Mabel Osgood Wright - The Garden, You, and I

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My righteous garden-indignation dwindled; laughter caught me by the
throat and quenched the remainder. Evan, knowing nothing of the
concatenation, but scenting something from the card, joined
sympathetically. Glancing at father, I saw that his nose was twitching,
and in a moment his shoulders began to shake and he led the general
confession that followed. It seems that he arrived at the hospital
really the day of the consultation, but found that the patient, in need
of surgical care, had been seized with nervous panic and gone home!

After such a thoroughly vulgar day there is really nothing to do but
laugh and plan something pleasant for to-morrow, unless you prefer
crying, which, though frequently a relief to the spirit, is particularly
bad for eye wrinkles in the middle-aged.

_May-day._ I always take this as a holiday, and give myself up to any
sort of outdoor folly that comes into my head. There is nothing more
rejuvenating than to let one's self thoroughly go now and then.

Then, besides, to an American, May-day is usually a surprise in itself.
You never can tell what it will bring, for it is by no means the
amiable and guileless child of the poets, breathing perfumed south wind
and followed by young lambs through meadows knee deep in grass and
flowers.

In the course of fifteen years I have seen four May-days when there was
enough grass to blow in the wind and frost had wholly left for the
season; to balance this there have been two brief snow squalls, three
deluges that washed even big beans out of ground, and a scorching
drought that reduced the brooks, unsheltered by leafage, to August
shallowness. But to-day has been entirely lovable and full of the
promise that after all makes May the garden month of the year, the time
of perfect faith, hope, and charity when we may believe all things!

This morning I took a stroll in the woods, partly to please the dogs,
for though they always run free, they smile and wag furiously when they
see the symptoms that tell that I am going beyond the garden. What a
difference there is between the north and south side of things! On the
south slope the hepaticas have gone and the columbines show a trace of
red blood, while on the north, one is in perfection and the other only
as yet making leaves. This is a point to be remembered in the garden, by
which the season of blooming can be lengthened for almost all plants
that do not demand full, unalloyed sun, like the rose and pink families.

Every year I am more and more surprised at the hints that can be carried
from the wild to the cultivated. For instance, the local soil in which
the native plants of a given family nourish is almost always sure to
agree better with its cultivated, and perhaps tropical, cousin than the
most elaborately and scientifically prepared compost. This is a matter
that both simplifies and guarantees better success to the woman who is
her own gardener and lives in a country sufficiently open for her to be
able to collect soil of various qualities for special purposes. Lilies
were always a very uncertain quantity with me, until the idea occurred
of filling my bed with earth from a meadow edge where _Lilium
Canadense_, year after year, mounted her chimes of gold and copper bells
on leafy standards often four feet high.

We may read and listen to cultural ways and methods, but when all is
said and done, one who has not a fat purse for experiments and failures
must live the outdoor life of her own locality to get the best results
in the garden.

Then to have a woman friend to compare notes with and prove rules by is
a comforting necessity. No living being can say positively, "I _will_ do
so and so;" or "I _know_," when coming in contact with the wise old
earth!

Lavinia Cortright has only had a garden for half a dozen summers, and
consults me as a veteran, yet I'm discovering quite as much from her
experiments as she from mine. Last winter, when seed-catalogue time came
round, and we met daily and scorched our shoes before the fire, drinking
a great deal too much tea in the excitement of making out our lists, we
resolved to form a horticulture society of only three members, of which
she elected me the recording secretary, to be called "The Garden, You,
and I."

We expect to have a variety of experiences this season, and frequent
meetings both actual and by pen, for Lavinia, in combination with Horace
and Sylvia Bradford, last year built a tiny shore cottage, three miles
up the coast, at Gray Rocks, where they are going for alternate weeks or
days as the mood seizes them, and they mean to try experiments with real
seashore gardening, while Evan proposes that we should combine pleasure
with business in a way to make frequent vacations possible and take
driving trips together to many lovely gardens both large and small, to
our mutual benefit, his eyes being open to construction and landscape
effect, and mine to the soul of the garden, as it were; for he is
pleased to say that a woman can grasp and translate this more easily and
fully than a man. What if the records of The Garden, You, and I should
turn into a real book, an humble shadow of "Six of Spades" of jovial
memory! Is it possible that I am about to be seized with Agamemnon
Peterkin's ambition to write a book to make the world wise? Alas, poor
Agamemnon! When he had searched the woods for an oak gall to make ink,
gone to the post-office, after hours, to buy a sheet of paper, and
caused a commotion in the neighbourhood and rumour of thieves by going
to the poultry yard with a lantern to pluck a fresh goose quill for a
pen, he found that he had nothing to say, and paused--thereby, at least,
proving his own wisdom.

I'm afraid I ramble too much to be a good recording secretary, but this
habit belongs to my very own garden books that no critical eyes can see.
That reminds me! Father says that he met Bartram Penrose in town last
week and that he seemed rather nervous and tired, and worried about
nothing, and wanted advice. After looking him over a bit, father told
him that all he needed was a long vacation from keeping train, as well
as many other kinds of time, for it seems during the six years of his
marriage he has had no real vacation but his honeymoon.

Mary Penrose's mother, my mother, and Lavinia Cortright were all school
friends together, and since Mary married Bartram and moved to Woodridge
we've exchanged many little visits, for our husbands agree, and now
that she has time she is becoming an enthusiastic gardener, after my own
heart, having last season become convinced of the ugliness of cannas and
coleus beds about a restored colonial farmhouse. Why might they not join
us on our driving trips, by way of their vacation?

Immediately I started to telephone the invitation, and then paused. I
will write instead. Mary Penrose is on the long-distance line,--toll
thirty cents in the daytime! In spring I am very stingy; thirty cents
means six papers of flower seeds, or three heliotropes. Whereas in
winter it is simply thirty cents, and it must be a very vapid
conversation indeed that is not worth so much on a dark winter day of
the quality when neither driving nor walking is pleasant, and if you get
sufficiently close to the window to see to read, you develop a stiff
neck. Also, the difficulty is that thirty cents is only the beginning of
a conversation betwixt Mary Penrose and myself, for whoever begins it
usually has to pay for overtime, which provokes quarterly discussion. Is
it not strange that very generous men often have such serious objections
to the long-distance tails to their telephone bills, and insist upon
investigating them with vigour, when they pay a speculator an extra
dollar for a theatre ticket without a murmur? They must remember that
telephones, whatever may be said to the contrary, are one of the modern
aids to domesticity and preventives of gadding, while still keeping one
not only in touch with a friend but within range of the voice. Surely
there can be no woman so self-sufficient that she does not in silent
moments yearn for a spoken word with one of her kind.

When I had finished sowing my first planting of mignonette and growled
at the prospective labour entailed by thinning out the fall-sown Shirley
poppies (I have quite resolved to plant everything in the
vegetable-garden seed beds and then transplant to the flowering beds as
the easier task), Lavinia Cortright came up, note-book in hand, inviting
herself comfortably to spend the day, and thoroughly inspect the hardy
seed bed, to see what I had for exchange, as well as perfect her plan of
starting one of her own.

By noon the sun had made the south corner, where the Russian violets
grow, quite warm enough to make lunching out-of-doors possible, and
promising to protect Lavinia's rather thinly shod feet from the ground
with one of the rubber mats whereon I kneel when I transplant, she
consented to thus celebrate the coming of the season of liberty, doors
open to the air and sun, the soul to every whisper of Heart of Nature
himself, the steward of the plan and eternal messenger of God.

"Hard is the heart that loveth naught in May!" Yes, so hard that it is
no longer flesh and blood, for under the spell of renewal every grass
blade has new beauty, every trifle becomes of importance, and the humble
song sparrow a nightingale.

The stars that blazed of winter nights have fallen and turned to
dandelions in the grass; the Forsythias are decked in gold, a colour
that is carried up and down the garden borders in narcissus, dwarf
tulips, and pansies, peach blossoms giving a rosy tinge to the snow fall
of cherry bloom.

To-day there are two catbirds, Elle et Lui, and the first Johnny Wren is
inspecting the particular row of cottages that top the long screen of
honeysuckles back of the walk named by Richard _Wren Street_. Why is the
song sparrow calling "Dick, Dick!" so lustily and scratching so testily
in the leaves that have drifted under an old rose shrub? The birds' bath
and drinking basin is still empty; I pour out the libation to the day by
filling it.

The seed bed is reached at last. It has wintered fairly well, and the
lines of plants all show new growth. As I started to point out and
explain, Lavinia Cortright began to jot down name and quantity, and
then, stopping, said: "No, you must write it out as the first record for
The Garden, You, and I. I make a motion to that effect." As I was about
to protest, the postman brought some letters, one being from Mary
Penrose, to whom Mrs. Cortright stands as aunt by courtesy. I opened it,
and spreading it between us we began to read, so that afterward Lavinia
declared that her motion was passed by default.

"WOODRIDGE, _April_ 30.
"MY DEAR MRS. EVAN,

"I am going into gardening in earnest this spring, and I want you and
Aunt Lavinia to tell me things,--things that you have done yourselves
and succeeded or failed in. Especially about the failures. It is a great
mistake for garden books and papers to insist that there is no such word
in horticulture as fail, that every flower bed can be kept in full
flower six months of the year, in addition to listing things that will
bloom outdoors in winter in the Middle States, and give all floral
measurements as if seen through a telephoto lens. It makes one feel the
exceptional fool. It's discouraging and not stimulating in the least.
Doesn't even nature meet with disaster once in a while as if by way of
encouragement to us? And doesn't nature's garden have on and off
seasons? So why shouldn't ours?

"There is a quantity of _Garden Goozle_ going about nowadays that is as
unbelievable, and quite as bad for the constitution and pocket, as the
guarantees of patent medicines. No, _Garden Goozle_ is not my word, you
must understand; it was invented by a clever professor of agriculture,
whom Bart met not long ago, and we loved the word so much that we have
adopted it. The mental quality of _Garden Goozle_ seems to be compounded
of summer squash and milkweed milk, and it would be quite harmless were
it not for the strong catbriers grafted in the mass for impaling the
purses of the trusting.

"Ah, if we only lived a little nearer together, near enough to talk over
the garden fence! It seems cruel to ask you to write answers to all my
questions, but after listing the hardy plants I want for putting the
garden on a consistent old-time footing, I find the amount runs quite to
the impossible three figures, aside from everything else we need, so
I've decided on beginning with a seed bed, and I want to know before we
locate the new asparagus bed how much ground I shall need for a seed
bed, what and how to plant, and everything else!

"I like all the hardy things you have, especially those that are mice,
lice, and water proof! If you will send me ever so rough a list, I
shall be grateful. Would I better begin at once or wait until July or
August, as some of the catalogues suggest?

"Bart has just come in and evidently has something on his mind of which
he wishes to relieve himself via speech.

"Your little sister of the garden,

"MARY P."

"She must join The Garden, You, and I," said Lavinia Cortright, almost
before I had finished the letter. "She will be entertainer in chief, for
she never fails to be amusing!"

"I thought there were to be but three members," I protested, thinking of
the possible complications of a three-cornered correspondence.

"Ah, well," Lavinia Cortright replied quickly, "make the Garden an
_Honorary_ member; it is usual so to rank people of importance from whom
much is expected, and then we shall still be but three--with privilege
of adding your husband as councillor and mine as librarian and custodian
of deeds!"

So I have promised to write to Mary Penrose this evening.

III

CONCERNING HARDY PLANTS

THE SEED BED FOR HARDY FLOWERS

When the Cortrights first came to Oaklands, expecting to remain here but
a few months each summer, their garden consisted of some borders of
old-fashioned, hardy flowers, back of the house. These bounded a
straight walk that, beginning at the porch, went through an arched grape
arbour, divided the vegetable garden, and finally ended under a tree in
the orchard at the barrier made by a high-backed green wooden seat, that
looked as if it might have been a pew taken from some primitive church
on its rebuilding.

There were, at intervals, along this walk, some bushes of lilacs,
bridal-wreath spirea, flowering almond, snowball, syringa, and scarlet
flowering quince; for roses, Mme. Plantier, the half double Boursault,
and some great clumps of the little cinnamon rose and Harrison's yellow
brier, whose flat opening flowers are things of a day, these two
varieties having the habit of travelling all over a garden by means of
their root suckers. Here and there were groups of tiger and lemon
lilies growing out of the ragged turf, bunches of scarlet bee balm, or
Oswego tea, as it is locally called, while plantain lilies, with deeply
ribbed heart-shaped leaves, catnip, southernwood, and mats of grass
pinks. Single hollyhocks of a few colours followed the fence line; tall
phlox of two colours, white and a dreary dull purple, rambled into the
grass and was scattered through the orchard, in company with New England
asters and various golden rods that had crept up from the waste
pasture-land below; and a straggling line of button chrysanthemums,
yellow, white, maroon, and a sort of medicinal rhubarb-pink, had backed
up against the woodhouse as if seeking shelter. Lilies-of-the-valley
planted in the shade and consequently anaemic and scant of bells, blended
with the blue periwinkle until their mingled foliage made a great shield
of deep, cool green that glistened against its setting of faded,
untrimmed grass.

This garden, such as it was, could be truly called hardy, insomuch as
all the care it had received for several years was an annual cutting of
the longest grass. The fittest had survived, and, among herbaceous
things, whatsoever came of seed, self-sown, had reverted nearly to the
original type, as in the case of hollyhocks, phlox, and a few common
annuals. The long grass, topped by the leaves that had drifted in and
been left undisturbed, made a better winter blanket than many people
furnish to their hardy plants,--the word _hardy_ as applied to the
infinite variety of modern herbaceous plants as produced by selection
and hybridization not being perfectly understood.

While a wise selection of flowering shrubs and truly hardy roses will,
if properly planted, pruned, and fertilized, live for many years,
certain varieties even outlasting more than one human generation, the
modern hardy perennial and biennial of many species and sumptuous
effects must be watched and treated with almost as much attention as the
so-called bedding-plants demand in order to bring about the best
results.

The common idea, fostered by inexperience, and also, I'm sorry to say,
by what Mary Penrose dubs _Garden Goozle_, that a hardy garden once
planted is a thing accomplished for life, is an error tending to bitter
disappointment. If we would have a satisfactory garden of any sort, we
must in our turn follow Nature, who never rests in her processes, never
even sleeping without a purpose. But if fairly understood, looked
squarely in the face, and treated intelligently, the hardy garden,
supplemented here and there with annual flowers, is more than worth
while and a perpetual source of joy. If money is not an object to the
planter, she may begin by buying plants to stock her beds, always
remembering that if these thrive, they must be thinned out or the clumps
subdivided every few years, as in the case of hybrid phloxes,
chrysanthemums, etc., or else dug up bodily and reset; for if this is
not done, smaller flowers with poorer colours will be the result.

The foxglove, one of the easily raised and very hardy plants, of
majestic mien and great landscape value, will go on growing in one
location for many years; but if you watch closely, you will find that it
is rarely the original plant that has survived, but a seedling from it
that has sprung up unobserved under the sheltering leaves of its parent.
The old plant grows thick at the juncture of root stock and leaf, the
action of the frost furrows and splits it, water or slugs gain an
entrance, and it disappears, the younger growth taking its place.
Especially true is this also of hollyhocks. The larkspurs have different
roots and more underground vigour, and all tap-rooted herbs hold their
own well, the difficulty being to curb their spreading and undermining
their border companions.

[Illustration: 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 each spring, 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 every third 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
by _Garden 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.

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