Part 22

What a freemasonry the love of dogs creates! Loki’s Grandfather, travelling up from our moors the other day, met a family likewise going to London; and these had with them a small Pekinese, who sat very sadly with drooping head and tail. The owner of Loki watched him sympathetically for some time in silence, then unable to repress his feelings, he leant forward and said very solemnly to the Pekinese’s lady:

“This little dog wants a pow-wow!”

“Oh! we know,” eagerly cried the lady in charge, “we know he does! He should have had it this morning, only we were travelling.”

We were pleased with the anecdote when Loki’s Grandfather told us. No introductions, no explanations needed: even our own special doggy dialect instantly apprehended! One touch of Peky makes the whole world kin.

* * * * *

A divine discontent seems an unavoidable accompaniment of garden ambition. The Lady of Villino Loki is always furiously disappointed every time she returns home—except in the Spring. She had, this time, wonderful visions of her Madonna Lilies, proudly straight against the upper terrace wall; of her Blue Border foaming blue; of her new turf settling down into greenness. And, behold, the Lilies have got the lily disease, drat them! the Blue Border never will be blue, whatever she does; the Anchusas have gone back to the wild; and not one drop of water has the infant turf received through three weeks of drought since her departure—with the results that can be imagined!

Not one of our precious packets of seed have come up! We once knew a pretty American whose daughter married a rather impoverished young Englishman of very good connexions. He was, however, scarcely important enough himself to attract much attention: and the day before the wedding he was nonplussed by his future mother-in-law, hitherto the most silky and smiling of beings, taking him by the arm and marching him round the displayed wedding presents, pausing at every step to remark: “I do not see the present of your uncle, Lord A.! I do not see the present of your cousin, Lady B.! I do not see the present of your great aunt, the Duchess of C.!”...

We want to take the seedsman in similar fashion round the greenhouse shelves:

“Where are the pots of Mignonette?” we will say. “Where the serried ranks of Scarlet Verbena? Where are the potted Nicotianas?”...

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XXIV

The Master of the House—he has admitted it himself somewhere in these pages—understands little if anything of gardener’s art: that is, of the art of rearing flowers in their proper seasons, in suitable ground and so forth. But he complacently believes that he has an aptitude for what, on a larger theatre of operations than the few acres of Villino Loki, would be called Landscape Gardening! He imagines that, had fate provided him with an “estate,” he would have been great at devising vistas, grouping trees, laying out pleasing curves of approach, and all that sort of thing.

At the Villino this imaginary special competency could only find an opening in clearance work. And when we first bought this strip of hill-side, clearance was indeed no small matter.

With the exception of the terraces immediately round the House and of the kitchen yards about the Cottage, the whole place was a congeries of almost impenetrable thickets, interspersed with patches of heather and furze. There were but two paths, running down, in purely utilitarian lines, from the higher level to that of the cottage potager.

‹What has been achieved since then in the matter of path-cutting can be made patent by a glance at Mr. Robinson’s perspective map of the Villino grounds.›

So thick and strenuous was the growth of underwood—self-sown infant Hollies, adolescent Larches and Pines, young Ashes, Oaks and Chestnuts in their nonage, all interlocked, entwined in Brambles and Honeysuckle, that hardly anywhere could the trunks of the full-grown trees be distinguished.

Now it is obvious that the beauty of wooded grounds depends essentially upon light effects under the foliage and between the boles; upon distant peeps. In no direction ought the view ever to be solidly stopped—unless, of course, where it is desired to hide some unpleasing prospect. It may therefore be erected into a maxim that, if trees are to be enjoyed, underwoods must be sacrificed wholesale.

* * * * *

At first, with that reverence for things which, if they may be laid low at one blow or two of the billhook, require many years for their growth, one feels inclined to hesitate. One’s heart rebels at the thought of cutting off in the flower of its youth the sapling that in the spring is of so tender green, the bush of name unknown but engaging enough—if there were not “so many of him.” But it soon becomes evident that you must harden your heart and ruthlessly slash away the bulk of undergrowths, for good and all.

And this has been the province of the padrone. And although on many an occasion at first the padrona bewailed bitterly, almost tearfully, that he was making the place “simply scald,” it is now generally admitted that the result has proved a matter for congratulation.

There have been a few mistakes, no doubt. It was not easy, for instance, in the case of Holly, and perhaps also of Rowan, for the beginner to distinguish which clump was likely to bear the decorative winter coral and which not. Seeing what some of our Hollies in a good season can be ‹that which closes the prospect at the north end of our Hemicycle, for example, what a glory of pure scarlet it displays when all bright colours have disappeared from the garden!› we regret not to have spared a few more. Nevertheless, it is a wise decision, in grounds overgrown by underwood, that delendum est Ilex Aquifolium—that Common Holly must go.

In the first place, nothing will grow under the shade of its dark leathery, spinous leaves, which, even when shed, are more indestructible and noxious to grass than pine needles themselves. And, secondly, Holly is a very bully and brigand among growing trees. Its vitality and pushfulness over-masters everything. Your young Holly will thrust aside the sturdiest neighbouring branches; will conquer its “place under the sun” to the detriment of the equally fair claims of Oak, or Ash, or anything that strives upward.

No—the right place of Holly is in the close-set hedge, for which its forbidding, never-failing foliage and its vigorous growth pre-eminently fit it. Or, again, in a dignified isolation where it can, without truculent self-assertion, develop on all sides its regular, shapely growth, look beautiful at all times in its evergreen sheen; and, if of the fruit-bearing sex, relieve with its scarlet the browns of autumn and the white of a winter landscape.

* * * * *

The first spot to be assailed was the area now called the Blue-bell Glade, the interior of which was then terra incognita. It had to be tackled like a fortress—by regular sap. Nothing was spared but the full-grown trees. Terrible was the destruction, and gigantic the accumulation of small firewood for future use. But great was the landscape result: it gave us our first far-reaching perspective along our own ground. We had, of course, fine and wide views over the tree-tops from the highest terrace. But now we obtained, in one direction at least, a middle-distance prospect of green fields between the boles under overhanging branches. And the effect was singularly satisfying.

And so the war on undergrowth was carried-on, with system, until the present pleasing condition was reached, when in every direction the eye is able to find, up hill or down, either some far view of moor or valley, or some corner of the grounds themselves, now grass-grown or bright with flower-beds.

Grass—that was what Villino Loki most wanted! And the extirpation of the greatest enemies to grass—Brushwood, Heather, Gorse, and Bracken—has been the hardest achievement of all: one which Grandpa is fond of letting every one know is more especially his own.

The Great Clearance took place in what may be called the pre-Adamite age of this little Earthly Paradise. Adam ‹in a kind of fateful way› only appeared upon the scene after the rougher work had been dealt with of letting in the air and light of heaven wherever it had hitherto failed. He arrived, of his own initiative, to offer his services in the matter of gardening, on the very day when his predecessor—one Grinder, whom on benevolence intent we had allowed to assume the duties of “gardener,” save the mark!—had had at last to be dismissed.