Another garden dial thus gives, "in long, lean letters," its warning word:—
"You'll mend your Ways To-morrow
When blooms that budded Flour?
Mortall! Lern to your Sorrow
Death may creep with his Arrow
And pierce yo'r vitall Marrow
Long ere my warning Shadow
Can mark that Hour."
These dials are all of heavy metal, usually lead; sometimes with gnomon of brass. But I have heard of one which was unique; it was cut in box.
At the edge of the farm garden often stood the well-sweep, one of the most picturesque adjuncts of the country dooryard. Its successor, the roofed well with bucket, stone, and chain, and even the homely long-handled pump, had a certain appropriateness as part of the garden furnishings.
So many thoughts crowd upon us in regard to the old garden; one is the age of its flowers. We have no older inhabitants than these garden plants; they are old settlers. Clumps of flower-de-luce, double buttercups, peonies, yellow day-lilies, are certainly seventy-five years old. Many lilac bushes a century old still bloom in New England, and syringas and flowering currants are as old as the elms and locusts that shade them.
This established constancy and yearly recurrence of bloom is one of the garden's many charms. To those who have known and loved an old garden in which,
"There grow no strange flowers every year,
But when spring winds blow o'er the pleasant places,
The same dear things lift up the same fair faces,"
and faithfully tell and retell the story of the changing seasons by their growth, blossom, and decay, nothing can seem more artificial than the modern show-beds of full-grown plants which are removed by assiduous gardeners as soon as they have flowered, to be replaced by others, only in turn to bloom and disappear. These seem to form a real garden no more than does a child's posy-bed stuck with short-stemmed flowers to wither in a morning.
And the tiresome, tasteless ribbon-beds of our day were preceded in earlier centuries by figured beds of diverse-colored earths—and of both we can say with Bacon, "they be but toys, you may see as good sights many times in tarts."
The promise to Noah, "while the earth remaineth seed-time and harvest shall not cease," when heeded in the garden, brings various interests. The seed-time, the springing-up of familiar favorites, and the cherishing of these favorites through their in-gathering of seeds or bulbs or roots for another year, bring pleasure as much as does their inflorescence.