Charlotte, Vt., is very reliable in this matter.

XIV

FRAGRANT FLOWERS AND LEAVES

(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)

_Woodridge, August 26._ The heliotrope is in the perfection of bloom and seems to draw perfume from the intense heat of the August days only to release it again as the sun sets, while as long as daylight lasts b.u.t.terflies of all sizes, shapes, and colours are fluttering about the flowers until the bed is like the transformation scene of a veritable dance of fairies!

Possibly you did not know that I have a heliotrope bed planted at the very last moment. I had never before seen a great ma.s.s of heliotrope growing all by itself until I visited your garden, and ever since I have wondered why more people have not discovered it. I think that I wrote you anent _hens_ that the ancient fowl-house of the place had been at the point where there was a gap in the old wall below the knoll, and that the wind swept up through it from the river, across the Opal Farm meadows, and into the windows of the dining room? The most impossible place for a fowl-house, but exactly the location, as _The Man from Everywhere_ suggested, for a bed of sweet odours.

I expected to do nothing with it this season until one day Larry, the departed, in a desire to use some of the domestic guano with which the rough cellar of the old building was filled, carted away part of it, and supplying its place with loam, dug over and straightened out the irregular s.p.a.ce, which is quite six feet wide by thirty long.

The same day, on going to a near-by florist's for celery plants, I found that he had a quant.i.ty of little heliotropes in excess of his needs, that had remained unpotted in the sand of the cutting house, where they had spindled into sickly-looking weeds. In a moment of the horticultural gambling that will seize one, I offered him a dollar for the lot, which he accepted readily, for it was the last of June and the poor things would probably have been thrown out in a day or two.

I took them home and spent a whole morning in separating and cutting off the spindling tops to an even length of six inches. Literally there seemed to be no end to the plants, and when I counted them I found that I had nearly a hundred and fifty heliotropes, which, after rejecting the absolutely hopeless, gave me six rows for the bed.

For several weeks my speculation in heliotropes was a subject of much mirth between Bart and myself, and the place was anything but a bed of sweet odours! The poor things lost the few leaves they had possessed and really looked as if they had been haunted by the ghosts of all the departed chickens that had gone from the fowl-house to the block. Then we had some wet weather, followed by growing summer heat, and I did not visit the bed for perhaps a week or more, when I rubbed my eyes and pinched myself; for it was completely covered with a ma.s.s of vigorous green, riotous in its profusion, here and there showing flower buds, and ever since it is one of the places to which I go to feast my eyes and nose when in need of garden encouragement! Another year I shall plant the heliotrope in one of the short cross-walk borders of the old garden, where we may also see it from the dining room, and use the larger bed for the more hardy sweet things, as I shall probably never be able to buy so many heliotrope plants again for so little money.

Now also I have a definite plan for a large border of fragrant flowers and leaves. I have been on a journey, and, having spent three whole days from home, I am able for once to tell you something instead of endlessly stringing questions together.

We also have been to the Cortrights' at Gray Rocks, and through a whiff of salt air, a touch of friendly hands, much conversation, and a drive to Coningsby (a village back from the sh.o.r.e peopled by the descendants of seafarers who, having a little property, have turned mildly to farming), we have received fresh inspiration.

You did not overestimate the originality of the Cortrights' seaside garden, and even after your intimate description, it contained several surprises in the shape of ma.s.ses of the milkweeds that flourish in sandy soil, especially the dull pink, and the orange, about which the brick-red monarch b.u.t.terflies were hovering in great flocks. Neither did you tell me of the thistles that flank the bayberry hedge. I never realized what a thing of beauty a thistle might be when encouraged and allowed room to develop. Some of the plants of the common deep purple thistle, that one a.s.sociates with the stunted growths of dusty roadsides, stood full five feet high, each bush as clear cut and erect as a candelabrum of fine metal work, while another group was composed of a pale yellow species with a tinge of pink in the centre set in very handsome silvery leaves. I had never before seen these yellow thistles, but Lavinia Cortright says that they are very plentiful in the dry ground back of the marshes, where the sand has been carried in drifts both by wind and tide.

The table and house decorations the day that we arrived were of thistles blended with the deep yellow blossoms of the downy false foxglove or Gerardia and the yellow false indigo that looks at a short distance like a dwarf bush pea.

We drove to Coningsby, as I supposed to see some gay little gardens, fantastic to the verge of awfulness, that had caught Aunt Lavinia's eye.

In one the earth for the chief bed was contained in a surf-boat that had become unseaworthy from age, and not only was it filled to the brim, but vines of every description trailed over the sides.

A neighbour opposite, probably a garden rival of the owner of the boat but lacking aquatic furniture, had utilized a single-seated cutter which, painted blue of the unmerciful shade that fights with everything it approaches, was set on an especially green bit of side lawn, surrounded by a heavy row of conch sh.e.l.ls, and the box into which the seat had been turned, as well as the bottom of the sleigh itself, was filled with a jumble of magenta petunias and flame-coloured nasturtiums.

After we had pa.s.sed down a village street a quarter of a mile long, bordered on either side by floral combinations of this description, the sight began to pall, and I wondered how it was possible that any flowers well watered and cared for could produce such a feeling of positive aversion as well as eye-strained fatigue; also, if this was all that the Cortrights had driven us many miles to see, when it was so much more interesting to lounge on either of the porches of their own cottage, the one commanding the sea and the other the sand garden, the low dunes, and the marsh meadows.

"It is only half a mile farther on," said Aunt Lavinia, quick to feel that we were becoming bored, without our having apparently given any sign to that effect.

"It! What is _it_?" asked Bart, while I, without shame it is confessed, having a ravenous appet.i.te, through outdoor living, hoped that _it_ was some quaint and neat little inn that "refreshed travellers," as it was expressed in old-time wording.

"How singular!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Aunt Lavinia; "I thought I told you last night when we were in the garden--well, it must have been in a dream instead. _It_ is the garden of Mrs. Marchant, wholly of fragrant things; it is on the little cross-road, beyond that strip of woods up there,"

and she waved toward a slight rise in the land that was regarded as a hill of considerable importance in this flat country.

"It does not contain merely a single bed of sweet odours like Barbara's and mine, but is a garden an acre in extent, where everything admitted has fragrance, either in flower or leaf. We chanced upon it quite by accident, Martin and I, when driving ourselves down from Oaklands, across country, as it were, to Gray Rocks, by keeping to shady lanes, byways, and pent roads, where it was often necessary to take down bars and sometimes verge on trespa.s.sing by going through farmyards in order to continue our way.

"After traversing a wood road of unusual beauty, where everything broken and unsightly had been carefully removed that ferns and wild shrubs might have full chance of life, we came suddenly upon a white picket gate covered by an arched trellis, beyond which in the vista could be seen a modest house of the real colonial time, set in the midst of a garden.

"At once we realized the fact that the lane was also a part of the garden in that it was evidently the daily walk of some one who loved nature, and we looked about for a way of retracing our steps. At the same moment two female figures approached the gate from the other side.

At the distance at which we were I could only see that one was tall and slender, was dressed all in pure white, and crowned by a ma.s.s of hair to match, while the other woman was short and stocky, and the way in which she opened the gate and held it back told that whatever her age might be she was an attendant, though probably an intimate one.

"In another moment they discovered us, and as Martin alighted from the vehicle to apologize for our intrusion the tall figure immediately retreated to the garden, so quickly and without apparent motion that we were both startled, for the way of moving is peculiar to those whose feet do not really tread the earth after the manner of their fellows; and before we had quite recovered ourselves the stout woman had advanced and we saw by the pleasant smile her round face wore that she was not aggrieved at the intrusion but seemed pleased to meet human beings in that out-of-the-way place rather than rabbits, many of which had scampered away as we came down the lane.

"Martin explained our dilemma and asked if we might gain the highway without retracing our steps. The woman hesitated a moment, and then said, 'If you come through the gate and turn sharp to the right, you can go out across the apple orchard by taking down a single set of bars, only you'll have to lead your horse, sir, for the trees are set thick and are heavy laden. I'd let you cross the bit of gra.s.s to the drive by the back gate yonder but that it would grieve Mrs. Marchant to see the turf so much as pressed with a wheel; she'd feel and know it somehow, even if she didn't see it.'

"'Mrs. Marchant! Not Mrs. Chester Marchant?' cried Martin, while the far-away echo of something recalled by the name troubled the ears of my memory.

"'Yes, sir, the very same! Did you know Dr. Marchant, sir? The minute I laid eyes on you two I thought you were of her kind!' replied the woman, pointing backward over her shoulder and settling herself against the shaft and side of Brown Tom, the horse, as if expecting and making ready for a comfortable chat.

"As she stood thus I could take a full look at her without intrusiveness. Apparently well over sixty years old, and her face lines telling of many troubles, yet she had not a gray hair in her head and her poise was of an independent landowner rather than an occupier of another's home. I also saw at a glance that whatever her present position might be, she had not been born in service, but was probably a native of local importance, who, for some reason perfectly satisfactory to herself, was 'accommodating.'

"'Dr. Marchant, Dr. Russell, and I were college mates,' said Martin, briefly, 'and after he and his son died so suddenly I was told that his widow was mentally ill and that none could see her, and later that she had died, or else the wording was so that I inferred as much,' and the very recollection seemed to set Martin dreaming. And I did not wonder, for there had never been a more brilliant and devoted couple than Abbie and Chester Marchant, and I still remember the shock of it when word came that both father and son had been killed by the same runaway accident, though it was nearly twenty years ago.

"'She was ill, sir, was Mrs. Marchant; too ill to see anybody. For a long time she wouldn't believe that the accident had happened, and when she really sensed it, she was as good as dead for nigh five years. One day some of her people came to me--'twas the year after my own husband died--and asked if I would take a lady and her nurse here to live with me for the summer. They told me of her sickness and how she was always talking of some cottage in a garden of sweet-smelling flowers where she had lived one happy summer with her husband and her boy, and they placed the house as mine.

"'Her folks said the doctors thought if she could get back here for a time that it might help her. Then I recollected that ten years before, when I went up to Maine to visit my sister, I'd rented the place, just as it stood, to folks of the name of Marchant, a fine couple that didn't look beyond each other unless 'twas at their son. In past times my grandmother had an old-country knack of raising healing herbs and all sorts of sweet-smelling things, along with farm truck, so that folks came from all about to buy them and doctors too, for such things weren't sold so much in shops in those days as they are now, and so this place came to be called the Herb Farm. After that it was sold off, little by little, until the garden, wood lane, and orchard is about all that's left.

"'I was lonesome and liked the idea of company, and besides I was none too well fixed; yet I dreaded a mournful widow that wasn't all there anyway, according to what they said, but I thought I'd try. Well, sir, she come, and that first week I thought I'd never stand it, she talked and wrung her hands so continual. But one day what do you think happened? I chanced to pick a nosegay, not so much fine flowers perhaps as good-smelling leaves and twigs, and put it in a little pitcher in her room.

"'It was like witchcraft the way it worked; the smell of those things seemed to creep over her like some drugs might and she changed. She stopped moaning and went out into the garden and touched all the posies with her fingers, as if she was shaking hands, and all of a sudden it seemed, by her talk, as if her dead were back with her again; and on every other point she's been as clear and ladylike as possible ever since, and from that day she cast off her black clothes as if wearing 'em was all through a mistake.

"'The doctors say it's something to do with the 'sociation of smells, for that season they spent in my cottage was the only vacation Dr.

Marchant had taken in years, and they say it was the happiest time in her life, fussing about among my old-fashioned posies with him; and somehow in her mind he's got fixed there among those posies, and every year she plants more and more of them, and what friends of hers she ever speaks of she remembers by some flowers they wore or liked.

"'Well, as it turned out, her trustees have bought my place out and fixed it over, and here we live together, I may say, both fairly content!

"'Come in and see her, won't you? It'll do no harm. Cortright, did you say your name was?' and before we could retreat, throwing Brown Tom's loose check-rein across the pickets of the gate, she led us to where the tall woman, dressed in pure white, stood under the trees, a look of perfectly calm expectancy in the wonderful dark eyes that made such a contrast to her coils of snow-white hair.

"'Cortright! Martin Cortright, is it not?' she said immediately, as her companion spoke the surname. 'And your wife? I had not heard that you were married, but I remember you well, Lavinia Dorman, and your city garden, and the musk-rose bush that ailed because of having too little sun. Chester will be so sorry to miss you; he is seldom at home in the mornings, for he takes long walks with our son. He is having the first entire half year's vacation he has allowed himself since our marriage.

But you will always find him in the garden in the afternoon; he is so fond of fragrant flowers, and he is making new studies of herbs and such things, for he believes that in spite of some great discoveries it will be proven that the old simples are the most enduring medicines.'