DAFFODILS

“Swift summer into the autumn flowed,And frost in the mist of the morning rode;”

“Swift summer into the autumn flowed,

And frost in the mist of the morning rode;”

and the Spiraea, deeply offended, did nothing at all except slowly rot, and, to pursueThe Sensitive Plant,

“Fill the place with a monstrous undergrowth,”

as was only to be expected. Since that check to its ardour, it has devoted itself to root-action and the results; and all I can do is to admire its rapidly maturing timber, and consider whether it or the house should be removed.

Lucky accidents, or happy experiments, will acclimatise difficult things sometimes. I don’t know how often or in how many places I had tried to make the Alpine gentian,verna, feel at home, when I happened to meet a soldier somewhere who lived in Ireland. He told me of his own efforts with it in artfully prepared moraines and joy-heaps of the kind. It lived, and it flowered, as it has lived and flowered, and also died, here—but it did not spread. It existed, not throve. Then, perhaps by inspiration, he put some of it into a gravel path, and left it there. Or perhaps it drifted there by itself, as such things will—I don’t remember how it was. There, at any rate, it increased and multiplied and replenished the earth, growing indeed as you may see it in Swiss pastures in early Spring, deep blue stars afloat in the streaming waters—one of earth’s loveliest sights. Ah, what an “event” for a gardener to nail that miracle every year as it comes round. I would wait for that as I do for the cuckoo. But first I must wait for a gravel path.

I don’t suppose that any flower in England, except the rose, has been more bepraised, as somebodys aid, by poets who were not gardeners, and gardeners who were not poets; and it is certainly difficult in dealing with it to leave Wordsworth out. I shan’t be able to do it, because I shall want him, but I shall do my best to reach the end of this article without quoting fromA Winter’s Tale. It is satisfactory, at least, to be certified, as I am from Parkinson, that all of our poets, from Shakespeare to Mr. Masefield, have been exercised about the same plant. Parkinson says that we had two English daffodils, one which he calls Peerless Primrose, and another which can be identified as the double daffodil, and which, he says, Gerard found in an old woman’s cottage garden—just where we find it now. Neither Parkinson nor, I suspect, any of the poets had a notion that, strictly speaking, the daffodil was the Asphodel; but how it came about that the word changed its designation I am not able to say. Branching asphodel grows wild in Ireland—not, I believe, in England—and classical poetry is, of course, full of it, though it puts the stiff and stately thing to strange uses. Poets who, as it was freely declared, reclined upon beds of asphodel and moly had not found out the best sites in the Elysian Fields. No flower, however, more eloquently reports the South. I never see mine, whose seed I collected on the Acropolis at Athens, but I remember the Pont du Gard,and the sharp smell of the box-bushes, or Greece, where it clouds the slopes of Hymettus with pink, and burns brown against the sky as you labour up the winding path to Acrocorinth. It will do in England, and do well, if you can secure it sun and drouth.

Our own name for the wild daffodil is Lent Lily, a beautiful and sufficient one, and, to judge by the poets again, the plant has been well distributed. Shakespeare saw it in Warwickshire, and Herrick in Devon; Clare in Northamptonshire, and Wordsworth in the Lakes. Mr. Housman knows it in Salop, and Mr. Masefield in Worcestershire. I know that it is in Sussex and Cornwall, and on the edges of the New Forest. It may be in North Wilts, almost certainly is in the upper Thames Valley; but it is not here, to the best of my belief. I imagine that it does not care for chalk, for though I make it do, it does not thrive, that is, spread itself. Rather, it degenerates, as it used in Kent, where I lived as a boy, and in two or three years turned itself into the old “greenery-yallery” mophead which, whatever Parkinson may say, is not a true variety at all but a bad kind of recidivist. Now, my expert friend, Mr. George Engleheart, who lives across the hills, but on loam, grows daffodils which are a wonder of the realm; but the point is that his discards, which he throws into ditches or stuffs into holes to take their chance, never degenerate into doubles. His ground is a soapy yellow loam, on which you can grow any mortal thing; and a visit to his daffodil fields, as it were just now, is an experience which I have had and promise myself again. All the same,honesty moves me to say—miror magis!He, of course, is a scientist who has grown grey in the pursuit, and I am a sciolist. The beautiful things whose minute differences of hue and measurement are of such moment to him; the nicety of the changes which you can ring upon perianth and calyx—such modulations do not, in my judgment, give the thrill or sudden glory which flowers growing freely and in masses give me: such a thrill as you get from Poet’s Narcissus in a Swiss pasture, or such as Wordsworth’s sister, and then Wordsworth, had from the wind-caught drift of daffodils in Gowbarrow Park; or such as I had in an orchard in North Cornwall, where, as it seemed, under a canopy of snow and rose some god at a picnic had spilled curds and whey all over the sward. The flowers were so thick together as to be distinguishable only as colour: they streamed in long rivers of yellow and white down the hill. My description is less poetical than literal. The things looked eatable, they were so rich.

If you can get such a thrill on your own ground it is by the grace of God. Mr. Engleheart does not grow bulbs for the thrills of the unscientific, though no doubt he has some of his own. But there is one glory of the unskilled and another of the skilled—indeed, the latter has two, for as well as the pure delight of having “pulled off” a delicate bit of cross-breeding, there is added the hope of gain. Your new daffodil should be a gold-mine, and rightly so, because it may represent the work, the thought, and the anxieties of seven years or even more. I heard of a groweronce who, at the season of distribution, had his bulbs out upon his studio table, where they were being sorted, priced and bestowed. In one heap he had certain triumphs of science which were worth, I was told, £90 the bulb. From that point of bliss you could run down through the pounds to the shillings and bring up finally upon the articles which went out at ten shillings a hundred, or even less. There then they lay out, “so many and so many and such glee.” And then, O then—“a whirl blast,” as Wordsworth says, “from behind the hill” swept in at the open door, lifted all the sheets of paper and their freight together, and scattered the priced bulbs higgledy-piggledy on the floor. There was tragic work! Bang went all your ninety pounders; for a bulb in the hand may be worth a thousand on the floor.

One of those unaccountable facts in entomology which are always cropping up in gardening has much exercised my learned friend. Although he has never imported a bulb, nevertheless into his bulb-farm there has imported itself the daffodil parasite—out of the blue, or the black. He showed it me one day, a winged beast somewhere in appearance between a wasp and a hoverfly. I saw bars upon its body, and short wings which looked as if they were made of talc. This creature has aluesfor laying its eggs in the daffodil bulb, and to do so pierces it through and through. Last of all the bulb dies also. There seems to be no remedy but pursuit, capture and death. Just so have the figs at Tarring called up thebeccaficofrom Italy. Can these things be, without our special wonder?

To grow and bring to flower every daffodil you put in the ground is not what I call gardening. Reasonable treatment will ensure it, for the flower is in the bulb before you plant it. As well might you buy from the florist things in full bud, plunge them into your plots, and callthatgardening. Yet it is the gardening of the London parks, and of certain grandees, who ought to know better. If you are graced by nature or art to make daffodils feel themselves at home, you are in the good way. Wisley is so graced; not, I think, Kew. At Wisley they have acclimatised those two charming narcissi,bulbocodiumandcyclamineus, which really carpet the ground. When I was last there they were all over the paths, in the ditches, and in the grass. I daresay they required drastic treatment, for Wisley, after all, was made for man, and not for daffodils. Yet if Wisley were my garden, I know that I should be so flattered by the confidence of those pretty Iberians that I should let them do exactly as they pleased. If a plant chose to make itself a weed, I would as readily allow it as I would a weed which chose to make itself a plant—within reason. I add that qualification, that tyrant’s plea, because I have just remembered what occurred when I was once rash enough to introduceMulgedium alpinumfrom Switzerland. There is no shaking off that insatiable succubus. I was reconciled to giving up a garden on its account, and full of hope that I should never see it again. But I brought with me a peony and some phloxes, andMulgediumwas coiled about their vitals like a tapeworm. It is with me to this hour.

The prettiest thing that a narcissus ever did was done to an old lady I used to know who lived in a cottage in Sussex. Somebody had given her half-a-dozen Jonquil bulbs, which she planted and left alone. They took kindly to her and her cottage garden, and seeded all over it. When I came to know her, the little patch of ground, the dividing ditch, the bank beyond it, and some of the arable beyond that were golden with jonquils; and on days of sun-warmed wind you could smell them from afar. As, with trifling exceptions, it is the sweetest and most carrying scent in the garden, that is not surprising. Hawthorn is such another. Somewhere in Hakluyt’sVoyagesis an account of the return of an embassy from the Court of Boris Godounov. The sailors knew that they were near Sussex before they could see the white cliffs by the smell of the may wafted over sea. What a welcome home!

“Anemones, which droop their eyesEarthward before they dare ariseTo flush the border....”

“Anemones, which droop their eyes

Earthward before they dare arise

To flush the border....”

says the poet, and says truly, for I believe there is no exception to his general statement. The point is really one in the argument between the gardeners and the botanists, as to whether you are to reckon hepaticas as anemones. I shall come to that presently, and here will only point out that hepaticas donotdroop their eyes, or hang their heads, as I prefer to say. Let that be remembered when the scientist tries, as he is so fond of doing, to browbeat the mild Arcadian. Except for that remark I don’t call to mind that the poets have sung about the windflowers. None of them has likened his young woman to a windflower. Meleager, indeed, when he is paying a compliment to his Zenophile, pointedly leaves it out.

“Now bloom white violets, now the daffodilsThat love the rain, now lilies of the hills,”

“Now bloom white violets, now the daffodils

That love the rain, now lilies of the hills,”

he begins; and what lilies those could have been, unless they were lilies of the valley (which sounds absurd), I don’t know. But how could he talk about spring flowers in his country and leave anemones out? It is true, he was a Syrian; but politics don’t interest anemones. No one is to tell me that Asia Minor is withoutAnemone fulgens.

Fulgens is the typical Greek anemone, anyhow, as Coronaria always seems to me specifically Italian. It is a wonder of the woodlands—as of those between Olympia and Megalopolis, or of the yet denser brakes about Tatoi, where the late Constantine used to retire and meditate statecraft. Blanda, the starry purple flower of eighteen points, is commoner in the open. Nothing more beautiful than the flush of these things under the light green veil of the early year can be imagined. The gardener in England who can compass anything like it is in a good way. Luckily it is easy, for these are kindly plants, seed freely, flower in their first year, and are not so affected by climate as to change their habits to suit our calendar. Do not grow them in woods if you want them early. Our woods,in quella parte del giovinetto anno, are both cold and wet. Put them in the open, in light soil sloping to the south, and you will have as many as you want. One thing I have noticed about them is that in England fulgens is constant to its colour, whereas in Greece there are albinos, pure white and very beautiful, with black stamens. The pairing of those with the staple has produced a pink fulgens of great attractions. I have imported it, but it has not spread, and the seed of it comes up scarlet. Blanda has no sports, and is so proliferous that if it is much grown in soils that suit it very probably it will become a naturalised British subject. Here it is a weed.

Our own pair of windflowers are not nearly so easy to deal with as those two Aegean tourists. Nemorosa will only grow happily in woods, and even there does not readily transplant. Pulsatillais subject to winter rot, as anything which lies out at nights in a fur coat must expect to be; and it reacts immediately and adversely to a rich soil. Now nemorosa grows in the fields in Germany, even in water meadows; pulsatilla in Switzerland will stand any amount of snow. But the snow in Switzerland is as dry as salt, and no flower objects to a flood when it is beginning to grow. The enemy in England is wet at the slack time. The best way to treat pulsatilla is to grow it on a steep slope, for that is how it grows itself.

Talking of nemorosa, there is a harebell blue variety of it which I have seen, but never had, and of course the yellow ranunculoides, to be met with in Switzerland, though it is not a widespread plant. I found a broad patch of it under some trees on the edge of Lake Lugano: a clear buttercup yellow, not a dirty white. I don’t call it an exciting plant, all the same, and am perfectly happy without it, and to know it the only truly yellow anemone that exists.

No offence, I hope, to the great sulphur anemone of the Alps, a noble windflower indeed. I know few things more exhilarating than to round a bluff and find a host of it in stately dance. And I know few things less so than to try to dig it up. I have devoted some hours to the pursuit, notably after a night spent at Simplon Dorf. I rose early and toiled till breakfast. I had an inefficient trowel, bought in Florence, and an alpenstock, and with them excavated some two feet of Simplon. At that depth the root of the sulphur anemone was of the thickness of a reasonable rattlesnake, and ran like thecodaof a sonata, strongly, andapparently for ever. Something had to give, and it was the anemone. I coiled up what I had, brought it back with me in a knapsack, and made a home for it among my poor rocks. Nothing to speak of happened for two years, except that it let me know that it lived. Then came a Spring and a miracle. The sulphur anemone burgeoned: that is the only word for what it did. Since then it has never failed, though more than once the rocks have been rent asunder. In what goes on underground this anemone is a tree.

I do not forget—am not likely to forget—Coronaria, which in its (I must own) somewhat sophisticated form ofAnemone de Caenis the glory of my blood and state in the little hanging garden I now possess. I own, it seems, the exact spot it likes. It is thoroughly at home, and proves it by flowering practically all the year round. In the dog-days, I don’t say. But who cares what happens in August? Except for that waste month—the only one in the almanac with nothing distinctive to report—I believe I have hardly failed of a handful of coronaria. Since Christmas I have not failed of a bowlful, and at this time of writing it is out in a horde. Wonderful things they are: nine inches high, four inches across, with a palette ranging from white through the pinks to red and crimson, through the lilacs to violet and the purple of night. There are few better garden flowers. Untidy? Yes, they need care. Too free with their seed? They cannot be for me. I am open to the flattery of a flower’s confidence as (still) to that of a woman’s. Another thing to its credit is its attraction for bees, with the range oftint and tinge which that involves. Your whites will be flushed with auroral rose, or clouded with violet; you will have flecks and splashes of sudden colour, the basal ring of white, whence comes its cognomen, annulata, sometimes invaded. Even the black centre with its stamens is not constant: I have one with a pale green base and stamens of yellow. With these fine things fulgens goes usefully and happily. Coronaria has no such vermilion. A bank of the two together, growing in the sun, can be seen half a mile away, and won’t look like scarlet geranium if there is a judicious admixture. To qualify that dreadful sophistication called “St. Brigid” I shall serve myself of W. S. Gilbert’s useful locution. “Nobody,” he said, “thinks more highly of So-and-so than I do; andIthink he’s a little beast.”

Apennina, I think, wants a mountain. I should like to try it in some favoured ghyll in Cumberland, and some day I will. I have it on a lawn, and have had it for many years. There is no less, but no more, than there ever was. It does not seed. The two colours, china-blue and white, are delicious in partnership, though the blue is not so good as that of blanda, and the white not quite so white as nemorosa’s.

And what am I to say of hepaticas, and howécraserthe botanists? Who am I to deny them with my reason—entirely satisfactory to myself—that thefeelingof the two flowers is distinct and separable? What does an anemone imply? A spring woodland on a mountain slope. What an hepatica? A wet cleft in a rock, sodden last year’s leaves, ragged moss, pockmarked crust ofsnow—and out of them a pale star raying gold from blue. The anemone is gregarious, the hepatica solitary; the anemone is a spring flower, the hepatica a winter flower. And lastly, as a gardener, I say, the anemone can be moved, and is often much the better of it; the hepatica should not be, and is always the worse. If you plant an hepatica root and leave it alone for fifty years, you will have something worth waiting for—a ring of it as big as a cartwheel. I have not done it—but it has been done for me.

One day short of St. Valentine’s (when Nature still takes the liberties which men used to allow themselves) I am able to announce tulips in bud in the open border, which is as much of a record as my crocuses were on the 18th of January. I don’t speak of a sheltered or fruitful valley by any means. What they may be doing with flowers at Wilton and Wilsford has no more relation to me than their goings-on at Torquay or Grange-over-Sands. Up this way, for reasons which it would be tedious to report, the spring comes slowly—as a rule. This year is like no other that I can remember, as no doubt the reckoning will be.

I know what tulip it is. There is only one which would be so heedlessly daring. It is that noble wild Tuscan flower which the people of the Mugello and thereabouts callOcchio del Sole, which has a sage green leaf, a long flower-stalk of maroon, and atop of that a great chalice of geranium red with yellow base and a black blotch in the midst. Looking into the depths from above there is the appearance of a lurid eye. But its real name isPraecox, and Parkinson says that it flowers in January. I don’t believe him. I have had it for years, and never saw it before mid-March. Parkinson is vague about tulips, classing them mostly by colour and inordinate names of his own. You may have the Crimson Prince, or Bracklar; or the Brancion Prince; or a Duke, “that is more or less faire deep red, with greater or lesser yellowedges, and a great yellow bottome.” Then there is a Testament Brancion, or a Brancion Duke; and lastly The King’s Flower, “that is, a crimson or bloud red, streamed with a gold yellow”—which ought to look indifferent well at Buckingham Palace.Praecoxused to grow freely in the hill country above Fiesole, always on cultivated ground; and I have found lots of it in thepoderiof Settignano, not so much as of the ordinary blood red, a smaller and meaner flower altogether; but enough to make a walk under the olives in very early Spring an enchantment. Ages ago Mrs. Ross sent me a hamper of them, which has lasted me ever since; for this tulip increases freely, and is invaluable as the first of its family.

The next to appear will be the little Persianviolacea, with its crinkled wavy leaves flatlings, and the pointed bud, which gives a rose-coloured flower when open, slightly retroflexed, enough so, at least, to make it plain that the familiar ornament of Persian and Rhodian tiles was adapted from it. I always thought its name waspersica; but Weathers, I see, makes that a bronze flower, and namesviolaceaas the earliest of all the Persians, which mine certainly is. So that, as they say, is that. I find it happiest among rocks, as all bulbs, except lilies, are if they can get there. How else secure the baking in summer which is so necessary? A pretty thing it is, in short, charming to discover for yourself in a corner of a man’s rock-garden, all the more so as you will make your discovery at a season when you least expect tulips; but there is nothing of a “sudden glory” to be had from it. Nobody could be knocked off hisæsthetic perch by a Persian tulip, still less off his moral perch. I have known that done by one of the Caucasian tulips—it led to swift and stealthy work with a penknife at Kew. But that was a long time ago, and the delinquent can never do it again, for a final reason.

The loveliest tulip in the world—I speak only of natural flowers, not of nurserymen’s monsters—is, in my opinion, the littleBandiera di Toscana, the sword-leaved, sanguine-edged thing with the narrow bud of red and white, which opens in the sun to be a milky star. It is the loveliest, alike in colour and in habit, but one of the most fastidious. Short of lifting it, which the true gardener disdains to do, there is no certainty that it will spring up again when the time comes round. Your best chance is on rocks, I daresay; and I have succeeded with it in a border under a south wall with a pent of thatch over. It does not like frost, and abominates rain at the wrong time of year. It clings, in fact, to its Mediterranean habits, which some things contentedly lose—Irisstylosa, for instance, which flowers here better in November than it does in April. I have myclusianas—for that is their proper name—now in a terraced border, full south, under clumps of mossy saxifrage, and they do as well as can be expected. They return with the swallows, and open wide to the sun; but I am not going to pretend that they ramp. If I could afford it I would put them in a place where they could take their chance of the spade; for there is this to be said of all the Florentine tulips that, although they are not designedly lifted, they grow in a country whereevery square yard of ground is cultivated, and consequently are turned over by the plough of the spade every year—no doubt to their vast benefit. But you must not mind how many of them you slice, or bury upside down, or leave above ground at that work—and Idomind.

The truly marvellousGreigiis just showing itself: no increase there, I am sorry to say. Weathers says that it “reproduces itself freely.” Not here, O Apollo. I cannot make any Caucasian tulips have families; they are resolute Malthusians; nevertheless, I shall have my few bubbles of scarlet as before, and before they have done with me they will be as large as claret-glasses, on short stems, which are the best kind of claret-glasses. I could do with a hundred of them, but I don’t know what to give them that I have not given. They grow on limestone at home, and I give them limestone. They are never disturbed in the Caucasus, and I never disturb them. It is my distance from the equator that beats me. So I must be content with my three or four—only I shan’t boast of them to ladies from Aix-les-Bains. A tulip, by the way, which I covet, but have not so far been able to obtain, is called, Ithink,saxatilis. It has rather a sprawly growth, but several flowers on the stalk, and is sweetly scented. In colour it is faint and indeterminate; flushes of mauve, white and yellow. Several nurserymen offer me bulbs by that name, some have induced me to buy them; but it has never been the right thing. I may be wrong, or they may be: I must ask an expert. It may be priceless, in which case I shan’t have it. I bought somePeruvianpseudo-crocusonce, of a marvellous blue indeed—not a gentian, but a kingfisher blue—at seven and sixpence per bulb, and the mice, mistaking it for a real crocus, ate them all. “These are my crosses, Mr. Wesley.” But, if we are talking about money, Mrs. Rossgaveme a tulip once which was worth, so she told me, twenty pounds. Certainly it was very handsome, a tall Darwin of bronze feathered with gold: calledBuonarroti. It was prolific, and in no short time filled the border in which it grew. If its sons had been worthy of their sire there might have been hundreds of pounds’ worth of them, all growing naked in the open air. But I observed that they grew paler year by year; and when I returned to the garden after a five years’ absence I could not believe that I had ever planted such a bilious tulip. My grand oldOcchi del Sole, on the other hand, were as vivid as ever.

I have never possessed the so-called native English tulip, whose botanical name issilvestris; but I have seen it. I know where it grows, and blows, and could take you to the place—only I shall not. My father found it by chance, and brought a flower of it home in high feather. He found it, truly enough, in a wood, so its name describes its habits. Now, I inquire, is it an indigenous plant? It is what I doubt. If it is, it must have existed from all time; the Iberians must have grown it on their lenches, or found it lower down, in the jungle. Yet it is unknown to the poets; and the word “tulip,” remark, is a Turkish word disguised. Parkinson knows nothing ofTulipa silvestris. Far more probably it camefrom the South, in the maw of some straying bird—perhaps a hoopoo, or the hold of an adventuring ship. That was how we became possessed of the wild peony which is, or was, to be found on an island in the Severn Sea. Who is to say how that happened? Perhaps Spanish sailors had a peony growing in the after-cabin to Our Lady of Seven Dolours, and were shipwrecked with her and it on the strand of Lundy. How did two ilexes come to be growing out of the Guinigi tower at Lucca? How did a fig-tree find itself in the middle arch of the bridge at Cordova? There are more ways of accounting for a wild tulip in Kent than by imagining that God Almighty bade it grow there.

I have left myself no room in which to treat of nurserymen’s tulips, and the less the pity in that they can talk of them so eloquently themselves. There is a Dutch grower who simply wallows in adjectives about them every year. He photographs his children, smiling like anything, up to the neck in tulips; he poses with his arms full of them before his wife, like an Angel of the Annunciation. As for his words, they come bubbling from him as they used from Mr. Swinburne when he saw a baby. It is true that, like the talk about them, they get taller every year. They are less flowers than portents, and the only thing to do with them is to treat them as so much colour, turning your garden for the time being into a Regent Street shop-window. Brown wallflower andLa Rêvelook well, so do yellow wallflower andOthello. Last year I triedClara ButtandCheiranthus allionii, and had a show like Mr.Granville Barker’sTwelfth Night. Rose pink and orange is not everybody’s mixture.

The finest unrehearsed effect I ever had with cottage tulips was when we had a heavy fall of snow one 30th of April, and I went out and saw the great red heads swimming in the flood like strong men. They were up to the neck, and seemed to enjoy it. But they died of the effort; for at night it froze.

If, like me, you are more interested in seeing things happen than in seeing them when they have happened, you will not be such an advocate of Summer as of other, any other, seasons. For Summer is the one time of year when practically nothing happens outdoors. From about the middle of May—I speak of the south parts—to the middle of September Nature sits with her hands in her lap and a pleasantly tired face. There, my children, she says, I have done my job. I hope you like it. Most of us, I own, do like it very much, and signify the same in the usual manner by vigorous ball-exercise and liquid refreshment, much of it of an explosive and delusive kind. When the Summer is over, somewhere round about Michaelmas day, Nature rolls up her sleeves and begins again. Properly speaking, there are only two seasons—Spring and Summer. The people therefore who, like me, prefer the Spring to the Summer, have more time in which to exhibit or dissemble their love—and a good deal of it, I confess, uncommonly beastly in the matter of weather.

The people who like everything are the people to envy. Children, for example, love the Winter just as much as the Summer. They whistle as they jump their feet, or flack their arms across their bodies; and whistling is one of the sure signs of contented youth. I remember that we used to think it rare sport to find the sponge a solid globe of ice, or to be able to get off cleaningour teeth on the ground that the tooth water was frozen in the bottle. I don’t believe I ever had cold feet in bed, and am sure that if I did I had something much more exciting to think about. There might be skating to-morrow, or we could finish the snow-man, or go tobogganning with the tea-tray; or it was Christmas; or we were going to the pantomime. All seasons were alike to us; each had its delights. That of Summer, undoubtedly, was going to the seaside. We always had a month of that, and then a month in some country place or other which my father did not know. That was done for his sake, because the seaside bored him so much that even his children noticed it. It was nothing to us, of course, as we lived in the country, and did not, as he did, poor man, spend most days of the year in London; but equally of course we weren’tbored. I never heard of a child being bored, and can imagine few things more tragic in a small way. No: it was always interesting to live in someone else’s house, learn something of their ways, chance upon a family photograph, or a discarded toy, or a dog’s grave in the shrubbery; or to read their books and guess what bits they had liked—any little things like that. And, of course, it was comfortable to know that one’s father wasn’t always smothering a gape, or trying to escape from nigger-minstrels. As for the sea—a very different thing from the seaside—I don’t believe he ever looked at it. I am certain that I never saw him on the sands. The sands are no place for you unless you had rather be barefoot than not. Now, it is a fact that I never saw my father’s feet.

At the same time, I don’t know where else one could be in August, except at the seaside. Really, there is very little to say for the country in that month. The trees are as near black as makes no matter, the hills are dust-colour, the rivers are running dry. True, the harvest is going on; but the harvest is not what it used to be. You had, indeed, “a field full of folk” (in old Langland’s words) in former days. All hands were at it, and the women following the men, building the hiles, as we call them; and the children beside them, twisting up the straw ties as fast as they could twist. And then the bread and cheese and cider—or it might be home-brewed beer—in the shade! But bless me—last year I saw the harvesting of a hundred acre field—our fields run very big down here; and the whole thing was being done by one man on a machine! The Solitary Reaper, forsooth! The man was reaper, tyer and binder all in one; you never saw so desolate a spectacle. So the harvest is not what it was. It may have attractions for the farmer, but for nobody else that I can think of. Go north for your Summer and you may do better. August is wet, generally, in Scotland, but when you are in Scotland you won’t mind rain, or had better not. You can catch trout in the rain in Scotland, and with a fly too: that is the extraordinary part of it. And the Scottish summer twilights are things to remember. They are overdone in Norway, where they go on all night; where the sun may go behind the hill for five minutes and begin the day before you have thought of going to bed. You can’t keep that up—but it is exciting enoughat first. The great charm of the Norwegian Summer to me is that it includes what we call Spring. The other season in that country is Winter, which begins in September and ends with May. Then, immediately, Summer begins: the grass grows and is ready for the scythe, the cherries flower and get ripe and are eaten—all at once. You get those amazing contrasts there which you only have in mountainous countries; which I remember most vividly crossing the Cevennes from Le Puy to Alais. On the watershed I was picking daffodils, only just ready to be picked; in the valley of the Ardeche they were making hay, and roses were dusty in the hedges. I slid from March into June—in twenty minutes. You will not be so piqued in England; yet if your taste lies in the way of strawberries for instance, you can do pretty work even in England. You can begin in Cornwall, or Scilly, and have your first dish in early May, or late April, with clotted cream, of course. Then you can eat your way through the western shires to Hampshire, and make yourself very ill somewhere about Fareham, in June. When you are able to stand the journey, you can go on to the Fens and find them ready for you in early July. In August you will find them at their best in Cumberland, and in October, weather permitting, you will have them on your table in Scotland. After that, if you are alive, and really care for strawberries, you must leave this kingdom, and perhaps go to California. I don’t know.

The Summer will give you better berries than the strawberry, in my opinion. It will give youthewildstrawberry, which, if you can find somebody to pick them for you, and then eat them with sugar and white wine, is a dish for Olympians, ambrosial food. Then there is the bilberry, which wants cream and a great deal of tooth-brush afterwards, and the blaeberry, which grows in Cumberland above the 2,000 foot mark, just where the Stagshorn moss begins; and the wild raspberry which here is found on the tops of the hills, and in Scotland at the bottoms. I declare the wild raspberry to be one of the most delicious fruits God Almighty ever made. In Norway you will have the cranberry and the saeter-berry; but in Norway you will want nothing so long as there are cherries. I know Kent very well—but its cherries are not so good as those of Norway.

I had no intention, when I began, to talk about eating all the time. It is a bad sign when one begins that, though as a matter of fact we do think a great deal of our food in the country—because we are hungry, and it is so awfully good; and (as I daresay the Londoner thinks) because we have nothing else to think about. That is a mistake, and the Summer is the time to correct it, by spending it in the country and trying to understand us. Let me be bold enough to suggest to the Londoner who takes the prime of Summer to learn the ways of the country in it, that he would prove a more teachable disciple if he did not bring his own ways with him. He is rather apt to do that. He expects, for example, his golf, and always has his toys with him for the purpose. Well, he should not. Golf is a suburban game, handy for the townsman in his off hours. Country people don’t play golf.They have too much to do. The charabanc is another town-institution, to be used like a stagecoach. Nothing of the country can be learned by streaming over moor and mountain in one of them. The Oreads hide from them; Pan and old Sylvanus treat them as natural process, scourges to be endured, like snowstorms or foot-and-mouth disease. The country is veiled from charabancs, partly in dust, partly in disgust. For we don’t understand hunting in gangs. The herd-instinct which such things involve and imply is not a country instinct. We are self-sufficient here, still, in spite of all invitation, individuals.

With the West wind blowing down the valley, wet and warm from the Atlantic, men go home leisurely from their work in the fields, happy in the last of the light, and enjoying, though they never say so, the delicate melancholy of the hour. It is a gift you make no account of when the East wind brings it you, for that Scythian scourge withers what it touches, and under its whip the light itself seems like a husk about the day. Old people tell us that it brings the blight, whatever they mean by that. It brought locusts into Egypt once, and brings influenza into England. Perhaps they put the two together. It brings sick thinking too, a cold which has the property of drying up the springs of the blood. There’s no escape from it. The air seems thinner that comes from the East; brickwork will not keep it out, nor glazed windows. One fancies in the black mood of it that the “channering worm” at his work in the churchyard must feel it, and dive deeper into the mould.

But now one can enjoy the sweet grave evening and turn the mind hopefully to the prime of the year that is coming. The blackbird whistles for it in the leafless elm; a belated white hen on the hillside, very much at her ease, is still heeling up the turf and inspecting the result. A cottage wife, having her fire alight and kettle on the boil, stands for a moment at her open door. To mate the gentle influence of the evening she has made herself trim in clean white blouse and blue skirt, andlooks what she was intended to be, a pretty young woman with a pride in herself. A friend, going home, stops her perambulator for a minute to exchange sentiments about the nights “drawing out.” Almost as she speaks this one draws in—for at this time of year twilight is a thing of moments. It will be dark before she is home. No matter: the wind is warm and balmy; she can take her ease, and her baby be none the worse. This is the weather that opens the human buds as well as the snowdrops, and gems the gardens with aconites, and the hearths with sprawling children. We do not heed Dr. Inge down here.

Here’s the end of January, and the winter, by our calendar, over in three weeks’ time. Since that calendar was written up we have invented a new winter. It is more difficult to get through April with safety, at least to garden buds, than any January we have known for forty years; but as far as we are concerned ourselves we can stand anything in April, with May to follow; whereas January can still intimidate, and a cold spell then will cause twice the sickness of the Spring-winter. January is to April as Till to Tweed:

“Till said to Tweed,’Though ye rin wi’ speed,An’ I rin slaw,Where ye drown ae monI drown twa.”

“Till said to Tweed,

’Though ye rin wi’ speed,

An’ I rin slaw,

Where ye drown ae mon

I drown twa.”

If you look at the graves in a country churchyard, of the two outside generations, that is, of old people and young children, nearly all willhave found their “bane” in December and January.

With us in the West, the thing which kills the plants in our gardens also kills the villagers, very old or very young: excessive wet, namely, followed by hard frost or murderous wind. The other day we had a day of warm drenches, drifting sheets of rain, a whole day of them, the wind in the West. About midnight, the weathercock chopped round to meet a whirl-blast from the East: the sky cleared, and it froze like mad. I went round my borders in the morning, quaking at the heart. The garden was like a battle-field. Nothing can cope with that. The babies get pneumonia, the veterans bronchitis, the sexton is busy; every day you hear the passing bell. Yet whether it is because we observe punctually the Laws of Being, or (as the Dean will have it) in spite of it, the facts are that the supply of babies never fails, and that we live to a great age. The oldest gardener I know—I shouldn’t wonder if he were the oldest gardener in the world—lives in this village. Eighty-nine.

“I know a girl—she’s eighty-five”—

That was Lord Houghton’s way of beginning a poem on Mrs. Grote. My gardener beats her by four years. To and fro, four times a day, he walks his half-mile—to work and back. I saw him the other day half-way up a cherry-tree, sawing off a dead branch. Mrs. Grote again:

“She lived to the age of a hundred and ten,And died of a fall from a cherry-tree then.”

“She lived to the age of a hundred and ten,

And died of a fall from a cherry-tree then.”

To look at his sapless limbs, you might think he could saw off one of them and take no hurt. But not at all. Life is high in him still. His eye is bright, his step is brisk. We have many octagenarians, but I believe he is the patriarch of our village. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in Bath, beats him by a year.

We are stoics, without knowing what that means down here. Whatever our years tell us we make no account of them, or of ailments, or physical discomfort; and as for Death, the Antick, however close he stand to us—the Grizzly One, we call him—we take no notice of him, so long as we can move about. The end is not long in coming when a man must keep the house, or his bed. Then, so sure as fate, he will stiffen at the joints and come out no more to enjoy the lingering of the light. The chalk, which he has been inhaling and absorbing all his life, will harden in him, and, he will tell you, “time’s up.” Want of imagination, that fine indifference to fate, perhaps—but I don’t know. I have never been able to deny imagination to our country folk. The faculty takes various forms, and is not to be refused to a man because it finds a harsh vent and issues contorted. I prefer to put it that tradition, which is our religion, has put obedience to the Laws of Life above everything else. One of those laws says, Work. And work we do, until we drop. There is a noble creature lying now, I fear, under a stroke which will prevent her doing another hand’s turn of work. Her children are all about her bed; I saw one of them this morning before she went there. She confessed, with tears, the anguish it would be to see hermother lying idle. Sixty-three, she was, and had never been a day without work in her children’s recollection. She had never been in bed after six in the morning, never stayed at home or abed except, of course, for child-bed. She had had eight children, brought up six of them to marry and prosper in the world. And now she lies stricken, and they, those prosperous young women, all about her bed. How well Shakespeare knew that world:

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,Nor the stormy winter’s rages;Thou thy earthly course hast run,Home hast gone, and ta’en thy wages.”

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the stormy winter’s rages;

Thou thy earthly course hast run,

Home hast gone, and ta’en thy wages.”

Nothing for tears, or knocking of the breast. The words ring as solemnly as the bell. I cannot conceive of earthly thing more beautiful than such faithful, patient, diligent, ordered lives, rounded off by such mute and uncomplaining death-bed scenes. The fact that so they have been lived, so rounded off, for two thousand years makes them sacred, for me. How often has the good soul whose end I am awaiting now stood at her cottage door to mark the lingering of the light? May her passing be as gentle as this day’s has been!

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