Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth

by Alice Morse Earle

It has been the fortune of some communities to be the home of men in nature like Thoreau of Concord and Gilbert White of Selborne, men who live solely in love of out-door things, birds, flowers, rocks, and trees. To all these nature lovers is not given the power of writing down readily what they see and know, usually the gift of composition is denied them; but often they are just as close and accurate observers as the men whose names are known to the world by their writings. Sometimes these naturalists boldly turn to nature, their loved mother, and earn their living in the woods and fields. Sometimes they have a touch of the hermit in them, they prefer nature to man; others are genial, kindly men, albeit possessed of a certain reserve. I deem the community blest that has such a citizen, for his influence in promoting a love and study of nature is ever great. I have known one such ardent naturalist, Arba Peirce, ever since my childhood. He lives the greater part of his waking hours in the woods and fields, and these waking hours are from sunrise. From the earliest bloom of spring to the gay berry of autumn, he knows all beautiful things that grow, and where they grow, for hundreds of miles around his home.

Terraced Garden of Misses Nichols, Salem, Massachusetts.

I speak of him in this connection because he has acquired through his woodland life a wonderful power of distinguishing flowers at great distance with absolute accuracy. Especially do his eyes have the power of detecting those rose-lilac tints which are characteristic of our rarest, our most delicate wild flowers, and which I always designate to myself as Arethusa color. He brought me this June a royal gift—a great bunch of wild fringed Orchids, another of Calopogon, and one of Arethusa. What a color study these three made! At the time their lilac-rose tints seemed to me far lovelier than any pure rose colors. In those wild princesses were found every tone of that lilac-rose from the faint blush like the clouds of a warm sunset, to a glow on the lip of the Arethusa, like the crimson glow of Mullein Pink.

My friend of the meadow and wildwood had gathered that morning a glorious harvest, over two thousand stems of Pogonia, from his own hidden spot, which he has known for forty years and from whence no other hand ever gathers. For a little handful of these flower heads he easily obtains a dollar. He has acquired gradually a regular round of customers, for whom he gathers a successive harvest of wild flowers from Pussy Willows and Hepatica to winter berries. It is not easily earned money to stand in heavy rubber boots in marsh mud and water reaching nearly to the waist, but after all it is happy work. Jeered at in his early life by fools for his wood-roving tastes, he has now the pleasure and honor of supplying wild flowers to our public schools, and being the authority to whom scholars and teachers refer in vexed questions of botany.

I think the various tints allied to purple are the most difficult to define and describe of any in the garden. To begin with, all these pinky-purple, these arethusa tints are nameless; perhaps orchid color is as good a name as any. Many deem purple and violet precisely the same. Lavender has much gray in its tint. Miss Jekyll deems mauve and lilac the same; to me lilac is much pinker, much more delicate. Is heliotrope a pale bluish purple? Some call it a blue faintly tinged with red. Then there are the orchid tints, which have more pink than blue. It is a curious fact that, with all these allied tints which come from the union of blue with red, the color name comes from a flower name. Violet, lavender, lilac, heliotrope, orchid, are examples; each is an exact tint. Rose and pink are color names from flowers, and flowers of much variety of colors, but the tint name is unvarying.

Edward de Goncourt, of all writers on flowers and gardens, seems to have been most frankly pleased with the artificial side of the gardener's art. He viewed the garden with the eye of a colorist, setting a palette of varied greens from the deep tones of the evergreens, the Junipers and Cryptomerias through the variegated Hollies, Privets and Spindle trees; and he said that an "elegantly branched coquettishly variegated bush" seemed to him like a piece of bric-a-brac which should be hunted out and praised like some curio hidden on the shelf of a collector.

A lack of color perception seems to have been prevalent of ancient days, as it is now in some Oriental countries. The Bible offers evidence of this, and it has also been observed that the fragrance of flowers is nowhere noted until we reach the Song of Solomon. It is believed that in earliest time archaic men had no sense of color; that they knew only light and darkness. Mr. Gladstone wrote a most interesting paper on the lack of color sense in Homer, whose perception of brilliant light was good, especially in the glowing reflections of metals, but who never names blue or green even in speaking of the sky, or trees, while his reds and purples are hopelessly mixed. Some German scientists have maintained that as recently as Homer's day, our ancestors were (to use Sir John Lubbock's word) blue-blind, which fills me, as it must all blue lovers, with profound pity.