Home Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

The richest autumnal glory came from the cheerful marigold, the "golde" of Chaucer, and "mary-bud" of Shakespeare. This flower, beloved of all the old writers, as deeply suggestive and emblematic, has been coldly neglected by modern poets, as for a while it was banished from modern town gardens; but it may regain its popularity in verse as it has in cultivation. In farm gardens it has always flourished, and every autumn has "gone to bed with the sun and with him risen weeping," and has given forth in the autumn air its acrid odor, which to me is not disagreeable, though my old herbal calls its "a very naughty smell."

A favorite shrub in our garden, as in every country dooryard, was southernwood, or lad's-love. A sprig of it was carried to meeting each summer Sunday by many old ladies, and with its finely dissected, bluish-green foliage, and clean pungent scent, it was pleasant to see in the meeting-house, and pleasant to sniff at. The "virtues of flowers" took a prominent place in the descriptions in old-time botanies. The southernwood had strong medicinal qualities, and was used to cure "vanityes of the head."

"Take a quantitye of Suthernwood and put it upon kindled coales to burn and being made into powder mix it with the oyle of radishes and anoynt a balde place and you shall see great experiences."

It was of power as a love charm. If you placed a sprig in each shoe and wore it through the day when you were in love, you would then also in some way "see great experiences."

In the tender glamour of happy association, all flowers in the old garden seem to have been loved save the garish petunias, whose sickish odor grew more offensive and more powerful at nightfall and made me long to tear them away from their dainty garden-fellows, and the portulaca with its fleshy, worm-like stems and leaves, and its aggressively pushing habits, "never would be missed." Perhaps its close relation to the "pusley," most hated of weeds, makes us eye it askance.

There was one attribute of the old-time garden, one part of nature's economy, which added much to its charm—it was the crowding abundance, the over-fulness of leaf, bud, and blossom. Nature there displayed no bare expanses of naked soil, as in some too-carefully-kept modern parterres; the dull earth was covered with a tangle of ready-growing, self-sowing, lowly flowers, that filled every space left unoccupied by statelier garden favorites, and crowded every corner with cheerful, though unostentatious, bloom. And the close juxtaposition, and even intermingling, of flowers with herbs, vegetables, and fruits gave a sense of homely simplicity and usefulness, as well as of beauty. The soft, purple eyes of the mourning-bride were no less lovely to us in "our garden" because they opened under the shade of currant and gooseberry bushes; and the sweet alyssum and candytuft were no less honey-sweet. The delicate, pinky-purple hues of the sweet peas were not dimmed by their vivid neighbors at the end of the row of poles—the scarlet runners. The adlumia, or mountain fringe, was a special vine of our own and known by a special name—virgin's bower. With its delicate leaves, almost as beautiful as a maidenhair fern, and its dainty pink flower, it festooned the ripening corn as wantonly and luxuriantly as it encircled the snowball and lilac bushes.

Though "colored herbs" were cultivated in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as carefully as were flowers,—striped hollies, variegated myrtles, and bays being the gardener's pride,—yet in our old American gardens few plants were grown for their variegated or odd-colored foliage. The familiar and ever-present ribbon-grass, also called striped grass, canary grass, and gardener's garters,—whose pretty expanded panicles formed an almost tropical effect at the base of the garden hedge; the variegated wandering jew, the striped leaves of some varieties of day-lilies; the dusty-miller, with its "frosty pow" (which was properly a house plant), fill the short list. The box was the sole evergreen.

And may I not enter here a plea for the preservation of the box-edgings of our old garden borders? I know they are almost obsolete—have been winter-killed and sunburned—and are even in sorry disrepute as having a graveyard association, and as being harborers of unpleasant and unwelcome garden visitors. One lover of old ways thus indignantly mourns their passing:—

"I spoke of box-edgings. We used to see them in little country gardens, with paths of crude earth. Nowadays, it has been discovered that box harbours slugs, and we are beginning to have beds with tiled borders, while the walks are of asphalt. For a pleasure-ground in Dante's Inferno such materials might be suitable."

For its beauty in winter alone, the box should still find a place in our gardens. It grows to great size. Bushes of box in the deserted garden at Vaucluse in Newport, Rhode Island, are fifteen feet in height, and over them spread the branches of forest trees that have sprung up in the garden beds since that neglected pleasaunce was planted, over a century ago. The beautiful border and hedges of box at Mount Vernon, the home of Washington, plead for fresh popularity for this old-time favorite.