Part 5

My own time of trial came in the early afternoon. During the more than ten years that I have been a gardener on my own account, I have naturally tried many experiments and have gradually come to the conclusion that it is a mistake to grow too many species of flowers,--better to have more of a kind and thus avoid spinkiness. The pink family in general is one of those that has stood the test, and this year a cousin of Evan's sent me over a quantity of Margaret carnation seed from prize stock, together with that of some exhibition single Dahlias.

Late in February I sowed the seed in two of the most protected hotbeds, muffled them in mats and old carpets every night, almost turned myself into a patent ventilator in order to give the carnations enough air during that critical teething period of pinks, when the first grasslike leaves emerge from the oval seed leaves and the little plants are apt to weaken at the ground level, damp off, and disappear, thinned them out with the greatest care, and had (day before yesterday) full five hundred lusty little plants, ready to go out into the deeply dug cool bed and there wax strong according to the need of pinks before summer heat gains the upper hand.

The Dahlias had also thriven, but then they are less particular, and if they live well will put up with more snubs than will a carnation.

Weather and Bertel being propitious, I prepared to plant out my pets, though of course they must be sheltered of nights for another half month. As I was about to remove one of the props that held the sash aloft, to let in air to the Dahlias, and still constitute it a windbreak, I heard a violent whistling in our grass road north of the barn that divides the home acres from the upper pastures and Martha's chicken farm. At first I thought but little of it, as many people use it as a short cut from the back road from the Bluffs down to the village. Soon a shout came from the same direction, and going toward the wall, I saw Mr. Vandeveer struggling along, his great St. Bernard Jupiter, prize winner in a recent show and but lately released from winter confinement, bounding around and over him to such an extent that the spruce New Yorker, who had the reputation of always being on dress parade from the moment that he left bed until he returned to it in hand-embroidered pink silk pajamas, was not only covered with abundant April mud, but could hardly keep his footing.

At the moment I spied the pair, a great brindled cat, who sometimes ventures on the place, in spite of all the attentions paid her by the beagles, and who had been watching sparrows in the barnyard, sprang to the wall. Zip! There was a rush, a snarl, a hiss, and a smash! Dog and what had been cat crashed through the sash of my Dahlia frame, and in the rebound ploughed into the soft earth that held the carnations.

The next minute Mr. Vandeveer absolutely leaped over the wall, and seeing the dog, apparently in the midst of the broken glass, turned almost apoplectic, shouting, "Ah, his legs will be cut; he'll be ruined, and Julie will never forgive me! He's her best dog and cost $3000 spot cash! Get him out, somebody, why don't you? What business have people to put such dangerous skylights near a public road?"

Meanwhile, as wrath arose in my throat and formed ugly words, Jupiter, a great friend of ours, who has had more comfortable meals in our kitchen during the winter than the careless kennel men would have wished to be known, sprang toward me with well-meant, if rough, caresses,--evidently the few scratches he had amounted to nothing. I forgave him the cat cheerfully, but my poor carnations! They do not belong to the grovelling tribe of herbs that bend and refuse to break like portulaca, chickweed, and pusley the accursed. Fortunately, just then, a scene of the past year, which had come to me by report, floated across my vision. Our young hounds, Bob and Pete, in the heat of undisciplined rat-catching (for these dogs when young and unbroken will chase anything that runs), completely undermined the Vandeveers' mushroom bed, the door of the pit having been left open!

When Mr. Vandeveer recovered himself, he began profuse apologies. Would "send the glazier down immediately"--"so sorry to spoil such lovely young onions and spinach!"

"What! not early vegetables, but flowers?" Oh, then he should not feel so badly. Really, he had quite forgotten himself, but the truth was Julie thought more of her dogs and horses than even of himself, he sometimes thought,--almost, but not quite; "ha! ha! really, don't you know!" While, judging by the comparative behaviour of dog and man, the balance was decidedly in favour of Jupiter. But you see I never like men who dress like ladies, I had lost my young plants, and I love dogs from mongrel all up the ladder (lap dogs excepted), so I may be prejudiced.

After Bertel had carefully removed the splintered glass from the earth, so that I could take account of my damaged stock, about half seemed to be redeemable; but even those poor seedlings looked like soldiers after battle, a limb gone here and an eye missing there.

At supper father, Evan, and I were silent and ceremoniously polite, neither referring to the day's disasters, and I could see that the boys were regarding us with open-eyed wonder. When the meal was almost finished, the bell of the front door rang and Effie returned, bearing a large, ornamental basket, almost of the proportions of a hamper, with a card fastened conspicuously to the handle, upon which was printed "With apologies from Jupiter!" Inside was a daintily arranged assortment of hothouse vegetables,--cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant eggs, artichokes,--with a separate basket in one corner brimming with strawberries, and in the other a pink tissue-paper parcel, tied with ribbon, containing mushrooms, proving that, after all, fussy Mr. Vandeveer has the saving grace of humour.

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.