The garden edges and the street were overhung by graceful larches and by thorny honey-locust trees that bore on their trunks great clusters of powerful spines and sheltered in their branches an exceedingly unpleasant species of fat, fuzzy caterpillars, which always chose Sunday to drop on my garments as I walked to church, and to go with me to meeting, and in the middle of the long prayer to parade on my neck, to my startled disgust and agitated whisking away, and consequent reproof for being noisy in meeting.
What fragrances arose from that old garden, and were wafted out to passers-by! The ever-present, pungent, dry aroma of box was overcome or tempered, through the summer months, by a succession of delicate flower-scents that hung over the garden-vale like an imperceptible mist; perhaps the most perfect and clear among memory's retrospective treasures was that of the pale fringed "snow-pink," and later, "sweet william with its homely cottage smell." Phlox and ten-weeks stock were there, as everywhere, the last sweet-scented flowers of autumn.
At no time was this old garden sweeter than in the twilight, the eventide, when all the great clumps of snowy phlox, night-rockets, and luminous evening primrose, and all the tangles of pale yellow and white honeysuckle shone irradiated; when,
"In puffs of balm the night air blows
The burden which the day foregoes,"
and scents far richer than any of the day—the "spiced air of night"—floated out in the dusky gloaming.
Though the old garden had many fragrant leaves and flowers, their delicate perfume was sometimes fairly deadened by an almost mephitic aroma that came from an ancient blossom, a favorite in Shakespeare's day—the jewelled bell of the noxious crown-imperial. This stately flower, with its rich color and pearly drops, has through its evil scent been firmly banished from our garden borders.
One of the most cheerful flowers of this and of my mother's garden was the happy-faced little pansy that under various fanciful folk-names has ever been loved. Like Montgomery's daisy, it "blossomed everywhere." Its Italian name means "idle thoughts"; the German, "little stepmother." Spenser called it "pawnce." Shakespeare said maidens called it "love-in-idleness," and Drayton named it "heartsease." Dr. Prior gives these names—"Herb Trinity, Three Faces under a Hood, Fancy Flamy, Kiss Me, Pull Me, Cuddle Me unto You, Tickle my Fancy, Kiss Me ere I Rise, Jump Up and Kiss Me, Kiss Me at the Garden Gate, Pink of my Joan." To these let me add the New England folk-names—bird's-eye, garden-gate, johnny-jump-up, kit-run-about, none-so-pretty, and ladies'-delight. All these testify to the affectionate and intimate friendship felt for this laughing and fairly speaking little garden face, not the least of whose endearing qualities was that, after a half-warm, snow-melting week in January or February, this bright-some little "delight" often opened a tiny blossom to greet and cheer us—a true "jump-up-and-kiss-me," and proved by its blooming the truth of the graceful Chinese verse,—
"Ere man is aware
That the spring is here
The plants have found it out."
Another dearly loved spring flower was the daffodil, the favorite also of old English dramatists and poets, and of modern authors as well, when we find that Keats names a daffodil as, the thing of beauty that is a joy forever. Perhaps the happiest and most poetic picture of daffodils is that of Dora Wordsworth, when she speaks of them as "gay and glancing, and laughing with the wind." Perdita, in The Winter's Tale, thus describes them in her ever-quoted list: "Daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty." Most cheerful and sunny of all our spring flowers, they have never lost their old-time popularity, and they still laugh at our bleak March winds.
Bouncing-bet and her comely hearty cousins of the pink family made delightsome many a corner of our home garden. The pinks were Jove's own flowers, and the carthusian pink, china pink, clove pink, snow pink, plumed pink, mullein pink, sweet william, maltese cross, ragged robin, catch-fly, and campion, all made gay and sweet the summer. The clove pink was the ancestor of all the carnations.