A Year in a Lancashire Garden Part 6

But there are other pleasant ways of recalling one's friends to memory.

I never stay anywhere, where there is a garden, without bringing back with me some one or more shrubs, as a remembrance of a beautiful place or happy hours; and, when I plant them, I fasten to them a label, mentioning their old home, and thus I am reminded--now of a quaint low house covered with creepers and nestling among the hills of Wales--now of a magnificent castle with its pleasance in the north of Ireland,--now of a great hall in Scotland, where a wild glen runs down past the garden to the woods,--now of an old English abbey, where the flowers of to-day spring up among the ruins of a thousand years ago.

Among the flowers in the inner garden, which have well repaid me during the last year or two, have been the Anemones--delightful old flowers--"pied wind-flowers," Sh.e.l.ley calls them,--which first sprang to birth when Venus wept Adonis. Then I have had two successful beds of Ranunculus; one was prettily and fancifully mottled; the other was of the finest scarlet,--a scarlet so intense that it seemed to be almost black in the inner shadows of the petals. A gifted American lady once said to me--"Does not black seem to underlie all bright scarlet?" and I have thought of this as I have looked at this bed of Ranunculus, and I think of it often as I see the red coats of our soldiers pa.s.sing by. I have often noticed, too, that, in an evening, when there is still light enough to see flowers, that are yellow, or blue, or pink, the blossoms of a scarlet Pelargonium give forth no colour, but look as if cut out of some soft black velvet. Another spring bed, from which I had hoped much, has disappointed me. It was a bed of Crown Imperials, but for some reason they flowered irregularly and produced no effect. But the individual flowers of some were magnificent. I had never examined a Crown Imperial properly before, and never knew that its great beauty lay in the little circlet of pearls--nectaries, I suppose they are--which lie at the bottom of each orange bell. They are quite exquisite in their grey and white glittering movement, as the light plays upon them, and are more like pearls than anything else in nature.

Among my humbler flowers, of which I have somehow made no mention, is the Pansy, yet few flowers have more a.s.sociations connected with them.

The Pansy--the _Heartsease_ we still sometimes call it--is Shakespeare's "Love in Idleness," and Milton's "Pansy freak'd with jet." The American poet, Edgar Poe, speaks of the "beautiful Puritan Pansies;" and I remember a fine wild pa.s.sage in one of this same poet's little-known essays, where two angels are talking, and one of them says--"We will swoop outward into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where for Pansies, and Violets, and Heartsease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns."

Last year my finest bed was one of the Canna Indica, in which every plant threw up grand broad leaves and spikes of crimson or yellow blossom. Why is not the Canna far more common in all our gardens? At present one sees it in public parks, or where gardening on a great scale is carried on, but in smaller gardens it is very rare, and yet it is easy enough to grow; and once I think it must have been more known than it is at present. Gerarde speaks of it as "the flowering reed," and gives a very fair ill.u.s.tration of it. He adds, however, "Myself have planted it in my garden divers times, but it never came to flowering or seeding, for that it is very impatient to endure the injury of our cold climate." Cowley, too, speaks of the "l.u.s.tre of the Indian flowering reed;" and Dr. Darwin, in his _Loves of the Plants_, gives it (with its single pistil and stamen), as the best type of the conjugal fidelity of flowers, and tells how--

"The tall Canna lifts his curled brow, Erect to heaven;"

adding, in prose, that "the seeds are used as shot by the Indians, and are strung for prayer-beads in some Catholic countries." Indeed, the plant is often called the "Indian Shot," and as the seeds, s.h.i.+ning, hard and black, ripened with me last year, I can understand how appropriate is the name.

A bed of double Potentillas, some red, some yellow, and some with the two colours mingled, has been very fine; and so has a bed of hybrid Bulbous Begonias, which seem quite hardy. I plant the blue Lobelia between them, and it contrasts pleasantly with their crimson and orange bells. A long row of Sweet Peas of every variety of colour extends along the border in front of the vinery, and fills the garden with its scent; and not far off is a wire screen, which I cover with the large Convolvulus, and through the summer months the "Morning Glories," as the blossoms were once called, display all their short-lived beauty.

On either side of the gra.s.s-walk, which runs down the garden, at a right angle to the vineries, I am making rustic trellises of logs of wood, round which I shall plant Vegetable Marrows and Gourds, and at intervals clumps of the great Sunflower.[12] In another corner I am sowing a bed of the Bluet, or Corn-flower, the favourite flower of the Emperor of Germany. For some reason the Violets of Napoleon, of which I once had abundance, have not been so successful with me during the last few years,--will the Corn-flower do better?--What a glorious blue it is! and how much we have neglected it! because, I suppose, it is too common, and grows wild amid the ripening Corn and the scarlet Poppy.

[12] See Note IV. on the Sunflower of the Cla.s.sics.

Turning to the fruit-garden, my great discovery has been that I _must_ have bees--not at all for the honey, but for the proper setting of the fruit. A large May Duke Cherry is always covered with blossom, but scarcely anything has ever come from it. Last year I examined its blossom closely, and found that the pistil is so much longer than the stamens that it cannot fertilise itself, and must be dependent on insects. This is not the case with other varieties of Cherries, so far as I can see, and I am curious to find out whether my remedy of a bee-hive will this year have the desired effect. I believe it will be of service to the other wall-fruit too, and I have already seen the affection the bees have for the blossoms of the Apricot.

How beautiful a garden is when all the fruit-trees are in bloom! and how various that bloom is! Each Pear-tree bears a different blossom from its neighbour, and the handsomest of all, in size and shape of flower and form of cl.u.s.ter, is the Jargonelle. But no Pear-blossom can compare with the beauty of blossom on the Apple-trees;--and of all Apple-trees the Pomeroy is most beautiful, when every bough is laden with cl.u.s.ters of deep-red buds, which shade off into the softest rosy white, as, one by one, the blossoms open out.

Of other fruit I have nothing new to notice, unless it be to ask whether any one now living can smell the scent of dying Strawberry leaves? We all remember how Mrs. Gaskell in her delightful story gives Lady Ludlow the power, but now we all seem to have lost it. Certainly my dying Strawberry leaves give me no sense of sweetness. Was it a mere fond and foolish fancy? or were the Strawberries of Elizabethan gardens different from those we are now growing? Bacon tells us that, next to the white double Violet and the Musk Rose, the sweetest perfume in the open air is "Strawberry leaves dying, which yield a most excellent cordiale smell;"

and I find in an old play by Sir John Suckling--

"Wholesome As dying leaves of Strawberries."

But there are sounds that haunt a garden hardly less delightful than its sights and scents. What sound has more poetry in it than when in the early morning one hears the strong sharp sweep of the scythe, as it whistles through the falling gra.s.s, or the shrill murmur of the blade upon the whetstone; and, in spite of mowing machines, at times one hears the old sound still. How fond Andrew Marvell was of mowing and the mowers! He has given us "Damon the Mower," "The Mower to the Glow-worm,"

"The Mower's Song," "The Mower against Gardens," and "Ametas and Thestylis making Hay-ropes;" and again, in his fine poem, on "Appleton House," he describes the "tawny mowers" dividing the "gra.s.sy deeps,"

"With whistling scythe and elbow strong."

One of our latest poets too, Mr. Allingham, has a delicious little mower's song, with a quite perfect refrain of--

"A scythe-sweep and a scythe-sweep, We mow the gra.s.s together."

And again, what does not the garden owe to the voice of birds; the deep cawing of the rook in its "curious flight" around the elm-trees; the clear note of the cuckoo from the limes that bound the orchard; and, best of all, the rich, full melody of the thrus.h.!.+ The nightingale's song may be sweeter and stronger, but the nightingale only sings in certain places (certainly not with us), and the thrush is everywhere. The nightingale sings later in the night, but the thrush will go on till nine, and begin again at four, and surely that is all we need. Can anything be truer, or better said, than these lines of Browning's about a thrush?--

"Hark! where my blossomed Pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field, and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops, at the bent spray's edge-- That's the wise thrush--he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture."

But there is one bird dearer to us than the thrush, and that is the swallow, which for some years past has built its nest in our porch. It has been pretty to mark her skimming round and round with anxious watching, till we have left the place. Prettier still, when we have kept ourselves concealed, to see her darting upwards to the nest, which was fringed by four little heads all in a row, and, going from one to the other, give each its share. We could hear the sharp little cry of satisfaction as each nestling was attended to. How much the poets have written about swallows! There is the charming pa.s.sage in Longfellow's "Golden Legend," where the old monk is speaking; he is the librarian, whose duty it is to illuminate the missals for the convent's use and pride:--

"How the swallows twitter under the eaves!

There, now there is one in her nest; I can just catch a glimpse of her head and breast, And will sketch her thus in her quiet nook, For the margin of my gospel-book."

Then how delightful is the boast, which Mr. Courthope, in his _Paradise of Birds_, puts into the nightingale's mouth, that a bird is better than a man, for--

"He never will mount as the swallows, Who dashed round his steeples to pair, Or hawked the bright flies in the hollows Of delicate air."

And, long before this, Banquo had marked their "pendent beds" on Macbeth's castle, and noticed that--

"Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed The air is delicate."

And who does not recall Tennyson's--

"Swallow, swallow, flying, flying south,"

and bearing on swift wing the message that--

"Dark and true and tender is the north"?

Or who, that has once read it, can forget _Les Hirondelles_ of Beranger, and how the French captive among the Moors questions the swallows about his country, his home, his friends, which they perhaps have seen?

Lastly, what a felicitous line is this of the American poet Lowell, when he describes

"The thin-winged swallow _skating_ on the air."

I must bring these Notes, such as they are, to a close, and yet I feel I have scarcely even yet described the pleasures of a garden. But my memory at least can do it justice. It recalls summer afternoons, when the lawn tennis went merrily on on the lawn, by the weeping ash-tree, and summer evenings, when the house was too hot, and we sat out after dinner upon the terrace with the claret and the fruit. The air was all perfume, and the light lingered long in the east over the church steeple three miles away, and no sound but of our own voices broke the silence and the peace.

Again, there were fine bright autumn days--days when the garden was full of warm scent and warmer colour--days when the children could swing for hours in the hammock, which hangs between two large Sycamores, and have their tea-table beneath the trees,--days when the still air was only stirred by the patter of a falling chestnut, or the note of some solitary bird, or the sound of church bells far away. Beyond the gra.s.s-field, which comes nearly up to the house, was a field of wheat, and we could watch the harvesting, and follow with our eyes the loaded waggons as they pa.s.sed along by the hedge-row trees.

But such recollections grow thicker as I write, and words, such as I at least can command, do them little justice. I cannot really share with my readers these pleasures of the past, though I like to fancy that they may feel some kindly sympathy, as they remember happy days in gardens dear to them as mine to me.

NOTES.

NOTE I.

ON THE VIOLA OF THE ROMANS.

I contributed the following note on "The Viola of the Romans," to the _Gardeners' Chronicle_ of September 26, 1874, as I found a correspondent had been adopting Lord Stanhope's views.

Mr. Ruskin in his _Queen of the Air_ wrote, "I suspect that the flower whose name we translate 'Violet' was in truth an Iris" (he is speaking of the Greek _ion_, but the Viola no doubt is whatever the _ion_ was).

In Lord Stanhope's _Miscellanies_, second series, which was published in 1872, a paper, which had been previously (in 1830) read before the Society of Antiquaries, treats of the "Viola of the Ancients."

Lord Stanhope identifies it with the Iris, and on the following grounds:--

1. Because when riding through Sicily in the winter of 1825, he saw many Irises and no Violets, and heard that the country people called the Iris Viola.

2. Because Pliny speaks of Violae luteae, whereas there are no Violets of that colour.