English Larkspur Seven Feet High.
It is conditions like these that keep the gardener of hardy things ever on the alert. Beds for annuals or florists' plants are thoroughly dug and graded eachspring, so that the weeds that must be combated are of new and comparatively shallow growth. The hardy bed, on the contrary, in certain places must be stirred with a fork only and that with the greatest care, for, if well-planned, plants of low growth will carpet the ground between tall standing things, so that in many spots the fingers, with a small weeding hoe only, are admissible. Thus a blade of grass here, some chickweed there, the seed ball of a composite dropping in its aerial flight, and lo! presently weedlings and seedlings are wrestling together, and you hesitate to deal roughly with one for fear of injuring the constitution of the other. To go to the other extreme and keep the hardy garden or border as spick and span clean as a row of onions or carrots in the vegetable garden, is to do away with the informality and a certain gracious blending of form and colour that is one of its greatest charms.
Thus it comes about, with the most successful of hardy mixed borders, that, at the end of the third season, things will become a little confused and the relations between certain border-brothers slightly strained; the central flowers of the clumps of phloxes, etc., grow small, because the newer growth of the outside circle saps their vitality.
Personally, I believe in drastic measures and everythird or fourth year, in late September, or else April, according to season and other contingencies, I have all the plants carefully removed from the beds and ranged in rows of a kind upon the broad central walk. Then, after the bed is thoroughly worked, manured, and graded, the plants are divided and reset, the leavings often serving as a sort of horticultural wampum, the medium of exchange among neighbours with gardens, or else going as a freewill offering to found a garden for one of the "plotters" who needs encouragement.
The limitations of the soil of my garden and surroundings serve as the basis of an experience that, however, I have found carried out practically in the same way in the larger gardens of the Bluffs and in many other places that Evan and I have visited. So that any one thinking that a hardy garden, at least of herbaceous plants, is a thing that, once established, will, if not molested, go on forever, after the manner of the fern banks of the woods or the wild flowers of marsh and meadow, will be grievously disappointed.
Of course, where hardy plants are massed, as in nurseries, horticultural gardens, or the large estates, each in a bed or plot of its kind, this resetting is far simpler, as each variety can receive the culture best suited to it, and there is no mixing of species.
Another common error in regard to the hardy garden, aided and abetted byGarden Goozle, is that it is easy or even practicable to have every bed in a blooming and decorative condition during the whole season. It is perfectly possible always to have colour and fragrance in some part of the garden during the entire season, after the manner of the natural sequence of bloom that passes over the land, each bed in bloom some of the time, but not every bed all of the time. Artifice and not nature alone can produce this, and artifice is too costly a thing for the woman who is her own gardener, even if otherwise desirable. For it should appeal to every one having a grain of garden sense that, if the plants of May and June are to grow and bloom abundantly, those that come to perfection in July and August, if planted in their immediate vicinity, must be overshadowed and dwarfed. The best that can be done is to leave little gaps or lines between the hardy plants, so that gladioli, or some of the quick-growing and really worthy annuals, can be introduced to lend colour to what becomes too severely of the past.
There is one hardy garden, not far from Boston, one of those where the landscape architect lingers to study the possibilities of the formal side of his art in skilful adjustment of pillar, urn, pergola, and basin,—this garden is never out of flower. At many seasons Evan and I had visited it, early and late, only to find it one unbroken sheet of bloom. How was it possible, we queried? Comes a day when the complex secret of the apparent simple abundance was revealed. It was as the foxgloves, that flanked a long alley, were decidedly waning when, quite early one morning, we chanced to behold a small regiment of men remove the plants, root and branch, and swiftly substitute for them immense pot-grown plants of the tall flower snapdragon (Antirrhinum), perfectly symmetrical in shape, with buds well open and showing colour. These would continue in bloom quite through August and into September. So rapidly was the change made that, in a couple of hours at most, all traces were obliterated, and the casual passer-by would have been unaware that the plants had not grown on the spot. This sort of thing is a permissible luxury to those who can afford and desire an exhibition garden, but it is not watching the garden growing and quivering and responding to all its vicissitudes and escapes as does the humble owner. Hardy gardening of this kind is both more difficult and costly, even if more satisfactory, than filling a bed with a rotation of florists' flowers, after the custom as seen in the parks and about club-houses: to wit, first tulips, then pansies and daisies,next foliage plants or geraniums, and finally, when frost threatens, potted plants of hardy chrysanthemums are brought into play.
No, The Garden, You, and I know that hardy plants, native and acclimated, may be had in bloom from hepatica time until ice crowns the last button chrysanthemum and chance pansy, but to have every bed in continuous bloom all the season is not for us, any more than it is to be expected that every individual plant in a row should survive the frost upheavals and thaws of winter.
If a garden is so small that half a dozen each of the ten or twelve best-known species of hardy herbs will suffice, they may be bought of one of the many reliable dealers who now offer such things; but if the place is large and rambling, affording nooks for hardy plants of many kinds and in large quantities, then a permanent seed bed is a positive necessity.
This advice is especially for those who are now so rapidly taking up old farmsteads, bringing light again to the eyes of the window-panes that have looked out on the world of nature so long that they were growing dim from human neglect. In these places, where land is reckoned by the acre, not by the foot, there is no excuse for the lack of seed beds for both hardy and annual flowers (though these latter belong to anotherrecord), in addition to space for cuttings of shrubs, hardy roses, and other woody things that may be thus rooted.
If there is a bit of land that has been used for a vegetable garden and is not wholly worn out, so much the better. The best seed bed I have ever seen belongs to Jane Crandon at the Jenks-Smith place on the Bluffs. It was an old asparagus bed belonging to the farm, thoroughly well drained and fertilized, but the original crop had grown thin and spindling from being neglected and allowed to drop its seed.
In the birth of this bed the wind and sun, as in all happy gardens, had been duly consulted, and the wind promised to keep well behind a thick wall of hemlocks that bounded it on the north and east whenever he was in a cruel mood. The sun, casting his rays about to get the points of compass, promised that he would fix his eye upon the bed as soon as he had bathed his face in mist on rising and turned the corner of the house, and then, after watching it until past noon, turn his back, so no wonder that the bed throve.
Any well-located bit of fairly good ground can be made into a hardy seed bed, provided only that it is not where frozen water covers it in winter, or in the way of the wind, coming through a cut or sweepingover the brow of a hill, for flowers are like birds in this respect,—they can endure cold and many other hardships, but they quail before the blight of wind.
For all gardens of ordinary size a bit of ground ten feet by thirty feet will be sufficient. If the earth is heavy loam and inclined to cake or mould, add a little sifted sand and a thin sprinkling of either nitrate of soda or one of the "complete" commercial manures. Barn-yard manure, unless very well rotted and thoroughly worked under, is apt to develop fungi destructive to seedlings. This will be sufficient preparation if the soil is in average condition; but if the earth is old and worn out, it must be either sub-soiled or dug and enriched with barnyard (not stable) manure to the depth of a foot, or more if yellow loam is not met below that depth.
If the bed is on a slight slope, so much the better. Dig a shallow trench of six or eight inches around it to carry off the wash. An abrupt hillside is a poor place for such a bed, as the finer seeds will inevitably be washed out in the heavy rains of early summer. If the surface soil is lumpy or full of small stones that escape fine raking, it must be shovelled through a sand-screen, as it is impossible for the most ambitious seed to grow if its first attempt is met by the pressure of what wouldbe the equivalent of a hundred-ton boulder to a man.
It is to details such as these that success or failure in seed raising is due, and when people say, "I prefer to buy plants; I am very unlucky with seeds," I smile to myself, and the picture of something I once observed done by one of the so-called gardeners of my early married days flits before me.
The man scraped a groove half an inch deep in hard-baked soil, with a pointed stick, scattered therein the dustlike seeds of the dwarf blue lobelia as thickly as if he had been sprinkling sugar on some very sour article, then proceeded to trample them into the earth with all the force of very heavy feet. Of course the seeds thus treated found themselves sealed in a cement vault, somewhat after the manner of treating victims of the Inquisition, the trickle of moisture that could possibly reach them from a careless watering only serving to prolong their death from suffocation.
The woman gardener, I believe, is never so stupid as this; rather is she tempted to kill by kindness in overfertilizing and overwatering, but too lavish of seed in the sowing she certainly is, and I speak from the conviction born of my own experience.
When the earth is all ready for the planting, and thesweet, moist odour rises when you open the seed papers with fingers almost trembling with eagerness, it seems second nature to be lavish. If a few seeds will produce a few plants, why not the more the merrier? If they come up too thick, they can be thinned out, you argue, and thick sowing is being on the safe side. But is it? Quite the contrary. When the seedlings appear, you delay, waiting for them to gain a good start before jarring their roots by thinning. All of a sudden they make such strides that when you begin, you are appalled by the task, and after a while cease pulling the individual plants, but recklessly attack whole "chunks" at once, or else give up in a despair that results in a row of anæmic, drawn-out starvelings that are certainly not to be called a success. After having tried and duly weighed the labour connected with both methods, I find it best to sow thinly and to rely on filling gaps by taking a plant here and there from a crowded spot. For this reason, as well as that of uniformity also, it is always better to sow seeds of hardy or annual flowers in a seed bed, and then remove, when half a dozen leaves appear, to the permanent position in the ornamental part of the garden.
With annuals, of course, there are some exceptions to this rule,—in the case of sweet peas, nasturtiums,mignonette, portulaca, poppies, and the like, where great quantities are massed.
When you have prepared a hardy seed bed of the dimensions of ten by thirty feet, which will allow of thirty rows, ten feet long and a foot apart (though you must double the thirty feet if you intend to cultivate between the rows with any sort of weeding machine, and if you have room there should be two feet or even three between the rows), draw a garden line taut across the narrow way of the plot at the top, snap it, and you will have the drill for your first planting, which you may deepen if the seeds be large.
Before beginning, make a list of your seeds, with the heights marked against each, and put the tallest at the top of the bed.
"Why bother with this, when they are to be transplanted as soon as they are fist up?" I hear Mary Penrose exclaim quickly, her head tipped to one side like an inquisitive bird.
Because this seed bed, if well planned, will serve the double purpose of being also the "house supply bed." If, when the transplanting is done, the seedlings are taken at regular intervals, instead of all from one spot, those that remain, if not needed as emergency fillers, will bloom as they stand and be the flowers to be utilized by cutting for house decoration, without depriving the garden beds of too much of their colour. At the commercial florists, and in many of the large private gardens, rows upon rows of flowers are grown on the vegetable-garden plan, solely for gathering for the house, and while those with limited labour and room cannot do this extensively, they can gain the same end by an intelligent use of their seed beds.
Many men (and more especially many women), many minds, but however much tastes may differ I think that a list of thirty species of herbaceous perennials should be enough to satisfy the ambition of an amateur, at least in the climate of the middle and eastern United States. I have tried many more, and I could be satisfied with a few less. Of course by buying the seeds in separate colours, as in the single case of pansies, one may use the entire bed for a single species, but the calculation of size is based upon either a ten-foot row of a mixture of one species, or else that amount of ground subdivided among several colours.
Of the seeds for the hardy beds themselves, the enticing catalogues offer a bewildering array. The maker of the new garden would try them all, and thereby often brings on a bit of horticultural indigestion in which gardener and garden suffer equally, and the resultingplants frequently perish from pernicious anæmia. Of the number of plants needed, each gardener must be the judge; also, in spite of many warnings and directions, each one must finally work on the lines of personally won experience. What is acceptable to the soil and protected by certain shelter in my garden on one side of hill crest or road may not flourish in a different soil and exposure only a mile away. One thing is very certain, however,—it is time wasted to plant a hardy garden of herbaceous plants in shallow soil.
In starting the hardy seed bed it is always safe to plant columbines, Canterbury bells, coreopsis, larkspur, pinks in variety, foxgloves, hollyhocks, gaillardia, the cheerful evergreen candy-tuft, bee balm and its cousin wild bergamot, forget-me-nots, evening primroses, and the day-flowering sundrops, Iceland and Oriental poppies, hybrid phlox, the primrose and cowslips of both English fields and gardens, that are quite hardy here (at least in the coastwise New England and Middle states), double feverfew, lupins, honesty, with its profusion of lilac and white bloom and seed vessels that glisten like mother-of-pearl, the tall snapdragons, decorative alike in garden or house, fraxinella or gas plant, with its spikes of odd white flowers, and pansies, always pansies, for the open in spring and autumn, in rich, shady nooksall summer, and even at midwinter a few tufts left in a sunny spot, at the bottom of a wall by the snowdrops, will surprise you with round, cheerful faces with the snow coverlet tucked quite under their chins.
Fraxinella, German Iris and Candy-tuft.
It is well to keep a tabulated list of these old-time perennials in theGarden Boke, so that in the feverish haste and excitement of the planting season a mere glance will be a reminder of height, colour, and time of bloom. I lend you mine, not as containing anything new or original, but simply as a suggestion, a hint of what one garden has found good and writ on its honour list. Newer things and hybrids are now endless, and may be tested and added, one by one, but it takes at least three seasons of this adorably unmonotonous climate of alternate drought, damp, open or cold winter, to prove a plant hardy and worthy a place on the honour roll. (See p. 376.)
Before you plant, sit down by yourself with the packages spread before you and examine the seeds at your leisure. This is the first uplifting of the veil that you may see into the real life of a garden, a personal knowledge of the seed that mothers the perfect plant.
It may seem a trivial matter, but it is not so; each seed, be it seemingly but a dust grain, bears its own type and identity. Also, from its shape, size, and the hardness or thinness of its covering, you may learn the necessities of its planting and development, for nowhere more than in the seed is shown the miraculous in nature and the forethought and economy of it all.
The smaller the seed, the greater the yield to a flower, as if to guard against chances of loss. The stately foxglove springs from a dust grain, and fading holds aloft a seed spike of prolific invention; the lupin has stout, podded, countable seeds that must of necessity fall to the ground by force of weight. Also in fingering the seeds, you will know why some are slow in germinating: these are either hard and gritty, sandlike, like those of the English primrose, smooth as if coated with varnish, like the pansy, violet, columbine, and many others, or enclosed in a rigid shell like the iris-hued Japanese morning-glories and other ipomeas. Heart of Nature is never in a hurry, for him time is not. What matters it if a seed lies one or two years in the ground?
With us of seed beds and gardens, it is different. We wish present visible growth, and so we must be willing to lend aid, and first aid to such seeds is to give them a whiff of moist heat to soften what has become more hard than desirable through man's intervention. For in wild nature the seed is sown as soon as it ripens, and falls to the care of the ground before the vitalityof the parent plant has quite passed from it. That is why the seed of a hardy plant, self-sown at midsummer, grows with so much more vigour than kindred seed that has been lodged in a packet since the previous, season.
My way of "first aiding" these seeds is to tie them loosely in a wisp of fine cheese-cloth or muslin, leaving a length of string for a handle (as tea is sometimes prepared for the pot by those who do not like mussy tea leaves). Dip the bag in hot (not boiling) water, and leave it there at least an hour, oftentimes all night. In this way the seed is softened and germination awakened. I have left pansy seeds in soak for twenty-four hours with good results. Of course the seed should be planted before it dries, and rubbing it in a little earth (after the manner of flouring currants for cake) will keep the seeds from sticking either to the fingers or to each other.
What a contrast it all is, our economy and nature's lavishness; our impatience, nature's calm assurance! In the garden the sower feels a responsibility, the sweat beads stand on the brow in the sowing. With nature undisturbed it may be the blind flower of the wild violet perfecting its moist seed under the soil, a nod of a stalk to the wind, a ball of fluff sailing by, or the hunger of a bird, and the sowing is done.
(From Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)
Woodridge,May10.
"Dear Mrs. Evan,
"For the past week I have been delving in the seed bed, and until it was an accomplished fact, that is as far as putting on the top sheet of finely sifted dirt over the seeds sleeping in rows and rounding the edges after the most approved methods of bed-making, praying the while for a speedy awakening, I had neither fingers for pen, ink, and paper, nor the head to properly think out the answer to your May-day invitation.
"So you have heard that we are to take a long vacation this summer, and therefore ask us to join your driving and tramping trip in search of garden and sylvan adventure; in short to become your fellow-strollers in the Forest of Arden, now transported to the Berkshires.
"It was certainly a kind and gracious thought of yours to admit outsiders into the intimacies of such a journey, and on the moment we both cried, 'Yes, we will go!'and then appearedbut—that little word of three letters, and yet the condensation of whole volumes, that is so often the stumbling-block to enthusiasm.
"The translation of this particularbutwill take a quire of paper, much ink, and double postage on my part, and a deal of perusive patience on yours, so to proceed. Like much else that is hearable the report is partly true, insomuch that your father, Dr. Russell, thinks it necessary for Bart to take a real vacation, as he put it, 'An entire change in a place where time is not beaten insistently at the usual sixty-seconds-a-minute rate, day in and out,' where he shall have no train-catching or appointments either business or social hanging over him. At the same time he must not hibernate physically, but be where he will feel impelled to take plenty of open-air exercise, as a matter of course! For you see, as a lawyer, Bart breathes in a great deal of bad air, and his tongue and pen hand get much more exercise than do his legs, while all the spring he has 'gone back on his vittles that reckless it would break your heart,' as Anastasia, our devoted, if outspoken, Celtic cook puts it.
"The exact location of this desired valley of perfection, the ways and means of reaching it, as well as what shall become of the house and Infant during our absence, have formed a daily dialogue for the past fortnight, orI should say triologue, for Anastasia has decided opinions, and has turned into a brooding raven, informing us constantly of the disasters that have overtaken various residents of the place who have taken vacations, the head of one family having acquired typhoid in the Catskills, a second injured his spine at the seaside by diving in shallow water, while the third was mistaken for a moose in Canada and shot. However, her interest is comforting from the fact that she evidently does not wish to part with us at present.
"It must be considered that if we take a really comfortable trip of a couple of months' duration, and Bart's chief is willing to allow him a three months' absence, as it will be his first real vacation since we were married six years ago, it will devour the entire sum that we have saved for improving the farm and garden.
"You live on the place where you were born, which has developed by degrees like yourselves, yet you probably know that rescuing, not an abandoned farm but the abode of ancient and decayed gentility, even though the house is oak-ribbed Colonial, and making it a tangible home for a commuter, is not a cheap bit of work.
"As to the Infant—to take a human four-and-a-half-year-old travelling, for the best part of a summer,is an imposition upon herself, her parents, and the public at large. To leave her with Bart's mother, whose forte is Scotch crossed with Pennsylvania Dutch discipline, will probably be to find on her return that she has developed a quaking fear of the dark; while, if she goes to my mother, bless her! who has the beautiful and soothing Southern genius for doing the most comfortable thing for the moment, regardless of consequences, the Infant for months after will expect to be sung to sleep, my hand cuddled against her cheek, until I develop laryngitis from continued vocal struggles with 'Ole Uncle Ned,' 'Down in de Cane Brake,' and 'De Possum and de Coon.'
"This mental and verbal struggle was brought to an end yesterday byThe Man from Everywhere. Do you remember, that was the title that we gave Ross Blake, the engineer, two summers ago, when you and Evan visited us, because he was continually turning up and always from some new quarter? Just now he has been put in charge of the construction of the reservoir that is to do away with our beloved piece of wild-flower river woods in the valley below Three Brothers Hills.
"As usual he turned up unexpectedly with Bartram Saturday afternoon and 'made camp,' as a matter ofcourse. A most soothing sort of person is this sameMan from Everywhere, and a special dispensation to any woman whose husband's best friend he chances to be, as in my case, for a man who is as well satisfied with crackers, cheese, and ale as with your very best company spread, praises the daintiness of your guest chamber, but sleeps equally sound in a hammock swung in the Infant's attic play-room, is not to be met every day in this age of finnickiness. Then again he has the gift of saying the right thing at difficult moments, and meaning it too, and though a born rover, has an almost feminine sympathy for the little dilemmas of housekeeping that are so vital to us and yet are of no moment to the masculine mind. Yes, I do admire him immensely, and only wish I saw an opportunity of marrying him either into the family or the immediate neighbourhood, for though he is nearly forty, he is neither a misanthrope nor a woman hater, but rather seems to have set himself a difficult ideal and had limited opportunities. Once, not long ago, I asked him why he did not marry. 'Because,' he answered, 'I can only marry a perfectly frank woman, and the few of that clan I have met, since there has been anything in my pocket to back my wish, have always been married!'
"'I have noticed that too,' said Bart, whom I did notknow was listening; 'then there is nothing for us to do but find you a widow!'
"'No, that will not do, either; I want born, not acquired, frankness, for that is only another term for expediency,' he replied with emphasis.
"So you see thisManis not only somewhat difficult, but he has observed!
"Last night after dinner, when the men drew their chairs toward the fire,—for we still have one, though the windows are open,—and the fragrance from the bed of double English violets, that you sent me, mingled with the wood smoke, we all began to croon comfortably. As soon ashehad settled back in the big chair, with closed eyes and finger tips nicely matched, we propounded our conundrum of taking three from two and having four remain.
"A brief summary of the five years we have lived here will make the needs of the place more clear.
"The first year, settling ourselves in the house and the arrival of the Infant completely absorbed ourselves, income, and a good bit of savings. Repairing the home filled the second year. The outdoor time and money of the third year was eaten up by an expensive and obliterative process called 'grading,' a trap for newly fledged landowners. This meant taking all the kinksand little original attitudes out of the soil and reproving its occasional shoulder shrugs, so to speak,—Delsarte methods applied to the earth,—and you know that Evan actually laughed at us for doing it.
"Even in the beginning we didn't care much for this grading, but it was in the plan that father Penrose had made for us by a landscape gardener, renowned about Philadelphia at the time he gave us the place as a 'start in life,' so we felt in some way mysteriously bound by it. And I may as well assert right here that, though it is well to have a clear idea of what you mean to do in making a garden, or ever so small pleasure grounds, that every bit of labour, however trivial, may go toward one end and not have to be undone, a conventional plan unsympathetically made and blindly followed often becomes a cross between Fetish and Juggernaut. It has taken me exactly four years of blundering to find that you must live your garden life, find out and study its peculiarities and necessities yourself, just as you do that of your indoor home, if success is to be the result!
"As it was, the grading began behind the lilac bushes inside the front fence and proceeded in fairly graceful sweeps, dividing each side of the level bit where the old garden had been, the still remaining boxwoodbushes and outlines of walks and beds, saving this from obliteration, and meeting again at the drying yard.
"Here the proceeding stopped abruptly, as if it had received a shock, which it had, as at this point the family purse wholly collapsed with a shudder, for the next requirement of the plan was the turning of a long crest of rocky woodland, shaped like a three-humped camel, that bounded us on the northwest, into a series of terraces, to render the assent from a somewhat trim residential section to the pastures of the real farming country next door less abrupt.
"In its original state this spur of woodland had undoubtedly been very beautiful, with hemlocks making a windbreak, and all manner of shrubs, wild herbs, and ferns filling in the leaf-mould pockets between the boulders. Now it is bare of everything except a few old hemlocks that sweep the pasture and the rocks, wandering cattle and excursionists from the village, during the 'abandoned' period of the place, having caused havoc among the shrubs and ferns.
"Various estimates have been given, but $1000 seemed to be the average for carrying out the terrace plan even partially, as much blasting is involved, and $1000 is exactly one-fourth of the spendable part of Bart's yearly earnings!
"The flower garden also cries for proper raiment, for though the original lines have been preserved and the soil put in a satisfactory shape, in lieu of the hardy plants and old-time favourites that belong to such a place, in emergency we were reduced, last summer, to the quick-growing but monotonous bedding plants for fillers. Can you imagine anything more jarring and inconsistent than cannas, castor-oil beans, coleus, and nasturtiums in a prim setting of box?
"Then, too, last Christmas, Bart's parents sent us a dear old sundial, with a very good fluted column for a base. The motto reads 'Never consult me at night,' which Bart insists is an admonition for us to keep, chickenlike, early hours! Be this as it may, in order to live up to the dial, the beds that form its court must be consistently clothed—for cannas, coleus, and beans, read peonies, Madonna lilies, sweet-william, clove-pinks, and hollyhocks, which latter the seed bed I hope will duly furnish.
"All these details, and more too, I poured into the ears ofThe Man from Everywhere, while Bart kept rather silent, but I could tell by the way his pipe breathed, short and quick, that he was thinking hard. One has to be a little careful in talking over plans and wishes with Bart; his spirit is generous beyond hispocket-power and he is a bit sensitive. He wants to do so much for the Infant, the home, and me, that when desire outruns the purse, he seems to feel that the limit lies somewhere within the range of his own incapacity, and that bare, camel-backed knoll outlining the horizon, as seen from the dining-room window, showing the roof of the abandoned barn and hen yards, and the difficulty of wrestling with it, is an especially tender spot.
"'If it was anything possible, I'd hump my back and do it, but it isn't!' he jerked, knocking his pipe against the chimney-side before it was half empty and then refilling it; 'it's either a vacationorthe knoll—which shall it be?
"'I don't hanker after leaving home, but that's what a complete change means, I suppose, though I confess I should enjoy a rest for a time from travelling to and fro, like a weaver's shuttle! Mary hates to leave home too; she's a regular sit-by-the-fire! Come, which shall it be? This indecision makes the cure worse than the disease!' and Bart fingered a penny prior to giving it the decisive flip—'head, a vacation; tail, an attack on the knoll!' The penny spun, and then taking a queer backward leap fell into the ashes, where it lay buried.
"'That reads like neither!' said Bart, sitting up with a start.
"'No, both!' repliedThe Man from Everywhere, opening his eyes and gazing first at Bart and then at me with a quizzical expression.
"Instantly curiosity was piqued, for compared to this most domestic of travelled bachelors, the Lady from Philadelphia was without either foresight or resources.
"'You said that your riddle was to take three from two and have four. My plan is very simple; just add three to two and you have not only four but five! Take a vacation from business, but stay at home; do your own garden improvements with your head and a horse and cart and a pair of strong hands with a pick and spade to help you out, for you can't, with impunity, turn an office man, all of a sudden, into a day labourer. As to hewing the knoll into terraces up and down again, tear up that confounded plan. Restore the ground on nature's lines, and you'll have a better windbreak for your house and garden in winter than the best engineer could construct, besides having a retreat for hot weather where you can sit in your bones without being observed by the neighbours!'
"He spoke very slowly, letting the smoke wreathsfloat before his eyes, as if in them he sought the solution he was voicing.
"'A terrace implies closely shorn turf and formal surroundings, out of keeping with this place; besides, young people with only a general maid and a useful man can't afford to be formal,—if they would, the game isn't worth the strain.' (Did I not tell you that he observes?)
"'Let us take a look at the knoll to-morrow and see what has grown there and guess at what may be coaxed to grow, and then you can spend a couple of months during this summer and autumn searching the woods and byways for native plants for the restoration. This reservoir building is your opportunity; you can rob the river valley with impunity, for the clearing will begin in October, consequently anything you take will be in the line of a rescue. So there you are—living in the fresh air, improving your place, and saving money at both ends.'
"'By George! It sounds well, as far as I'm concerned!' ejaculated Bart, 'but how will such a scheme give Mary a vacation from housekeeping and the everlasting three meals a day? She seldom growls, but the last month she too has confessed to feeling tired.'
"'I think it's a perfectly fascinating idea, but howwill it give Bart a "complete change, away from the sound of the beat of time," as the doctor puts it?' I asked with more eagerness than I realized, for I always dislike to be far away from home at night, and you see there has been whooping cough in the neighbourhood and there are also green apples to be reckoned with in season, even though the Infant has long ago passed safely through the mysteries of the second summer.
"The Man from Everywheredid not answer Bart at all, but, turning to me with the air of a paternal sage and pointing an authoritative forefinger, said, somewhat sarcastically, I thought, 'What greater change can an American have than leisure in which to enjoy his own home? For giving Time the slip, all you have to do is to stop the clocks and follow the sun and your own inclinations. As to living out of doors, the old open-sided hay barn on the pasture side of the knoll, that you have not decided whether to rebuild or tear down, will make an excellent camp. Aside from the roof, it is as open as a hawk's nest. Don't hurry your decision; incubate the idea over Sunday, Madam Penrose, and I'll warrant by Monday you will have hatched a really tangible plan, if not a brood of them.'
"I looked at Bart, he nodded back approvingly, so I slipped out, first to see that the Infant was sleeping properly, head up, and not down under the clothes, as I had once found her, and then to walk to and fro under the budding stars for inspiration, leaving the pair to talk the men's talk that is so good and nourishing for a married man like Bart, no matter how much he cares for the Infant and me.
"Jumbled up as the garden is, the spring twilight veils all deficiencies and releases persuasive odours from every corner, while the knoll, with its gnarled trees outlined against the sky, appealed to me as never before, a thing desirable and to be restored and preserved even at a cost rather than obliterated.
"'Oh, Mrs. Evan, I wish I could tell you howThe Man'splan touches me and seems made for me especially this spring. I seem fairly to have a passion for home and the bit of earth about and sky above it that is all our own. And unlike other times when I loved to have my friends come and visit me, and share and return the hospitality of neighbours, I want to be alone with myself and Bart, to spend long days under the sky and trees and have nothing come between our real selves and God, not even the ticking and dictation of a clock! There is so much that I want to tell myhusband just now, that cannot be put in words, and that he may only read by intuition. When I was younger and first married, I did not feel this need so much, but now life seems to take on so much deeper a meaning! Do you understand? Ah, yes, I know you do! But I am wandering from the point, just as I yearn to wander from all the stringencies of life this summer.
"Evidently seeing me, the Rural Delivery man whistled from his cart, instead of leaving the evening mail in its wren box, as usual. I went to the gate rather reluctantly, I was so absorbed in garden dreams, took the letters from the carrier, and, as the men were still sitting in the dark, carried them up to the lamp in my own sitting room, little realizing that even at that moment I was holding the key to the 'really tangible plan' in my hand.
"The next morning.Two of the letters I received on Saturday night would have been of great importance if we were still planning to go away for a vacation, instead of hoping to stay at home for it. The first, from mother, told me that she and my brother expect to spend the summer in taking a journey, in which Alaska is to be the turning-point. She begs us to gowith them and offers to give me her right-hand-reliable, Jane McElroy, who cared for me when a baby, to stay here with the Infant. The second letter was from Maria Maxwell, a distant cousin of Bart's. She has also heard of our intended vacation,—indeed the rapidity with which the news travels and the interest it causes are good proofs of our stay-at-home tendencies and the general sobriety of our six years of matrimony!
"Maria is a very bright, adaptable woman of about thirty-five, who teaches music in the New York public schools, is alone in the world, and manages to keep an attractive home in a mere scrap of a flat. When she comes to visit us, we like her as well the last day of her stay as the first, which fact speaks volumes for her character! Though forced by circumstances to live in town, she has a deep love for the country, and wishes, if we intend to leave the house open, to come and care for it in our absence, even offering to cook for herself if we do not care to have the expense of a maid, saying, 'to cook a real meal, with a real fire instead of gas, will be a great and refreshing change for me, so you need feel under no obligation whatever!'
"Thinking of the pity of wasting such tempting offers as these, I went to church with my body only, mymind staying outside under a horse-chestnut tree, and instead of listening as I should, I looked sidewise out of the window at my double in the shade and wondered if, after all, the stay-at-home vacation was not a wild scheme. There being a Puritan streak in me, via my father, I sometimes question the right of what I wish to do simply because I like to do it.
"At dinner I was so grumpy, answering in monosyllables, that sensitive Bart looked anxious, and as if he thought I was disappointed at the possible turn of affairs, butThe Man from Everywherelaughed, saying, 'Let her alone; she is not through incubating the plan, and you know the best of setting hens merely cluck and growl when disturbed.'
"Immediately after dinner Bart andThe Manwent for a walk up the river valley, and I, going to the living room, seated myself by the window, where I could watch the Infant playing on the gravel outside, it being the afternoon out of both the general maid Anastasia and Barney the man, between whom I suspect matrimonial intentions.
"The singing of the birds, the hum of bees in the opening lilacs, and the garden fragrance blending with the Infant's prattle, as she babbled to her dolls, floated through the open door and made me drowsy, and Iturned from the light toward the now empty fireplace.
"A snap! and the air seemed suddenly exhilarating! Was it an electric spark from the telephone? No, simply the clarifying of the thoughts that had been puzzling me.
"Maria Maxwell shall come during our vacations,—at that moment I decided to separate the time into several periods,—she shall take entire charge of all within doors.
"Bart and I will divide off a portion of the old hay-barn with screens, and camp out there (unless in case of very bad thunder or one of the cold July storms that we sometimes have). Anastasia shall serve us a very simple hot dinner at noon in the summer kitchen, and keep a supply of cooked food in the pantry, from which we can arrange our breakfasts and suppers in the opposite side of the barn from our sleeping place, and there we can have a table, chairs, and a little oil stove for making tea and coffee.
"Maria, besides attending to domestic details, must also inspect the mail and only show us letters when absolutely necessary, as well as to say 'not at home,' with the impenetrable New York butler manner to every one who calls.
"Thus Bart and I will be equally free without the rending of heart strings—free to love and enjoy home from without, for it is really strange when one comes to think of it, we learn of the outside world by looking out the windows, but we so seldom have time to stand in another view-point and look in. Thus it occurred to me, instead of taking one long vacation, we can break the time into three or four in order to follow the garden seasons and the work they suggest. A bit at the end of May for both planning and locating the spring wild flowers before they have wholly shed their petals, and so on through the season, ending in October by the transplanting of trees and shrubs that we have marked and in setting out the hardy roses, for which we shall have made a garden according to the plan that Aunt Lavinia says is to be among the early Garden, You, and I records.
"May 15.Maria Maxwell has joyfully agreed to come the twenty-first, having obtained a substitute for her final week of teaching, as well as rented her 'parlor car,' as she calls her flat, to a couple of students who come from the South for change of air and to attend summer school at Columbia College. It seems that many people look upon New York as a summer watering place. Strange that a difference in climate can be merely a matter of point of view.
"Now that we have decided to camp out at home, we are beginning to realize the positive economy of the arrangement, for as we are not going among people,—neither are they coming to us,—we shall need no new clothes!
"We, a pair of natural spendthrifts, are actually turning miserly for the garden's sake.
"Last night Bart went to the attic with a lantern and dragged from obscurity two frightful misfit suits of the first bicycle cuff-on-the-pants period, that were ripening in the camphor chest for future missionary purposes, announcing that these, together with some flannel shirts, would be his summer outfit, while this morning I went into town and did battle at a sale of substantial, dollar shirt-waists, and turning my back upon all the fascinations of little girls' frills and fur-belows, bought stout gingham for aprons and overalls, into which I shall presently pop the Infant, and thus save both stitches and laundry work.
"Mother has sent a note expressing her pleasure in our plan and enclosing a cheque for $50, suggesting that it should be put into a birthday rose bed—my birthday is in two days—in miniature like the old garden at her home on the north Virginia border. I'm sending you the list of such roses as she rememberedthat were in it, but I'm sure many, like Gloire de Dijon, would be winter killed here. Will you revise the list for me?
"Bart has arranged to shut off the back hall and stairs, so that when we wish, we can get to our indoor bedroom and bath at any hour without going through the house or disturbing its routine.
"Anastasia has been heard to express doubts as to our entire sanity confidentially to Barney, on his return from the removal of two cots from the attic to the part of the barn enclosed by some old piazza screens, thereby publicly declaring our intention of sleeping out in all seasonable weather.
"May 20.The Blakes, next door below, are going to Europe, and have offered us their comfortable family horse, the buggy, and a light-work wagon, if we will feed, shoe, pet, and otherwise care for him (his name, it seems, is Romeo). Could anything be more in keeping with both our desires and needs?
"To-day, half as a joke, I've sent out P.P.C. cards to all our formal friends in the county. Bart frowns, saying that they may be taken seriously and produce like results!
"May 22.Maria has arrived, taken possession of the market-book, housekeeping box, and had a satisfactory conference with Anastasia.
"Hurrah for Liberty and outdoors!Itbegins to-morrow. You may label it Their Garden Vacation, and admit it to the records of The Garden, You, and I, at your own risk and peril; but as you say that if you are to boil down the practical part of your garden-boke experiences for the benefit of Aunt Lavinia and me and I must send you my summer doings, I shall take this way of accomplishing it, at intervals, the only regular task, if gossiping to you can be so called, that I shall set myself this summer.
"A new moon to-night. Will it prove a second honeymoon, think you, or end in a total eclipse of our venture? I'm poppy sleepy!
"May 23.10 A.M. (A postal.) Starting on vacation; stopped bedroom clock and put away watches last night, and so overslept. It seems quite easy to get away from Time! Please tell me what annuals I can plant as late in the season as this, while we are locating the rose bed.
"Mary Penrose."
Oaklands, May 25.A garden vacation! Fifty dollars to spend for roses! What annuals may be planted now to tide you easily over the summer? Really, Mary Penrose, the rush of your astonishing letter completely took away my breath, and while I was recovering it by pacing up and down the wild walk, and trying to decide whether I should answer your questions first, and if I did which one, or ask you others instead, Scotch fashion, about your unique summer plans, Evan came home a train earlier than usual, with a pair of horticultural problems for which he needed an immediate solution.
Last evening, in the working out of these schemes, we found that we were really travelling on lines parallel with your needs, and so in due course you shall have Evan's prescription and design for A Simple Rose Garden (if it isn't simple enough, you can begin with half, as the proportions will be the same), while I nowsend you my plans for an inexpensive midsummer garden, which will be useful to you only as a part of the whole chain, but for which Evan has a separate need.
Over at East Meadow, a suburb of Bridgeton that lies toward the shore and is therefore attractive to summer people, a friend of Evan's has put up a dozen tasteful, but inexpensive, Colonial cottages, and Evan has planned the grounds that surround them, about an acre being allotted to each house, for lawn and garden of summer vegetables, though no arbitrary boundaries separate the plots. The houses are intended for people of refined taste and moderate means who, only being able to leave town during the school vacation, from middle June to late September, yet desire to have a bit of garden to tend and to have flowers about them other than the decorative but limited piazza boxes or row of geraniums around the porch.
The vegetable gardens consist of four squares, conveniently intersected by paths, these squares to be edged by annuals or bulbs of rapid growth, things that, planted in May, will begin to be interesting when the tenants come a month later.
But here am I, on the verge of rushing into another theme, without having expressed our disappointmentthat you cannot bear us company this summer, yet I must say that the edge of regret is somewhat dulled by my interest in the progress and result of your garden vacation, which to us at least is a perfectly unique idea, and quite worthy of the inventive genius ofThe Man from Everywhere.
Plainly do I see by the scope of this same letter of yours that the records of The Garden, You, and I, instead of being a confection of undistinguishable ingredients blended by a chef of artistic soul, will be a home-made strawberry shortcake, for which I am to furnish the necessary but uninspired crust, while you will supply the filling of fragrant berries.
With the beginning of your vacation begin my questions domestic that threaten to overbalance your questions horticultural. If the Infant should wail at night, do you expect to stay quietly out "in camp" and not steal on tiptoe to the house, and at least peep in at the window? Also, you have put a match-making thought in a head swept clean of all such clinging cobwebs since Sukey Crandon married Carthy Latham and, turning their backs on his ranch experiment, they decided to settle near the Bradfords at the Ridge, where presently there will be another garden growing. If you have no one either in the family or neighbourhood likely toattractThe Man from Everywhere, why may we not have him? Jane Crandon is quite unexpectedly bright, as frank as society allows, this being one of his requirements, besides having grown very pretty since she has virtually become daughter to Mrs. Jenks-Smith and had sufficient material in her gowns to allow her chest to develop.
But more of this later; to return to the annuals, I understand that you have had your hardy beds prepared and that you want something to brighten them, as summer tenants, until early autumn, when the permanent residents may be transplanted from the hardy seed bed.
Annuals make a text fit for a very long sermon. Verily there are many kinds, and the topic forms easily about a preachment, for they may be divided summarily into two classes, the worthy and the unworthy, though the worth or lack of it in annuals, as with most of us humans, is a matter of climate, food, and environment, rather than inherent original sin. The truth is, nature, though eternally patient and good-natured, will not be hurried beyond a certain point, and the life of a flower that is born under the light cloud shelter of English skies, fed by nourishing mist through long days that have enough sunlight to stimulate and not scorch, has a differentconsummation than with us, where the climate of extremes makes the perfection of flowers most uncertain, at least in the months of July and August when the immature bud of one day is the open, but often imperfect, flower of the next. As no one may change climatic conditions, the only thing to be done is to give to this class of flowers of the summer garden room for individual development, all the air they need to breathe both below ground, by frequent stirring of the soil, and above, by avoidance of over-crowding, and then select only those varieties that are really worth while.
This qualification can best be settled by pausing and asking three questions, when confronting the alluring portrait of an above-the-average specimen of annual in a catalogue, forGarden Goozleapplies not only to the literature of the subject, but to the pictures as well, and a measurement of, for instance, a flower stalk of Drummond phlox, taken from a specimen pot-grown plant, raised at least partly under glass, is sure to cause disappointment when the average border plant is compared with it.
First—is the species of a colour and length of flowering season to be used in jungle-like masses for summer colour? Second—has it fragrance or decorative quality for house decoration? Thirdly, has it the backbone to stand alone or will the plant flop and flatten shapelessly at the first hard shower and so render an array of conspicuous stakes necessary? Stakes, next to unsightly insecticides and malodorous fertilizers, are the bane of gardening, but that subject is big enough for a separate chronicle.
By ability to stand alone, I do not mean is every branchlet stiff as if galvanized, like a balsam, for this is by no means pretty, but is the plant so constructed that it can languish gracefully, petunia fashion, and not fall over stark and prone like an uprooted castor bean. Hybridization, like physical culture in the human, has evidently infused grace in the plant races, for many things that in my youth seemed the embodiment of stiffness, like the gladiolus, have developed suppleness, and instead of the stiff bayonet spike of florets, this useful and indefatigable bulb, if left to itself and not bound to a stake like a martyr, now produces flower sprays that start out at right angles, curve, and almost droop, with striking, orchid-like effect.
For making patches of colour, without paying special heed to the size of flower or development of individual plants, annuals may be sown thinly broadcast, raked in lightly, and, if the beds or borders are not too wide for reaching, thinned out as soon as four or five leavesappear. Portulaca, sweet alyssum, Shirley poppies, and the annual gaillardias belong to this class, as well as single petunias of the inexpensive varieties used to edge shrubberies, and dwarf nasturtiums.
Sweet peas, of course, are to be sown early and deep, where they are to stand half an inch apart, like garden peas, and then thinned out so that there is not less than an inch between (two is better, but it is usually heartbreaking to pull up so many sturdy pealets) and reënforced by brush or wire trellising. Otherwise I plant the really worthy, or what might be called major annuals, in a seed bed much like that used for the hardy plants, at intervals during the month of May, according to the earliness of the season, and the time they are wanted to bloom. Later, I transplant them to their summer resting places, leaving those that are not needed, for it is difficult to calculate too closely without scrimping, in the seed bed, to cut for house decoration, as with the perennials. Of course if annuals are desired for very early flowering, many species may be started in a hotbed and taken from thence to the borders. Biennials that it is desired shall flower the first season are best hurried in this way, yet for the gardenerless garden of a woman this makes o'er muckle work. The occasional help of the "general useful" is not very efficient when itcomes to tending hotbeds, giving the exact quantity of water necessary to quench the thirst of seedlings without producing dropsy, and the consequent "damping off" which, when it suddenly appears, seems as intangible and makes one feel as helpless as trying to check a backing horse by helpless force of bit. A frame for Margaret carnations, early asters, and experiments in seedling Dahlias and chrysanthemums will be quite enough.
The woman who lives all the year in the country can so manage that her spring bulbs and hardy borders, together with the roses, last well into July. After this the annuals must be depended upon for ground colour, and to supplement the phloxes, gladioli, Dahlias, and the like. By the raising of these seeds in hotbeds they are apt to reach their high tide of bloom during the most intense heat of August, when they quickly mature and dry away; while, on the other hand, if they are reared in an open-air seed bed, they are not only stronger but they last longer, owing to more deliberate growth. Asters sown out-of-doors in May bloom well into October, when the forced plants barely outlast August.
Of many annuals it is writ in the catalogues, "sow at intervals of two weeks or a month for succession."This sounds very plausible, for are not vegetables so dealt with, the green string-beans in our garden being always sown every two weeks from early April until September first? Yes, but to vegetables is usually given fresher and deeper soil for the crop succession than falls to flower seeds, and in addition the seeds are of a more rugged quality.
My garden does not take kindly to this successive sowing, and I have gradually learned to control the flower-bearing period by difference in location. Spring, and in our latitude May, is the time of universal seed vitality, and seeds germinating then seem to possess the maximum of strength; in June this is lessened, while a July-sown seed of a common plant, such as a nasturtium or zinnia, seems to be impressed by the lateness of the season and often flowers when but a few inches high, the whole plant having a weazened, precocious look, akin to the progeny of people, or higher animals, who are either born out of due season or of elderly parents. On the other hand, the plant retarded in its growth by a less stimulating location, when it blooms, is quite as perfect and of equal quality with its seed-bed fellows who were transplanted at once into full sunlight.
Take, for example, mignonette, which in the largergardens is always treated by successive sowings. A row sown early in April, in a sunny spot in the open garden and thinned out, will flower profusely before very hot weather, bloom itself out, and then leave room for some late, flowering biennial. That sown in the regular seed bed early in May may be transplanted (for this is the way by which large trusses of bloom may be obtained) early in June into three locations, using it as a border for taller plants, except in the bed of sweet odours, where it may be set in bunches of a dozen plants, for in this bed individuality may be allowed to blend in a universal mass of fragrance.
In order to judge accurately of the exact capabilities for shade or sunlight of the different portions of a garden, one must live with it, follow the shadows traced by the tree fingers on the ground the year through, and know its moods as the expressions that pass over a familiar face. For you must not transplant any of these annuals, that only live to see their sun father for one brief season, into the shade of any tree or overhanging roof, but at most in the travelling umbra of a distant object, such as a tall spruce, the northeastern side of a hedge, or such like.
In my garden one planting of mignonette in full sun goes in front of the March-planted sweet peas; ofthe two transplantings from the seed, one goes on the southwest side of the rose arbour and the other on the upper or northeast side, where it blooms until it is literally turned into green ice where it stands.
This manipulation of annuals belongs to the realm of the permanent resident; the summer cottager must be content to either accept the conditions of the garden as arranged by his landlord, or in a brief visit or two made before taking possession, do his own sowing where the plants are to stand. In this case let him choose his varieties carefully and spare his hand in thickness of sowing, and he may have as many flowers for his table and as happy an experience with the summer garden, even though it is brief, as his wealthy neighbour who spends many dollars for bedding plants and foliage effects that may be neither smelled, gathered nor familiarized.
Among all the numerous birds that flit through the trees as visitors, or else stay with us and nest in secluded places, how comparatively few do we really depend upon for the aerial colour and the song that opens a glimpse of Eden to our eager eyes and ears each year, for our eternal solace and encouragement? There are some, like the wood thrush, song-sparrow, oriole, robin, barn-swallow, catbird, and wren, withoutwhich June would not be June, but an imperfect harmony lacking the dominant note.