Part 3

Beyond, on the long lawn next “the par,” stands Sir Tristram, the fine young Pinsapo; he all but perished in the frost of 1879-80, but now he seems to have drawn new strength and vigorous green from that nearly fatal conflict with his terrible enemy. On the house lawn, the Deodara, is the fairy Morgan-le-faye. Near her stood Sir La Cote-mal-taille, an ill-formed Lawsoniana; but he is now transplanted elsewhere. King Mark is a rather wretched ill-grown Cedrus, in summer almost hidden by Laburnums. Dame Bragwaine is a curious Cryptomeria Elegans; she has so many names (seven, at least, that I know of), and she takes such odd diverse disguises! once, loaded with heavy snow, she had to be supported by a stake, and took the semblance of a bear leaning on a ragged staff. In summer she is green, and in winter she wears a dress of purple brown; in rain or heavy dew she is spangled all over with diamonds and pearls. Queen Guinevere was never represented; no tree was found to fit her character. But near King Arthur and Sir Tristram, the two great Pampas tufts, still waving wintry plumes, are “La Beale Isoude” and “Isoude les Blaunch Mains.”

From our foolish garden-dreaming let us rest, and turn with a long look of revering love to the great Oak, that stands in his strength out in the park field, beyond the garden. On three sides round are lines of guardian Elms, in all their pride of delicate leafless intricacy; alone, amid the leafless ones, rises the Oak, wearing still his crown of brown, sere leaves. Smooth and straight grows up the giant stem, full twenty feet to the spring of the lowest branch. Two brother Oaks stand on either side. Their form is more rounded, more perfect; but high above them the great Oak uprears his head--unconcerned, and grandly branched, though shattered by every fierce west wind that blows. Every storm works some loss, but from the way each torn limb lies, you would say he had thrown it down in proud defiance. The wood-pigeons shelter among the summer leaves; the autumn ripens a rich store of acorns; and now, as I survey him from the terrace walk, or gaze upwards from the wet dead leaves beneath, through all the mystery of his bare and spreading boughs, I think of Keats’ stanza--

“In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne’er remember Their green felicity; The North cannot undo them, With a sleety whistle through them, Nor frozen thawings glue them From budding at the prime.”

The Oak is to my mind the tree of trees; and the destruction of its foliage, by insect ravages, that has year by year saddened so many parks and woods, has not come near us, I rejoice to say. Our few (there are but four or five) are safe as yet. I heard the gardener of one great place that had suffered much acknowledge as the cause the scarcity of birds.

JANUARY, 1883.

“To the Attentive Eye, each Moment of the Year has its own Beauty.”--EMERSON.

IV.

JANUARY.

Of Field-Mice, and the Thorn of Joseph of Arimathea--Of “Poor Johnnys”--A Lilac Gem--and Greenhouse Flowers.

January 5, 1883.--A large body of the army of the small ones of the earth has attacked us, and it is no fault of theirs if we are not despoiled of the best of our spring delights. The field-mice have at length found out the Crocuses; we, on our side, have set traps in their way, and large numbers have fallen--quite flat, poor little things!--under the heavy bricks. We believe we should have slain many more, had not some clever creature made a practice of examining the traps during the night, devouring the cheese, and in some way withdrawing the bit of stick, so as to let the brick fall harmless. Suspicion points towards one person especially--the old white fox-terrier, who lives in the stables, and is master (in his own opinion) of all that department, and whom neither gates nor bars can prevent going anywhere he chooses to go. “Impossible!” says he, with Mirabeau; “don’t mention that stupid word!” Up to this time field-mice have not troubled us much. In the days when there was always a hawk or two hovering over the ploughed land, or keeping watch over the green meadows, and when we used to hear the owls in the summer nights, and saw the white owl who lived somewhere near by sail silently in the grey of evening across the lawn--in those days we knew little of the plague of field-mice. But now we have changed all that; cheap gun licences have put a gun into every one’s hand, the vermin is ruthlessly shot, and the balance of Nature is destroyed.

It is rather a fearful pleasure that we take just now to mark the unwonted earliness of green things of all kinds. One cannot help dreading that some great check will happen later on in the year; and yet it may be an omen for good that the birds’ full concert has only just begun, in these dark mornings, amongst the trees of the garden. The saying goes in Scotland, “If the birds pipe afore Christmas they’ll greet after;” and so far as I know, not a note was sung till December 30. The birds served our Hollies a good turn at Christmas. In November the Hollies were scarlet with berries, and one thought with a shudder of how they would have to suffer, when the time came for Christmas decorations; then occurred two short severe frosts, and, to my joy, the Holly trees were swept clear of every tempting spot of scarlet before Christmas, and thus were saved the customary reckless breaking and tearing of branches. Dear birds! Does any one ever think, I wonder, sitting in the summer shade near “some moist, bird-haunted English lawn,” how dull it would be without them--how much they enhance for us the grace and charm of the garden and the country? It is their gay light-heartedness that is so delightful, and that we should miss so much if they were not there. Who ever saw a grave bird?--at least I mean a grave little one--the bigger the sadder it is, with them. Their very labours of nest-building, and of feeding their young ones, are done like a merry bit of child’s play! The birds’ never-failing interest in life is like a sort of tonic to those who love them. Michelet felt this when he called them “des êtres innocents, dont le mouvement, les voix, et les jeux, sont comme le sourire de la Création.”

I do not remember having seen before in mid-winter a Hawthorn hedge bursting out into leaf! At the end of last month, however, there were strong young shoots and fully formed leaves on some of the Quicks in a hedge planted last spring in our lane. I have known nothing like this, except the Glastonbury Thorn. There is one of these strange Thorns, a large tree, growing just within the park gates of Marston Bigot, in Somersetshire. It used to bloom with great regularity in mild winters about this time. Tufts of flowers came all over the branches, smelling as sweet as Hawthorn in May. I have often cut a long spray all wreathed with pearly bloom, on New Year’s Eve, in former years. The flowers come with scarce a sign of leaf about them, and they are rather smaller than those of the common May. The emerald green of turf, thickly sprinkled with Daisies, seems also an unusual sight for January. The first green glow on the grass and the first Daisy we are surely used to hail as signs of approaching spring. On the lawn, too, a yellow Buttercup, careless of the heavy roller, has dared to hold up its head!

Jan. 8.--The weather has been for many weeks so dark and gloomy, that the rare sunshine which shone upon the land to-day was as welcome and nearly as unlooked for as May flowers in January. The house stood blocked out in sun and shadow. Magnolia Grandiflora, which covers the south-east gable, looked grand in this flood of radiance. Standing before it, the refrain of a wild canzonetta I once heard, chanted forth lazily in the little sun-steeped piazza of an old Italian town, came back to the mind’s ear--“Oh, splendid bella!” The eye, soon tired, however, of so much dazzling brilliance in the polished foliage, each leaf reflecting back the sun, follows the ascending lines of beauty up above the pointed roofs, where the soft golden rust of the topmost leaves’ inner lining meets the deep blue, cloudless sky. Next the Magnolia, just under the painting-room window, is a Flexuosa Honeysuckle which has not lost a leaf this winter. New shoots and twists of brightest green, set with young leaves two and two, are springing all over it. One tender shoot, indeed, has had the heart to curl twice round a branch, sending out a length of spray beyond.

Hard by the Flexuosa flourished once a fine Gum Cistus. To my sorrow, it perished in the frost of two winters back. The aroma of its gummy foliage, under the noontide sun, would penetrate deliciously through the open windows. We lost that winter all but one of our Gum Cistus, and their destruction was so universal that there was a difficulty in replacing them. I like the Gum Cistus best when growing upon the lawn. The snow of fallen petals on the grass seems right, and gives no sense of untidiness, there. The loss of the Cistus, however, made room for better growth to the old Maiden’s-blush Rose in the corner, by another window. She has hard work, anyhow, to hold her own against the flowery smothering of an Everlasting Pea, which persists in spreading beyond all bounds, notwithstanding the hints it yearly receives from knife and spade. Further on, still under the south front, a white Hepatica (Poor Johnny) is already shyly blooming. The root is sheltered by its own undecayed leaves; other plants of the same kind being quite bare. Hepaticas in England almost always look discontented, and this is no marvel to any who have seen them wild in their own place. I remember as clear as yesterday the joy of finding the blue Hepatica for the first time. It was in a narrow lovely valley at Mentone, on a mossy bank beside the little stony river. We were gathering Violets, which abound in that place; but on the edge of the bank, and over its steep side, intermingled with deep Moss and Ferns, there was another blue, which was not the blue of Violets. It was like the surprise and wonder of a new world thus unawares to come upon such a flower--the beloved of childhood--in such rich profusion--a flower we had never seen before that happy day, save in rare scanty patches, in some damp garden border! About the same time I saw also both the pink and white Hepaticas, from the Pine woods on the slopes of the Alpes Maritimes. In a corner near the Hepaticas is a little patch of Violets with Bella Donna Lilies. The Lilies are sending up strong, healthy leaves, and that is about all they will ever do to please me. Fine, good roots were put in six years ago in this choice south corner, where I believed they could not but do well. But no; it is in vain I watch and hope!--not one of those exquisite “harmonies in ink” I so long to enjoy do they vouchsafe to give me. Possibly they may object to the society of the Violets!

Primroses have been with us more or less since September last, and now they are more abundant than ever--all colours--red, brown, yellow, white, sulphur: the garden is quite full of Primroses. Roses, also, we have scarcely been without all winter. Within the walled garden there are real red Rosebuds, rather tightly closed up, but capable of opening any day. Many Rose-bushes have never lost their old leaves, and some are already putting forth new. On the top of the wall I perceived to-day a white spot--it was a Gloire de Dijon--looking very pale, but fully opened; and below it the Marcartney and an Apricot Tea Rose are in bud. A space of kitchen garden wall by the north iron gate is resplendent with Jasminum Nudiflorum, and close by, the bare branches of a Fig tree are already pointed with green, recalling in a dim way the Fig trees of the South, which in March glow like great branched candlesticks lighted up with flames of golden-green, in honour of the coming festa of spring. The Pyrus Japonica--a very old plant--has opened two coral cups. But the gem of the whole garden just now is a small, most delicately yet brilliantly tinted lilac Iris. The contrast between it and the rich dark green of its reed-like leaves, amidst which the flower shines, is charming. It is only in the mildest of winters that it ventures to appear. Last year the date of its blooming first was February 10. There are several tufts of foliage, but as yet only this one perfect flower, and we find rarely more than half-a-dozen in the season. In “the land of flowers,” however, which I believe to be its own, the paths of many a Cypress and Ilex-shaded garden must be lined with lilac and green, at this very time. I often think how little use is made of that most poetical of colours, lilac--“lalock,” as our grandmothers used to pronounce it. It was Schiller’s favourite colour; but I hardly know of any one else particularly caring for it. Perhaps one reason may be, because it is so hard to mix the most lovely shades of lilac in painting, or in manufactured stuffs; and then it is so evanescent. Even Nature herself does not make use of lilac so freely as of other colours--yellow being, I almost think, her favourite. She has, however, hit the mark indeed in the colouring of my lilac gem; there is a sharpness in the flavour--so to speak--which makes it perfect. The dear little winter Aconite--each bud of pure clean yellow surrounded with its green frill of leaves--appears here and there among the damp dead leaves. Snowdrops are showing daily whiter and larger above the ground, and all sorts of green peaceful spears are piercing in their strength, up through the black mould everywhere.

We have got through some rather important work within the past three weeks. A new Beech hedge has been planted on the open side of a green walk or close, already hedged in on one side. I once read somewhere of how it is reckoned good for the health to walk between Beech hedges, the air being purified and freshened by passing through the leaves. An old border, full of bulbs and Damask Roses, has been dug and rearranged. The Roses, which are old plants, will be refreshed and improved by the moving, and we shall add some day one or two York and Lancaster Roses. In this border the Grape Hyacinths have increased so rapidly that it is literally full of them, and we are planting them about in different places, some under the Deodara (Morgan-le-faye) on the lawn, with Snowdrops and Daffodils. The Deodara is in the wrong place, and was spreading so much as to injure the effect of the Yew hedges. So, instead of cutting it down, it is trimmed up to eight feet or so from the grass; and for this act I have had to brave a perfect storm of adverse criticism! In a few months I hope the stem will be clothed with Virginia Creeper, which, when touched by Autumn’s fiery finger, will become a pillar of flame, while wreaths of white Clematis (Virgin’s Bower) are to light up the green in summer. Then we have been planting out four fine tree Pæonies on the turf by the entrance drive. In their season they will be as beautiful as great cabbage roses.

There have been two days of frost and bitter cold, and yet the impatient flowers are not discouraged. At the further end of the broad walk, down among the broken Fern and withered leaves, a sense of colour is felt in the border as one passes by. Omphalodes Verna (would that dear English names were possible!) is wide awake, and little eyes of cœrulean blue are looking upwards. The Rock Roses are full of bud, and small variegated-leaved Periwinkles, on a low wall, already begin to tip their hanging sprays with stars of misty grey. But the strangest effort of all is a Foxglove spire of buds, rising well up from its leaf-crowned root on an ancient stump of Wistaria.

The mention of all these flowers would make it seem, I fear, as if our garden were even now a sort of flowery Paradise. The truth is a sad contrast to every such idea; for though the beautiful things are all in truth here, it would be difficult to describe the heavy gloom and damp of the whole place. And so one turns more often than usual to the greenhouse for consolation. Small as ours is--only about fifteen paces long--it is large enough for as much pleasure as I desire, under glass. To me the open garden is daily bread, the greenhouse “the honey that crowns the repast.” There happens at this time to be a chord of colour there, worth noting--ivory whiteness of Roman Hyacinths, green of all exquisite gradations, pale yellow of Meg Merrilies Chrysanthemums; others of a warmer yellow, and pure white; fairest pink of Primulas, and a deep purple note, struck once or twice, of Pleroma. What a flower that is! how charming in its way of blooming sideways on its stalk, to let the sun shine through its violet translucence!

FEBRUARY.

With the Trees of the Garden.

FEBRUARY.

Land of Mandragora and the Serpent Flower.

“There never was a juster debt Than what the dry do pay for wet; Never a debt was paid more nigh As what the wet do pay for dry!”

February 13.--If the West Country farmer’s rhyme prove true this year, the “dry” will have a heavy debt to pay! Some of the gravel walks in the garden are quite green, along the sides where the almost ceaseless rain flows down. All our dressed stone--sun-dial, vases, steps--is discoloured and green, and will all have to be scrubbed with hot water and soap, like the rocks in the great rockery once described in the Gardener’s Chronicle (vol. xviii., p. 747). A large part of the grounds has been under water nearly all through the winter; the “wet,” however, in which they sometimes stand ankle deep for weeks, seems not to do any harm to the evergreens here; whilst we get from the floods charming landscape effects. I could almost wish the glassy meres, with their clear reflections of tree or sky, to be permanent.

I have been looking over and making notes of our Fir trees--we have only about a dozen or so, I am afraid! I find that Pinus Austriaca thrives better than any other here; it is a regret to me that we did not plant numbers more of them, instead of wasting years in trying to make Scotch Fir succeed. Spruce never seems to do well in this part of the country; we have two or three old Spruce Firs which are mere poles, and some much younger, which must be cut down to relieve our eyes from that garden misery, a sickly tree. Only in the “Fantaisie” are our Spruce Firs successful, and there, from overcrowding--for there are at least ten--they are well-nigh spoilt. This little spot has proved good for them, I imagine, because it was new ground, taken in from old unbroken pasture and well trenched. One or two others, full and healthy, of a few years’ growth, suddenly went off last summer; it was as if a blighting wind had scorched their branches, or lightning had seared them. I know no successful Spruce plantations anywhere in the neighbourhood. The soil is gravelly, with chalk and flint; and sometimes trees seem to strike their roots down into a subsoil--perhaps an intermittent layer of greensand--and then they go off. But this can scarcely be the only cause that so fatally affects our Firs. About 120 miles down west, there is a group of extremely fine Spruce Firs that I have known for the last thirty years, and when I visited them last year I found they had all gone off in the same way as ours here. Excelsa Grandis flourishes equally with Pinus Austriaca. One fine young plant in the “Fantaisie” was, as one says, “quite a picture” in the summer for the perfect symmetry of its form, and on the two topmost laterals were just two beautifully shaped upright green cones, crested with amber-coloured gum! I rejoiced in this young tree during all the season, but there is a fear since then that it may suffer in its growth from the premature effort. The Balm of Gilead Firs, a few of which we put in along one side of the turf walk, have failed entirely. I meant each to become a little rounded beauty, like that one planted by my father, which I remember long years since as a wonder of aromatic greenery; but these are grey and stunted, and they all wear such a look of age and decay as I fear we cannot long endure to see. The crisp leaves, however, are as sweet when crumpled in the hand as they ought to be. With two or three of these piteous little trees, the branches show, without losing stiffness, a certain tendency to droop or turn downwards at the extremities. It is rather curious, this droop, affected by a few individuals in a Fir plantation! For they do not begin life with that intention; the young tree may be just like any other for years, when suddenly one branch will be observed turned down, then another and another, till finally the whole thing is decided, and the tree becomes a “weeper,” as some call them. In a large plantation in Aberdeenshire, some years since, I knew one young Silver Fir out of all the others that grew itself into a drooping form, so that it seemed at last to draw down its branches close together as one would draw a cloak around one in the cold. It was then ten or twelve feet high, and now it must indeed be a remarkable object if it has grown and drooped at the same rate. Our Douglas Fir (Sir Bedivere) has known this temptation to droop, but evidently the feeling of the mass of his branches is dead against the idea, and it will come to nothing.

This accident or sport is common in other trees all over the world, I suppose, and one of the most ancient nomadic patterns of Persian rugs depicts, on either side the Tree of Life, the columnar Cypress and the drooping Cypress, beside a little tomb.

In various odd nooks and corners of the garden, I know where to find a few little old Cephalonian Pines, all that remain out of a number we once had. They are only about 4 or 5 feet high, yet they were grown from seed over a quarter of a century ago. Like poor old useless retainers, they have followed the fortunes of the family, and we have become attached to one another. One amongst the original number became a fine specimen--and perished. The rest have never had a chance of growing up, for every spring their new buds are nipped, so they remain still the same, with a sort of look of old-young trees. I am especially interested in the welfare of one of the Cephalonians, who lives in an English Yew. Those two are certainly bosom friends! The Yew itself was only half a tree, spared, out of charity, on what seemed a bare chance of surviving. The Cephalonian stood near and shivered, and lost its buds every spring, while the Yew crept nearer and nearer, till at last its thick dark foliage reached the little Pine, and so grew on; and now the Yew fairly holds it within its warm, comfortable embrace. Some say, “What a mistake to leave them thus!” I say, “They shall not be parted;” so the two remain together, and grow quite happily in each other’s arms. Oddly enough, the Pine seems to be assimilating itself in colour, and partly in form, with the Yew, so that it is not easy to distinguish them. But if the Cephalonian at last out-tops its benefactor, what will happen then? At times the space of ground over which we reign seems to be very much too small; and I incline to envy the possession of land, with room enough to plant; for there can be no more engrossing interest of its kind than to watch the growth of trees, their manners and customs. I would plant at once acres of Ilex Oak. What shelter they would make! And in a congenial soil they would not be too slow of growth. There should be broad bands of Beech and Oak, and long groves of Larch, delicious in spring for the fragrance of their green and pink-tipped tassels. And there should be plantations of Fir--Scotch Fir, for the delight of their healthy blue-green in youth, and for the glory of their great red stems in age; and Spruce Fir, with all their charm of deep mosses underneath, and the loveliness in spring of starry Winter-green (Trientalis Europæ) and “the rathe Primrose;” and for the music of the winds among their branches, and the velvet darkness of their colour under summer skies. (Mem.--The Winter-green would have to be sent us from the North.)

Our great work of last month has been an alteration at the east end of the garden. A Quickset hedge, forty or fifty years old, is moved back, so as to take in from “the park” a bit of waste ground; the gravel path that ran under the hedge is widened, and a block of Laurels cut through. By this means a turf way, leading north and south, is made to enter the improved walk, whose chief attraction is the border of old damask Roses. Plum trees and Pears stand along the border amongst the Roses, and a large perennial yellow Lupin, in which thrushes have been known to make their nests. In the middle of the hedge grew a fine young Elder. I had long promised that Elder it should never be cut down, so when the Hawthorns were removed the tree remained, arching across the path to meet a Plum tree on the other side. An Elder in full bloom is such a beautiful thing that it is painful to feel obliged to destroy it; but Elders have such an unfortunate knack of appearing where they are not wanted! The birds sow Elder seeds in the clefts of trees, in chinks of walls, flower borders--all sorts of inconvenient places--now that the berries are no longer requisitioned to make Elder wine. In old-fashioned days it was worth having a cold, to enjoy a night-cap of Elder wine from the saucepan on the hob! So this one tree is preserved in honour, as compensation for those others which are no more. I am not in the least superstitious, but it is rather uncanny to cut down an old Elder! Eldritch legends and spells have clung to the tree in days of yore, and have even come down to our own times. I used to listen at my mother’s knee, and beg again and again for the story of the fairy changeling. The interest of the story never failed, and the rhyme never tired, about the enchanted hare, who ran--