CHAPTER XVIII
IN NORTHERN GARDENS
Away from the beaten tracks there are still by-paths where hyacinths grow in the springtime.—ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE.
Far off in the Southland, it is in the habit of Spring to come lagging over the land. She is a princess. You can tell it by her manner of moving, and her fine lady ways. Often, she is greatly bored.
Under the north star it is different. Spring is a wilding horsewoman, sweet and graceless, pirouetting a-tiptoe and waving to us kisses.
Hush! and hold you still, my merry Gentlemen. You may catch them if you try, and they are not in the least sinful.
Goldilocks, I call her.
"A young mother," you say, "and no Columbine."
Pray thee have it so, for when this season of seven sweet suns has begun, she is all things to all men.
What an ado there is when she calls to her flower-children and chides them to arise and put on their dresses.
Sleepy heads! Sleepy heads!
The vi'lets peer out of their green bed and complain of the cold, and as for the ferns, instead of expanding into fans of green, they curl themselves into foolish fiddle heads and beg to finish their dream.
The shy anemone, with flushed face, gets her up first that she may be with her mother. She is Spring's favourite child, but mark you, the maiden wears a ruff of fur about her neck, and snuggles into it, just as the pussy-willow does into his coat of grey.
Those flowers that have butter-pats to heads come on apace. Some there are who call them dandelions but we shall call them children's gold.
Ah! if flowers would only sing.
How terribly long has been the winter with its tiresome monochrome of white. Every vestige of colour has been bleached out of the earth like one would bleach a tablecloth.
By way of solace, our northern Indian paints his face and wears a scarlet sash as, by the same token, you and I wear poster coats and purple plumes.
It was recorded a day ago that when our dogs run away from us they always travel southward. There is no doubt in the world they are seeking colour.
Over the way from my study-window there is a glass-house where a man who, aforetime, taught school now grows flowers. The transition is surely a natural one.
His is the last conservatory on this hemisphere—at least I've heard tell it is.
He lets me walk up and down its long blossom-bordered aisles whenever I am so minded. Here, in his floral sanctuary, one may take deep draughts from the warm subtly-scented air till, someway or other, it is transmuted into the alembic of the soul.
May no blight fall on his roses or his heart! May God love him and let him live long!
This man's roses are of ivory and pink, but a few are red as if they might be the blood of some great wounded queen.
Nearly all the roses are long-winged and heavy-headed. They could not be otherwise when they come and go from the land where dreams are born. Once, a poet told that the soul of a rose went into his blood. This was how he came to write the Idylls of the King.
One of the gardeners ties the red roses to stakes and he will not have it that the habit is cruel. "You may have noticed, Lady"—and here he tightly draws the cord—"that most folk are hung by their sweethearts." I almost hate this man.
Hath not a rose-tree organs, passions, senses? If you prick it does it not bleed? Verily I say unto you that it hath and it does.
It is near to April before the lilies are at flood-tide. You must needs see them before Passion Week when the gardeners cut and send them to a large hungry place called down the line, where, in prairie churches of tin and pine and sod, the Eastertide worshippers consider the lily and sing songs about death and life.
Not an inch of space is lost in the long lines where, tall and lissome, the stalks bend and curtsy to the passer-by. The glory of the lily is short-lived, for always they are cut off in maturity. The message they give is not one of prophecy and resurrection as the writers have ever taught. You may hear the message if you are still enough. "There is no second flowering time" they whisper. "Love while life doth last."
But, after all, the lilies are white like the snow outside, so that I esteem the big purple hyacinths better, and the bobbing daffodils.
There is an osier chair in one room wherein I often sit and watch the buyers flit from plant to plant. The women who come from the British Isles choose primroses, while those of Ontario and the other provinces to the south, prefer a lilac in bloom, marguerites, or carnations—anything they knew and loved at home.
The Fraus, Madames, and Senoritas from Europe (every one must have a blossom for Easter, else where is luck to hail from?) are better satisfied with heliotropes, azaleas, and claret-coloured cyclamens.
Our erstwhile teacher places the Norway pines close under the palms; the tree of shade and the tree of sun that sigh vainly for each other. I like him for this. He knows that Titiana loved Bottom. He must know it.
Very few care for my favourite flower—the narcissus. I always buy it, and a fern. There are folk who despise ferns because they are nothing but leaves but I like them for their history. They are the survival of the fittest; types which Nature, in her great printing-press, never breaks up. They are the old-timers of the vegetable world.
Also, I walk down the tomato avenue and take my pick—that is I do if I have enough money, for, here, at the edge of the world, they are as expensive as Jacob's mess of pottage. One does not dream of robbing banks so much as stripping tomato-vines.
Tomatoes do not ripen out of doors (but you must not tell the Board of Trade I said so) unless on a sunny slope, or by reason of some other special dispensation.
Other vegetables thrive, and the cauliflowers attain a size and perfection elsewhere undreamed of.
Never were there such toothsome red radishes as are grown here in the north, large, firm, and flavorous. They are not so big, though, as the radishes the Jews used to raise long ago of which it was said a fox and her cubs could burrow in the hollow of one. I have, however, seen a pumpkin large enough for a fox-warren, but candour compels the confession that the gardener fed it daily with milk by means of an incision which he made in its stalk.
Our strawberries are not the equal of those grown on the Pacific slope, but are larger, sweeter and firmer than Ontario berries.
We do not sit under our own fig-tree (nor, alas, our apple-tree), but why should we sigh when each summer the sunflower springs up to a height of twelve or fifteen feet? It is the palm-tree of the north, only more beautiful.
The Mormons on their exodus from Illinois to Salt Lake City sowed sunflower seeds along the trail, and ever since it has been marked by sunflowers. In the province of Saskatchewan, the Russian refugees sometimes divide their fields by rows of poppies. In Manitoba, their hedges are of sweet-peas; in British Columbia, of broom.
After awhile, when all our real-estate has been sold, and all our companies have been promoted, we of Alberta shall have time and inclination to consider our provincial plant.
Grant us then that it may be the sunflower!