Mabel Osgood Wright - The Garden, You, and I

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The rock graft was more difficult, but after many failures by way of
stones that rolled off, a coarse network of cords was put across and
fastened to whatever twigs or roots came in the way. Naturally a period
of constant sprinkling followed, and for that season the rock graft
seemed decidedly homesick, but the next spring resignation had set in,
and two years later the polypodys had completely adopted the new
location and were prepared to appropriate the whole of it.

So you see that there are comparatively only a few ferns, after all,
that are of great value to The Garden, You, and I, and likewise there
are but a few rules for their transplanting, viz.:--

Don't bother about the tops, for new ones will grow, but look to the
roots, and do not let them be exposed to the air or become dry in
travel. Examine the quality of soil from which you have taken the ferns,
and if you have none like it nearer home, take some with you for a
starter! Never dig up more on one day than you can plant during the
next, and above all remember that if a fern is worth tramping the
countryside for, it is worth careful planting, and that the moral
remarks made about the care in setting out of roses apply with double
force to the handling of delicate wild flowers and ferns.

Good luck to your knoll, Mary Penrose, and to your fern fence, if that
fancy pleases you. May the magic of fern seed fill your eyes and let you
see visions, the goodly things of heart's desire, when, all being
accomplished, you pause and look at the work of your hands.

"And nimble fay and pranksome elf
Flash vaguely past at every turn,
Or, weird and wee, sits Puck himself,
With legs akimbo, on a fern!"

X

FRANKNESS,--GARDENING AND OTHERWISE

(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)

_July 15._--_Midsummer Night._ Since the month came in, vacation time
has been suspended, insomuch that Bart goes to the office every day,
Saturdays excepted; but we have not returned to our indoor bedroom. Once
it seemed the definition of airy coolness, with its three wide windows,
white matting, and muslin draperies, but now--I fully understand the
relative feelings of a bird in a cage and a bird in the open. The air
blows through the bars and the sun shines through them, but it is still
a cage.

In these warm, still nights we take down the slat screens that hang
between the hand-hewn chestnut beams of the old barn, and with the open
rafters of what was a hay-loft above us, we look out of the door-frame
straight up at the stars and sometimes drag our cots out on the wide
bank that tops the wall, overlooking the Opal Farm, and sleep wholly
under the sky.

These two weeks past we have had the Infant with us at night, clad in a
light woollen monkey-suit nighty with feet, her crib being, however,
under cover. Her open-eyed wonder has been a new phase of the vacation.
Knowing no fear, she has begun to develop a feeling of kinship with all
the small animals, not only of the barn but dwellers on Opal Farm as
well, and when she discovered a nest of small mice in an old tool-box
under the eaves and proposed to take them, in their improvised house, to
her very own room at the opposite end, this "room" being a square marked
around her bed by small flower-pots, set upside down, I protested, as a
matter of course, saying that mice were not things to handle, and
besides they would die without their mother.

The Infant, still clutching the box, looked at me in round-eyed wonder:
"I had Dinah and the kittens to play with in the nursery, didn't I,
mother?"

"Certainly!"

"And when Ann-stasia brought them up in her ap'n, Dinah walked behind,
didn't she?"

"Yes, I think so!"

"Ver-r-y well, the mouse mother will walk behind too, and I love mice
better'n cats, for they have nicer hands; 'sides, mother, don't you know
who mice really and truly are, and why they have to hide away? They are
the horses that fairlies drive, and I'm going to have these for the
fairlies in my village!" making a sweep of her arm toward the encampment
of flower-pots; "if you want fairlies to stay close beside your bed, you
must give them horses to drive, 'cause when it gets cold weather cobwebs
gets too sharp for them to ride on and there isn't always fireflies 'n
candle worms to show 'em the way,--'n it's true, 'cause Larry says so!"
she added, probably seeing the look of incredulity on my face.

"Larry knows fairlies and they're really trulies; if you're bad to them,
you'll see the road and it won't be there, and so you'll get into
Hen'sy's bog! Larry did,--and if you make houses for them like mine
(pointing to the flower-pots) and give 'em drinks of milk and flower
wine, they'll bring you _lots_ of childrens! They did to Larry, so I'm
trying to please 'em wif my houses, so's to have some to play wif!"

Larry's harmless folklore (for when he is quite himself, as he is in
these days, he has a certain refinement and an endless fund of
marvellous legends and stories), birds and little beasts for friends,
dolls cut from paper with pansies fastened on for faces, morning-glories
for cups in which to give the fairies drink, what could make a more
blissful childhood for our little maid? That is the everlasting pity of
a city childhood. Creature comforts may be had and human friends, but
where is the vista that reaches under the trees and through the long
meadow-grass where the red-gold lily bells tinkle, up the brook bed to
the great flat mossy rock, beneath which is the door to fairyland, the
spotted turtle being warder. Fairyland, the country of eternal youth and
possibility!

I wouldn't give up the fairies that I once knew and peopled the solemn
woods with down in grandfather's Virginia home for a fortune, and even
now, any day, I can put my ear to the earth, like Tommy-Anne, and hear
the grass grow. It occurred to me yesterday that the Infant, in age,
temperament, and heredity, is suited to be a companion for your Richard.
Could you not bring him down with you before the summer is over? Though,
as the unlike sometimes agree best, Ian and she might be more
compatible, so bring them both and we will turn the trio loose in the
meadows of Opal Farm with a mite of a Shetland pony that _The Man from
Everywhere_ has recently bestowed upon the Infant--crazy, extravagant
man! What we shall do with it in winter I do not know, as we cannot yet
run into the expense of keeping such live stock. But why bother? it is
only midsummer now, grazing is plentiful and seems to suit the needs of
this spunky little beast, and the Infant riding him "across country," as
Bart calls her wanderings about Opal Farm, is a spectacle too pretty to
be denied us. Yes, I know I'm silly, and that you have the twins to
rhapsodize about, but girls are so much more picturesque in the clothes!
What! thought she wore gingham bloomers! Yes, but not all the time, for
Maria will frill her up and run her with ribbons of afternoons!

* * * * *

Back to the house and garden! I'm wandering, but then I'm Lady Lazy this
summer, as _The Man from Everywhere_ calls me, and naturally a bit
inconsequent! As I said, Bart is at the office daily, and will be for
another week, but Lady Lazy has not returned to what Maria Maxwell calls
"The Tyranny of the Three M's,"--the mending basket, the market book,
and the money-box! I was willing, quite willing; in fact it is only fair
that Maria should have her time of irresponsibility, for I know that she
has half a dozen invitations to go to pleasant places and meet people,
one being from Lavinia Cortright to visit her shore cottage. I'm always
hoping that Maria may meet the "right man" some summer day, but that she
surely will never do if she stays here.

"I've everything systematized, and it's easier for me to go on than
drop the needles for a fortnight or so and then find, on coming back,
that you have been knitting a mitten when I had started the frame of a
sock," Maria said, laughing; "make flower hay while the crop is to be
had for the gathering, my lady! Another year you may not have such free
hands!"

Then my protests grew weaker and weaker, for the establishment had
thriven marvellously well without my daily interference. The jam closet
shows rows of everything that might be made of strawberries, cherries,
currants, and raspberries, and it suddenly struck me that possibly if
domestic machinery is set going on a consistent basis, whether it is not
a mistake to do too much oiling and tightening of a screw here and
there, unless distinct symptoms of a halt render it absolutely
necessary.

"Very well," I said, with a show of spunk, "give me one single task,
that I may not feel as if I had no part in the homemaking. Something as
ornamental and frivolous as you choose, but that shall occupy me at
least two hours a day!"

Maria paused a moment; we were then standing in front of the fireplace,
where a jar of bayberry filled the place of logs between the andirons.
First, casting her eyes through the doors of dining room, living room,
and den, she fixed them on me with rather a mischievous twinkle, as she
said, "You shall gather and arrange the flowers for the house; and
always have plenty of them, but never a withered or dropsical blossom
among them all. You shall also invent new ways for arranging them, new
combinations, new effects, the only restriction being that you shall not
put vases where the water will drip on books, or make the house look
like the show window of a wholesale florist. I will give you a fresh
mop, and you can have the back porch and table for your workshop, and if
I'm not mistaken, you will find two hours a day little enough for the
work!" she added with very much the air of some one engaging a new
housemaid and presenting her with a broom!

It has never taken me two hours to gather and arrange the flowers, and
though of course we are only beginning to have much of a garden, we've
always had flowers in the house,--quantities of sweet peas and such
things, besides wild flowers. I began to protest, an injured feeling
rising in my throat, that she, Maria Maxwell, music teacher, city bound
for ten years, should think to instruct _me_ of recent outdoor
experience.

"Yes, you've always had flowers, but did you pick the sweet peas or did
Barney? Did you cram them haphazard into the first thing that came handy
(probably that awful bowl decorated in ten discordant colours and
evidently a wedding present, for such atrocities never find any other
medium of circulation)? Or did you separate them nicely, and arrange the
pink and salmon peas with the lavender in that plain-coloured Sevres
vase that is unusually accommodating in the matter of water, then
putting the gay colours in the blue-and-white Delft bowl and the duller
ones in cut glass to give them life? Having plenty, did you change them
every other day, or the moment the water began to look milky, or did you
leave them until the flowers clung together in the first stages of
mould? Meanwhile, the ungathered flowers on the vines were seriously
developing peas and shortening their stems to be better able to bear
their weight. And, Mary Penrose,"--here Maria positively glared at me as
if I had been a primary pupil in the most undesirable school of her
route who was both stone deaf and afflicted with catarrh, "did you wash
out your jars and vases with a mop every time you changed the flowers,
and wipe them on a towel separate from the ones used for the pantry
glass? No, you never did! You tipped the water out over there at the end
of the piazza by the honeysuckles, because you couldn't quite bring
yourself to pouring it down the pantry sink, refilled the vases, and
that was all!"

In spite of a certain sense of annoyance that I felt at the way in which
Maria was giving me a lecture, and somehow when a person has taught for
ten years she (particularly _she_) inevitably acquires a rather
unpleasant way of imparting the truth that makes one wish to deny it, I
stood convicted in my own eyes as well as in Maria's. It had so often
happened that when either Barney had brought in the sweet peas and left
them on the porch table, or Bart had gathered a particularly beautiful
wild bouquet in one of his tramps, I had lingered over a book or some
bit of work upstairs until almost the time for the next meal, and then,
seeing the half-withered look of reproach that flowers wear when they
have been long out of water, I have jammed them helter-skelter into the
first receptacle at hand.

Sometimes a little rough verbal handling stirs up the blood under a
too-complacent cuticle. Maria's preachment did me good, the more
probably because the time was ripe for it, and therefore the past two
weeks have been filled with new pleasures, for another thing that the
month spent in the open has shown me is the wonderful setting the
natural environment and foliage gives to a flower. At first the
completeness appeals insensibly, and unless one is of the temperament
that seeks the cause behind the effect, it might never be realized.

The Japanese have long since arrived at a method of arranging flowers
which is quality and intrinsic value as opposed to miscellaneous
quantity. The way of nature, however, it seems to me, is twofold, for
there are flowers that depend for beauty, and this with nature that
seems only another word for perpetuity, upon the strength of numbers, as
well as those that make a more individual appeal. The composite
flowers--daisies, asters, goldenrod--belong to the class that take
naturally to massing, while the blue flag, meadow and wood lilies,
together with the spiked orchises, are typical of the second.

By the same process of comparison I have decided that jars and vases
having floral decorations themselves are wholly unsuitable for holding
flowers. They should be cherished as bric-a-brac, when they are worthy
specimens of the art of potter and painter, but as receptacles for
flowers they have no use beyond holding sprays of beautiful foliage or
silver-green masses of ferns.

Porcelain, plain in tint and of carefully chosen colours, such as
beef-blood, the old rose, and peach-blow hues, in which so many simple
forms and inexpensive bits of Japanese pottery may be bought, a peculiar
creamy yellow, a dull green, gobelin, and Delft blue and white, sacred
to the jugs and bowls of our grandmothers, all do well. Cut glass is a
fine setting for flowers of strong colour, but kills the paler hues, and
above and beyond all is the dark moss-green glass of substantial texture
that is fashioned in an endless variety of shapes. By chance, gift, and
purchase we have gathered about a dozen pieces of this, ranging from a
cylinder almost the size of an umbrella-stand down through fluted,
hat-shaped dishes, for roses or sweet peas, to some little troughs of
conventional shapes in which pansies or other short-stemmed flowers may
be arranged so as to give the look of an old-fashioned parterre to the
dining table.

I had always found these useful, but never quite realized to the full
that green or brown is the only consistent undercolour for all field and
grass-growing flowers until this summer. But during days that I have
spent browsing in the river woods, while Bart and Barney, and more
recently Larry, have been digging the herbs that we have marked, I have
realized the necessity of a certain combination of earth, bark, and
dead-leaf browns in the receptacles for holding wood flowers and the
vines that in their natural ascent clasp and cling to the trunks and
limbs of trees.

Several years ago mother sent me some pretty flower-holders made of
bamboos of different lengths, intended evidently to hang against
door-jambs or in hallways. The pith was hollowed out here and there, and
the hole plugged from beneath to make little water pockets. These did
admirably for a season, but when the wood dried, it invariably split,
and treacherous dripping followed, most ruinous to furniture.

A few weeks back, when looking at some mossed and gnarled branches in
the woods, an idea occurred to Bart and me at the same moment. Why could
we not use such pieces as these, together with some trunks of your
beloved white birch, to which I, _via_ the screen at Opal Farm, was
becoming insensibly devoted at the very time that you wrote me?

Augur holes could be bored in them at various distances and angles, if
not too acute; the thing was to find glass, in bottle or other forms, to
fit in the openings. This difficulty was solved by _The Man from
Everywhere_ on his reappearance the night before the Fourth, after an
absence of a whole week, laden with every manner of noise and fire
making arrangement for the Infant, though I presently found that Bart
had partly instigated the outfit, and the two overgrown boys revelled in
fire-balloons and rockets under cover of the Infant's enthusiasm, much
as the grandpa goes to the circus as an apparent martyr to little
Tommy's desire! A large package that, from the extreme care of its
handling, I judged must hold something highly explosive, on being opened
divulged many dozens of the slender glass tubes, with a slight lip for
holding cord or wire, such as, filled with roses or orchids, are hung in
the garlands of asparagus vines and smilax in floral decorations of
either houses or florists' windows. These tubes varied in length from
four to six inches, the larger being three inches in diameter.

"Behold your leak-proof interiors!" he cried, holding one up. "Now set
your wits and Bart's tool-box to work and we shall have some speedy
results!"

Dear _Man from Everywhere_, he had bought a gross of the glasses,
thereby reminding me of a generous but eccentric great-uncle of ours who
had a passion for attending auctions, and once, by error, in buying, as
he supposed, twelve yellow earthenware bowls, found himself confronted
by twelve _dozen_. Thus grandmother's storeroom literally had a golden
lining, and my entire childhood was pervaded with these bowls, several
finally falling into my possession for the mixing of mud pies! But
between the durability of yellow bowls and blown-glass tubes there is
little parallel, and already I have found the advantage of having a good
supply in stock.

Our first natural flower-holder is a great success. Having found a
four-pronged silver birch, with a broken top, over in the abandoned
gravel-pit (where, by the way, are a score of others to be had for the
digging, and such easy digging too), Larry sawed it off a bit below the
ground, so as to give it an even base. The diameter of the four uprights
was not quite a foot, all told, and these were sawn of unequal lengths
of four, six, seven, and nine inches, care being taken not to "haggle,"
as Larry calls it, the clean white bark in the process.

Then Bart went to work with augur and round chisel, and bored and
chipped out the holes for the glass tubes, incidentally breaking two
glasses before we had comfortably settled the four, for they must fit
snugly enough not to wiggle and tip, and yet not so tight as to bind and
prevent removal for cleaning purposes. This little stand of natural wood
was no sooner finished and mounted on the camp table than its
possibilities began to crowd around it. Ferns being the nearest at hand,
I crawled over the crumbling bank wall into the Opal Farm meadow and
gathered hay-scented, wood, and lady ferns from along the fence line and
grouped them loosely in the stand. The effect was magical, a bit of its
haunt following the fern indoors.

Next day I gathered in the hemlock woods a basket of the waxy,
spotted-leaved pipsissewa, together with spikes and garlands of club
moss. I had thought these perfect when steadied by bog moss in a flat,
cut-glass dish, but in the birch stump they were entirely at home. If
these midsummer wood flowers harmonize so well, how much more charming
will be the blossoms of early spring, a season when the white birch is
quite the most conspicuous tree in the landscape! Picture dog-tooth
violets, spring beauties, bellwort, Quaker-ladies, and great tufts of
violets, shading from white to deepest blue, in such a setting! Or, of
garden things, poets' narcissus and lilies-of-the-valley!

Other receptacles of a like kind we have in different stages of
progress, made of the wood of sassafras, oak, beech, and hackberry,
together with several irregular stumps of lichen-covered cedar. Two long
limbs with several short side branches Bart has flattened on the back
and arranged with picture-hooks, so that they can be bracketed against
the frame of the living-room door, opposite the flower-greeting table
that I have fashioned after yours. These are to be used for vines, and I
shall try to keep this wide, open portal cheerfully garlanded.

The first week of my flower wardenship was a most strenuous one. I use
the word reluctantly, but having tried half a dozen others, no
equivalent seemed to fit. I had flowers in every room in the house,
bedchambers included, using in this connection the cleanest-breathed and
longest-lived blossoms possible.

Late as was the sowing, the annuals remaining in the seed bed have begun
to yield a glorious crop. The fireplaces were filled with black-eyed
Susans from the fields and hollyhocks from an old self-seeded colony at
Opal Farm, and every available vase, bowl, and pitcher had something in
it. How I laboured! I washed jars, sorted colours, and freshened still
passable arrangements of the day before, and all the while I felt sure
that Maria was watching me, with an amused twinkle in the tail of her
eye!

One day, the middle of last week, the temperature dropped suddenly, and
we fled from camp to the house for twenty-four hours, lighted the logs
in the hall, and actually settled down to a serious game of whist in the
evening, Maria Maxwell, _The Man_, Bart, and I. Yes, I know how you
detest the game, but I--though I am not exactly amused by it--rather
like it, for it gives occupation at once for the hands and thoughts and
a cover for studying the faces and moods of friends without the reproach
of staring.

By the way, _The Man_ has hired half the house from Amos Opie--it was
divided several years ago--and established helter-skelter bachelor
quarters at Opal Farm. Bart has told him, over and over again, how
welcome he is to stay here, under any and all conditions, while he works
in the vicinity, but he says that he needs a lot of room for his traps,
muddy boots, etc., while Opie, a curious Jack-at-all-trades, gives him
his breakfast. I'm wondering if _The Man_ felt that he was intruding
upon Maria by staying here, or if she has any Mrs. Grundy ideas and was
humpy to him, or even suggested that he would better move up the road.
She is quite capable of it!

However, he seems glad enough to drop in to dinner of an evening now,
and the two are so delightfully cordial and unembarrassed in their talk,
neither yielding a jot to the other, in the resolute spinster and
bachelor fashion, that I must conclude that his going was probably a
natural happening.

This evening, while Maria and I were waiting together for the men to
finish toying with their coffee cups and match-boxes and emerge
refreshed from the delightful indolence of the after-dinner smoke, the
odour of the flowers--intensified both by dampness and the
woodsmoke--was very manifest.

"How do you like your employment?" asked Maria.

"I like the decorative and inventive part of it," I said, thinking into
the fire, "but I believe"--and here I hesitated as a chain of peculiar
green flame curled about the log and held my attention. "That it is
quite as possible to overdo the house decoration with flowers as it is
to spoil a nice bit of lawn with too many fantastic flower beds!" Bart
broke in quite unexpectedly, coming behind me and raising my face, one
hand beneath my chin. "Isn't that what you were thinking, my Lady Lazy?"

"Truly it was, only I never meant to let it pop out so suddenly and
rudely," I was forced to confess. "In one way it would seem impossible
to have too many flowers about, and yet in another it is unnatural, for
are not nature's unconscious effects made by using colour as a central
point, a focus that draws the eye from a more sombre and soothing
setting?"

"How could we enjoy a sunset that held the whole circle of the horizon
at once?" chimed in _The Man_, suddenly, as if reading my thoughts. "Or
twelve moons?" added Bart, laughing.

No, Mrs. Evan, I am convinced by so short a trial as two weeks that the
art of arranging flowers for the house is first, your plan of having
some to greet the guest as he enters, a bit of colour or coolness in
each room where we pause to read or work or chat, and a table
garnishing to render aesthetic the aspect and surroundings of the human
animal at his feeding time; otherwise, except at special seasons of
festivity, a surplus of flowers in the house makes for restlessness, not
peace. Two days ago I had thirty-odd vases and jars filled with flowers,
and I felt, as I sat down to sew, as if I was trespassing in a bazaar!
Also, if there are too many jars of various flowers in one room, it is
impossible that each should have its own individuality.

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