Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth

by Alice Morse Earle

Winter as well as summer gave us many happy garden hours. Sometimes a sudden thaw of heavy snow and an equally quick frost formed a miniature pond for sheltered skating at the lower end of the garden. A frozen crust of snow (which our winters nowadays so seldom afford) gave other joys. And the delights of making a snow man, or a snow fort, even of rolling great globes of snow, were infinite and varied. More subtle was the charm of shaping certain things from dried twigs and evergreen sprigs, and pouring water over them to freeze into a beautiful resemblance of the original form. These might be the ornate initials or name of a dear girl friend, or a tiny tower or pagoda. I once had a real winter garden in miniature set in twigs of cedar and spruce, and frozen into a fairy garden.

In summertime the old-fashioned garden was a paradise for a child; the long warm days saw the fresh telling of child to child, by that curiously subtle system of transmission which exists everywhere among happy children, of quaint flower customs known to centuries of English-speaking children, and also some newer customs developed by the fitness of local flowers for such games and plays.

The Countess Potocka says the intense enjoyment of nature is a sixth sense. We are not born with this good gift, nor do we often acquire it in later life; it comes through our rearing. The fulness of delight in a garden is the bequest of a childhood spent in a garden. No study or possession of flowers in mature years can afford gratification equal to that conferred by childish associations with them; by the sudden recollection of flower lore, the memory of child friendships, the recalling of games or toys made of flowers: you cannot explain it; it seems a concentration, an extract of all the sunshine and all the beauty of those happy summers of our lives when the whole day and every day was spent among flowers. The sober teachings of science in later years can never make up the loss to children debarred of this inheritance, who have grown up knowing not when "the summer comes with bee and flower."

Milkweed Seed.

A garden childhood gives more sources of delight to the senses in after life than come from beautiful color and fine fragrance. Have you pleasure in the contact of a flower? Do you like its touch as well as its perfume? Do you love to feel a Lilac spray brush your cheek in the cool of the evening? Do you like to bury your face in a bunch of Roses? How frail and papery is the Larkspur! And how silky is the Poppy! A Locust bloom is a fringe of sweetness; and how very doubtful is the touch of the Lily—an unpleasant thick sleekness. The Clove Carnation is the best of all. It feels just as it smells. These and scores more give me pleasure through their touch, the result of constant handling of flowers when I was a child.

There were harmful flowers in the old garden—among them the Monk's-hood; we never touched it, except warily. Doubtless we were warned, but we knew it by instinct and did not need to be told. I always used to see in modest homes great tubs each with a flourishing Oleander tree. I have set out scores of little slips of Oleander, just as I planted Orange seeds. I seldom see Oleanders now; I wonder whether the plant has been banished on account of its poisonous properties. I heard of but one fatal case of Oleander poisoning—and that was doubtful. A little child, the sister of one of my playmates, died suddenly in great distress. Several months after her death the mother was told that the leaves of the Oleander were poisonous, when she recalled that the child had eaten them on the day of her death.

Oleander blossoms were lovely in shape and color. Edward Fitzgerald writes to Fanny Kemble: "Don't you love the Oleander? So clean in its Leaves and Stem, as so beautiful in its Flower; loving to stand in water which it drinks up fast. I have written all my best Mss. with a Pen that has been held with its nib in water for more than a fortnight—Charles Keene's recipe for keeping Pens in condition—Oleander-like." This, written in 1882, must, even at that recent date, refer to quill pens.

The lines of Mary Howitt's, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, ring to me so true; there is in them no mock sentiment, it is the real thing,—"the garden thicket's shade," little "cubby houses" under the close-growing stems of Lilac and Syringa, with an old thick shawl outspread on the damp earth for a carpet. Oh, how hot and scant the air was in the green light of those close "garden-thickets," those "Lilac ambushes," which were really not half so pleasant as the cooler seats on the grass under the trees, but which we clung to with a warmth equal to their temperature.