The Garden, You, And I Part 7

"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 inst.i.tution 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 acc.u.mulated 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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 th.o.r.n.y, half-double brier roses with petals of soft yellow crepe, 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 a.s.sorted 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 subst.i.tuting 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 j.a.panese iris, and inadvertently sheds its petals to make rose-water of the birds' bath.

An English sweetbrier of delicious leaf.a.ge hobn.o.bs with honeysuckle and clematis on one of the wren arbours, while a great nameless bush of exquisite blush buds, quite dest.i.tute 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 quant.i.ty 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 t.i.tled 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.